Elizabeth Short/Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood

Lou Reed said to have been influenced by Raymond Chandler. "And despite people's derision proved to be more than diversion. Neither one regretted a thing." -Street Hassle (1978) by Lou Reed. “There’s a lot of what you might call vicious songs in my work but I feel compassion for the characters in them. Because I know what that’s like; I know what it’s like to be on the outside. I know what it’s like to have an unhappy childhood. Not everybody is born with money or an education or friends or nice parents. And I delineate these people because either I identify with them or I think that they deserve their moment in the sun." -Lou Reed, Frebuary 1992 (Q Magazine)

“Some people would love me to die onstage. It never dawns on them if I was so high, how would I hit the cues on time? Heroin in movies or novels is not a big deal but in rock and roll it is. How many people do you think could go up there and do a song about heroin and not be laughed off the stage? Scott Walker? Frank Sinatra maybe. Why doesn’t he sing a song with some lyrical content? He did it “My Way.” Congratulations. Who doesn’t do it his way? There are many pretty songs I’ve written. Why don’t people talk about them?” -Lou Reed, 17 April 1975 (NY Daily News)

The Black Dahlia refers to Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old aspiring actress found brutally murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. The Blue Dahlia is a 1946 film noir starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, scripted by Raymond Chandler. The media coined the "Black Dahlia" moniker based on her rumored clothing style and the popular movie title. Despite a massive media frenzy, thousands of interviews, and several false confessions, the crime remains one of Los Angeles's most famous unsolved mysteries. The press branded Elizabeth Short the "Black Dahlia" because she reportedly favored black attire, though the name was primarily a play on the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia. 

The myth will tell you that Elizabeth Short was a sex worker, a gangster’s moll, or a movie extra yearning to become Lana Turner. She was none of those things. She was a young woman who was fired up by wanderlust to leave her small New England town and see the world, defying the postwar gender expectations to settle down, marry, and have children. She lived by her wits and her charm as she traveled around the country, exploring places far more exotic than Medford, Massachusetts, where she was raised. True-crime narratives deal with, in the words of pioneering FBI investigator John E. Douglas, the “fundamentals of what we loftily call ‘the human condition.’ ” But her life is still more important than her death.

Business along the Pike in Long Beach, California, was up 25 percent from the year before. But there was something sinister out there lurking behind the levity of the liberated world that hinted things would never go back to the way they were before. Doomsayers warned that the war had upended traditional morality. The Pike lured thousands of tourists to Long Beach every week. Many boys loitered outside an amusement arcade. Among them was the owner’s son, Tod Faulkner. On a sweltering day in July, Tod spotted a young woman striding alone toward the beach. She wore a two-piece bathing suit, far more revealing than the prewar one-pieces. Her hair was dark, swept back from an extremely high forehead and framing her face like a lion’s mane. Over the next several days, Tod would see this woman again on the Pike. Whether he looked for her or just spotted her by chance isn’t known. But one thing is certain. He did not forget her. David Lander noticed her, too. On her way from the beach, past the massage parlors and tobacconists, the woman often stopped for refreshment at Lander’s pharmacy, Service Drug, at 102 Linden Avenue.  

The Roosevelt Base on Terminal Island employed upward of twenty thousand, and the sprawling Naval Reserve Air Base saw a steady stream of reservists every few weeks. Even if she had wanted to, Elizabeth wouldn’t have been able to avoid military men in Long Beach. Robert Robertson was one of them. He and a buddy spotted her one morning on her way to Service Drug. “She was a very nice-looking girl,” Robertson said, “and she smiled at us.” Afterward, he and his friend walked with her to the beach. The next day, Elizabeth announced she wanted to go dancing at the Palladium in Hollywood, the big-band ballroom made famous by composer Tommy Dorsey. Robertson obliged, taking her on the thirty-mile ride to Hollywood on board the famous red trolleys. Something about her, however, must have appeared aimless, as he suggested she come back with him to Boise, where he was sure she could get a job. That was impossible, Beth explained. She needed to send for her birth certificate before she could get any work. So, Robertson helped her fill out a form for a town in Massachusetts called Hyde Park. 

“Loving you the way I do would make me do practically anything,” Gordon Fickling wrote to her, and he proved it by renting her a room at the Brevoort Hotel in Hollywood on Lexington Avenue near the corner of Vine. On August 20, they registered as “Lieutenant and Mrs. J.G. Fickling.” Gordon headed back to base. The Brevoort was “the friendliest spot in Hollywood,” its ads claimed. Actors on their way up or way down stayed at the Brevoort. Within easy walking distance from the Brevoort was the Brown Derby, NBC, RKO, Columbia, Sardi’s, and Earl Carroll’s Theatre, where Betty had posed under the marquee not long before. Hollywood offered more to see than just the Long Beach Pike, and Betty liked to wander. The most salient fact people knew about Betty Short, however, was that she had once been engaged to marry a war hero, Matt Gordon, who was killed in action. Was that why she seemed to just drift along? Was grief the reason she’d been unable to commit to Gordon Fickling? “Betty appeared very depressed over Matt’s death,” Margie recalled. “She carried a newspaper clipping and picture of him in her pocketbook.” The clipping stated that he was planning to marry his sweetheart from Medford, Massachusetts.

