Cormac McCarthy/Truman Capote/Herschell Gordon Lewis

“He strums the wire with his fin­gers.” From The Counselor, Ridley Scott, 2013

Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, from an ori­gin­al script by Cormac McCarthy, inspired quite a bit of crit­ic­al hyper­bole on both sides of the assess­ment scale, the most ridicu­lous of which was Andrew O’Hehir’s very silly “worst movie ever made” screed, which was in part based upon the extremely dubi­ous pro­pos­i­tion that Hollywood exec­ut­ives use the phrase “the dev­il’s candy” with the reg­u­lar­ity of  a Porky Pig stam­mer. I don’t want to be “meh” about the movie, which I greatly liked in part, but…I was kind of “meh” about the movie. The pro­found mor­al schema that a few of its admirers cite was kinda spoiled for me on account of the whole (speak­ing of spoil­ers, um, skip this part if you’re still look­ing for­ward to see­ing the movie) femme-fatale-comes-out-on-top finale, which is the sort of thing that tries to raise miso­gyny to a near-mystic level and nev­er really comes off. (See Basic Instinct.) (I also found Cameron Diaz’s per­form­ance as said femme fatale to be bor­der­line disgraceful.)

There’s also the fact that this is a genre movie with an almost self-consciously lit­er­ary ven­eer on it. Now this does­n’t both­er me, except, in this case, for the self-conscious part. That’s to say, Cormac McCarthy is in a sense both a lit­er­ary writer and a genre author. I’ve nev­er found the two to be mutu­ally exclus­ive myself. In McCarthy’s case, the genre could well be some kind of hor­ror (see Child of God), crime (No Country For Old Men), or the Western, sort of (see of course, Blood Meridian, a nov­el very much beloved of David Foster Wallace, who knew quite a bit about fic­tion both lit­er­ary and genre). My reser­va­tions about how this works in the con­text of an ori­gin­al script dir­ec­ted by a visu­al vir­tu­oso such as Ridley Scott are…well, they’re actu­ally imma­ter­i­al to what I want to talk about in this post, which is this whole decapitating-a-guy-on-a-motorcycle-with-a-wire ‑strung-across-the-highway thing.

You read that right. There’s a lot of talk in The Counselor, but every now and again there’s some grisly, vividly shot and edited action, and one of these sequences involves stop­ping a speed­ing motorcyclist—a crim­in­al cour­i­er of sorts—in the most extreme way pos­sible. By cut­ting off his head as he’s speed­ing down the road. 

In McCarthy’s screen­play, the descrip­tion of the set­ting up of the decap­it­at­ing wire is done in sober, metic­u­lous detail that would likely pass muster in Popular Mechanics. McCarthy intro­duces a man “car­ry­ing a roll of thin monel wire over one shoulder,” cross­ing the road and going to where “a tall met­al pipe is moun­ted to one of the fen­ce­posts.”

“He loops the wire around the corner post and pulls the end of the wire through the loop and wraps it about six times around the wire itself and tucks the end sev­er­al times inside the loop  and then takes the wire in both hands and hauls it as tight as he can get it. Then he takes the coil of wire and walks out and crosses the road, let­ting out the wire behind him.”

At the side of the road from whence this man walked, there’s a “ver­tic­ally moun­ted iron pipe at the right rear of the truckbed.” The man “threads the wire through a hole in the pipe and pulls it taut and stops it from slid­ing back by clamp­ing the wire with a pair of visegrips. Then he walks back out to the road and takes a tape meas­ure from his belt and meas­ures the height of the wire from the road sur­face. He goes back to the truck and lowers the iron pipe in its col­lars and clamps it in place again with a threaded lever that he turns by hand against the ver­tic­al rod. He goes out to the road and meas­ures the wire again and comes back and wraps the end of the wire through a heavy three-inch iron ring and walks to the front of the truck where he pulls the wire taut and wraps it around itself to secure the ring at the end of the wire and then pulls the ring over a hook moun­ted in the side rail of the truck bed. He stands look­ing at it. He strums the wire with his fin­gers. It gives off a deep res­on­ant note.” See, I was­n’t kid­ding about that Popular Mechanics stuff.

