Domesticity

Helen Keller - Family Meal Scene - The Miracle Worker

"There's a really interesting movie 

I watched recently, "The Miracle Worker," 

Arthur Penn's 1962 movie about Helen Keller. 

And it really felt like I was watching 

an early lost David Lynch film. 

There's a dinner scene where the very formal 

and proper Keller Family are 

sitting around The Table, and 

Helen is racing around it like a wild animal, 

growling at Food, grunting, and all 

the rest of The Family around her are trying 

to act like nothing is strange. 

That kind of contrast, at once comic and horrifying and a little sad, 

it felt very Lynchian. 

She'll be alright in a minute. 

ASCHER: 

There's another moment where 

Her Teacher is watching 

Helen out The Window, 

and then Annie flashes back 

to her own school days. 

As a kid, she was in an institution 

for the blind, and Penn uses a 

double exposure dissolve that lasts 

just an incredibly long time. 

If it doesn't look like a dream scene straight out of "The Elephant Man" or "Eraserhead," 

I don't know what does. 

It's something that David Lynch does in a way 

that feels effortless and it has 

this powerful, dreamlike effect. 

There's that amazing dissolve on Cooper's face that lasts a minute, minute and a half where he seems to be unmoored in his world. In "The Miracle Worker," it's almost as if the ghosts of Annie's past have returned. And in both cases, it's slightly "Oz"-like. 

All these characters are 

becoming untethered and losing track 

of which layer of reality they're in. 

Why would Lynch be that absorbed with " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz"? Well, it's a very nostalgic American icon of a film. But anyway, Toto, we're home. Home. And this is my room. 

ASCHER: 

In a lot of his movies, there's a sense of a search for a sort of lost, perfect American world. A nostalgia for paradise lost. 

Perhaps for one that never really existed. 

Did he watch " The Wizard of Oz" on 

a perfect day at the perfect time as a child 

and it sort of baked into his subconscious? 

I wonder if on the same day he watched 

"The Brain From Planet Arous" instead,

would his movies be very, very different? 

[ Dramatic music plays] 

Many filmmakers' works are often variations on a theme. To me, Stanley Kubrick's films are often about exposing the abuses, the excesses of people in power. 

"Paths of Glory" being one of the most literal ones. [ Speaks German ] -Guten tag. -[ Laughter] 

Hey, talk in a civilised language! 

But that continues all the way 

up to "Eyes Wide Shut," 

which is about the decadent super rich. 