It’s true that Betty could be a bit of a con artist. She knew that a well-timed letter to Gordon with a heart-rending tale of woe always brought a money order into Western Union. She’d sung a comparable refrain to Marjorie Graham to get free accommodations. What we still need to discover, however, is what she was looking for in Hollywood, if anything. Was modeling really her goal, or was it merely something she told people? We know, or can infer, details about the lives of Lynn Martin, Gordon Fickling, Marjorie Graham, and others. But it’s much more difficult to do that with Beth Short. She never gave an interview, never answered the questions of investigators the way her friends and acquaintances would do. To get closer to Beth and comprehend her life—and the forces that ended it—we need to consider the world around her, which was changing faster than anyone could have anticipated. 

It was a world increasingly unfamiliar and more dangerous in some ways in peace than it was in war. Even today, most studies of the U.S. homicide rate see only the forty-year trough that extends on charts from the early 1930s until the early 1970s. The historic eleven-year plunge of the homicide rate stopped abruptly in 1944, leveling at 4.9 out of every 100,000 people. A year later the rate had climbed to 5.6, and by 1946 it was 6.3. A 31 percent increase in American homicides over three years. And while the rate started to fall again in 1947, it took until 1955 to dip past the low point of 1944. In Los Angeles, where homicides were already higher than elsewhere, the spike wasn’t as dramatic, but it’s still noticeable, peaking in 1944 and only dropping significantly in 1948. Los Angeles police psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul de River claimed that the number of “girl criminals” in the city had increased 28 percent since Pearl Harbor.   

Anne Toth, her family said, had “brass.” She spoke her mind and “took nothing from nobody,” and that included both Leo Hymes and Mark Hansen. In short, Anne Toth was exactly the sort of person Beth Short needed to meet at that moment in her life. They became good friends. Anne kidded Beth about her Boston accent, the way she said “pahk” for “park” and “rawk” for “rock.” Young women, Anne counseled, had to be careful of the “jerks and moochers.” “You’ve got to stop being innocent sometime.” That’s fine for a kid, Anne said, but by the time you turn twenty-one, “gullibility is a liability.” Anne had left home at eighteen, traveling across the country to New York City “to seek her fortunes,” she said. She landed a job as a hostess at the New Yorker, the famous forty-two-story Art Deco hotel on Eighth Avenue. “That’s the center of the garment district,” Anne recalled, “and the first week I was there I had about fifty offers of modeling jobs.” Anne met “an exceptionally wonderful man, a very high-type fellow,” who was “very well connected,” she remembered. They began dating, and Anne’s new beau made introductions for her at the movie studios. 

Anne told Beth she had a great look, with that cascade of dark hair and porcelain doll face, although she’d have to do something about her teeth. Anne offered to help Beth get work in the movie studios. Yet while Beth listened to her advices and seemed grateful for it, she failed to follow through. The problem, Anne concluded, was a lack of confidence on Beth’s part, something Marjorie Graham seconded. She “had an inferiority complex,” Margie told a reporter some months later. The goal of modeling, Margie came to believe, was a ruse. Beth wasn’t lazy. She was insecure. “She was too scared to try because she thought she might fail,” Anne said. To mask her insecurity, Beth sometimes acted like a blue blood from back East. “Betty had a lot of high ideas, believe me, with her Boston family and all that stuff,” Anne said. She alternated between calling her Betty and Beth, probably because Margie called her the former and Mark Hansen the latter. 

The postwar transformation of America was not only social but also physical. In Los Angeles, the massive freeway development, finally underway, fundamentally changed the topography of the area, uprooting families and paving over neighborhoods, empowering the automobile over every other form of transportation. Rolling hills and citrus groves were bulldozed into tract housing. White flight abandoned urban areas to communities of color, who faced decreased funding for essential services and maintenance, and thus began the era of urban decay. From above, the verdant picture of Los Angeles County in 1940 would have compared starkly to the asphalt and brick of 1950, like before-and-after crime scene photos. One writer’s parallel between the disfigured body of Elizabeth Short and the disfigured City of Los Angeles is not an overstated metaphor. 

Under Harry Hansen’s scenario, a solution proposed by Larry Harnisch might be compelling. As a very likely suspect, Harnisch put forward Walter Bayley, a doctor who once lived on the block just past the vacant lot where the body of Elizabeth Short was found. Bayley’s daughter served as a witness at the marriage of Short’s sister Virginia to Adrian West in 1945. The connection is a bit tenuous, but Harnisch theorized that Virginia may have told Elizabeth to contact Dr. Bayley if she ever needed assistance and Elizabeth, upon being stranded at the Biltmore hotel, took her sister’s advice. Dr. Bayley, who had been suffering from emotional and mental problems due to degenerative illness, certainly had the skills to drain and bisect the body. Under Harnisch’s theory, Bayley then posed the corpse in order to traumatize his estranged wife, who still lived in the neighborhood. Virginia said in 1947 that she hadn’t seen her sister in several years and hadn’t spoken to her for two, which predates her wedding. (Boston Herald, January 18, 1947) —Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood (2026) by William J. Mann

Jeff Tweedy: Outwards Expressions of Joy

Jeff Tweedy: I honestly haven't seen the Wilco documentary since I watched it in the theater when it came out. I went to the theater with my wife and I felt like hiding. My ideal audience is a group of people that are better with outward expressions of joy than I am. I only worry about maintaining the personal and intimate connections I have with my family and friends and I prefer to be somewhat removed from the notion of fans. That's more of an abstract thing to me. I'm not anti-modern crowd participation. I'm anti-technological crowd distraction at concerts. And my father always told me I had a face for radio.