“The wire hums.” And so it goes, until McCarthy calls for a “shot of the green rider with his face turned back to the flood­light now behind him.” And… “sud­denly his head zips away and in the hel­met it goes boun­cing down the high­way behind the bike.”

 Yikes! Ridley Scott being the visu­al vir­tu­oso that he is, he pulls off the scene with great dis­patch and to ostens­ibly impress­ive effect, so much so that you might for­get for a moment that the whole thing is pre­pos­ter­ous on sev­er­al levels. Yet there’s some­thing about the whole Guignol aspect of the killing meth­od that makes it argu­ably irres­ist­able for a writer. As it hap­pens, anoth­er lit­er­ary writer who showed an oblique affin­ity for genre, Truman Capote, described just such a mode of murder, while sim­ul­tan­eously acknow­ledging its pre­pos­ter­ous­ness, in his 1975 sort-of non-fiction novella Handcarved Coffins. Handcarved Coffins finds Capote try­ing to return to the form he claimed to have inven­ted with In Cold Blood, but hav­ing dis­sip­ated a good deal of his geni­us, he here approaches it from an easi­er angle, mak­ing him­self a char­ac­ter in the crime nar­rat­ive and telling quite a bit of the story in the form of scrip­ted dia­logue. Capote’s guide and docent in this “account of an American crime” is an invest­ig­at­or named Jake Pepper, and early in the nar­rat­ive he tells Capote of the killing of his friend Clem Anderson, decap­it­ated while driv­ing what’s described as his “homemade jeep” over a “nar­row ranch road.” Here’s their exchange:

TC: The wire, yes. I have nev­er under­stood about the wire. It’s so—

JAKE: Clever?

TC: More than clev­er. Preposterous.

JAKE: Nothing pre­pos­ter­ous about it. Our friend had simple figured out a nice neat way to decap­it­ate Clem Anderson. Kill him without any pos­sib­il­ity of witnessed.

TC: I sup­pose it’s the math­em­at­ic­al ele­ment. I’m always bewildered by any­thing involving mathmatics.

JAKE: Well, the gen­tle­man respons­ible for this cer­tainly has a math­em­at­ic­al mind. At least he had a lot of very accur­ate meas­ur­ing to do.

TC: He strung a wire between two trees?

JAKE: A tree and a tele­phone pole. A strong steel wire sharpened thin as a razor. Virtually invis­ible, even in broad day­light. But at duck, when Clem turned off the high­way and was driv­ing in that crazy little wag­on along that nar­row road, he couldn’t pos­sibly have glimpsed it. It caught him exactly where it was sup­posed to: just under the chin. And, as you can see, sliced off his head as eas­ily as a girl pick­ing petals off a daisy.

TC: So many things could have gone wrong.

JAKE: What if they had? What’s one fail­ure? He would have tried again. And con­tin­ued till he succeeded.

TC: That’s what’s so pre­pos­ter­ous. He always does succeed.

JAKE: Yes and no. But we’ll come back to that later. 

Lifting, or bor­row­ing, from Capote, is one thing. But giv­en that the ostens­ibly fac­tu­al con­tent of Handcarved Coffins has, since pub­lic­a­tion, been cast into con­sid­er­able doubt…well, there’s a lot of stuff on the Internet fea­tur­ing latter-day vari­ations on this improb­able decap­it­a­tion scen­ario, but its actu­al ori­gin in the arts may in fact go back to 1968, and to über-schlock-meister Herschell Gordon Lewis’ very hard to watch (I could­n’t even bring myself to look at it again for the pur­poses of this piece) She-Devils On Wheels. In which the afore­men­tioned She-Devils con­trive to kill some guy in pre­cisely the same way as it plays out in The Counselor, only on a cheap budget and with an anti-virtuoso dir­ect­ing the proceedings. 