Ladies, where exactly are we going? -Exactly? -[ Laughter] Where the rainbow ends. Where the rainbow ends. ASCHER: In "The Shining," there's the whole conversation about all the best people who stayed at the Overlook. We had four presidents who stayed here. Lots of movie stars. Royalty? All the best people. ASCHER: Even Lolita is a girl who's preyed upon by different powerful men, Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert. Gee, I'm really winning here. I'm really winning. I hope I don't get overcome with power. ASCHER: Lolita is a girl who's forced to live in multiple worlds, the normal one of teenagers, but also a darker adult one. You want to stay with this filthy boy? -That's what it is, isn't it? -Yes! -Why don't you leave me alone? -Shut your filthy mouth. ASCHER: There's a lot of "Lolita" the film in "Twin Peaks," and there's a lot of Dolores Haze in Laura Palmer. What is real? How do you define real? ASCHER: Right now, I'm wrapping up a film about simulation theory and " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz" has been coming up a lot because at the end of the day, what kind of movie is it? It's the story of a young girl who moves between parallel worlds. It means buckle your seat belt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye. -[ Thunder rumbles] -ASCHER: And there's a question, a sort of question mark left at the end. Which of these worlds is the real one? Are both of them real in some way? But it wasn't a dream. It was a place. And you, and you, and you, and you were there. ASCHER: That's a question that people play with in countless movies that have been influenced by it, everything from "Nightmare on Elm Street" to "The Matrix." Lynch's films are filled with characters who move between different worlds, and they're often very innocent characters like Dorothy. Never seen so many trees in my life. W.C. Fields would say, "I'd rather be here than Philadelphia." ASCHER: In "Mulholland Drive," which might be the most " Wizard of Oz"-y of all of them, Betty is a perfect innocent who finds herself in sort of the twin versions of Hollywood, the dream and the nightmare. I think that in Lynch's duelling realities, the membranes between layers of reality are thinner than they were in " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz." In many of these movies, there are characters who hold all the cards, just like The Wizard of Oz himself. The man behind the curtain. Characters whose influence travels between worlds. We've met before, haven't we? I don't think so. Where was it you think we met? At your house. Don't you remember? When Lynch was talking about "Inland Empire," another story of a woman who moves between different levels of reality, he once answered, "We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along it. We are like the dreamer who dreams, then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe." Like Mulholland Drive and Winkie's Diner, that guy is talking about his dream, and he's afraid that the dream could come true. And then, soon enough, he finds himself in the nightmare of having to relive that dream. He says to a psychiatrist, "In the dream, I was sitting here, and you were up there by the cash register," and then it panned slowly over to the cash register. And you see the absence of the psychiatrist. And it cuts back and then you see the gears turning in the psychiatrist's head who says, "Oh, you want to see if it's real." And then the man can't stop it from happening. The psychiatrist gets up and he walks to the register and we pan over. And now he is exactly in that position. He's filled the negative space, and then the man finds himself in his dream the way Dorothy is transported into her dreams of Oz, only without a tornado or even a dissolve. Just in the space of a line of dialogue or two. That very last scene in "Twin Peaks: The Return" is the summation of a lot of ideas that I think about with "Oz" and with Lynch. The question of dreams versus realities. Because I read that the woman who answered the door in the scene is actually the woman who lives in that house in our world. Is this your house? Do you own this house or do you rent this house? Yes, we own this house. ASCHER: So it's almost as if, well, which of the thousands of possible multiple realities does Cooper land in at the end of the series? He lands in the same one that you and I are living in and that the woman who owns the house that they film "Twin Peaks: The Return" lives in. And it's more than Cooper and Carrie are able to take. What year is this? [ Dramatic music plays] [ Screams ] ASCHER: They end that sequence in a complete mental breakdown, a complete panic, which was an experience that I really went through while watching that whole season. It was shortly after the election and a lot of us were confused and scared about what was going to happen in the world. God bless America. ASCHER: So it's really nice to return to the world of "Twin Peaks," even if within the show, there's one unspeakable nightmare after another, at least it was our unspeakable nightmare. This is the water. And this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within. ASCHER: But the strangeness crossed over into my reality because I remember episode eight, the big episode, the one with the atom b*mb and the fireman and that lizard. I've watched that episode twice. And each time, another horror would be waiting for me the morning after. The first time my wife and I watched it, our cat was acting really strange, rubbing her head against the TV. The next morning, we came downstairs, and the floor was just littered with blood and feathers of a bird that she had managed to catch while locked in the house all night. Maybe she escaped through a window and maybe she pulled it back inside somehow. I've got no idea. But she m*rder*d it while we were sleeping and scattered its remains all over the floor. And then two or three weeks later, I watched it again alone. And maybe this is in hindsight, but as I imagined myself walking down the steps the next morning, I'm feeling a sort of Lynchian dread, like that guy in "Mulholland Drive" who's walking back behind Winkie's. And I come to my desk and on my phone, there's like 20 new messages that have just popped in the last hour waiting for me. My father back in Florida, he d*ed the night before. He hadn't been doing well for a while, so it wasn't a shock. But I don't know, the timing felt really strange. I don't think I'm going to watch that episode again anytime soon. I don't want to know what's going to happen. There's bad juju baked to the bones of that thing. [ Dramatic music plays] It is happening again. ANNOUNCER: Like wildfire in the wheat field, the fabulous tale of " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz" spread from town to city to nation to the entire world. WATERS: For me, " The Wizard Of OZ" was the ultimate not just American movie, movie period that I saw as a child that made me want to be in show business, that made me want to create characters, that made me want to go on adventures and probably made me take LSD. [ Mid-tempo music plays ] I think it was a good influence on me all the way around. For me, it changed my life when I saw it. My obsession with it started before television. My parents took me to see it at the Rex Theatre in Baltimore, which, oddly enough, later became the sexploitation nudist camp movie theatre like 30 years later. Then the Christmas thing became like the sequel in my mind as a child. Every year, we watched it. I mean, it was a big deal event. And you always watched it because it didn't come on again. There was no other way. Nobody could imagine that you could ever buy a video of something and watch it whenever you wanted or rewind it. That's the thing I always thought was kind of against. You give away the magic trick. But, you know, the saddest thing I ever heard was I talked to this young kind of hipster kid, and we were just talking about movies. And I said, "Do you like 'The Wizard of 02'?" And he said, "No, not really. I mean, it's basically just walking." I thought, "God, what a blurb." If a kid watches " The Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz" today, the film completely works. I think it's the perfect -- like a drug to kids to get them hooked on movies for the rest of their young lives.

Poor, Lonely Little Boy

 

The Center of the World

David McCullough: [voice-over] 

"My dear Mama, 

I am in a great hurry. I found two birds' nests. 