I try to remember that being a musician doesn't require you to aspire to success on anyone else's terms. About Wilco constantly being named the American Radiohead, I'd feel better if they were being referred to as the "British Wilco." I play guitar every day and I practice by skronking along to Sonny Sharrock's records and try to figure out Elizabeth Cotten's songs. I have a song that my wife and I call your own, as in "oh honey, they are playing our song." That's "Somethin' Good" by Herman's Hermits. I met my wife Susan in 1989 at the Cubby Bear in Chicago. She already had a boyfriend so I just asked for her phone when I finally got her attention. But even then I could sense she was the one. Sources: stateofsound.com and npr.org

There are undeniable similarities between how the brain responds to substance addiction and how the brain responds to falling in love. Both substances of addiction and individuals we are attracted to cause the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter, into a brain region called the nucleus accumbens. Dopamine acting in this region helps us learn to associate cues with rewarding feelings. However, dopamine acts on two different types of receptors, called D1-receptors and D2-receptors, in complex ways. Activation of D2-receptors enhances bonding with a partner; it also promotes the reward value of a substance. Activation of D1-receptors maintain that bonding. 

During this time early on in a romantic relationship or early exposure to an addictive substance, dopamine is primarily acting on D2 receptors, heightening our senses and focusing our attention on the cues of our next encounter… developing our craving, our longing, our drive for the next meeting. When we are in the early obsessive stages of love, every encounter (and especially sexual encounters) causes a pleasurable release of not just dopamine, but also natural opioids. These two brain chemicals work together in the brain to continually strengthen the association of the stimulus (the one you are falling in love with) with intense positive feelings. This will cause you to seek more and more of these interactions, craving them intensely in the times in between. These same chemicals act on the same receptors in the same way during the process of forming an addiction to a substance, causing the person to seek more and more of it.

With time, the brain adapts. Repeated encounters no longer cause the same euphoria they once did, but rather, a sense of calm contentment. The dopamine that is released before and during these encounters is now activating more of the D1-receptors, which result in more tranquil passion. In terms of relationships, it is thought that this transition actually helps maintain a pair bond with one individual, because in this stage you are less driven to seek a competing pair bond and you are more likely to aggressively defend the pair bond you have already established. In terms of substance abuse, this phase is called tolerance. 

During this tolerance phase, lack of exposure to the object of your addiction results in a lack of dopamine and opioid release and an increase in stress hormone release. If we are talking about addiction to a substance, we call this withdrawal. If we are talking about a relationship, we call this separation anxiety or even heartbreak. To avoid these horrible feelings, we have to relapse… right back into the arms of our addiction. Love is not listed as a psychological disorder in the DSM-5, nor do we think of it as one. But in a true physiological sense, we may actually be addicted to the ones we love.

“Despite feeling loved being a fundamental human need, there is no consensually agreed upon definition of love and feeling loved,” explained Dr. Eric Sasaki in his postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. “Together with my co-authors, my first goal was to integrate scholarly and lay conceptualizations of love and key relationship theories to identify core components of feeling loved. These core components of feeling loved include feeling cared for, accepted, valued, and understood.”

The recent study “Feeling Loved as a Strong Link in Relationship Interactions: Partners Who Feel Loved May Buffer Destructive Behavior by Actors Who Feel Unloved”, was authored by Eric Sasaki, Nickola C. Overall, Harry T. Reis, Francesca Righetti, Valerie T. Chang, Rachel S.T. Low, Annette M.E. Henderson, Caitlin S. McRae, Emily J. Cross, Shanuki D. Jayamaha, Michael R. Maniaci, and Camille J. Reid. Source: psycnet.apa.org

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: Towering Art Rock

Involving Cold War spy recordings, drug addiction and music industry landmarks, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has been called a fable and a masterpiece. One of Wilco's best albums, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has uncanny connections to 9/11, a landmark Internet-first release; Reprise Records' then-president David Kahne listening to one of the most critically lauded albums of the 2000s and deciding Wilco should start again from scratch; Jay Bennett counting out tons of pills he'd had FedExed to the studio before the rest of the band arrived. Or perhaps it would be best to start further back: Jeff Tweedy perusing CDs in a record store and coming across one titled The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations: encoded spy transmissions made over shortwave radio. "The voices were so eerie,' Jeff Tweedy wrote, explaining the attraction, 'like a long dead ghost trying one more time to make contact.' On one section, against a storm of hiss, a woman's voice pronounced the same letters from the phonetic alphabet: 'Yankee, hotel, foxtrot'. There was no response."

Jay Bennett left the band during its making, and tragically died of an overdose eight years later, and Reprise Records rejected the finished record, only for it to be hailed as a masterpiece. The first element had all the ingredients of a cautionary tale; the second became something of a fable for the record industry as it began the 21st century. The Conet Project recordings made sense in the darkest corners of Jeff Tweedy's psyche. 'These solitudes exist so apart from each other in this sea of white noise and information,' he told Wilco biographer Greg Kot, 'and the beautiful thing is they keep transmitting to each other in the hope that somebody is going to find them.' The description seems to predict the America of today, a country atomised by the internet, but back then, for Jeff Tweedy, The Conet Project recordings described something more personal. 'The way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate in The Conet Project,' he explained, 'it's not all that different to me than my own efforts to communicate.' Those recordings, full of crackling static, might also have pointed Tweedy towards the album's experimental soundscapes. 

