I
‘m in the final stretch of RBT and I feel like Quint waiting in the water to board the rescue ship. Viewing the series has often been torturous (but never tortuous; also, no tortoises); having the end in sight should be a relief but is causing some anxiety — like I’ll get to the last episode and someone will discover another season of lost episodes in their attic.
This episode does, at least, get off to a promising start as we see the always amusing but criminally under-used Michael J. Pollard. He is the soul-proprietor [1] of a mortuary and small graveyard. He is ringing the chapel-bell [2] and turns it up to 13 only to be busted by a kid outside who also has too much time on his hands.
Later that day, he shakes hands with a yokel who says he has a cold hand, must have just embalmed a frigid woman. So he imagines the man dead. A clerk in a store hassles him to speak up, so he imagines her dead. Six minutes in, I’m imagining me dead.
Back at work, he puts on Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and starts talking to his clients. Pollard enjoys punking them before they are buried. He bakes a gluttonous fat woman into a cake. He injects black ink into the body of a racist. He removes the head from a muscular man so he can have his head sewn onto it someday. It’s not clear if that is intended to be a joke.
One of the stiffs turns out to have been merely pining for the fjords. Because he heard Pollards confessions, he is killed. That night — which is dark, as nights are wont to be, and stormy — shadowy figures come for Pollard.
The next morning, one of the yokels discovers blood on a tombstone and asks, “What kind of storm was that last night?” Spoken without any humor or irony, it is just another example of why Bradbury should have outsourced the screenplays. Pollard’s name is also scrawled on all of the tombstones in his cemetery. One of the yokels makes the profoundly stupid statement, “He couldn’t possibly be buried under all these tombstones.”
“Couldn’t he?” says the kid.
I get that Bradbury was great stylist of the prose in a short story, but the man had a George Lucasian grasp of dialogue. I keep telling myself that he was born in a different time, and wondering if maybe the small town America he grew up in was really accurately reflected in his stories.
Post-Post:
- [1] Once again, I must say it is gott-damn impossible to come up with anything original.
- [2] Go-ing to the chapel, and we’re going to get bu-uh-uh-uried. I’m not even Googling that one.
Your comment about a whole season of “Lost Episodes” being discovered cracked me up!!
Sounds like getting through this series is a daunting chore for you. I suppose if a person does one episode after another it would get tedious, such a mixed bag. I like when Bradbury would do simple and sweet, like “Great Wide World Over There”. It’s just a good character study– no menace, no magic.
By the way, why do so many bloggers insist on the black background with white lettering, one of the most difficult things on a reader’s eyeballs? Just curious; there might be some logical reason of which I’m unaware, instead of my assuming it’s just sadism, LOL.
This was one of the worst Bradbury adaptations ever made for TV. It completely fails to capture the mood of the original story or the obliquely satiric tone of the piece as Bradbury wrote it. Pollard was badly mis-cast in the role of “Mr. Benedict,” whatever we might say about his status as an actor. I realize Bradbury virtually disowned the story by the time he reissued the stories in “Dark Carnival” for “The October Country” in the early Fifties. When the latter appeared, “The Handler” was conspicuously missing. Bradbury obviously considered it too sensational for inclusion, and possibly thought it might damage the literary reputation he strove so fervently to establish during the 1940s. Yet I consider it one of his most fascinating stories, and “Benedict” one of his most interesting characters — the very essence of the lonely, alienated misfits that populated so much of his early fiction. The opening paragraphs of the story where Benedict is portrayed with deft literary brushstrokes have always stayed with me:
“He stood on the porch, painfully shy of the sun and inferior to people. A little dog trotted by with clever eyes, so clever that Mr. Benedict could not meet its gaze.” And later, when a child confronts him, here is Benedict’s reaction:
“The child continued to stare at him and he felt like a candle blown out in the wind. He was so very inferior. Anything that lived or moved made him feel apologetic and melancholy. He was continually agreeing with people, never daring to argue or shout or say no. Whoever you might be, if Mr. Benedict met you on the street he would look up your nostrils or perceive your ears or examine your hairline with his little shy, wild eyes and never look you straight in your eyes and he would hold your hand between his cold ones as if your hand was a precious gift as he said to you:
‘You are definitely, irrevocably, believably correct.’
But always, when you talked with him, you felt he never heard a word you said.”
Now THAT is incisive, sensitive writing, and shows one of the things that made Bradbury a unique writer. But Pollard captures none of this, and it seems to me he was clueless as to what the character was supposed to be. While one might concede that the story is excessive in its grotesquerie and may be the most horrific tale Bradbury ever wrote, those are precisely the things that make it so fascinating. What was it that compelled Bradbury to write such a searing tale in the first place? Did he “identify” with Benedict in some way? Was the story a kind of twisted metaphor for his own life at the time, when he perhaps was wondering if he would ever hit the big time as a writer? We can only guess, but I firmly believe “The Handler” has been either consistently overlooked in Bradbury’s oeuvre, or too casually dismissed as a kind of nasty, alien offspring. For that matter, it may be that a story like this cannot adequately be transferred to visual media (offhand, we might cite Theodore Sturgeon’s “Bianca’s Hands” as another macabre miniature that could not be accurately rendered for TV). So perhaps in the final analysis “The Handler” should have been left between the printed sheets of the Dark Carnival vault, not because it was intrinsically inferior but because it could not be resurrected for the screen without turning into a caricature. It wouldn’t be the first time, or the last.
Maybe this episode should’ve been called “Some Live Like Lazarus”, considering one of the corpses in the funeral home suddenly returns from the dead to expose Mr. Mortuary’s post-mortem ‘makeovers’. And then their ghosts not only come to life, but murder Pollard t o exact revenge? But they were all scumbags when they were alive. So how is that denouement viewed as ccsmic comeuppance? Fail.