A Persistence of Vision - Theodore Roszak's Flicker

What initially strikes you about Flicker is, quite apart from its cultural prescience (and it was published in 1992) is its similarity thematically with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. But while there are shadowy conspiracies, paranoia and Gnosticism, Flicker contains no car chases, cliff-hangers or narrow escapes.
Roszak at the time was better known for his sociology texts and for allegedly coining the term 'counterculture'; subsequently Flicker is a slow-burn - literary, analytical, comtemplative and a deeply, deeply seductive piece of writing.
Beginning in the 50's, Jonathan Gates, a young film scholar gradually discovers that the works of an all-but forgotten German film-maker, Max Castle are a window to an ancient hidden conspiracy, the ongoing work of Cathar religious heretics.
Gates finds himself under the tutelage of the older, analytical Clare Swann, a woman running a mildewed art-house cinema in L.A. and who likes to use film criticism as a sex aid. A "frenzied cerebral-genital curriculum". Together they unearth more of the mystery of the enigmatic Castle. To avoid the Nazi's Castle fled to Hollywood and found himself knocking out low grade horror and exploitation fare. After Castle was lost at sea near the end of the war, Castle's movies slid into obscurity. When they discover one of the 'lost' Castle movies, Gates slowly starts to realise there is more to his movies than meets the eye - literally. There are movies within his movies, something hidden within the 'flicker'...

There was in Castle’s films a genuine horror, one that froze through to the bone. At no point could I have said precisely where the film’s power lay—except that I was sure it was nothing I’d consciously seen that produced the effect. Rather, it was as if somewhere behind my eyes, another part of me was observing a different world, one in which the vampire and his victim were real, the supernatural events were real, the blasphemy was real.

Of course the subject of subliminal imagery has cropped up in many movies over the years: the skull over laying Anthony Perkins face in Psycho, the devils head in The Exorcist, and of course any amount of subliminal messages lurking behind modern day advertising. But that's a whole other conspiracy for another day.

Over the course of 600+ pages, Roszak very deliberately builds up a grandiose conspracy involving Gnostic dualists, Catholic persecution and an impending apocalypse that manages to convince purely because he's taken his sweet time about building up a rich fantasia of characters and places. There's a deep abiding love for cinema too, directors, actors, Hollywood trivia and an almost masturbatory detail for media theory. Orson Welles makes a cameo after it's established that Castle was on set for Citizen Kane, and was responsible for many of the innovations in the movie; indeed there's a wonderful overlap of fiction and actual movie fact in Flicker that you constantly find yourself wanting to rush to Wikipedia in order to tease apart the two in more obscure refrerences.

The subliminal 'movies within movies' is a seductive idea too; aside from the more well-known examples as noted earlier, it makes you wish for a real life equivalent of Castle's movies. Readers of the novel will know each other by the quickening of their pulse at the mention of a 'sallyrand', and I'll say no more.

Alas in the final 200 pages or so of the book, Roszak loses focus to an extent as he turns his attention from classic film appreciation to modern day movie making. The conspiracy takes centre stage and the characters slip out of focus somewhat. And for all Roszak's clear and abiding love of the golden age of cinema, his view of more modern fare makes him sound like an old curmudgeon. The ending too, while admittedly quite peverse, is something of a let-down after the comtemplative and academic stance of much of the novel. It feels like the denoument of a completely different, slightly more sensationalistic book.

That aside I can say that I did adore the book. It's rich, funny, beautifully written and filled to the brim with ideas. And books like that don't come along all that often.

Apparently Darren Aronofsky and Fight Club screenwriter JimUhls were connected with the book for a while, but it appears to have slipped through the cracks for the time being. Although Flicker would be a tough call for most directors, I can easily imagine Aronofsky getting to grips with the book's complexities and playing with the idea of Castle's subliminal movies within movies. Maybe one day.

Next up is Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road...

STENDEC

The memory is a funny thing. Years ago when I was quite young, I used to collect re-prints of 50's comic books published by Marvel before Stan Lee went on to create Spider-Man/Fantastic Four/X-Men etc. They went under the banner of Atlas Comics and had titles like Tales of Suspense, Strange Worlds and Tales to Astonish, and usually contained short comic book tales akin to Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. At an impressionable age, they really blew my mind and remain a delight. In fact I started to track them down on ebay to see if they were as good as I recalled, and they were. They were also probably my first exposure to the writing talents of Stan 'The Man' Lee and the wonderfully weird world of artist Steve Ditko.