The band had been in transition from punk-adjacent alt-country rockers to studio nerd wizards for some time. Jay Bennett, an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, joined the band in time for Being There. Glenn Kotche, a drummer and percussionist with an eye for detail, who had been briefly tutored by The Velvet Underground's Maureen Tucker, replaced ex-Uncle Tupelo drummer Ken Coomer. Following the use of the sample from the Conet Project (a voice repeating: ‘yankee, hotel, foxtrot’) on the song ‘Poor Places’, Irdial-Discs successfully sued the band for copyright infringement. In our current age of carefully edited music documentaries, in which every moment of vulnerability feels carefully calculated, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco feels genuine and edgy. It is a fascinating warts-and-all document, but it also appears to have warped the process it observed. Jeff Tweedy never got used to having the cameras around, out-nerding Kurt Cobain. 'Maybe the camera is like a fly on the wall but it's a type of fly that you always know is there and you can't stop thinking about it,' he later reflected. But YHF would eventually reach its reward: Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 225 on its updated "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list in 2020.

What followed was a well-documented comedy of errors and misjudgments. Then-President of Reprise David Kahne and A&R Mio Vukovic listened to the finished album, decided it had no hits and gave the band an ultimatum: start again or be dropped. One wonders how closely they really listened to the record, and how much they were influenced by the opener 'I Am Trying to Break Your Heart'. Despite Jim O'Rourke's new mix, that track probably remained the album's most experimental. Foreshadowing the music industry to come, Wilco streamed the whole thing online ahead of its physical release. Finally landing on record store shelves, somehow miraculously coherent and complete given its tangled production subplots, the album was critically acclaimed. Uncut said it was the Americana equivalent of Radiohead's Kid A, and Pitchfork called it a 'masterpiece' giving it a perfect 10. Given the album was unlikely to return much profit, there appeared little choice for Wilco but to leave Reprise with the masters: 'It was a choice of making a record we didn't like and not making any money,' Tweedy wrote later, 'or making a record that we loved and not making any money'. At the time, the band had a substantial fanbase and were darlings of the music press. Streaming Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fed both, driving sales of tour tickets, creating a buzzworthy story and giving the album considerable underground lustre.

There is an alternative history to the YHF album. Had Reprise Records loved the record, then it would have been put out on its original release date: 11th of September 2001, available in record stores at almost exactly the same time American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Centre's North Tower. The fact the album had duplicated towers on the cover (Chicago's so-called Corn Cob Towers), contained the lyrics 'tall buildings shake' and a song called 'Ashes of American Flags' would have lent the album a creepily prophetic quality. Jeff Tweedy has said the original 9/11 release date would have probably resulted in the album being pulled from shelves. Randomness also played a role in Jay Bennett's story. Eight years after he had departed Wilco, after several solo albums that failed to break through, Jay died of a fentanyl overdose. 'It was hard to be surprised, but that didn't make it any less heartbreaking,' Jeff Tweedy said, adding: 'I wouldn't have been surprised to see him onstage with Jackson Browne for instance. Jay would have made almost any band better if he'd been able to get help'.

According to critic Robert Christgau in The Village Voice: "The way Jeff Tweedy's tunes seep through shifting strata of complication recalls Beck's in Odelay, but Odelay was a lot jollier than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Jeff Tweedy with Wilco makes a virtue of their entanglement in disconnected sound, their depressive inability to control an encroaching environment--a defeatism familiar enough from slacker days, only slackers were more chill or at least ironic about it. Wilco and Jeff Tweedy's integrity comes down to a stubborn determination--distinctly American in its folksy affect and go-it-alone-ism--to tell the world how very ineffective they feel." Sam Jones (December 12, 2000): "I have had many discussions with Tony Margherita, Wilco’s manager, and although he assures me the band is excited about the idea of a documentary, I can’t get Jeff Tweedy to return my phone calls. 

Tony suggested to call directly Jeff's wife and she was lovely with us and encouraging of our project. Of course, Tweedy returned his wife Susan's call even during the rehearsal of 'Reservations', although he seemed distressed." According to the rival Son Volt's fan base, the marriage of Tweedy and Susan Miller might have been on the rocks at that time, but it's difficult to imagine there were serious problems in their relationship after all the eulogies that Tweedy has offered to her wife, being Sukierae (2014), an album explicitly dedicated to her, calling her "his best muse," and remarking "she understands me better than I understand myself. Without her, I wouldn't be here."

Sam Jones (January 13, 2001): "Christy (the producer), Roger (soundman) and I flew to Chicago. We arrived in the evening, and were met by Margherita. As he drove us from the airport to Wilco’s loft, I realized that he was a huge fan of the band, and that he had a very persistent habit of singing along with the stereo. We were let into the loft by none other than Jeff Tweedy himself. The rest of the band was sitting around a card table having Chinese food. I was introduced to Jay, John and Leroy. The mood was strangely silent and somber, and I felt very awkward as Christy and I tried to make conversation. And poor Glenn Kotche (Wilco’s new drummer). The band didn’t even tell him that a documentary was being made. He was about to find out. I just finished watching the Nine Inch Nails documentary, and I realize it is everything I don't want the Wilco film to be. It was full of quick edits in time to the music, with every visual medium ever invented mixed randomly. Although it is probably quite effective for the NIN audience, to me it is like watching moths darting around a porch light. After 30 minutes I decided that it was the antithesis of what I want my film to look like. I would rather a scene from my film be mistaken for “Harold and Maude” than it be mistaken for a music video. I don’t feel like the movie has to look like MTV to feel musical. And I decided right then and there that I do not want a music video editor to cut this film." Sources: stateofsound.com, gloriousnoise.com and medium.com

Sam Raimi: Send Help and Drag Me To Hell

When the System Collapses: What Sam Raimi Is Really Revealing About Power Structures

Sam Raimi’s films are famous for its excesses—vomit, blood, demonic spectacles. But the real horror in Drag Me to Hell and Send Help isn’t mostly supernatural. It’s mostly structural. Both films begin inside institutional-coded spaces—a bank, a corporate succession pipeline. And both stage the same experiment: What happens when the insulation around power disappears? The answer isn’t always empowerment. It’s often exposure. Power isn’t always Strength. Sometimes paradoxically it’s Insulation.

