May 2015 – Snopes

AVENGERS: SPASM DEUX: A DYNAMIC DUET

R.T. Smith

A DYNAMIC DUET

So the first half of my Avenger ailment is simple: a kind of cantankerous geriatric resistance to the laws of probability, feasibility, possibility, rock-a-bility being not just stretched or suspended but shattered (or ignored); a hankering for sustainable shape, flexible wit, a vision (however winkingly presented) of a time and place where melodrama and pyrotechnics do not eclipse cause and effect. And well, I should say this: a hunger for fresh humor. The BBC The Avengers is funny, stylish, a spiffy spoof dominated by Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg, perhaps as mischievous a comic partnership as TV has given us. The show, at its peak, was kin to Get Smart, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and I Spy, but rhetorically more sophisticated, as if Noel Coward and Doyle might have collaborated. Or in some cases (the episode “The Joker,” for instance) written by Harold Pinter during his “Dumbwaiter”/ “Birthday Party” period.

In a signature moment the episode called “From Venus with Love,” the intrepid Steed dives into an open grave to escape a laser beam, which has managed to decapitate a funerary stature and send the loose stone head falling into the gaping grave. When Steed rises back into view, he is, in pensive mode, holding the statuary noggin in his palm and gazing eye-to-hollow-socket at the stone visage. One sidelong gaze at the camera, and that’s it. The writers know he doesn’t have to say “Alas, poor Yorick!” or provide any other prompts. The audience is trusted to “get it” or not, and the plot moves on. I also love the appearance in one episode of a surly gamekeeper is named Mellors, not to mention the discourse (same episode) on rose poems, including Herrick’s.

I know it’s unfair to compare these two pop phenomena on the basis of a shared name, and I should also admit that the TV show can be as goofy as the Marvel movies. In fact, the best scene in Ultron, involving Thor’s hammer as a gauge of macho power (bravo: the Excalibur parallel is unmistakable), seems to belong less to Lee than Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens, creators of the Steed-Peel adventures. In fact, there was an ill-fated film version of the TV show (guess the title) released in 1998 with the usually-adroit Ralph Fiennes as Steed and inimitable Uma Thurman as Peel, not to mention Connery as an evil meteorologist nemesis. A cast of sharp, brisk cosmopolitans costumed and equipped (Steed’s bowler, brolly, carnation, bon mots and joi de vivre; Peel’s effortless beauty, snazzy wardrobe, acerbic wit, and even a touch of her arsenal of impish gazes). But the film didn’t much work. It was almost impersonation, rather than acting, though as watchable with popcorn and soda as Josh Whedon’s effort. Throughout, it appeared that the producers had attempted to inflate a TV hour into a feature film.

What is it about the “cult classic” (enter its internet world at your peril) that so charms someone like me, who is no anglophile and would normally prefer the Eastwood of Unforgiven or the Connery/Bond version of mayhem and wit to the amateur anthropologist/industrial magnate/judo/society diva Mrs. Peel and the dapper Steed (whose brand of unflappability and bemusement seems to me the model Roger Moore was aiming for with his Bondemeanor)? Steed and Peel can’t fly, fling vintage Bentleys around or speak the King’s tongue with aliens, though they often ride about in one of the above (when not in Emma’s Lotus or go-cart). Sexuality between the principals enters the story only as innuendo and never develops beyond that, though never quite disappears. The number of bodies that mount up as P and S attempt to prevent espionage, destabilizing industrial monopoly and mass scale mind control is, well, euphemistic, by Lee-Whedon standards.

Panache – there, I’ve said it. It means, of course, “dash; swagger; verve,” but it’s ripped from the Latin for a bunch of feathers, as in a helmet plume. Emma the feather, John Steed the helmet (he’s former Special Branch, after all, a former major). But sometimes it’s the reverse, as they’re both wily and deft (which is both adroit and daft), durable and adaptable. Their gestures and inflections have texture, subtexture. At their best, even in the broadest jest, they’re artful.

And there’s the matter of form. The last refuge of scoundrels, or just an affection for symmetry and ritual? I won’t say that an episode of the TV Avengers works like a sonnet, that “moment’s monument,” but it has its demanding contours, regimen, dynamic, a reliable framework within which surprises may happen.

