(Theatrical Poster of the Ed Wood film “Plan 9 From Outer Space.)
Oh, yeah. Sunny skies and low humidity- baby, the summer doesn’t get any better. They say the swelter will be back, just like the crisis downtown, but we can push it back a few days. I have no idea what they think they are doing- the Republicans have arrived at a schism, or something, and the Speaker did not get to a trillion in cuts, and Majority leader Reid claims whatever the House produces is dead on arrival in the Senior Chamber.
Why should we worry? They will do something, I suppose. Or not.
I was listening to a commentator on the radio who announced that the situation was patently ridiculous; absurd, in fact. Hell, we could have told him that months ago.
Maureen Dowd is starting to make the most sense of anyone. She can’t let Bush get away with what he did, but also pointed out that the Perfect Storm that elevated President Obama to the Oval Office had created the first President without a party; he has the ability to infuriate the base of his party without accomplishing his goals. She called him “President Spock,” for his cerebral disengagement from the whole tawdry spectacle.
The idea of Star Trek being a model for the Executive branch and all the talk about the various plans that cannot be enacted made me think of other bad things and after Willow and the pool, I rooted around in the faux Mission cabinet at the end of the hall where I keep the DVDs I don’t watch. When you are confronted with the impossible, you may as well embrace it.
I have a boxed set of Ed Wood films to remind me of human limitations. Ed is legendary for creating bad movies. He has several on the list of the worst films ever made, including the bizarre “Glen or Glenda,” which is a quasi-documentary about the director’s apparent struggle with transvestism.
Ed Wood is much underestimated, since that turned out to only be prescient about where American society was heading anyway, and I decided to stay with the science fiction theme and popped “Plan 9 from Outer Space” into the DVD player, bypassing the Netflex discs that have been mutely accusing me from the top of the console for months.
The 1959 film is notable for several reasons. It was a key plot device in the bio-pic Ed Wood, which It sucks, not just because it was the last appearance of legendary vampire star Bela Lugosi, but because a double was used for him after his death after filming only a few scenes. The double was a fellow named tom Mason, the chiropractor of Woods then-wife, who was bald, twice the size of Lugosi and played his scenes with a black cape held in front of his face.
That is surreal enough, but Mr. Wood was oddly prescient about politics. The plot line goes like this: aliens are seeking to stop humans from creating a doomsday weapon that will destroy the cosmos. This is bad, I presume, or so the premise goes, and thus the Aliens formulate “Plan 9” to resurrect the dead of the Earth.
These days we would call them Zombies. Ed called them by the quaint term “ghouls,” which amounts to the same thing, and is another example of Wood’s genius. The appearance of the marching ghouls creates widespread disorder, as you might imagine, and Plan 9 succeeds in saving the galaxy, even if we the living have our brains eaten by the living dead.
(Actress Maila Nurmi, Dec. 21, 1921-Jan. 10, 2008. Photo Marissa Lorraine.)
My favorite ghoul is played by actress Maila Nurmi, a Finnish-American ingénue whose blockbuster part in “Plan 9” was followed up by memorable roles in the 1960 feature films “I Passed for White,” and “Sex Kittens Go to College.” The 1962 epic “The Magic Sword” gave her a cameo, but by late that year she was installing linoleum in Los Angeles and passed mostly from the public view.
I made it through her memorable entrance in the film, when she emerges from a faux forest with her arms extended before her and a blank look on her thin face. I sympathized. I almost made it through the end of the film before I fell asleep in the Brown Chair by the door to the balcony.
In 1980, the Medved brothers wrote a book about the legendary turkeys of Hollywood. In it, they called “Plan 9” one of the worst films ever made. I have to disagree. I think it was a documentary of the future and a work of demented genius that has accurately predicted the future of American politics.
It should come as no surprise that there were dreams that followed, and that one of the characters in a particularly vivid moment was played by a man in black who kept his cape completely over his face. He never disclosed the contents of Plan B.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com