In Drag Me to Hell, Christine competes for promotion against a less competent male colleague who thrives through proximity and schmoozing other colleagues. In Send Help, Linda is passed over in favor of a fraternity-connected executive heir. These institutions don’t simply reward merit. They simply stabilize incumbents. They absorb flaws. They normalize entitlement. They cushion mediocrity. The insiders do not need to prove themselves. The structure protects them from exposure. 

The Closed System: Raimi’s worlds operate as closed systems—procedural, indifferent, fixed. In Drag Me to Hell, Christine enters a supernatural bureaucracy that mirrors corporate logic: someone must pay the debt. She becomes ruthless enough to exhume a corpse and attempt to transfer the curse given previously to her. She follows the rules. And she still dies. Not because she lacked cruelty—but because she never controlled the inner mechanisms. And a simple technical error seals her fate. Compliance offers no authorship. The system does not always reward effort. It just deletes errors.

In Send Help, the plane crash strips away corporate hierarchy entirely. No inheritance. No networking advantage. No institutional buffer. But the pivot happens even earlier. On the plane, after overhearing the men casually confirm her marginalization, Linda deletes the plan draft she is completing. Her gesture is quiet but decisive. She withdraws her labor and ambitions from a system that will never convert them into leverage. The plane crash that follows does not create her break from legitimacy—it reveals she was already prepared to operate without it. 

From Compliance to Authorship: Once stranded on the island, Linda discovers the private beach resort—a hidden infrastructure with plenty of stocked resources, discovering an insulation she can control. From that moment, her survival shifts into authorship. She knows rescue is possible. But she chooses not to signal help. When Zuri and the guide suddenly arrive, she could restore legitimacy and return to the corporate order. Instead, she decides to eliminate them. Not in panic—but in consolidation of her new power. She refuses to reenter the system as a subordinate again, so she remains insulated. 

Baptism and Revelation: Christine seeks restoration and is destroyed by structural indifference. Linda rejects restoration, seizes authority, and converts it into insulation. Closed systems reward either inherited protection or self-authored control. They do not reward compliance by outsiders. Raimi renders this divergence grotesquely literal. Christine is baptized in corpse vomit—engulfed, swallowed by forces she cannot master. Her immersion marks her erosion. She remains subject to rules she did not design. Whereas, Linda is baptized in blood during the boar hunt—drenched, exhilarated, dominant. Her immersion marks her initiation. She stops seeking permission. She generates an inevitability. The difference in these two films is not morality. It is control. And sardonic inevitability.

Blondie’s “One Way or Another” frames Send Help at both beginning and end. At first, signifies how "outside" and not accepted Linda is. By the end, it lands as sardonic thesis. “I’m gonna get ya” is no longer playful. It’s structural. Linda does not only earn legitimacy. She embraces inevitability. One way or another. The humor works because the film knows exactly what it’s showing. Success here is not moral triumph. It is rational adaptation within an uncaring structure. 

The Structural Threat: If insulated hierarchies protect incumbents from exposure, then their authority depends on that insulation. When insulation collapses, what’s revealed is uncomfortable: power did not reflect ability. It reflected insulation. Christine believes compliance will protect her. It doesn’t. Linda recognizes compliance will not protect her. She exits legitimacy, gains authorship, and reenters the system insulated. Strip away the insulation, and power doesn’t disappear. What disappears is the illusion. Raimi’s horror isn’t moral—it’s structural. The system was never neutral, only uncaring. 

Rachel McAdams is wonderful as always—our eternal romantic lead. Here she uses every ounce of that built-in goodwill as a weapon. Her Linda is never a victim in Send Help. Even covered in sand, blood and sweat, she possesses a terrifying, luminous capability. It is a subversive performance that lands perfectly. Opposite her, Dylan O’Brien nails the specific, grating energy of a boss we have all had. He is not a cartoon villain, but an indifferent, casually manipulative dude who mistakes privilege for charm. His descent from predator to pathetic prey is horrifying, hilarious and—crucially—feels earned. Raimi’s genius is in the balance. The torture walks a razor’s edge between cruelty and catharsis, but it never tips into nihilism. You are always cheering for Linda’s ingenuity and cruelty. Source: cultmtl.com

Donnie Darko as Suicidal Ideation Allegory, Twilight Override (Jeff Tweedy from Wilco)

Narratively, cinema tends to oversimplify the onset of a character's mental illness by rooting it tidily in a single trauma. This is called the "presumption of traumatic etiology", a term used by Steven E. Hyler, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, in his Comprehensive Psychiatry article, "DSM-III at the Cinema." In the mythos of the film, Donnie Darko must sacrifice himself to save the universe. In another read, though, he instead comes to the unfortunately common conclusion that his suicide will improve everyone else's lives. He allows the jet engine to crush his bedroom with him inside: he kills himself. Just think of the image at the end of the jet engine falling through the wormhole tunnel. What does that resemble? A bullet traveling through a gun barrel. The jet engine's rounded, cylindrical, shiny-metal shape is completely analogous to that of a bullet. The jet engine missing him the first time might be symbolic of giving up on an early suicide attempt. 

