Inner Light, Inner Life in Charles Addams

One of the best Christmas presents Mom and Dad gave me was an oversize collection of cartoons by Charles Addams, My Crowd, (1970). This big book was the prize of a collection that included small paperbacks Monster Rally, Addams and Evil, and Homebodies, the book I "read" literally to pieces in the days before I could even sound out the words.

A Christmas-themed cartoon from 1947 reproduced giant-sized in My Crowd both fascinated and disturbed me. Addams referred to it in correspondence with The New Yorker as "Boiling Oil."

While I could see the humor in the Family's upside-down ethos, I also felt strong sympathy for those cheerful neighbors and for what they're about to experience. I was in there with them all. Addams cartoons often have that effect on me, and I'm not the only one.

His biographer Linda H. Davis explains how Addams layered his inked outlines with washes that gave his darks and lights a solidity and texture not seen in the line drawings we're used to. She writes that Addams made his Family's house real:

The Family mansion, into which you felt you could step, was constructed of splintery wood worn to the softness of velvet. Bent over his drawing table hour after hour, Wolff's pencil (then brush) in hand, Addams drew every wooden shutter, every carved baluster and warped floorboard, every silky strand of web, creating a fully realized world. Wednesday's room was decorated with a wallpaper border showing a scaly prehistoric creature in happy pursuit of a bat-child. (95)

With "Boiling Oil," Davis writes, "Addams's feeling for his subject and his mastery of technique reached sublime new heights: in the steam rising at an angle from the bubbling pot; in the shawl Morticia clutches against the winter night; in the bars of indoor light filtered through a shuttered window onto the snow." Cartoonist Ed Koren notices the "half circle of light which is mirrored by a circle of molten lead [and] the footprints in the snow ... a wonderful touch" (Linda H. Davis. Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life. Nashville TN: Turner Publishing, 2021).

Those "bars of light filtered through" window shutters are incidental to the story of the cartoon, but essential to establishing the reality of that house. What's going on in that room, we wonder.

I've written before how Addams cartoons are at the heart of some of my earliest and warmest memories:

I could spend quiet hours peering into his cobwebbed corners, imagining what lurked down dark halls, finding little faces [spying from] the black space behind shards of cracked windows. Bliss was to watch ["The Addams Family" TV sitcom] before bedtime on Friday nights, to lay my Addams cartoon collection Homebodies on the bedside table, and to wake before anyone else in the house Saturday mornings to leaf through those drawings, admiring their skill, making up my own stories about them.
(from my blogpost Rediscovering Charles Addams' Family in a Musical)

Vermeer has the same effect on me. The gradations of light from windows reflected on walls, sleeves, goblets, and a certain famous earring make his paintings live. Like Addams, he was often pulling us into a story - the young woman reacts to receiving a letter, for instance; a young woman seems to be startled by someone behind her; a maid is day-dreaming. Like Addams, most of his interiors are rooms of just one house, probably his own. An art historian did painstaking calculations to prove this from the fixed relationships of windows, floor tiles, and doors. Only props and furniture are re-arranged like a stage set. (Hans Koningsberger. The World of Vermeer, 1632-1675 (New York: Time/Life Books, 1967).

Both artists tantalize us with glimpses of other spaces through doors and shutters half-open. I see an analogy between writing and these side-channels that bring such life to the works of these two artists. Even in the Bible, where the action is often simply, even starkly, delineated, an odd detail fixes the story in our minds: the seven sneezes of the boy that Elisha brings back from death, or whatever it was that Jesus scrawls in the dirt -- and the tense silence -- before he answers a mob bent on stoning the woman accused of adultery.

Once you've seen Addams or Vermeer, their settings become part of your mental furniture. In dreams since Mom died over a month ago, I've explored long hallways, a shadowy basement, high-ceilinged spaces in need of repair, cobwebbed alcoves. In the dreams, not unpleasant, this house somehow belongs to me, though I can't recall making any mortgage payments. Somehow, I'm supposed to move Mom and Dad into this space. The levels, the many rooms, dillapidated, so much like Addams's house, give me a feeling of responsibility -- so much to repair, so many spaces to furnish -- and an excitement that comes with creative possibilities. 60 years after I fell in love with that Addams house, it's a metaphor for life now that Mom, Dad, uncles and aunts, the grandmothers, even the old teachers are gone: it's all up to me, now.

More on Vermeer I wrote in 2006 about an exhibit that juxtaposed Vermeer works with those of his contemporaries. At first, I was disappointed. Then:

In peripheral vision, I glimpsed the first Vermeer in the exhibit, and chills started at the back of my neck. I approached. What was the difference? Style, subject matter, and true-to-life drawing -- these were all the same. But Vermeer's paintings seemed to glow from the inside. I felt there that I was seeing not just a slice of life, but that it was reaching out to me.

See Vermeer, Updike, and Poetry Editorial]

Wake Up, Dead Man: Whodunnit Comedy with Heart

Commenting on the grandiose architecture of a church, the young priest tells a visitor, "You can almost feel His presence."

"Whose?" asks the visitor. Uncomfortable pause. "Oh."

