From
beyond the Vegetable Patch...
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Shite
Noise.
by
Jon Dunmore © 5 Jan 2006.
Not
only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the
twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and
still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms... Movie stars go to
mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear
amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness,
ignorance and savagery! - Leon Trotsky.
Apparently,
dead people can be heard through any electronic device with a microphone input.
It's called EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena). And all this time I thought it was
called Karaoke.
Like every other unsubstantiated and specious pseudo-science
(Phrenology, Intelligent Design, et al), endowing EVP with a name that
sounds like it was coined by the Professor from Gilligan's Island seems to grant
it a modicum of legitimacy. When in fact, it has as much credibility as those
hippie knuckleheads who used to light up and spin their Zeppelin albums backwards,
"decoding" the devilspeak they thunk themselves into discovering.
The "experts"
advise that when you first try recording the thin air, you won't hear Beyond The
Grave voices immediately, because it apparently takes awhile for the deceased
to master the art of voiceover, and because most of them haven't debased themselves
and humanity by appearing on American Idol to learn how to "woik"
a mic - but mostly because it's just plain asinine horse manure. I
suppose the 1957 Z-movie, The Dead Talk Back (resurrected for lampooning
by MST 3K) was so hideous and imbecilic that it needed to be remade as White
Noise. The 1957 version was better: I especially liked the professor's fake
real beard and the honking coffin. Nothing
as sensible in this film, although Michael Keaton does get his Beetlejuice on
and wastes his considerable acting talents staring at white noise and deciphering
messages his dead wife sends him: that someone is going to die in a car accident;
that someone is going to be stabbed; that someone should have swallowed his pride
and auditioned for Batman Begins… Successful
architect, Jonathan Rivers (Keaton), traumatized over his wife's mysterious death,
falls for the legitimacy of EVP so quickly that we are apt to harumph over his
turn of mind - until we realize that these are precisely the types of irrational
folk who are preyed on by the pseudo-science purveyors - they need not be ignorant
or even weak-minded (although that surely helps); they just need their traumatized
condition to prevent them from thinking straight. The
chumly presence of Ian McNeice as Raymond, the EVP purveyor (obviously not the
car-salesman type on the con), is meant to put us at ease - but that makes him
all the more temporarily insane in believing that the ambient noise he casually
records - for no apparent reason - is dead humans talking. At least it is quite
transparent that douchebag charlatans like John Edwards do it for the cash - but
dabbling as avocation places you higher on the Get A Life chart than middle-aged
dweebs owning self-designed lightsabers. Whilst
Rivers views "legitimate" images of dead folk on a grainy computer monitor,
intermingled are always three shadowy images, whom we deduce are, in fact, the
three aliens from Lost In Space who wanted to abscond with The Robot -
remember those faceless mimes with the bowler hats and capes, swaying and intoning,
"We want the mechanical man!"? Closely resembling the infamous "Shadow
Man" from a 1980's Twilight Zone episode, after decades in the "Where
Are They Now?" bin, they cryptically hound Rivers in this film, appearing
with joltingly loud soundtrack stabs just as we're assuming a comfortable sleeping
position. Never
mind that the Good Christians who would fall for this storyline (Rivers' deceased
wife foretelling where tragedies are going to occur so that Rivers might intervene
and save lives) do not even realize that any form of pre-destination heretically
negates "free will" - which is what your Good Christ was all about;
never mind that even though Rivers is present at two murder scenes, the police
never hold him for questioning; let the story unfold illogically for the sake
of the bonehead "believers" - they can't tell from reality anyway. A
psychic tells Rivers, "It's one thing to contact the dead," (an imbecilic
statement at best), "it's another thing to meddle - and you are meddling!
They urge you to stop!" Now let me get this straight: he is saving lives
that are being put in jeopardy by the Shadowmen. So who exactly is urging him
to stop "meddling"? The Shadowmen - so that they may continue to willfully
end lives prematurely? And if so - why urge him to stop? Wouldn't they relish
killing a meddler? Or is Rivers upsetting the natural balance of Who Stays
and Who Goes, befuddling both God's and Death's book-keeping? Is God the one urging
him to stop? But shouldn't God want Rivers to intervene in the nefarious
doings of the Shadowmen? Is it not the Shadowmen who are muddling God's books
with their premature killings? Guess I'll have to call Dionne Warwick for this
one… The
storyline is resolved about as clearly as EVP is explained, when a killer who
is controlled by the Shadowmen is himself killed by police in the end, with Rivers
being killed by the Shadowmen, which leaves exactly THREE spirit killers still
on the loose. I suppose the killings will only begin again when the Shadowmen
sign for a sequel: "We want the mechanical royalties!" As
with all pseudo-sciences, rules change when the plot calls for it: Raymond tells
Rivers the voices must be recorded and played back to be heard - yet at movie's
end, Rivers himself "comes back" directly via a radio, to assure his
son that yes, even death cannot quell redneck ignorance.
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