The suicidal young man's idea of himself as a hero who must sacrifice himself to save people is the psychology that is represented in many works (including Catcher in the Rye), and in certain mythology of rock and roll. Jeff Tweedy from Wilco differs from that mythology. Jeff Tweedy (talking over his most recent triple album Twilight Override): “I’m not espousing the dark underbelly of New York's nightlife or decadence or anything like that because I was so disappointed—even as an addict, I was so disappointed with the cliche of it, the hypocrisy of it. The disgusting nature of advocating for things that are really bad for people.  You know, honestly, the way rock and roll was marketed as a culture was just awful. And the part that I knew was there and was disappointed to find wasn’t really the guiding principle was the part that I thought was really beautiful.”

 

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you get together with your friends and then the world is a little less painful. You get together with your friends, make some music and you’re all transported. And then all of a sudden, you have a community around it. And then other bands start because they see that there’s this opportunity, there’s this place. There’s a strategy for living. It isn’t what you’ve been sold. And so, you know, I reject it. I fucking reject it in rock and roll. The radical, individuated self-expression of rock and roll and the self-liberation of it — that’s all that matters.” He makes it sound so simple. What if it is?" Source: insidehook.com

At first Donnie/the antihero has an impulse to harm others, and then he turns it inward and imagines an elaborate scenario by which he "saves" people. His destructive, lashing-out impulse has found a personal mythology that makes him feel justified and good. Catcher in the Rye's Holden character has a fantasy of saving children running through a field toward a cliff. Holden Caulfield is the guy who catches them before they fall to their deaths. By the end of that novel, we realize Holden is in therapy and undeniably suicidal. His rejection of "phonies" is very similar to Donnie Darko's hostility toward the moral preachings of those at the high school. By burning down the house of the Patrick Swayze's pedophile character, Donnie Darko basically "catches" the Sparkle Motion girls (and his little sister) by preventing the local creep from getting to them.

The fear/love dichotomy is similar. He fears dying, especially the loneliness of dying by his own hand, fears many other things, especially losing his girlfriend Gretchen and his family. He wants to love and be loved. His parents are shown to be very loving people, but not reaching him, not even his doting mother. He really doesn't want to hurt them. He finds a way to think that if he dies, he is somehow doing them a favor. Part of him realizes that the fear/love dichotomy is a cop-out, so by the end he has accepted that if it has to be one concept winning above the other, it should be love. 

The arrow of time, and the blob that goes in front of people before they take action, is like what he sees himself moving toward. But he's schizoprenic and starts to see his decision as inevitable. He goes onto a kind of autopilot toward his oblivion. That is similar to the resignation and elation that many suicidal people have just before they commit the deed. Often it is a sense of peace after the decision has been fully finalized and accepted. In suicidal research literature, this is often the time when people are giving away their personal items, as they don't care any more about possessions. Donnie's parents give him a lot of "new stuff" as a reaction to him getting in trouble at school, and unfortunately it doesn't mean much to him.

One major element of the story is the idea of destruction being a part of creation. "The Destructors" by Graham Greene is about young people destroying a man's wealth and home, and the story is said to mean something about destruction being a positive thing. It is the young reclaiming something from the old, an expression of vitality and renewal. I think the fixation on this story is completely a part of the psychological process Donnie Darko is working out. Interestingly, the term "cellar door" represents a portal to a downward location -- a portal one passes through to death. It's also a term from "a famous linguist," whom the screenplay avoids mentioning was J.R.R. Tolkien, whose claim to fame was the creation of a vast fantasy realm and mythology. Donnie Darko is creating his own personal mythology as he moves toward the "cellar door" of his demise. The two words are cast as "the most beautiful in the English language": death recast as a high form of beauty. Suicidal ideation.

Basically, Donnie considers himself a liability to his community. He falls in love with the new girl at school, but he imagines he might end up losing her, and fantasizes finally with saving her life. His therapist isn't making any real progress with him and recurs to use placebo medicine. The echo-voiced bunnyman he imagines doesn't seem to be alive -- it is a half-dead bunny face, like a skull. A bunny is a symbol of innocence but in the form Donnie hallucinates, it becomes a symbol of innocence turning to death, of something that has become rotten in its springtime. That's how he feels on the inside: Like he's not youthful or vital or hopeful like he thinks he ought to be, but already dead inside.

On October 2, 1988, Donnie Darko — a euphemistic “troubled teen” — receives a dreamlike message from a satanic bunny named Frank, that the world will be ending on October 30. Donnie accepts this news fairly stoically, but it’s just the beginning of a month of nightmares about destruction that Donnie then re-creates in real life. Or does he? Is anything that happens between the warning to Donnie of impending apocalypse and the date of its predicted arrival real? Is it all a drug-induced hallucination? Or a psychosis-induced fantasy, a detachment from reality? Donnie Darko is what Ferris Bueller’s Day Off might have been if David Lynch had ever gotten his hands on it, a daring, disturbing, visionary debut from writer/director Richard Kelly. 

It's at times a bleak and pessimistic vision, but it reflects some of the feelings of Xers that they’ve been ignored and unappreciated. Donnie knows where his parents hide their gun. The inevitable chest-blob-arrow leads him right to it, as though it's not even his own decision anymore. He imagines a scenario where he'll end up using the gun on somebody else, out of revenge or some angry impulse. He doesn't want to do that. Up close, the gun's barrel is a wormhole of time. The bullet's aim is the arrow of time. The bullet is the jet engine. The Philosophy of Time Travel becomes the ability to make time stop, for him and him only. Source: popmatters.com

The Dick Powell Story by Tony Thomas

No movie star ever made a more radical change of image in mid-career than Dick Powell. The former crooner turned tough guy in Murder, My Sweet, Cornered (his darkest film), Johnny O’Clock, To the Ends of the Earth, Pitfall, Station West, and Cry Danger, all among the best examples of American film noir. It was, as he admitted, “one hell of a transition.” Dick Powell’s position in Hollywood history is unique in that he is identified as a leading exponent of two vastly different film genres—the musicals of the Thirties and the films noir of the late Forties. The actor of the one is barely recognizable as the actor of the other. Film students might be forgiven for wondering if they are the same man. Despite the complex image, Dick Powell was a relatively simple man. He was the product of an average working-class family, growing up with traditional values, politically conservative with religious views that did not much go beyond a faith in the Golden Rule and The Ten Commandmants. Powell was a classic example of the Great Depression self-made man with a passion for work and seemingly gifted with the Midas touch. Powell believed that anyone can achieve anything if he tries hard enough. For him it certainly worked.