I took one egg. 

Your loving Franklin." 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent his childhood among people so unlike ordinary Americans they modeled themselves after the lords and ladies of England.

Bronson Chanler, Hudson Valley Neighbor: 

The world of wealth and privilege that F.D.R. grew up with was one that was essentially very comfortable for everybody. 

And the families that lived on those estates were generally friends with one another, related very often to each other, and were the only people that visited one another. 

I think it's fair to say that even The Professional Men in the towns, who were the doctors and the lawyers and so on, were not generally invited to the river houses to dinner.

David McCullough: [voice-over] Franklin Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York on January 30, 1882 on the big, forested estate his parents called Springwood.

Geoffrey Ward, Biographer: 

Springwood was a beautiful, isolated place. 

It was its own world, and it was entirely 

built around this privileged little boy. 

And I think he spent most of his life trying to replicate the way his boyhood was arranged.

David McCullough: [voice-over] "At the very outset he was plump, pink and nice," his mother said. "I used to love to bathe and dress him. He looked very sweet, his little blonde curls bobbing as he ran as fast as he could whenever he thought I had designs on combing them."

Nearly every detail of Franklin's childhood was recorded with single-minded devotion by his mother, Sarah Delano Roosevelt. She kept his baby clothes, every childish drawing, each golden curl. Franklin was eight and a half years old before he was allowed to bathe himself.

Geoffrey Ward, Biographer: If it's the job of a mother to make her child feel that he or she can do anything, then Sarah Delano Roosevelt was surely one of the great mothers in American history.

David McCullough: [voice-over] Franklin's father was more than 25 years older than Sarah. He was 53 when Franklin was born. Franklin called him "Popsy." Everyone else called him "Mr. James." Mr. James bred trotters and rode to the hounds. He smoked cheroots. He would ride out with his son to survey their estate. The workers tipped their hats to Mr. James and then to Master Franklin. The boy accepted these displays of deference as routine.

Curtis Roosevelt, Grandson: F.D.R. grew up in a very tight little island. He learned how to please adults from probably before he remembered. His activities were related to showing off for them, relating to them, not to other children, and he didn't go off to play games with other children. I don't think he ever swung a baseball bat until he finally went to school. He was tutored at home or abroad, because every year they went abroad for several months. F.D.R., with all this attention, was undoubtedly a lonely boy.

David McCullough: [voice-over] Franklin wandered his family estate, secure, he later said, in the peacefulness and regularity of things. Then, when he was nine, his well-ordered world fractured. His 63-year-old father suffered a heart attack. Any irritation might aggravate him, provoke another heart attack and kill him.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Biographer: His father's sickness must have reinforced the tendency that was already in him as a small child to be a nice boy, to never make any trouble, never make anybody sad. Now he had to worry, "If I go in there and make trouble, I may weaken his already-weakened heart." So it must have put an enormous pressure on this kid.

David McCullough: [voice-over] With an infirm father and a domineering mother, Franklin learned to conceal his true feelings. Throughout his life, he would remain a charming but distant figure even to those who were closest to him. When he was 14 years old, Franklin left the rarified world of his Hyde Park estate. His path seemed clear -- boarding school, Harvard, and an uneventful life of luxury and ease among his own kind.

"Dear Mama, I am getting on very well with the fellows. I have not had any black marks or lateness yet, and I'm much better in my studies."

Geoffrey Ward, Biographer: His letters are always cheerful -- everything's wonderful, he's having a grand time with the other fellows -- and yet he wasn't. He was, I think, quite unhappy.

David McCullough: [voice-over] At Groton, the private school for sons of the rich, Franklin, with all his charm and self-assurance, expected to excel. He did please his teachers and took to heart his headmaster's urgings toward public service, but he did not fit in with the boys.

Curtis Roosevelt, Grandson: Groton was his first exposure to other children on a regular basis. After all, he boarded -- all the children boarded -- so he was with other boys 24 hours a day. And it must have been a rude shock to come out of that nest, that very protective nest where he was the only bird or chick in the nest.

David McCullough: [voice-over] Sports meant everything at Groton, but Franklin was too slight for success. His mother worried Franklin might be injured and wrote that he "not have the misfortune of hurting anyone." He was enthusiastic about baseball, but only carried the bats and fetched the water for the ballplayers.

Jeffery Potter, Groton School Alumnus: He wasn't an athlete. He had never played with other boys' games much, and that was very bad indeed, because it made him an outsider, as if he wasn't -- no, as if he didn't belong and really in a sense where he didn't belong.

