“We have adjusted our perspective to that of the kangaroo and the digeridoo. This automatically throws us either down under and/or out back and, from that point of view, it’s most improbable that anyone will ever know exactly who is enjoying the shadow of whom.”
— from Duke Ellington’s introduction to The Afro Eurasian Eclipse album.
In 1973, at age ten, I saw Nicholas Roeg’s Australia-set Walkabout at the only theater in Amery, Wisconsin with my mother. I asked her later why she took me to the film and she recalled only that she’d read it was "a sophisticated fairy tale for children." Here’s a quick summary of what I remember from Walkabout (having revisited it a few times as an adult):
A father drives his two children, a teenage girl and a boy who was about my age when I first saw the film, from the city to the edge of the Outback for a picnic. The father returns to the car where he has hidden a gun and attempts to shoot his children. The boy, assuming the situation is play, pretends to shoot back with a plastic water pistol, laughing. The father pours gasoline on the car, lights it on fire and then shoots himself. The car explodes. The girl and the boy wander into the wilderness and eventually meet an aboriginal boy on his walkabout, a ritual transition into adulthood. In the initial appearance of the aboriginal boy, who is about the same age as the girl, he wears a belt hanging with dead lizards. The three proceed together, swim naked. Many animals are graphically killed, including the bludgeoning to death of a kangaroo. Near the film's end, the aboriginal boy paints his face white and performs what must be a courtship dance. The girl ignores him and he hangs himself from a tree. The children finally make their way back to civilization.
The two disconsolate friends in Wim Wender’s Kings of the Road joke drunkenly at the end of the film, “The Yanks have colonized our subconscious,” a reference to the American music that they listen to as they drive from town to town repairing movie projectors. Walkabout colonized my subconscious when I was ten. The imprint we receive from films is particularly powerful when we are young and our understanding of the world is still forming. I dreamt randomly juxtaposed images from the film for years afterward: a lens flare around the sun, sand, blue eyes, sweat drops on a face, fire, a white shirt, a black face, a lizard, a black face painted white, a spider. I didn’t have the experience at the time to interpret the visual sequences that Walkabout stimulated in my dreams. It was as if I were staring uncomprehendingly at a sentence in a language I couldn’t read.
The Legend of Boggy Creek also played at the Amery Theater in 1973. The 1970's was a big decade for Bigfoot. Like many of the low-budget exploitation pictures produced at the time, Boggy Creek presented itself as a documentary: handheld cameras, headshot interviews, eyewitness reenactments of encounters with the monster. Amateurish technique can suggest a putative authenticity; Boggy Creek played like a cross between a home movie and the television news and thus, for a boy of ten, the film was authoritative confirmation that Bigfoot existed.
Just months before I saw The Legend of Boggy Creek my family had moved to a house in the woods. I lay in bed at night during the summer of 1973 listening to the heavy shifting back and forth of Bigfoot outside my window. If I squinted I could make out his enormous silhouette against the darkness. As with Walkabout, the film inspired a recurring dream. I walked to school from the new house with a cornfield on my right and woods on my left. As I walked I could hear something moving parallel to me, unseen behind the trees. If I stopped abruptly, the hidden presence took one audible step more and then stopped too. I knew that it was Bigfoot, walking in the woods beside me in a mirror image of my movements. I stood and stared into the trees. He stood too, concealed, staring back at me.
On Saturday afternoons in the early 1970’s I gathered with my brothers and friends in our basement to watch the television program Horror Incorporated. Most of the featured movies were Toho Studio monster rampages or Hollywood variations like Them and Tarantula. One day, alone because I was quarantined with chicken pox, I watched an odd, human-scale film called It’s Alive that had the same 'home-movie' feeling as Boggy Creek. (This was not the better-known It’s Alive directed by Larry Cohen.)
Picturing the film as I write this more than forty years later, the opening scene of Night of the Living Dead intervenes: a car with a young couple inside approaching a graveyard from the distance, shot in grainy, high-contrast black and white. In my memory of It’s Alive a couple sits in a similar, boxy 1960’s car in a rural setting. They have run out of gas. A farmer discovers them stranded and brings them to his farm. He subdues or perhaps kills the man and imprisons the woman in his house. There is a subplot about a goggle-eyed monster in a cave behind the house that requires feeding. In the scene that appeared subsequently in my dreams, the farmer brings the confined woman a covered serving tray. She eyes it hungrily, but with suspicion. The man stands in the doorway, leering, while she uncovers the tray to reveal a dead mouse. The following sequence consists of canted angle close-ups of the woman screaming with her hands to her face and the man laughing sadistically in reaction. The fact that there was no sound over the images disturbed me most.
