Traumatized by a hellish New York City cab ride that conjured up memories of the gruesome abduction scene in The Bone Collector, Joe Queenan was forced to confront the irrational fears that big screen "entertainment" instills in us all.
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Late one evening not long ago, as Poseidon capriciously chose to inundate Gotham with a rainstorm, I flagged down a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the train station. Realizing that it was too late to reach Grand Central Terminal in time to catch the 10:02 Poughkeepsie Express, I told the driver to cut them off at the pass by depositing me at the Metro North station at 125th Street in Harlem, where my train would pull in at 10:13. No sooner had I issued these instructions than I realized that there was something not quite right about the taxi or its driver. For one, the partition between passenger and driver was completely sealed off, making it difficult for him to hear what I was saying. Second, I could not actually see the driver's face, as it was submerged inside a hooded sweatshirt. Third, the taxi was hurtling along at a preposterously rapid clip. But what really unnerved me was when the driver suddenly veered off the main ' drag and headed down a dark, deserted side street. Suddenly a bloodcurdling thought crossed my mind. What if I were trapped inside a taxicab with a maniac like the sadistic killer in The Bone Collector?. If this were the case, some thick-lipped flatfoot would soon be excavating my surgically detached remains from a deserted factory in East Harlem where I'd been drugged, bound, and had my face gnawed off by famished rats. All because I'd gotten into the wrong taxi.
Luckily, the cab got stuck in traffic as we hit one of the main north-south streets. Jamming a crisp $10 bill into the tiny slot in the partition, I ripped open the door, clambered out of the back seat, and hurtled into the engulfing mistral without waiting for a receipt. Although I did not make it to the train station on time and arrived home hours later with my shoes and sports-coat completely ruined, I was determined to look on the bright side--I hadn't been abducted by a psychopathic surgeon and dragged to a forlorn industrial zone where no one could hear my anguished screams; I hadn't been forced to watch as a madman hacked off each of my fingers; and I hadn't gotten my face eaten off by rats. But it had been one close call.
Everyone who loves movies has seen at least one that has permanently altered his or her lifestyle by instilling a deep, irrational fear that transforms some everyday activity into a dreaded experience. Since I saw Psycho, I have never taken a shower in a motel without locking the bathroom door. Since I took in Jaws, I haven't been able to go in the ocean at night. Since I watched Fatal Attraction, I have never had an affair with a blonde woman. And since I caught Billy Crystal single-handedly sucking the charm out of Paris in Forget Paris, I haven't been able to set foot inside the City of Lights. One of my friends says that she immediately stopped dating men with garish tattoos after seeing what Robert De Niro did to Illeana Douglas's face in the remake of Cape Fear. Another friend says she will never again hike through the woods of rural Maryland after seeing The Blair Witch Project, though not so much because she fears being murdered by a sorceress or a pedophile as because she fears being trapped in the wilderness with someone as annoying as Heather Donahue. Yet another friend claimed that all woods were off-limits for her after she watched that obsessive-compulsive grizzly bear methodically hunt down human snacks in The Edge.
As long as people do not go overboard on this sort of thing, lessons derived from watching movies can play an invaluable role in shaping a sane, well-balanced personality. Pathologies only emerge when one begins to shape one's values, attitudes and behavioral patterns entirely in response to unsettling scenes from popular movies. Unfortunately, this is precisely what happened to me after my Bone Collector experience. I was so completely discombobulated by the event that I stayed home from work the next day, trying to shake off the willies.
Shortly after my children left for school and my wife set off for her yoga class, the phone rang. Ordinarily, I would have lifted the receiver after a single ring, but this time I was unable to pick it up at all. Grim memories of Drew Barrymore's fatal yakking at the beginning of Scream made it impossible for me to take the call. As the phone continued to ring, I retreated into the family room and began watching a popular game show. But then it occurred to me that by absentmindedly gazing at the screen I might inadvertently be sucked into a black-and-white parallel universe like Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire in Pleasantville, and never escape. So I switched off the television set and went into the kitchen to get a drink. The kitchen was definitely the wrong place to be. For starters I might find a dead rabbit in the fatally attractive saucepan. Or perhaps the butcher knives would come flying around the room the way they did in Carrie. And forget about drinking the tap water; if it was anything like the water in Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action, I'd have brain cancer or leukemia by lunchtime.
I went outside and made a halfhearted attempt to garden. But then I remembered how Marlon Brando had keeled over and died while fiddling around among the tomato plants in The Godfather. Soon I spotted a neighbor coming down the road, and fearful that he might be an uptight Marine who'd want to shoot me like Kevin Spacey's next-door neighbor in American Beauty, I retreated into the house. I tried curling up with an old book, but it occurred to me that the one I was reading bore a striking resemblance to the book Frank Langella unearths in The Ninth Gate and thus might inadvertently open the gates of hell. I thought I'd be better off doing the laundry, but the memory of the monochromatic corpse from Stir of Echoes was enough to persuade me to stay out of the basement. I considered going out to my favorite diner for lunch, but then recalled how Mary Stuart Masterson used the ground-up remains of a man's corpse as the main ingredient for her soup du jour in Fried Green Tomatoes. Terrified at the thought that someone might stick lye in my espresso the way Eric Roberts fed it to Burt Young in The Pope of Greenwich Village, I decided to abstain from my mid afternoon caffe latte at the local bistro, too. And so the day meandered along, with each passing second bringing fresh terrors. When my two kids were late returning home from school, I knew it could mean only one of three things: They had accidentally run over a fisherman like the drunken teens in I Know What You Did Last Summer, and had tossed his body in the river; their teachers were extraterrestrial mutants in disguise like the malevolent pedagogues in The Faculty, and had ripped them limb from limb; or they were down in the hood shooting heroin like Michael Douglas's screwed-up daughter in Traffic.