David McCullough: [voice-over] Plunged into an unforgiving world of adolescent boys, Franklin never fit in. His struggle for acceptance only isolated him further.

Jeffery Potter, Groton School Alumnus: Franklin's tone was not the Groton tone. He seemed so desperate for approval. He was too ambitious and too eager and he was very much, I would say from what I've heard, very close to being a golden retriever. In other words, his tail was always wagging even when it shouldn't be.

David McCullough: [voice-over] Jeffrey Potter's father was the star of the baseball team. "I can't understand this thing about Frank," he said when Roosevelt became president. "He never amounted to much at school." At Groton, Franklin confessed years later, something had gone sadly wrong.

At Harvard, he was determined to win popularity and recognition, and he did succeed. He campaigned for class office and won and was elected editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, but what he wanted even more was admission to Porcellian, Harvard's most exclusive club.

Bronson Chanler, Hudson Valley Neighbor: You immediately, if you were a member of the Porcellian Club, were recognized as a-- as we say in the club, a brothah, by all graduates who had been in the place that were still alive. But it was essentially a network of friendships, not of power but of friendships, but that could lead to power.

David McCullough: [voice-over] The election was secret, held behind closed doors in the Porcellian Clubhouse. Each member was given one white and one black ball. A single black ball deposited in the wooden ballot box was all it took to exclude a candidate. His father had been a member. So had other Roosevelts. Franklin had every reason to believe that he would be chosen, too. Franklin was blackballed.

Bronson Chanler, Hudson Valley Neighbor: No doubt Franklin Roosevelt failed to be elected to the Porcellian Club for the simple reason that somebody who was in there at the time didn't like him. You didn't have to have done anything particularly significant. The fellow would just say, "I don't like the cut of your jib, so I don't want you in there," and out you went.

David McCullough: [voice-over] Years later when he was president and the New Deal at high tide, there were those Porcellian members who would call him a traitor to his class and ascribe his social policies to revenge.

Geoffrey Ward, Biographer: Certainly, none of Roosevelt's classmates at Harvard imagined that he would ever be president. I think they were the first of many, many people who underestimated Roosevelt.

David McCullough: [voice-over] While Franklin was at Harvard, his father, 72 years old and grown frail and weak from heart disease, died. Sarah wrote in her diary, "All is over. He merely slept away." Now her boy was all she had left. She moved to Boston to be near him. A family friend once wrote, "She would not let her son call his soul his own."

Franklin began using a secret code in his diary. He wrote, "E is an angel." Franklin had fallen in love with a distant cousin. "E" was Eleanor Roosevelt. From the first, Eleanor Roosevelt saw that there was a serious man beneath the easygoing charm. For the rest of their life together, even through the most difficult years of their marriage, she would be drawn to the serious side of his nature.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Biographer: Franklin and Eleanor come, from the same social class. There are certain mores, customs, rituals that link their childhoods. Everything else is so totally different they might have come from the other ends of the world.

Eleanor Roosevelt: I was a very ugly little girl. My mother was very beautiful. I think she always wondered why her daughter had to be so ugly. I adored my mother, but rather like a distant and beautiful thing that I couldn't possibly get close to.

Oh, my father meant a tremendous amount. I adored him all the days of my childhood. He called me Little Nell after the Little Nell in Dickens's story, and I always liked that.

David McCullough: [voice-over] Eleanor's childhood was a series of losses. Her parents' marriage was troubled. Elliott Roosevelt was an alcoholic. Erratic and self-destructive, he left home when she was six. Less than two years later, her mother died of diphtheria. The year after, her younger brother died, and the following year her beloved, drunken father died. Eleanor and her brother were left with dutiful, reserved relatives. She grew afraid of other children, mice, the dark, practically everything.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Biographer: From the melancholy lives of both of her parents, Eleanor took away the feeling that love never lasts, that the world is a dark and forbidding place and that you never can count on anything.

David McCullough: [voice-over] Then when she was 15, she was sent to an English boarding school called Allenswood where she was encouraged to think for herself, be independent, overcome her fears.

Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt Biographer: Allenswood was definitely a turning point. It was the first time that she was really allowed to shine, and her own specialness was recognized. That is really where she got her sense of security and also her sense of her own power.

David McCullough: [voice-over] The years she spent at Allenswood, Eleanor said, were the happiest of her life. She was 18 when Franklin began to pursue her.

Edna Gurewitsch, Roosevelt Family Friend: He was a gay and outgoing and charming young man. There was something very sympathetic about him and romantic, and they had a very sweet and romantic relationship according to their early letters.