Almost all the songs sung by Dick Powell in his first two years in Hollywood were written by Harry Warren and his lyricist Al Dubin. Dubin quit Hollywood in 1938, but Warren stayed for the rest of his long and productive life. He and Powell remained friends. “Of all the singers I’ve ever dealt with, he was just about the easiest to get along with. I don’t think he ever made an objection to any song we ever handed him. Music was easy for him. He’d been a musician and he’d been singing since he was a choirboy. His only problem at Warners was getting more money. Even when he was doing 42nd Street he was only getting $175 a week, and it was a constant fight to raise it.”

Naughty But Nice brought the long Warner Bros. phase of Dick Powell’s career to a rather abrupt end. The original title of this minor musical was The Professor Steps Out, which indicates the nature of the plot. In something of a change of pace for Powell, he is not a genial dunderhead but a serious minded music professor named Hardwick, who goes to New York to arrange for his symphony to be published. In The Big Apple the poor man is used, abused and confused, and learns that the music business is not run by decent minded academics. 

Professor Hardwick is not equipped to deal with the kind of sharks who run Tin Pan Alley. Part of his problem is that he has been coddled and protected by three maiden aunts who believe him to be a genius. Although far from that he does have some ability with melody, which leads to one of his serious pieces being bowdlerized into a snappy jive song, “Hooray for Spinach,” performed by the slinky Zelda Manion (Ann Sheridan), who is in league with a sleazy publisher. She pursues the professor in order to filch more of his melodies but Linda McKay (Gale Page) falls in love with the sweet natured but thoroughly naive professor. Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer wrote four songs for Naughty But Nice. Ann Sheridan, whose career Warners was building, got two of them and Powell got “I’m Happy About the Whole Thing” and “In a Moment of Weakness,” which he recorded for Decca. Sadly it would be the last of the movie songs that he would record. 

Dick Powell and Joan Blondell had been married four years by the time they made I Want a Divorce and still happy enough to hazard a film with such a title. While the critics had praised Powell for his performance in Christmas in July they didn't make many comments about any real change of image. That came with I Want a Divorce. Variety noted that there was no singing and commented that “he handles the straight role in capable fashion, displaying ability to carry both dramatic and comedy situations required by the characterization.” The Hollywood Reporter was even kinder: “Dick Powell is genuinely amazing as the boy, his work opening up a fresh screen career to him. Here Powell proves beyond question that glorified chorus boy roles are definitely behind him. He realizes expert understanding of the character changes in his role and plays each to the hilt.” He had been waiting a very long time to get a comment like that.

Murder, My Sweet continues to be a much studied and admired film. Its qualities are many but pivotal is the performance of Dick Powell. Always a confident man, he was here able to focus his intelligence as an actor. Never before had he been able to take such command of a characterization. His Philip Marlowe is not an especially likeable man but he is basically decent, “I’m just a small businessman in a very messy business, but I like to follow through on a sale.” 

Much of the effectiveness of Powell’s performance was due to his skill in delivering lines, one of which became a classic, “I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom.” Powell could muster the right tone for cynical dialogue, as when seeing the palatial home of the Grayles, “It was a nice little front yard. Cozy. Okay for the average family. Only you'd need a compass to go to the mailbox.” After this film Dick Powell no longer had to dog anybody to be considered for a good role. He had made the breakthrough. Now they would come to him. Philip Marlowe would be played by other actors, including Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, but there are those who feel that Powell’s Marlowe was the closest to the part as written by Raymond Chandler. 

One of them was Chandler himself, who felt that Murder, My Sweet was the best film adaptation of any of his novels. In his book The Detective in Film (1972), film historian William K. Everson noted: “Purely as a thriller, with a complicated yet logically worked out plot, Marder, My Sweet was near perfect. Powell—because the realistic conception of the private eye was relatively new, and because Powell was totally new to it—became Marlowe far more easily than Bogart, who had several other competing images against him: the gangster image, Sam Spade, Rick from Casablanca. Powell tossed off the tired, contemptuous, yet biting Raymond Chandler wisecracks and insults with superbly underplayed style.”

Powell’s emergence as a director and producer was closely tied to the legendary eccentric Howard Hughes when he took over RKO as owner and manager in 1948. The studio’s financial affairs were then in disarray and the assumption was he had acquired RKO as a tax write-off. This proved not to be the case. Production picked up and for a while it seemed as if Hughes would become a movie tycoon, albeit one with highly unusual business practices. Hughes’ office was not at RKO but at the Goldwyn Studios and it is said that he set foot on the RKO lot only once and getting an appointment with him was virtually impossible. RKO functioned as if it had a ghost boss. 