This infuri­ated descrip­tion of the scene, from an equally infuri­ated long-form account of Lewis’ movie, at the very ded­ic­ated web­site Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension, is a vivid an, to the best of my own recol­lec­tion, accur­ate one: “The gang slowly trundle out to their bikes, and after a cut we see them wrap wire around a pair of tele­phone poles, so that it stretches across the road at neck-height. HGL doesn’t actu­ally tell us what the wire’s for, but he sure takes his time let­ting us see the girls get it pre­pared. Then we see the biker poster girl spin around.

“Remember how the bar­tender didn’t know where Joe-Boy’s gang hides out? You’re smarter than HGL, because HE didn’t remem­ber that event – we now see Whitey and anoth­er Man-Eater ride up to Joe-Boy’s hot-rodders. Seriously, HGL – it was like a minute ago you told us that Queenie didn’t know where Joe-Boy was.

“Anyway the Man-Eaters get off their bikes, and again it takes both of them to put one of the bikes on its kick­stand. While Joe-Boy’s gang watches quietly, Whitey stabs a hole in a car’s tire. Joe-Boy runs up all aggress­ive and in-your-face but gets sprayed with a can of … deodor­ant? Hairspray? Something like that. Joe-Boy, hor­ri­fied at the threat of chlo­ro­fluoro­car­bons on the ozone lay­er, recoils, hands to his eyes, and the girls double up on Whitey’s bike and ride off, leav­ing one of their bikes behind.

“Joe-Boy, enraged, gets on the aban­doned bike bait without a second thought, and his gang rush to their cars. Don’t worry about the gang though – we nev­er see them again. Any of them.

“Off Joe-Boy rides in pur­suit to the sound of the James Bond theme(!). We see him on the bike, then we see the wire with all the Man-Eaters watch­ing. Then we see him. Then the wire. Then the Man-Eaters. Yes, HGL, I think we ‘get it.’ You’ve explained it enough. At least this time you only did it with repeated cam­era shots, not with dia­log. That’s a slight improvement.

“Joe-Boy rides into the wire with what one of my view­ing com­pan­ions imme­di­ately dubbed, ‘The worst decap­it­a­tion I’ve ever seen.’ ”

So there you have it. A com­pel­ling back­ward line from Cormac McCarthy to Herschell Gordon Lewis. Who says that “blogs” don’t do rel­ev­ant work in cul­tur­al archeology? 

UPDATE: Commentator Jason LaRiviere, below, cites “the greatest film to ever fea­ture motor­ized decap­it­a­tion by wire is Fellini’s Toby Dammit.” Indeed. The best seg­ment in the omni­bus film Spirits of the Dead, and one that Lewis could not have ripped off (unless he’d just heard about it), because that film was premier­ing at the Cannes Film Festival just as She-Devils was mak­ing its non-illustrious  U.S. the­at­ric­al run. Hmm.

And the movie did­n’t even occur to me as I was writ­ing this, even though it’s an old favor­ite of mine. The reas­on: In the Fellini movie, there’s no attempt to make the event plaus­ible in a mater­i­al­ist empir­ic­al sense. The wire that cuts off Toby’s head is, for all intents and pur­poses, put in place by a super­nat­ur­al agent who need not con­cern him or her self with, say, the chances that the wire will catch some oth­er idi­ot in a sports car. I am reminded, I have to say, of the Patti Smith poem “robert bresson,” and its treat­ment of a scene in Au has­ard Balthasar, and the scene’s lar­ger implic­a­tions. This is the last sec­tion of the poem: 

there is oil on the road.

the oil is the cause of the car going out of control.

what we want to find out is who put the oil there

and what the motive was.

who put the oil there?

i did

motive

art

i had to recre­ate the death of Jackson Pollock

w/the same rad­ic­al des­tiny that spun from the

hal­lowed designs of his own death.

image: no. 11, 14 and por­trait of a dream

image: the woman, lee krasner, shad­ing her eyes

with hands brown and spotted.

here we have no acci­dent no crime but a lateral

trans­la­tion of a man going out of control

the ini­ti­ation of a girl

(the intim­acy of mod­el and clone)

who would teach

as her teacher

taught her.

axle grease

film of sorrow

who put this oil here?

i did.

motive

art.

who was your teacher?

robert bresson