David McCullough: [voice-over] "We have had two happy days together," she wrote him, "and you know how grateful I am for every moment which I have with you. Your devoted Little Nell."

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Biographer: Eleanor's relatives and friends thought of Franklin as a feather duster, which meant somebody who just skimmed along the surface of life and never got very deep into anything at all, so I'm not sure they thought that he was such a wonderful catch for her, because even then Eleanor had a certain vitality, a certain seriousness of purpose that made people feel that she was something special.

Edna Gurewitsch, Roosevelt Family Friend: Can you imagine how different she must have been from the average run of debutantes of the time? She must have been very interesting, besides being tall with a beautiful figure, fine light hair and lovely skin and great warmth. There was something else, too, and this is not to be underestimated. It didn't hurt his courtship that her uncle was President of the United States.

The Lost Cause of Independents

“…..They’re Not Coming;

Command says it’s Too Hot — 

We’re to Lay-Down Arms….”

From Outer Space

 

JOSE CHUNG: 

What is your opinion, of Hypnosis?

SCULLY: 

I know that it has its therapeutic value, but 

it has never been proven to enhance Memory. 

In fact, it actually worsens it since, 

since, since people in that state 

are prone to confabulation.

JOSE CHUNG: 

When I was doing research for my book 

"The Caligarian Candidate..."

SCULLY: 

....one of the greatest 

Thrillers ever written.

JOSE CHUNG: 

Oh... (He chuckles.) Thank you. 

I was, uh... interested, in how The C.I.A., 

when conducting their MK-Ultra Mind-

Control experiments, back in the '50s --

.....had no idea how hypnosis worked.

SCULLY: 

Hmm.

JOSE CHUNG: 

Or what it was.

SCULLY: 

No one still knows.

JOSE CHUNG: 

Still, as A Storyteller -- I'm fascinated 

how a person's sense of consciousness, 

can be... so transformed, by nothing 

more magical, than listening 

to words -- Mere words.

(Cut to the interrogation room. 

Doctor Fingers sits across from Chrissy very closely. 

In the background, Chrissy's parents 

are sitting down in the back like before. 

Manners is standing, then Mulder is more to the front. 

Scully is still leaning on the door in the back. 

His voice is very soothing and slow. 

She is sitting in a recliner, eyes closed.)

FINGERS: 

You are feeling very sleepy, very relaxed. 

As your body calmly drifts deeper and deeper 

into a state of peaceful relaxation, 

you will respond only to 

the sound of my voice.

(She opens her eyes as the room starts to become shaky in her vision. She gasps as everyone is replaced by aliens, down to one still holding Manners' cup of coffee. As the "Fingers" alien talks, the mouth does not move.)

Chrissy? Can you recall 

where you are?

(Chrissy is hooked onto a glass table with white lines all over it up against the wall. She and Fingers talk over the scene.)

CHRISSY GIORGIO: 

I'm in a room... 

on a spaceship... 

surrounded by aliens.

FINGERS:
What do the aliens look like?

CHRISSY GIORGIO: 

They're small... but their heads and 

their eyes are big. They're gray.

FINGERS: Are you alone?

(She looks to her left and sees Harold on 

a similar table, one hooked to the floor.)

CHRISSY GIORGIO: 

No, Harold's on another table... 

but he seems really out of it... l

ike he's not really there.

(In reality, the table has donuts and coffee on it.)

FINGERS: 

What are the aliens doing now?

CHRISSY GIORGIO: 

They're sort of arguing. 

I sort of hear them but I can't understand what they're saying.
(The aliens bicker illegibly. The "Scully" alien walks over to the "Mulder" alien. She and Fingers still talk over the scene.)
Except the leader. I can understand him.
FINGERS: 

When The Leader speaks to you, 

does his mouth move?

CHRISSY GIORGIO: No.
(She starts to cry.)
But I hear him in my head.

FINGERS: 

What is he saying?

CHRISSY GIORGIO: 

He's telling me this is for 

the good of my planet, but...

FINGERS: But what?

CHRISSY GIORGIO: 
I don't like what he's doing. 
It's like he's inside my mind, like... 

like he's stealing my memories

SCENE 12

JOSE CHUNG'S OFFICE

(Chung is typing on the typewriter. He hears murmuring outside and sees a silhouette in his window. He takes out his gun and slowly makes his way to the door. He opens it to see Mulder and another man starting off.)

JOSE CHUNG: 

Agent Mulder?

(He motions for him to come in. 

Mulder looks at the other man.)

MULDER: 

Thanks.

(Mulder walks in and Chung closes the door. 

They stand opposite each other at the desk.)

JOSE CHUNG: 

What can I do for you, Agent Mulder?