But that isn't really where the post is going. Tonight after watching an episode of the recently obtained boxset of Supernatural (a show that has inexpicably slipped under my radar for four seasons, and is really rather fantastic), I was reminded of a story I read when I was probably no more than six years old in one of those Atlas Comics reprints. It purported to be a true story of the Stardust Airliner that vanished from the skies mid-flight in 1947. I don't recall the details by now but what I do remember is the final panel that recounted the final radio message from the Stardust minutes before it vanished; it was

ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 [standard time] STENDEC

The meaning of the word STENDEC has never been conclusively explained, the comic book told me.

Somewhat bizarrely the word STENDEC has stuck with me for over thirty years. I've forgotten the detail of people's faces, names, dates and experiences, but STENDEC stuck with me. When this episode of Supernatural concerning a demon causing a series of plane crashes begun, STENDEC suddenly popped into my head for the first time in a few years, and as the internet was at hand, I typed it into Google, expecting some seriously random results.

But it turns out that that story in a reprint of a fifties comic was based on an actual event, and finally after thirty years the mystery of the word opened up for me again.

This is from a BBC site concerning a Horizon programme about the missing Stardust...

On August 2nd 1947, a British civilian version of the wartime Lancaster bomber took off from Buenos Aires airport on a scheduled flight to Santiago. There were 5 crew and 6 passengers on board the plane - named "Stardust". But Stardust never made it to Santiago. Instead it vanished when it was apparently just a few minutes from touchdown. One final strange morse code radio message - "STENDEC" - was sent, but after that nothing more was heard from the plane.

Despite a massive search of the Andes mountains no trace of the plane was ever found. For 53 years the families of those who disappeared have not known what happened to their loved ones.

But earlier this year the plane suddenly reappeared on a glacier high up in the Andes, more than 50 km’s from the area where the plane was last reported. In February this year the Argentine army arranged a major expedition to visit the crash site beneath the massive Tupangato peak (6800m). Their aim was to bring back the human remains which had been found at the site, so that an attempt could be made at identifying them. The expedition also offered a unique opportunity for crash investigators to see if they could finally explain what happened to the ill-fated plane.

The expedition discovered the plane and some human remains, and explained much of the mystery surrounding the Stardust's disappearance: the high altitude 'jetstream' in all probability caused the Stadust to veer from its course and collide with Mount Tupangato; the plane then became buried in the glacier, travelling downhill under the influence of gravity until it reached a warmer zone, and the ice began to melt. Fifty years later, the Stardust had revealed its secrets.
All save for one: STENDEC.
For a long time it became part of the tapestry of UFO conspiracy theories (and becoming the name of a Spanish UFO magazine); but of course, once the Stardust was discovered, we could be fairly certain that little green men had nothing to do with it. If I recall correctly, that Atlas story certainly indicated the UFO angle, and was probably why it captured my imagination at an early age; who doesn't love a UFO story when they're a kid?
In 1947 the official report into Stardust’s disappearance had this to say on the subject of STENDEC:
The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before the ETA. The Chilean radio operator at Santiago states that the reception of the signal was loud and clear but that it was given out very fast. Not understanding the word "STENDEC" he queried it and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. A solution to the word "STENDEC" has not been found. From this time on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was made with the control tower at Santiago. All further calls were unanswered.

Type STENDEC into Google and you'll find a multitude of theories:

• STENDEC is an anagram of DESCENT. Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as the Lancastrian was unpressurised and the plane was flying at 24000 feet, which would have led the radio operator to scramble the message. Other explanations for the appearance of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic radio operator and/or receiver in Santiago, and playfulness on behalf of Stardust’s radio operator.
• The radio operator meant to say Stardust. STENDEC and Stardust have some similarities both in Morse code and English.
• Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes amusing messages based on using STENDEC as a series of initials: Hence we have:"Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago tower aircraft now descending entering cloud")"Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash""Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled")."Santiago tower even navigator doesn’t exactly know"

STENDEC (or anything similar to the word ) doesn't appear in any language apparently, so the mystery will remain unsolved. I'm sure the truth is really rather prosaic (as is often the case), but at least tonight I've resolved a word that's been bouncing around unarrested in my subconscious for thirty years. Maybe one day I'll find the comic it appeared in too, and I can close the circle completely...

Easter Means...

... a new Doctor Who. Who needs Easter eggs when you have a new Doctor Who on the telly?