Here’s the drill. 1. Opening titles with champagne and bongo beat, close-ups of stars, saucy music, zero in on Steed’s accoutrements and boutonniere, Peel’s eyes and revolver. 2. A brief prologue, usually revealing in flagrante felony some naughty sociopath, quack scientist or Official Secrets thief, maybe a hypnotized giant striding with unswerving menace. 3. Standard bars of series anthem with title of episode (like “A Room Without a View,” “Mission . . . Highly Improbable,” “The Winged Avenger”) and (in half the technicolor episodes) two quirky sub-captions, such as “Steed Goes off the Rails; Mrs. Peel Finds Her Station in Life.” 4. Peel in her snazzy flat happily painting, sculpting, fencing; in short, busy. Steed appears almost ex nihilo to say, “Mrs. Peel, we’re needed.” In what medium he says this? Surprise, wit, untenable improvisation arise. Business card to skywriting out the window, a toy carrousel with knights who carry notecards. 5.-9. Context, investigation, confrontation, judo, duels of wit, discussion, eureka. All of this involving arcane or acerbic British types. 10. Solution revealed and tossed off with caprice. 11. Piano reprising the intro, then gliding into musical theme with our two contract sleuths riding into the distance in/on horseback, tractor, golf cart, Rolls, hot air balloon, etc. It’s as if, over the years, the final couplet before the end titles (12.) constitutes an essay on vehicular history. All in about 52 minutes.

But I’ve omitted something. Though this be madness . . . . Mischief, yes, but serious mischief. The stories that unfold touch on extrapolations from the science of the time (often nuclear or the psychological sort), earning the series the sub-genre label Spy-fi, or politics (either the ominous cold war assassin chess or the cost of a couple of centuries of imperialism doubling back to bite Merry Olde in the hinter parts). The package may be farcical and formal and sometimes Peter Maxx-goofy, designed with the psychedelic prejudices of the decade, but the undercurrent runs not too shallow, the themes thicker than water, and even when her ensembles are Barnaby, Mrs. Peel is all Dior.

I hope all this fiddle makes it clear: without resorting to the urge to cooperate in mass mayhem, the audience is invited to be in on the jokes, rather than be shocked and awed and July 4 WOWed by “special” effects. All nostalgia and bifocals –shawl over my shoulders, hearth at my back, teacup at hand, hound on my feet – I savor Steed and Peel and remember how they’re precious in the way real estate is: nobody’s making any more of it.

[Note: Lionsgate has released a sixteen-disc set of DVDs containing all 51 of the episodes featuring Diana Rigg. Absolutely addictive, to some sorts of jasper.]

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

Avengers Revisited, in Two Spasms

R.T. Smith

SPASM THE FIRST: TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS, ONE A FRENZIED GALLIMAUFRY OF THE FANTASTIC

I have little patience with some of the heroes called Avengers and a steady appetite for others. Which enemies of evil fall into which of those categories is likely a function of my generational tastes and my own twisted eccentricities, and yet, though this be madness, there’s some method to it. I was weary of the graphic versions of Thor, Ironman, the Hulk, Captain America et al before they came to the giant screen, but I can binge with the most fanatical fans over John Steed and Emma Peel. I even harbor some fondness for Peel’s antecedents and successors like Cathy Gale, Tara and Purdey. If this is a little cryptic to some readers, The Avengers was a British TV series about a team of blue-blooded agents back in the sixties, and at least three of the four women who took the lead female role would be familiar even now to most American pop culture followers. Honor Blackman quit the show to become Pussy Galore in the film Goldfinger, three years later Diana Rigg (as Mrs. Peel, the brightest star of the whole series) stepped away to become James Bond’s only (and very temporary) wife Tracy in the big screen’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Those too young for that film may well know Rigg from her Emmy-nominated performances in Game of Thrones. Joanna Lumley, a widely successful actress perhaps most remembered for the BBC comedy Absolutely Fabulous, was the last of the sixties femme-Avengers.