MULDER: 

Don't write this book.

(Chung sits. Mulder walks over to the left and 

stands next to a small dresser with books.)

You'll perform a disservice through a field of inquiry 

that has always struggled for respectability. 

You're a gifted writer, but no amount of talent could 

describe the events that occurred in any realistic vein 

because they deal with alternative realities 

that we've yet to comprehend. And when presented 

in the wrong way, in the wrong context, 

the incidents and the people involved in them 

can appear foolish, if not downright psychotic.

(He walks back to the right, in front of Chung's desk.)

I also know that your publishing house is owned by Warden White, Incorporated... a subsidiary of MacDougall-Kesler, which makes me suspect a covert agenda for your book on the part of the military-industrial-entertainment complex.

JOSE CHUNG: 

Agent Mulder, this book will be written. 

But it can only benefit if you can 

explain something to me.

MULDER: What's that?

JOSE CHUNG: 

What really happened to 

those kids on that night?

(Mulder looks down.)

MULDER: 

How the hell should I know?

(Chung stands in anger.)

JOSE CHUNG: 

Agent Mulder, 

I appreciate this little visit 

but I have deadlines to face.

(Mulder stares at him for a second, then walks out as Chung sits back down. Chung starts to type again, but stops and looks at the door. He talks over the scene.)

Evidence of extraterrestrial existence remains as elusive as ever...

(Cut to Blaine, pointing his flashlight to the sky as he is lifted up on the electric company crane. Chung continues to talk.)

...but the skies will continue to be searched by the likes of Blaine Faulkner, hoping to someday find not only proof of alien life, but also contentment on a new world. Until then, he must be content with his new job.

(Blaine screams as sparks fly off of the electric pole. Cut to El Cajon, California. A group of people sit on the floor, gathered around Roky, who is standing in front of a strange diagram of the earth with a triangle in the middle, much like an Egyptian pyramid. The triangle has an eye in each corner and clouds in the middle. Roky is wearing a crystal necklace. Chung continues to talk from his book.)

Others search for answers from within. Roky relocated to El Cajon, California, preaching to the lost and desperate.

ROKY CRIKENSON: And so, at each death, the soul descends further into the inner earth, attaining ever greater levels of purification, reaching... enlightenment at the core. Assuming, of course, that your soul is able to avoid... the lava men.

(He holds his crystal. Cut to the X-Files office, where she is reading Jose Chung's new book, "From Outer Space." Chung talks over.)

JOSE CHUNG: 

Seeking the truth about aliens means 

a perfunctory nine-to-five job to some. 

For although Agent Diana Lesky 

is noble spirit and pure of heart, 

she remains, nevertheless, 

a federal employee.

(Scully glares at the book. Cut to Mulder's apartment. Mulder lies in his bed, shirt off, watching television. He changes the channel. Chung continues his monologue.)

As for her partner, Reynard Muldrake... 

that ticking timebomb of insanity... 

his quest into the unknown has so warped his psyche, 

one shudders to think how he receives any pleasures from life.

(Mulder watches the television intently, a shaky video camera 

footage of Bigfoot walking through the woods far away. 

Cut to Chrissy Giorgio, typing at her computer.)

The Writer:

Chrissy Giorgio has come to believe her alien visitation 

was a message to improve her own world, and she has 

devoted herself to this goal wholeheartedly.

(There is another rattling on The Window. 

She goes to it and opens it to reveal 

Harold standing outside.)

CHRISSY GIORGIO: 

Oh, it's you. What do you want?

HAROLD LAMB: 

I just wanted to tell you

 I still Love You.

CHRISSY GIORGIO: 

Love. Is that all You-

Men think about?

(She closes Her Window. 

Harold's eyes tear up. 

Chung keeps talking.)

The Writer: 

Then there are those who care 

not about extraterrestrials, 

searching for Meaning in 

other Human Beings. 

Rare or lucky are 

those who find it.

(Harold starts off.)

For although we may not 

be alone in the universe, 

in our own separate ways, 

on this planet, 

We are, all... alone.

[THE END]

1985

You're having counseling sessions with

Dr. Ruth while I'm stuck here in 1985?

Lookit. Ziggy says you're 

here to help Doug and Debbie.

Unless you Do 

Something about that,

You're gonna STAY stuck in 1985,

wearing your silly high heels and 

your stupid dresses, and talking 

to strangers about G-spots.

“IT had come here long after 

The Turtle withdrew into its shell, here to Earth, 

and IT had discovered a depth of imagination 

here that was almost new, almost of concern. 

This quality of imagination 

made The Food very rich. 

