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(1922–1978). American director.
Wrote:
The Bride and the Beast (Adrian Weiss 1958); Orgy of the Dead (A.
C. Stevens 1966).
A rational
book on science fiction film would dismiss Edward D. Wood, Jr. in a single
sentence: "Edward Wood was a director with very limited talents and very
limited resources who made a few, very bad films." More discussion is required
only because Wood has improbably become the center of a cult. His work has been
extensively analyzed in the bad-movie books of the Medved brothers, who awarded
him a Golden Turkey as the Worst Director of All Time. His films are regularly
shown at film festivals and chalk up steady sales in video stores. And he has
been the subject of a video documentary and a film that was, astonishingly, a
rather traditional Hollywood biopic, Tim BURTON's Ed Wood (1994).
Whether all this attention is really a service to the man remains debatable; it
is better to be remembered than to be forgotten, I suppose, but deciding
whether one prefers eternal obscurity or eternal ridicule is a difficult
choice.
It is also
not immediately clear why, with so many other plausible candidates available
(Al ADAMSON, Larry BUCHANAN, Phil TUCKER, etc.), Wood has emerged as the most
celebrated bad-movie director. Perhaps it is only because he was such a colorful
character, a cheerful transvestite who attracted an extremely odd circle of
friends and collaborators. Or perhaps—if laughter is indeed, as Henri Bergson
argues, based on the appearance of incongruity—it is because Wood's films are
so amazingly incongruous; no other director combined such lofty ambitions with
such dismal results. It is hard for modern viewers to believe, but Glen or
Glenda was envisioned as a passionate argument for the acceptance of
transvestitism; the conclusion of Bride of the Monster was supposed to
serve as a powerful statement about the folly of nuclear war; and Plan Nine
from Outer Space was designed as a science-fictional take on the Book of
Revelations, as signalled by its titular number nine and its dead people rising
from their graves. There is also the minor incongruity of Wood's insistence on
making movies that demand special effects when he had no budget or talent for
special effects; some of the biggest laughs in Burton's film come from
displaying his absurd improvisations in this area—Bela LUGOSI wrapping the
stuffed octopus around him, the paper-plate flying saucer set on fire, and so
on. But there is no need for a lengthy analysis of Wood's various ineptitudes;
other critics have done all that work.
With their infinite
ingenuity, critics could no doubt advance any number of arguments about Wood's
importance—pointing out that his films suggest a natural affinity between
science fiction and the alienated, eccentric outsider; arguing that there are
recurring themes, such as a simultaneous fascination with and revulsion towards
the unknown, that reverberate throughout his work; perhaps even maintaining
that films can be appreciated not simply as polished narratives but as
documentary records of encounters between interesting people, which would make
Wood's movies inadvertent but valuable examinations of a neglected American
subculture. But this is also work that I will leave to others. I strongly
suspect that any profundities one might extract from Wood's oeuvre could
also be extracted, with less effort, from any number of bad science fiction
films. (As a professor of mine once pointed out, if you stare at anything
long enough, you start to see deeper meanings in it.) This is the question
critics must ask: do these films communicate anything of value, anything that
is not communicated in quite the same way by other films? To me, the only
lesson Wood provides is that science fiction films can be very bad indeed when
they are made quickly and cheaply by talentless people; but do we really need
any evidence to support that hypothesis?
People may
choose their own entertainments, but I am personally tired of laughing at
incompetence. The last I tried to watch Plan Nine from Outer Space, I
gave up well before its conclusion—perhaps recalling my parents' words and
realizing, as is often the case, that they were right all along.
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