Now that we’re straight on the players, just what is it that leaves me cold about the Hollywood Avengers, beyond the possibility that much of the production is aimed at gamers and comic fans perhaps too young to drive? Despite the few attempts at off-color humor or drive-by high culture allusion (a quotation from Nietzsche, reference to a Eugene O’Neill title), the stories resemble evidence in a repetition-compulsion case study. Heroes from the Marvel Avenger team – one a Norse God, another an inventor, yet another an indestructible WWII G.I. altered in the kind of experiment sci-fi writers have been cooking up since Wells – engage in endless fights (building to the most recent Mother of All Brawls) with a few misguided mortals and legions of cyberthingies (none of which can chill me like Hal). These bouts involve a magical Viking war hammer, zap rays, Glocks, fists, exploding arrows and the hurling of everything from furniture and vehicles to whole plots of urban real estate. Irresistible forces meet immovable objects again and again, things fall apart, and “those that build them again are gay” (“gay” in the Yeatsian, near-obsolete sense; that is: “merry”). These durable combatants include computer programs, glittery facsimiles of the aurora borealis, robots and to some degree humans, the superheroes being more than resilient than mere mortals.

I understand that this spectacle is all unfolding in the video-arcade post-realistic mode and with metaphorical implications with apocalyptic overtones, but I’m not stirred by the mix-tape version of which laws of physics are to be trusted and which not, when gravity works and what color button makes which items levitate or dissolve, all in the service of fleeting and sometimes indistinguishable steps in the tangled but plodding plot. In short, I don’t believe the creators of these Avengers are very interested in physics, astrophysics, metaphysics, phys ed or curative physic. And if the plot lines and character complications resemble WWW Raw, the cosmology is not too far off from the Scientologists’ version of our origin and destiny. Though I suspect that devotees of this kind of inventiveness may rush to the fore with charts, tables, Smart phones, cross-references, hard-drive burdening statistics that argue au contraire (and perhaps Tasers), I’m compelled to maintain that the boundaries and limitations of powers and faculties are viable only to the degree that they are systematic and successfully dramatized, which would require more clarity and less velocity than Stan Lee and his cadre are addicted to.

A central tenant in my impatience with the crew that Tony Stark funds and Nick Fury inspires is best caught in Coleridge’s phrase “the willing suspension of disbelief.” After all, if the aphorism that “religion is what we believe, even if we know it’s not so” carries any witty wisdom at all, then I’m prepared to suspend my skepticism and practical sense in order to entertain conceits like Marquez’s Macondo, Bond’s marksmanship, Erewhon, the magical Forest of Arden, Hannibal Lector, and certainly Renfield, if the improbabilities are marshaled meticulously and presented with originality and verve, which do not result from mere scale, volume, number, color and wholesale destruction. In other words, the film makers have to “sell it.” So the StanLeevengers leave me cold on a couple of counts: the plots are chess without rules played by characters whose physical limits are inhuman or superhuman but blithely undefined. I don’t even want to think about the psychology and motivation of gods, cybots, spybots, green Jekyll-Hulks and James Spader’s voice. Yet I’m sure they’re all calibrated just right for the comic books from which they leap with hands (or claws) outstretched to seize our admission fees.

That’s all my wind and energy for now, but in a few days, Confessions of a Nostalgic Em-appeal Geezer. Enter at your own risk.

Ouija Bard

R.T. Smith

“Tis a tale told by an idiot,” and yet, “Much Madness is divinest Sense.” I’ve been trying to contact Shakespeare with my spirit board. Why not? Even if, at best, the device invented as a parlor game but taken supernaturally seriously by a happy few provides a vehicle for my own buried impulses and crackpottery, it might still be of some value. After all, I may know something I don’t know I know.

My friends are, generally, tolerant but unenthusiastic, so I’ve had to go it on my own, as the spooky-boo movies tell you never to do. The Ouija covenant, after all, is not a marriage but a ménage a trois, though still less a pack activity than séances. Besides, I wanted to get the jump on Shakespeare 2016, WLU’s celebration of the Bard in special events (Chanticleer performance, art exhibit, features on Shenandoah), lectures and courses.