The primary mystery of It’s Alive was that after I watched the film, it disappeared forever. In the era before the Internet it was much more difficult to find information about films. During the 1970’s, I was often dependent upon broadcast television to see a movie; even VHS tape rental wasn't an option yet. (I’ve just searched online and found instantly that the film was directed by Larry Buchanan in 1969. It turns out that I remember it in black and white because my family didn't have a color television.) For years afterward I searched in vain for confirmation that It’s Alive existed outside of my imagination. Despite my best efforts, I never found the movie again and I never met anyone else who had seen it. I began to wonder if the film had originated in my dreams or had simply been my private, chicken pox-induced hallucination.
A decade later when I was twenty and studying at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, I read an article about lucid dreaming, a state in which the sleeper grows aware that they are dreaming. Instead of simply playing actor to the subconscious script of the dream, one attempted to direct the action. I began experiments to cue ‘waking’ within my dreams and, while I wasn’t able to fully control these scenes, I did gain a memorable perspective. I ‘woke up’ while dreaming one night in an ordinary room. A wooden table stood in the center with a bowl of grapes on it. A window was open behind the table, the curtains moving in a light breeze. I knocked on the table with my knuckles and thought, “This is as substantial as any table in the real world.” I ate a grape and it tasted just like grapes outside my dreams. The breeze moving the curtains felt exactly like that which would blow through my dorm room window while I studied. I read "Wuthering Heights" in a class soon after I had this dream and a thought of Catherine's struck me:
I’ve dreamed in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.
I decided that the world created in my mind while dreaming was no less real than that mediated by my senses in the other world when awake. The color of my own mind had been altered by this experience, as it also had been watching, and then dreaming, Walkabout at age ten.
While I was conducting my lucid dream experiments, a series of coincidences occurred involving the three films that I've described above. I discovered a math major in my dorm who had also seen It’s Alive. We excitedly recounted the ‘mouse on the tray’ scene, both relieved to know that this strange movie existed for someone else. A few nights later, watching television at 3 a.m. in the basement of the dorm, I turned the channel unexpectedly to The Legend of Boggy Creek. I watched the second half of the movie, went to bed and had my Bigfoot dream again, for the first time in years. In this updated version though, the folk song from the movie about the loneliness of the monster played as I walked next to the woods. And then a week or two later, I read that Walkabout would be playing soon in the Lawrence University Film Club series. When I saw the name of the film in the schedule, the image of the aboriginal boy with his face painted white flashed in my mind. Although I was curious to see the movie again, I also had vague misgivings because it had left such a complicated impression upon me. I had the sensation that my strongest cinematic memories of 1973 were welling into and threatening to overwhelm my present life in 1983.
When I watched Walkabout for the second time, it didn’t feel as if I were simply revisiting a movie I’d seen before; the images on the screen played more like a recollection of direct experience. I felt that I had physically lived as the boy of ten who was uncomfortable and thirsty in the dry land. The film had colonized my subconscious ten years earlier, but I had also colonized the film in reaction through the very dreams that it had inspired. At twenty, watching the film objectively known as Walkabout, I ‘woke up’ into my personal lucid dream of Walkabout again, a documentary time-capsule of my ten-year-old self’s sensibility. In this manner, the movie continued to dream itself through me, as presumably it must also do through other people who’ve seen it at multiple points in their life.
Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami wrote in 1995:
“in the darkened theater, we give everyone the chance to dream and to express his dream freely. If art succeeds in changing things and proposing new ideas, it can only do so via the free creativity of the people we are addressing, each individual member of the audience.”
We all have personal relationships with movies that have imprinted deeply upon us, recurring films, like recurring dreams. A psychological middle ground is created, a conversation between two simultaneous projections: 24 photographic frames per second cast upon the screen and the subjective memories and desires that we cast like shadows upon those images. And in my Bigfoot dream, I walk parallel to a projection from a movie that I've seen. I peer into the presence that peers into me and it is, indeed, difficult to know exactly who is enjoying the shadow of whom.