Playing With Dead Things

by Tony Fonseca

05/16/2005

Kimball, Michael. The Way the Family Got Away. New York: Four walls, Eight Windows, 2000. 143 p.

May. Directed by Lucky McKee, 2002.

I know we usually will not review a book that is more than a year old here at Necropsy. But then I offered to compose a feature on the ten weirdest books and films that I have had the pleasure of reading and viewing in my ten odd years as a reviewer and horror bibliographer, and I thought it would be nice to take the opportunity to right two of the biggest wrongs of which we have been guilty: the failure to review what are certainly two of the strangest pieces of horror fiction ever created, Michael Kimball's brief but wonderful Faulkneresque novel The Way the Family Got Away and Lucky McKee's first and only film, the indescribably bittersweet and tragic character study slasher film, May (2 Loops Films, distributed by Lion's Gate).  

For those of you familiar with As I Lay Dying, you will recognize the motif of taking a journey with a dead body in tow, which is the impetus of Kimball's book. Faulkner relishes in the darkly comic elements of transporting grandmother's corpse by horse and buggy during a hot Mississippi summer (and having the family's youngest child drill a hole through her coffin so she can breathe, and—to put it bluntly—missing by just a few inches thereby defiling the body). He uses changing point of view to expose various characters' shallowness, greed or anger. Kimball, on the other hand, has two children only, a boy approximately 5 or 6 years old and his younger sister, relate the story of a cross country trek with a dead baby in the family trunk.

In doing so, Kimball reduces the ironic distance typical of Faulkner's novel and ends up with something that is gut wrenching and sad. What he produces is a "road novel unlike any other that tracks the physical and emotional distance a family travels after tragedy." In this case, the tragedy is watching the infant son die of yellow fever. The novel begins here, and then traces the small town of Mineola, Texas's reaction, as neighbors arrive with food, embalming materials, and shovels to help bury the child. The family, however, immediately takes the coffin out of the grave and packs all of its belongings to head north, where the extended family resides. The boy narrates the geographical distance traveled, in chapters that take their titles from the two cites that mark point A and point B. He enumerates the sale or trade of family possessions, including wedding rings and his own clothes, as the family barters to find gas money. His sister deals with the emotional distance, by constantly comparing her doll family (one of the items that is packed up—and sold—is her dollhouse and dolls) to her people family. Her main concern is bringing the baby back to life. I will not say what happens at the end of the journey, so as not to spoil what does come as a shock.

Unlike As I Lay Dying, which always seemed to me to be more of an experiment in prose (much like Absalom, Absalom!) rather than an attempt at a story, The Way the Family Got Away packs a punch because for starters, Kimball imagines the linguistic universe of childhood well, often not allowing his narrators to know the names of items. The boy and girl rely on what is termed a kenning in Old English literature. Here, a narrator combines two known words with a hyphen in order to describe an unknown item (the sea being a whale-road, for example), as in this passage where the sister tells how the family tried to make the dead baby look more natural after his embalming:

We pulled his cheeks back out with the finger-pinchers but they just made holes inside his face and didn't even breathe his cheeks back out. We opened his lips and mouth up with the short knife until he smiled. We unheld his arms from together with the small tooth-cutter. We made the tire-cross stand up behind him to hold his arms back out again but his arms didn't work enough to hug us or even hold onto anything else even when it looked like my little brother was trying to hold on to everything in my people-family and us.

Kimball also does an admirable job of recreating the universe of childhood, as he has the sister play with her plastic dolls, and eventually her string and paper dolls, in order to come to terms with the death of the little brother and (we infer from various descriptions) the current pregnancy of the mother. Many writers have attempted to visualize and literarily represent childhood, and Kimball succeeds because his prose is accurate (in fact, the novel is somewhat challenging to read because often you have to figure out what it is the children are saying), visceral, and compellingly emotional. This is apt when you consider that he is attempting to relate one family's collapse due to tragedy.