The young priest, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor), has been accused of murdering his superior Monsignor Wick (James Brolin) during Mass. The visitor is Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), convinced at their first meeting that the young priest isn't a guilty man pretending innocence, but an innocent man who appears to be guilty. About religion, though, Blanc is dismissive: "God is a fiction."

Cracking Blanc's attitude to religion is a story that underlies the plot in this third whodunnit to feature the detective, after Knives Out and The Glass Onion.

The sacrament of confession punctuates the plot five times. The first confession is played for laughs as Father Jud hears TMI from Wick. In a replay of that situation, the young priest fights back, confessing that he has snooped around to learn all the ways that Wick is abusing his power over his followers. Once a boxer, Fr. Jud has sworn to fight for Jesus with his hands open in love, not with fists. His resolve is tested.

Confessions four and five are spoilers, but number three is the heart of this funny, macabre murder mystery. It has nothing to do with whodunnit, and there's nothing funny about it.

It happens in a phone conversation with Laurie, office-manager at the excavation company that unsealed a crypt. Who ordered that work? Blanc wants Fr. Jud to find out ASAP. But Laurie seems to be in a chatty mood, and Fr. Jud listens patiently while Blanc rolls his eyes.

Suddenly, Laurie stops. When we hear her again, she's sobbing, and Fr. Jud takes the phone and confession to another room. It's after dark by the time Laurie accepts forgiveness and finds the information they needed, but Blanc's attitude has changed. "You're really good at this!" he tells his young client.

What Blanc has learned carries over into a key decision he makes during the Big Reveal that usually caps tales of this genre.

As much as I laughed and thrilled to all the old mystery tropes - long shadows, a creepy crypt, a sudden storm, and an impossible "locked-room" murder - it's Fr. Jud's solemn and loving pronouncement of absolution to those who desperately need it that I've taken away from the movie. I'm tearing up now, a week later.

The Joy of Singers & SINNERS

When the lights came up after the credits for Sinners, the elderly black man beside me, who had seen me gasp, laugh, and cry throughout the movie, said, "So, I suppose you're a blues man?"

"I am now," I replied.

It's true: to my collection of hundreds of recordings, I've recently added the first two blues albums, both by Buddy Guy, the revered singer-guitarist who appears late in the movie. I've been listening to them over and over, beginning to appreciate what I've been missing.

Sure, Sinners tells a story of vampires who crash a party at a Mississippi juke joint during the Jim Crow era. They do make a bloody mess, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "sundown town." But the tentpoles of this film are music and dance, and, like Blues songs about tough life, the overall effect is joy.

The first words of the movie are voiced by a woman who tells us about music's power to open a door between our world and the spirit world, between past and present, between good and evil. Take that as the thesis sentence for the movie. We will hear the blues, and we will also hear Irish folk music from another race of down-trodden people.

Then there's the character Sammie. The charismatic actor Michael B. Jordan was the draw to this movie, playing both "Smoke" and "Stack," Sammie's uncles. But it's Miles Caton as Sammie who stole the show. Sammie's a teenager, son of a preacher who forbids him to play guitar or sing the blues. Sammie's uncles think he might be a good singer for the opening bash at their new juke joint. So it's sort of an audition when, riding shotgun beside his uncles, he strums guitar and sings. The fullness and maturity of the sound from this deferential, unimposing young man is so unexpected that his uncle gasps, turns to gape at his passenger, then smiles broadly. That was my reaction, and others' too. Caton is now hailed as the "breakout" star of the movie.

Caton admits in an interview that he got the part before he understood SINNERS is a vampire movie.

His is the voice that cracks open the spirit world. Like songs in the best musical theatre tradition, the words of his blues number are very specific to his story:

You threw me a Bible on that Mississippi road
See, I love you Papa, you did all you can do
They say the truth hurts, so I lied to you
Yes I lied to you
I love the blues

It starts as voice and guitar, but ramps up to a surreal dance number. As the camera roams the dance floor, the dancers seem unfazed when they're infiltrated by musicians and dancers from Africa, China, past and future (there's a rap DJ with turntable).

Then a trio of white people ask to be invited in. They're musicians, too, says their spokesman Remmick (Jack O'Connell). He says they're not Klansmen: "We believe in equality." What that really means is, every new vampire joins a "community" of vampires who share Remmick's mind -- including his accent and movements. The trio sings a little ditty about eating a man. Smoke and Stack turn them away, but they lurk in the woods and pick off guests who leave the party, one by one.

Soon, Remmick has enough vampires to make up the cast of Riverdance, and that's what they do. He leads an Irish dance tune, "The Road to Dublin," and the chorus encircles the club doing their Irish jig.

At this point, I was laughing and crying -- one, because it was so incongruous to see blood-smeared black people jigging, and, two, because it was both outrageous and fitting -- perfection!

The film score by Ludwig Göransson is nearly continuous -- bluegrass or blues guitar playing behind images when not accompanying voices. Songs performed by women in the cast express their tangled relations with Smoke, Stack, and Sammie.

Director Ryan Coogler has made a great movie that busts out of one genre to another: music is at the heart of this horror movie. You can watch SINNERS for the thrill of a bloody horror suspense film, and find yourself exhilarated by the season's best musical.