However, Hughes appeared to like Powell and gave his approval when producer Edmund Grainger suggested that he be hired to direct Split Second. Hughes’ respect for Powell increased when he found that Powell was not cashing any of the checks paid to him in the period of pre-production. Hughes called and wanted to know what was wrong. Said Powell, “I told him that the script was being altered without my having any say in the matter. Hughes asked for my ideas and immediately phoned the writer to work directly with me. Then I cashed my checks. The movie was a hit and Hughes started cultivating me.” 

Dick Powell considered many other projects for Twentieth Century-Fox but none materialized. In 1960 he asked that his contract with them be terminated. It was obvious to Fox and to everybody else that Four Star Television had burgeoned into a major production company and Powell was the man who ran it. It was a matter of too much to do and too little time. He had directed five films, while also producing four of them. Split Second and The Enemy Below deserve special mention as very fine pieces of work. He was never pretentious about anything he did and about his work as a director he made no lofty claims. “I do the best I can with the type of material I am able to get. I have no illusions about joining the company of William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Henry Koster, Elia Kazan, Carol Reed or John Ford. I admire all these filmmakers for the honesty with which they attempt to do their pictures.” Still, it is interesting to wonder how good a track record Dick Powell might have had as a director had he been not so busy. 

Ronald Reagan became friendly with Dick Powell soon after he arrived at Warners in 1937. He played an announcer in the film Hollywood Hotel and afterwards played supporting roles in three other Powell pictures. Recalls Reagan, “On Hollywood Hotel, Dick was the star and I had only two lines, but he couldn’t have been nicer. Easily and smoothly he put me at ease. I was one of thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. He always seemed to feel such genuine pleasure at seeing you. Sometimes our paths took us in different directions and months would pass without our seeing each other. Still in these later years, when we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick ever saying an unkind word about anyone.” 

Four Star Productions blossomed in the late Fifties, taking over the Republic Pictures lot in Studio City. It quickly became known as a place that gave fresh talent a break. Powell said at the time: “I know what a tough time I had realizing my ambitions, so I’m giving everybody a chance to make money and do what other shows won’t let them do. I’ve been able to sign the best writers and actors in the business because I’m not following the greed principle of the other producers. The actors are coming into my fold because I’m offering them all rights outside of the United States in the shows in which they appear for me. And I’m giving the writers every financial break.” One of the young producers in whom he put his trust was Stanley Kallis: “I was hired as an associate producer for The Law and Mr. Jones and at the end of the first season, we didn’t know if we would be picked up. Dick came to me and told me: ‘I’d like you to stay here. I don’t have anything for you at the moment but I’ll find something.’ I was amazed. This is not the usual way of doing things in Hollywood. I’d been striving to find a niche in this business and he gave it to me. Dick was a very generous man. 

There was a decency about him that is unfortunately rare in this business. He was a ‘no nonsense’ character. He had a genius for business but he did it with charm. Dick was a gentleman. I’d have done anything for this man.” According to Kallis, Powell was also a man of vision. “One evening in his office he showed me some plans he  had drawn up for a future concept of the studio. He always had a keen regard for real estate and he thought the old idea of sound stages covering acres of ground was a waste. His concept was to build new sound stages one on top of the other, to stack them and thereby leave the cleared ground for location use or other buildings. There’s no telling how far he would have gone had he lived.”

Someone who had a good idea of where Powell wanted to go was June Allyson, who always referred to her husband as Richard. Allyson said: “Richard’s wheeling and dealing in TV boggled my mind. At one point Four Star was buying the stock ownership of Marterto Productions, which owned, among other things, ninety episodes of Make Room For Daddy. It would cost us $1,800,000. Time magazine called Richard ‘one of the major, and sharpest, businessmen in U.S. television.’ Richard's favorite phrase was, ‘Nobody loses, everybody wins.’” About Dick's investments, June sometimes complained: "No sooner would I get used to one house than Richard would move us to another—this time to Bel Air. But I loved English Tudor. And I told him "I love this house. I’ll never move. Never." He grabbed me and mashed the hysterics out of me in a big rough bear hug that ultimately turned into a long evening of lovemaking. The next day I sputtered all the way to Bel Air, grumbling about being thrown out of my house and deaf to his lecture on real estate values and the art of doubling your investment. He turned it into a most impressive estate on Copa de Oro."

MGM intended to star Dick and June as the married couple honeymooning in The Long, Long Trailer (1954) based on a best-selling book. Then when I Love Lucy became a sensation, the studio offered Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz the property. June wasn't happy about it, and Dick Powell never made another film, choosing to concentrate on TV productions. Powell justified all the long hours and the many periods away from home by affirming it as his plan for the future—to turn Four Star into a major film studio, one that would rival MGM. The plans were admirable, but the strain on his marriage was severe. He arose at six, conducted business by phone during breakfast and often put in sixteen-hour days, in addition to the constant trips out of town. 

June Allyson complained: “Where was Richard? He was late. He was sorry but he wouldn’t be home early enough, so we'd just go ahead and have dinner without him.” Aside from the fact that they were genuinely in love and attached to each other, the Powell-Allyson marriage was regarded by some friends as a strange one. And in fact they were different kinds of people. He was confident and reserved, she was volatile and emotional. An industry insider once described them as "an oak tree paired with a butterfly." Despite of various rumors echoed by the press, the reality was simple: Dick Powell never really changed despite of his stardom. His views towards his marriage were based on mutual respect, love and family. Despite some obstacles thrown upon Powell and Allyson typical of their Hollywood milieu, it's been difficult to prove infidelity on either side. Powell belongs in that rare category of the consummate Hollywood artist who was also a basically decent man (in the same league of Fred MacMurray or James Stewart). —The Dick Powell Story (Riverwood Press, 1993) by Tony Thomas