I was reduced to sitting perfectly still, staring out the window. Even then, I noticed a small child wandering past, carrying a large doll that bore a disturbing resemblance to Chucky. I briefly considered warning the tyke that the seemingly harmless doll might contain the toxic personality of a dead psychopath, but thought better of it as I did not want the neighbors to think I had gone around the bend. And I didn't really like the kid that much.
Eventually my family returned home. My wife suggested that we have dinner with our new neighbors, but fearing that they might be affable terrorists like Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack in Arlington Road, I begged off. Frankly, I was starting to suspect that my spouse was one of the Stepford Wives, and that my kids, Bridget and Gordon, were the Children of the Corn. Conversely, it was obvious that the three of them now suspected there was something wrong with me. They weren't shy about voicing their opinions, either. My wife said I was starting to resemble the demented Jack Nicholson character in The Shining. My daughter said I was starting to resemble the obsessive-compulsive Jack Nicholson character in As Good As It Gets. My son said I was starting to resemble the deranged, facially disfigured Jack Nicholson character in Batman. They unanimously suggested that I take some time off. Maybe I should go to Philadelphia to see my mom.
Philadelphia? Wasn't that where Tom Hanks got AIDS and died a horrible death in the film of the same name? What kind of vacation destination was that? Besides, how could I even get there in one piece? If I took the train I might end up in a wreck like Bruce Willis did in Unbreakable. If I took a bus, I might end up at the mercy of a deranged extortionist like the character in Speed. If I took a plane I might end up like any number of characters in Fearless or Final Destination or Random Hearts or Cast Away. That only left a car, but if I went by car I might end up being buried alive in the Holland Tunnel like the characters in Daylight. And even if I got to Mom's in one piece, there was no guarantee that she wouldn't turn out to be a dangerous psychotic like Jessica Lange in Hush.
How about an overseas vacation, then? A splendid idea on first inspection, but where could I possibly go to relax? Not Turkey--look what happened to Brad Davis in Midnight Express. Not South America--I saw Proof of Life. Not the South Pacific--that's where Leonardo DiCaprio lost his Scandinavian friends to bloodthirsty sharks, saw his pothead buddies get gunned down by marijuana farmers and was forced to bed Tilda Swinton in The Beach. Rampant drug abuse in Trainspotting induced me to rule out Scotland. And the frightening thought that everyone in Italy might be as big an asshole as Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful permanently negated any thought of taking a jaunt to Florence, Rome, Venice or Sicily.
That evening, instead of going to bed, I spent the entire night sitting by the front door with a baseball bat, ready to flatten anybody who tried stealing my car in 60 seconds. A wreck by morning, I thought I'd relax if I went upstairs to take a bath, but then I recalled how Harrison Ford tried to slowly drown Michelle Pfeiffer in a tub in What Lies Beneath. I took a shower instead, which brought me full circle to Psycho.
This horrible interlude lasted for days on end. Eventually I realized that I would have to confront my own personal demons if the hideous bout of paranoia were ever to subside. I did not want to spend the rest of my life wondering if my good-natured new neighbor was secretly a vicious hit man like Bruce Willis in The Whole Nine Yards. Or if my son was getting after-school tutoring in world history from a retired Nazi, as in Apt Pupil. And I didn't want to have to abstain forever from dessert simply because someone had gotten intimate with an otherwise tasty pastry in American Pie.
I have now realized what I must do. I have to prove to myself once and for all that what takes place in films transpires only in the realm of fantasy. Movies make us dread experiences like ordinary cab rides, all because people living humdrum lives like to be frightened, and nothing is more frightening than an ordinary activity that suddenly becomes extraordinary. It is time to dispel these baseless fears. It is time to head back into the city, hail a taxi and take another ride through the mean streets of New York. It is time to get back in the saddle again. Ready or not, New York, here I come.
Editor's note: We are unsure whether Joe Queenan intended for his story to finish at this point, or whether he planned to report on the success of his bold strategy. Two weeks after the piece was due, we called his home and found out that he had not been seen for close to a month. We expressed our concern for his safety and our sympathy with his family, then pleaded with his wife to search down his password, get on his computer and send us his manuscript so we could make our print deadline. Despite a reward of $198 offered by his family, no clues to Joe's whereabouts have been found. Forensics experts did determine that a solitary male finger found in a rat-infested Bronx warehouse looked like it may have belonged to a middle-aged freelance writer, but the degree of decay made it impossible to say whether the finger was Joe's. Because Joe is extremely late on another story as of the day of this writing, we are all praying he turns up soon. Alive, of course.
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Joe Queenan wrote about wimpy villains for the May issue of Movieline.