Also a personal tragedy, May is marketed as a slasher flick, but like Spider Baby (Jack Hill, 1964) and Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), it is also a tragic dark comedy (not a tragicomedy, since in the strictest terms a tragicomedy does not end in death). To boot, it is disturbing, and despite its over-the-top grotesqueness, deeply moving. May Canady is a born outcast who grows up into a very weird young woman, and at first the film plays her plight for snickers and sometimes even guffaws, as we watch other characters react to her strangeness. The reason the film works is because her strangeness very naturally gravitates to madness, as she slowly comes to the realization that "there aren't any perfect people," and that she will never find a friend who will accept her exactly as she is and not betray her. 

Angela Bettis (who played Carrie in the abysmal television remake) is May, in the same way that Paul Newman was Cool Hand Luke and Clint Eastwood was Dirty Harry. These are cases where the actors became their characters, and the characters became synonymous with the actors. Her portrayal of someone who is so twisted as May could have easily degenerated into ridiculousness, but Bettis makes her character believable, and more importantly, sympathetic. This is important because May, who developed a "lazy eye" as a child and was teased mercilessly because of her oversized eye patch, never really outgrows her sense of being ostracized, not even as she approaches her twenties. It doesn't even matter that she is fairly nice looking and potentially "cool" because of her retro sense of fashion. She was as a child, and will always be, shy and more than a little quirky. In one scene she meets an amateur filmmaker, Adam Stubbs (Jeremy Sisto), and manages to peak his interest (she falls for him because he has beautiful hands, but more of that later). She admits she is "weird," to which he replies, as many of us who consider ourselves a bit eccentric or outside the mainstream would, "I like weird."

May then becomes a study of the difference between weird and weird. Adam's idea of weird is attending a horror flick revival and making a short film that equates raw sex with cannibalism, and May's idea of weird is, well, weird. After she sees his film, she says it was "sweet" and then questions the idea of getting an entire finger bitten off in one chomp as being kind of "far-fetched." And when Bettis as May says this, she seems genuine. Adam, the film's other principle, is also believable: when May goes too far and bites his lip during foreplay, he realizes that she is really off the wall, and he starts to distance himself. He does so slowly, as one would do with someone one cared about romantically and actually had concern for as a valuable human being. If the film has a weak spot it is the cardboard cutout Polly (Anna Faris), the libidinous lesbian who works with May at the veterinary clinic and who also burns May.

So what is May actually about you ask? Well, it is almost impossible to explain this film, but let me give it a try.

May, outcast as a child because of her lazy eye, is next seen on her sixteenth birthday blowing out her candles. She has apparently still made no friends, as no one but her mother and father are at the party. Her mother, a seamstress and doll-maker, gives her a precious gift:, the first doll she ever sewed (named Susan), still in its glass cabinet. Se tells May what she learned as a child, "when you can't find a friend, make one." Fast forward to May working in the vet clinic, going home at night to Susan, who now speaks to her, and spending her entire night sewing. She sees Adam working on a car one day, or more accurately, sees Adam's beautiful hands. After some fumbling around, she manages to meet him and actually strikes up a friendship—until the night she bites him. As he pulls away, she lets herself be seduced by Polly (Polly has a beautiful neck), who immediately betrays her by taking up with a leggy, tall blonde. At this point, May realizes that there are no perfect people, only perfect parts. Suffice it to say that eventually, May decides to make a new friend. It's no accident that her first "donor," a stranger, has a Frankenstein's monster tattoo on his arm.

By now May has subtly gone from being a black comedy to a gothic (but not gory) slasher film. When the ending, which is truly sad and dark, arrives, it does so as a natural progression, and it holds true with the prevalent metaphors and images established throughout the film by McKee (who, Hitchcock and Shyamalan-like, gives himself a cameo). May's action at the end of the movie will shock even the most jaded of viewers as well, which is a plus, and the final image is one guaranteed to burn in any thinking person's mind.

I wholeheartedly recommend that you set aside some time to enjoy both of these wonderfully made yet tragic works. Words to the wise—make sure you’re in “a good place” emotionally when taking up either of these challenging examples of horror. Both Kimball’s novel and McKee’s movie are downers, but then again some of us are “weird,” and actually enjoy art that delves into the darkest recesses of the human mind.