Medawar/Benjamin/HouseonHauntedHill

Today I finished Mardi Oakley Medawar’s 1998 novel Death At Rainy Mountain. The tangent consisting of Tay-bodal’s brief stay with Union troops after he was shot proved to be just that: a tangent. The novel is not really about white-Indian contact as much as it is about exploring the complexities of Kiowa culture and society. These complexities are presented most fully in the novel’s climactic scene, in which Tay-bodal successfully exonerates the Cheyenne Robber and reveals the identity of the murderer. There are obvious connections between this scene and the revelation scene of, say, an Agatha Christie novel where the omniscient detective explains his deductions. The difference is that Medawar connects the solution to her mystery brilliantly to questions of status and power in Kiowa society that in a very real sense provided the motive for the crime. Fittingly, the novel concludes with Tay-bodal’s marriage to Crying Wind, not only providing a happy ending, but also signifying his journey from outsider at the start of the novel to fully integrated community member at novel’s end.

I also read the next fifty pages of Medea Benjamin’s Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control. When Benjamin discusses the human costs of drone attacks (which include not only deaths and woundings but also the psychological trauma that results from living in a constant state of fear) it’s heart-rending. But then I’m reminded of Richard Wright’s famous comment about Native Son, namely, that he wanted to write something so hard and deep that people would have to read it without “the consolation of tears.” I feel the same way about this section of Drone Warfare: anger, rather than tears, is the more appropriate and useful response. Benjamin then goes on to discuss the legal issues surrounding the use of drones. It’s not difficult to demonstrate that the US is violating international law but doing so is unavoidably based on two rather naïve assumptions: a) that there has ever been a time when the US has NOT violated international law, and b) that anyone will ever hold the US to account. I’m not saying that Benjamin assumes these things; it’s just that any discussion of the legality of US policy can’t help but seem beside the point.

I also watched William Castle’s 1959 horror classic, The House on Haunted Hill. Vincent Price, at his brilliantly campy best, stars as an eccentric millionaire who promises to pay a group of strangers $10,000 each if they spend the night in a haunted house. By the end of the film, we find out that this arrangement was a ploy by Price to draw out his wife and her lover, who were planning to murder Price. The resolution of the murder plot, however, is hardly the focus of the film. Instead, the film is almost entirely driven by the development and gradual ratcheting up of an atmosphere of paranoid suspense. The sub-par special effects (especially what appears to be a dancing skeleton) don’t help much in this respect, but Price and Elisa Cook, Jr. between them are strong enough to carry the film and its camp aspects turn out to be much effective and memorable than its ability to scare the audience. Supposedly, the enormous success of this film inspired Hitchcock to try his hand at a low-budget horror film, with Psycho being the result. If one compares the two films, however, one will see that they’re completely different, so maybe Castle’s work served only as a negative example to Hitch.