If you’re not familiar with this form of communication, Google “Ouija” and select images from the margin menu. Lots of pictures, most of them pretty much the same – a board with the alphabet and single digit numbers spread out like a magician’s deck of trick-ready cards (or Eva Green’s on Penny Dreadful). You’ll also find yes in one upper corner and no in the other, though the name of the device is really yes-yes, French-German. Most common graphic details include a moon and sun, and at the bottom of the board there’s usually FAREWELL, which sounds more ominous than the common goodbye or later.

The other element in the tool kit is called a planchette, a heart-shaped wooden pointer with a hole (or eye) in the center. Most sets come with a plastic planchette, but I have little faith in their numinous power and prefer cedar. The process itself is simple: you utter a mystic rhyme, usually of your own making (I’m not telling mine; it’s like the cosmic pin number); then with the pair of you (or you solo, if you dare) place fingers on the planchette, swirl it around the board and attempt to summon with your mind and voice, any spirit who’s been drawn by the whisper of the pointer skating across the board and by your salutation (or salivation). The spirit is supposed to direct the planchette until the eye is over one letter (or answer) after another. For detailed instructions, you can do the little research and hear it from an expert.

All I wanted to do was commune with Shakespeare, and only briefly. The spirits are supposed to know everything that can be known, as well as everything else, but I just want to ask Will if he’s really who my high school English teacher Miss Eliot said he was (glover’s boy, scribe with little Latin and less Greek, bold appropriator, bed-willer, polymath, fast learner, shifty wit) or one of the other candidates I think of as the Unlikelies, for reasons of location, timing, lack of cerebral voltage, flabby rhetoric or obvious stamps of crackpottery that put mine in the shade. Now that it’s widely known that the prominent Shakeman Mark Rylance-Cromwell (Wolf Hall) is a Doubter in the matter of Shakespeare being Shakespeare, inquiring minds want to know more than ever, and I can find no way to contact The Most Interesting Man in the World for assistance, despite the tease on the Dos Equis website. Therefore: Ouija.

Candles, a flat table, full moon, concentration to the heart’s deep core (Georgie Yeats used a yes-yes). So far, no cigar, and I wonder if, alas, my efforts are foiled by misinformation. I mean, what if Shakespeare is an alias? Do spirits respect aliases, noms de guerre, traveling names, etc? Will the board traffic in such shifty nonsense as re-naming?

So I tried calling up the usual suspects: Bobby Devereux (Essex), Kit Marlowe, Manners, Oxford, Derby, Bacon, Burbage, Jesus Alou, assorted cabals and cadres, Drake and the Freemasons, Various & Sundry, Mary Sidney Herbert. No soap.

I’ve begun to think I’m using the wrong bait, if bait is called for. (“. . . with a little shuffling, you may choose/ a sword unbated….”), ( “unbated and envenom’d.”)

Should I try the more common search tactic of FaceBook to lure the dead? That way madness lies. But I’ll give it one more shot tonight, setting an extra glass of whiskey on the table. I believe Elizabethans were more inclined toward wine, ale, mead, sack or maybe even flip than toward whiskey, and I know that the Gaelic phrase from which we get “whiskey” translates as “water of life,” which might be distasteful to ghosts. Yet there’s some logic in it – spirits attracted to spirits. And after all, improvisation has always been a trait of specter speculators.

I’ll report back if any important discoveries ensue.

And if I don’t succeed this time? Flights of angels, silence, etc. I have Avengers to consider and will call in the pros. Mrs. Peel, you’re needed.

Tractor Blog, or A Random Ramble While I Gather Kindling for My Blog on Various Stripes of Avengers

R.T. Smith

Yesterday, as I was driving down the snaky and rut-rippled gravel road I live on, I encountered one of my farmer neighbors steering what appeared to be a new tractor, red as a fire engine and large as a triceratops. Tractasaurus. We each put right tires on the rim of the ditch and waved as we passed, slowly, and I realized that just a couple more coats of paint and we wouldn’t be able to complete that maneuver without scraping.

Though the gleaming piece of agricultural apparatus was impressive, the fact that Mr. Agricola was in the cab chatting away on his smart phone really caught my fancy. I suppose that a driver navigating a back road from a perch ten feet in the air on such a heavy piece of military-strength equipment might not give a lot of thought to the standard hazards of distracted driving. But he’s a bright fellow and seemed in control, so I resisted the thought that his behavior might be routine. Probably, I thought, he’s conducting some agrarian business that requires immediate attention.