ITs teeth rent flesh gone stiff with exotic terrors 

and voluptuous fears: they dreamed of nightbeasts 

and moving muds; against their will 

they contemplated endless gulphs. 

Upon this rich Food IT existed in a simple cycle 

of waking to eat and sleeping to dream. 

IT had created a place in ITs own image, 

and IT looked upon this place with favour 

from the deadlights which were ITs eyes. 

Derry was ITs killing-pen, 

the people of Derry ITs sheep. 

Things had gone on. 

Then … these children. 

Something new. For the first time in forever. 

When IT had burst up into 

the house on Neibolt Street, 

meaning to kill them all, vaguely uneasy 

that IT had not been able to do so already 

(and surely that unease 

had been the first new thing), 

something had happened 

which was totally unexpected, 

utterly unthought of, and 

there had been Pain, PAIN, 

great ROARING Pain all through 

The Shape IT had taken, and for 

one moment there had also been Fear, 

because the only thing IT had in common 

with the stupid old Turtle and the cosmology 

of The Macroverse outside the puny egg of 

this universe was just this : 

ALL Living Things must •abide• 

by The Laws of The Shape they INHABIT. 

For the first time IT realised that perhaps ITs ability to change ITs shapes might work against IT as well as for IT. 

There had never •been• Pain before, there had never •been• Fear before, and for a moment IT had thought IT might die – oh ITs head had been filled with a great white silver pain, and IT had roared and mewled and bellowed and somehow the children had escaped. But now they were coming. 

They had entered Its domain under The City, seven foolish children blundering through The Darkness without Lights or Weapons. 

IT would kill them now, surely. 

IT had made a great self-discovery : 

IT did not want Change or Surprise. 

IT did not want new things, ever. 

IT wanted only to eat and 

sleep and dream and eat again. 

Following The Pain and that brief bright Fear, another new emotion had arisen (as all genuine emotions were new to It, although IT was a great •mocker• of emotions):  Anger. 

IT would kill the children because they had, 

by some amazing accident, Hurt IT. 

But IT would make them suffer first 

because for one brief moment 

they had made IT fear them. 

Come to me then, IT thought, 

listening to their approach. Come to me, 

children, and see how We float down here 

… how We ALL float. 

And yet there was A Thought that 

insinuated itself no matter how strongly 

IT tried to push the thought away. 

It was simply this : if all things flowed from IT 

(as they surely had done since The Turtle 

sicked up the universe and then fainted 

inside its shell), how could any creature 

of this or any other world Fool IT or Hurt IT, 

no matter how briefly or triflingly? 

How was that possible? 

And so a last new thing had come to IT, 

this not an emotion but a cold speculation : 

suppose IT had not been alone, 

as IT had always believed? 

Suppose there was Another? 

And suppose further that these children 

were agents of that Other? Suppose … suppose … 

IT began to tremble. 

Hate was new. Hurt was new. 

Being Crossed in ITs Purpose was new. 

But the most terrible new thing was this Fear. 

Not fear of the children, that had passed, 

but the fear of not being alone. No. 

There was no other. Surely there was not. 

Perhaps because they were children 

their imaginations had a certain raw power 

IT had briefly underestimated. 

But now that they were coming, 

IT would let them come. They would come 

and IT would cast them one by one 

into The Macroverse … 

into the deadlights of Its eyes. 

Yes. When they got here IT would 

cast them, shrieking and insane, 

into the deadlights.”

 It/May 1985

 Now they were coming again, and while everything had gone much as It had foreseen, something It had not foreseen had returned: that maddening, galling fear … that sense of Another. It hated the fear, would have turned on it and eaten it if It could have … but the fear danced mockingly out of reach, and It could only kill the fear by killing them. Surely there was no need for such fear; they were older now, and their number had been reduced from seven to five. Five was a number of power, but it did not have the mystical talismanic quality of seven. It was true that Its dogsbody hadn’t been able to kill the librarian, but the librarian would die in the hospital. Later, just before dawn touched the sky, It would send a male nurse with a bad pill habit to finish the librarian once and for all. 

The writer’s woman was now with It, alive yet not alive – her mind had been utterly destroyed by her first sight of It as It really was, with all of Its little masks and glamours thrown aside – and all of the glamours were only mirrors, of course, throwing back at the terrified viewer the worst thing in his or her own mind, heliographing images as a mirror may bounce a reflection of the sun into a wide unsuspecting eye and stun it to blindness. 