But what? I must have been in need of some distraction myself, because even after I left the bendy gravel road behind and was cruising down the asphalt, I couldn’t stop thinking about that tractor and that smart phone. Agribusiness. After all, somebody has to order the feed and vaccines, contact the tax assessor, orchestrate the irrigation, alert the sheriff to the new bear in the area, ask the co-op if those new roles of fencing are in. Or was he calling up his flock of Dorsets to suggest they’d find a greener pasture across the creek? Maybe he was whispering to the chickens about egg production and yolk density or reminding his herd of Guernseys ruminating on a nearby western slope that milking time was nigh. Inviting the newly planted corn to put the recent rain to good use and break through the fertilized dirt? All manner of chores and inspections have to be done, and a good manager knows how to delegate authority and keep in touch with his troops. But the cell phone is more than a business tool, so he could have been following William Shatner on Twitter or checking to see if Poetry Daily (PoemsOnly.com?, no: poems.com) had posted a rousing vernal sonnet. Maybe he was trying to find a synonym for “thesaurus.”

In moderation, speculation is a fine and salutary practice, but I needed to settle on an answer and move on to a more pressing question. Faced with the need to show a little enterprise, I went to my default setting: be swift, arbitrary and obvious. So I decided he was checking his contacts on FarmersOnly.com. After all, it’s a roomy cab, and he “don’t have to be lonely,” right?

2?
My mother’s father John (or J. P.; we’re a tribe of abbreviators) taught me how to drive on a tractor in Griffin, Georgia when I was just tall enough to reach the pedals and strong enough to set the hand brake on an orange Allis-Chalmers Type C manufactured in 1947. No cab or actual chassis, the seat a steel kidney shape molded to fit the backsides of no human being. You could see the A-C’s limbs and joints, shafts and axles. The exhaust pipe belched oily smoke, and it hurt my wrists to steer. What it resembled, parked in its hornet-haunted shed or under the bean-dangling catalpa tree with its crawly worms, was a large pumpkin-colored insect that might feed off those black-and-yellow stripy caterpillars. Allis-Chalmers, or Alice Chalmers – it sounded like a third grade teacher but was more belligerent. I loved it. I also loved my granddad, who tended to binge but did not cuss and had what must amount to the carpenter’s version of perfect pitch. I am older now than he was when I watched them lower his casket. I have gardened but never farmed. I’ve never owned a tractor and have never touched a drop of Old Crow. I’ve tried to heed his best advice: “Son, when you’re ripe, fall far from the tree.”

3?
What Monsieur Agricola has acquired is an International and not, I’ve figured out, a popular Japanese Kubota, a Deere competitor marketed a lot on TV lately. “Kubota” – sounds like something from the ocean floor resurrected to save us from a more malicious monster: “Kubota Versus Godzilla,” coming soon. But more likely his colossus resembles some vehicle engineered to fight our battles on the next planet out from the sun. I wish he’d bought an A-C, though, as they’re usually the same fregetable color as our old insect, instead of a maraschino cherry. In the Crayola eight-crayon box of my memory, orange will always mean “tractor.” (A Japanese poet named Kubota died of food poisoning a few years ago; he ate a bad clam, rather than a tractor.)

4?
One summer I worked at a public driving range, trolling back and forth across the fairway on a sub-standard green-and-yellow Deere (Nothing runs like a) with a chicken wire cage to protect me from golf balls the size of hailstones. The apparatus I was trailing collected the balls from the scabby lawn, and more than a few hookers, slicers and gaffers made it their mission to try to bounce their Titleists, Nikes and Wilsons off my mesh, probably in the hope that some gap in my cocoon would allow a projectile in on occasion and cause me discomfort while affording them amusement. No malice meant, just Southern fun. I had a walkie-talkie and could call off the barrage if I had to exit my coop and finagle the J-D’s works, but not every duffer with a bucket of rented balls understands a cease-fire order. I never did learn to love a Deere.

Besides, their namesakes gobble our hostas.

Stay tuned for Ouija and the Bard, Thor and Hulk, Steed and Peel, if you dare.