Now the mind of the writer’s wife was with It, in It, beyond the end of the macroverse; in the darkness beyond the Turtle; in the outlands beyond all lands. She was in Its eye; she was in Its mind. She was in the deadlights. Oh but the glamours were amusing. Hanlon, for instance. He would not remember, not consciously, but his mother could have told him where the bird he had seen at the Ironworks came from. When he was a baby only six months old, his mother had left him sleeping in his cradle in the side yard while she went around back to hang sheets and diapers on the line. His screams had brought her on the run. A large crow had lighted on the edge of the carriage and was pecking at baby Mikey like an evil creature in a nursery tale. He had been screaming in pain and terror, unable to drive away the crow, which had sensed weak prey. She had struck the bird with her fist and driven it off, seen that it had brought blood in two or three places on baby Mikey’s arms, and taken him to Dr Stillwagon for a tetanus shot. A part of Mike had remembered that always – tiny baby, giant bird – and when It came to Mike, Mike had seen the giant bird again. 

But when the dogsbody husband of the girl from before brought the writer’s woman, It had put on no face – It did not dress when It was at home. The dogsbody husband had looked once and had dropped dead of shock, his face gray, his eyes filling with the blood that had squirted out of his brain in a dozen places. The writer’s woman had put out one powerful, horrified thought – OH DEAR JESUS IT IS FEMALE – and then all thoughts ceased. She swam in the deadlights. It came down from Its place and took care of her physical remains; prepared them for later feeding. Now Audra Denbrough hung high up in the middle of things, crisscrossed in silk, her head lolling against the socket of her shoulder, her eyes wide and glazed, her toes pointing down. But there was still power in them. Diminished but still there. They had come here as children and somehow, against all the odds, against all that was supposed to be, all that could be, they had hurt It badly, had almost killed It, had forced It to flee deep into the earth, where it huddled, hurt and hating and trembling in a spreading pool of Its own strange blood. So another new thing, if you please: for the first time in Its neverending history, It needed to make a plan; for the first time It found Itself afraid simply to take what It wanted from Derry, Its private game-preserve. It had always fed well on children. Many adults could be used without knowing they had been used, and It had even fed on a few of the older ones over the years – adults had their own terrors, and their glands could be tapped, opened so that all the chemicals of fear flooded the body and salted the meat. But their fears were mostly too complex. The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face … and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown? 

It understood vaguely that these children had somehow turned Its own tools against It – that, by coincidence (surely not on purpose, surely not guided by the hand of any Other), by the bonding of seven extraordinarily imaginative minds, It had been brought into a zone of great danger. Any of these seven alone would have been Its meat and drink, and if they had not happened to come together, It surely would have picked them off one by one, drawn by the quality of their minds just as a lion might be drawn to one particular waterhole by the scent of zebra. But together they had discovered an alarming secret that even It had not been aware of: that belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one – probably a child – who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home. Yet in the end It had escaped; had gone deep, and the exhausted, terrified children had elected not to follow It when It was at Its most vulnerable. They had elected to believe It dead or dying, and had retreated. It was aware of their oath, and had known they would come back just as a lion knows the zebra will eventually return to the waterhole. It had begun to plan even as It began to drowse. When It woke It would be healed, renewed – but their childhoods would be burned away like seven fatty candles. The former power of their imaginations would be muted and weak. They would no longer imagine that there were piranha in the Kenduskeag or that if you stepped on a crack you might really break your mother’s back or that if you killed a ladybug which lit on your shirt your house would catch fire that night. Instead, they would believe in insurance. Instead, they would believe in wine with dinner – something nice but not too pretentious, like a Pouilly-Fuissé ’83, and let that breathe, waiter, would you? Instead, they would believe that Rolaids consume forty-seven times their own weight in excess stomach acid. Instead, they would believe in public television, Gary Hart, running to prevent heart attacks, giving up red meat to prevent colon cancer. They would believe in Dr Ruth when it came to getting well fucked and Jerry Falwell when it came to getting well saved. As each year passed their dreams would grow smaller. And when It woke It would call them back, yes, back, because fear was fertile, its child was rage, and rage cried for revenge. It would call them and then kill them. Only now that they were coming, the fear had returned. They had grown up, and their imaginations had weakened – but not as much as It had believed. It had felt an ominous, upsetting growth in their power when they joined together, and It had wondered for the first time if It had perhaps made a mistake. But why be gloomy? The die was cast and not all the omens were bad. The writer was half-mad for his wife, and that was good. The writer was the strongest, the one who had somehow trained his mind for this confrontation over all the years, and when the writer was dead with his guts falling out of his body, when their precious ‘Big Bill’ was dead, the others would be Its quickly. It would feed well … and then perhaps It would go deep again. And doze. For awhile.