Most notable amongst the artists who chose to make movies for radio, or “radio cinema,” are the collective works of visual artist, musician, writer, and performer Terry Allen. Allen is a compelling storyteller, and as a visual artist he understands the basic principle of the screenplay as a map — “show me, don’t tell me.” Employing a screenplay format and numerous filmic references within the text, as well as a consciously imagistic mode of storytelling Allen also brings to his work a recognition of aspects of American life usually not represented in contemporary art — that of white working-class culture and history. He is also known for his politically sophisticated but down-home in-your-face lyrics and eclectic hard-driving country band. As a songwriter and musician with a Texas country voice, he is also cognizant of how to turn four minutes of words and music into a Technicolor mini-epic that resonates with the history of where we have been and where we come from. Thus, structured like treatments for feature films, his twenty-seven minute radio pieces are vivid portraits of American life. They are also a form of cultural autobiography in which the landscapes of the American psyche are seen and heard not only through our cultural icons and images, but in the rhythms, cadences, and intonations of speech. Speech is culture.
Bleeder
Nowhere is this more evident than in Bleeder. Allen understands not only the power of radio as a storytelling medium but the capacity of sound and the sound of language to conjure up vivid images that are as essential to the central narrative as the progression of the story told through the characters. In Bleeder the recollections of one woman recounted in a distinctly Texan vernacular accompanied by a prairie wind, hymns, and songs evoking the 50s and 60s paint a vivid portrait of a piece of America through the fictional biography of one man. In this instance the central character to which the title refers is a hemophiliac who hates Dracula movies, “maybe because he spent his whole life living off other people’s blood.” He was a huckster, a politician, a possible gangster, a charlatan, a religious fanatic, a drunk, and a great storyteller, born of oil and married into cattle, and the “only person I ever knew who had no conscience whatsoever.”
Like all of Allen’s titles “bleeder” functions as a metaphor that encompasses far more than its original reference. This work is a parable of America letting blood, America in the era of assassinations and Vietnam, America then and now. The telling of the story is an act of recollection, and a revision of history. Welcome to Lyndon Johnson’s Texas of backroom politics and big deals, cattlemen and oilmen, and women with big appetites and big hair, men with big hands, big talk, and big cars. This is also the Texas of revivalist preachers and TV evangelists, of hustlers and gamblers, whiskey and guns, cash through Christ, the Kennedys on the cross, blood money, faith betrayed. Allen makes every lie reveal a deeper truth as he examines the way history, events, images, memory, and hallucination dissolve into each other, become reworked and mythologized.
The Bleeder’s life story is told by a woman who knew him. “He’s really runnin’ through my heart tonight.” This eulogy embraces all the dichotomies and contradictions, equalizes all the shadings of good and bad, and transforms him into a cultural icon. For every act of redemption there are dirty sheets.
… We’d get really drunk, an tell dirty jokes, really filthy … we’d all be laughin’ our asses off rollin’ around howlin’ on the floor and all of a sudden he’d just stop … sit at the piano and stare at the keys … he’d start playin’ an singin’ real soft some wonderful sad beautiful gospel song (pause) like the devil had just hopped right outta his mouth and a sweet angel had stepped in …. He had a special thing in his heart for Jesus. I think it was that blood ….
The violence is in his body, a stomach full of whiskey and blood and Jesus. Guns, and pills for the pain, and stacks of bills in a suitcase. The Bleeder’s biography is also America’s biography. We make our own myths. History and memory bleed into each other. Paradox and nostalgia. Auld Lang Syne, and a country western song. Sex and death and resurrection. He had said “biography is form of necrophilia… blood could fly outta him like a dam breaking.” God bless America. Amen.
Torso Hell
In the opening line of Torso Hell, Allen introduces and frames the piece as “an idea for a horror movie, a treatment.” What makes Torso Hell so unique, and so profoundly disturbing as radio cinema, is that it would be almost unwatchable as the movie Allen describes, so lurid is its violence and vengeance, so painful is the nakedness of the underlying truth it reveals. We would turn away, or we would nervously laugh it off. As a parody of its genre it successfully reveals the way in which Hollywood deforms and perverts the realities of extreme violence and its psychic aftermath, and distances us from its meaning and reality. Keep in mind that in the mid-1980s everyone was following the campy melodramas of the rich in Dynasty and Dallas, or were absorbed in the yuppy angst of Thirty Something, not the dark shadowy margins of the paranormal world of The X Files and Millennium.
If we have become numb to images of suffering, terror, and degradation, Allen knows they can still get under the skin when vividly planted in the ear. As a sound work we cannot shut our eyes to the images materializing out of words and sounds in our brain. They remain immobilized at the edge of consciousness and memory, like a nightmare stuck fast in the heart of darkness. They call forth the demons in our national collective unconscious and flash them off and on like a neon sign in Las Vegas. But their true content cannot be glossed over with special effects. Allen’s radio film is an American theme park of horrors, but unlike a Disney or a Universal ride, it does not offer the catharsis of vicarious chills and thrills, the cheap escape of corporate entertainment. Instead it re-enforces the power of the mind over physical force.
Allen narrates Torso Hell in the easy familiar vernacular of everyday speech, as if he were pitching the story to a potential producer, leaving just enough open-ended possibilities in the details to allow for collaboration without altering the main thrust of the story. And the suggestions are forthcoming, embellishments that bring the film back into more recognizably Hollywood formulas, a kind of postmodern pastiche of familiar signposts — Disney-style animation with live action. Road Warrior types with southwest design art direction. Minnie and Mickey with punk music. 1960s hippie political clichés and “the kind of people you’d run into at a B-52’s concert in El Paso.” This mash-up of three decades of pop culture acts as the perfect counterpoint to the horror of the central story that is stretched beyond rational believability into the realm of unexplainable phenomena. As a radio movie we are forced to consciously navigate between these two forms of representation. As explicit as Allen’s descriptive language seems to be, it is actually the power of suggestion, the way our own imagination fills in the outline, conjuring up the gruesome details, that causes this piece to resonate in the pit of the stomach. We accept the possibility of the improbable when it is in the domain of evil, especially when such darkness of the soul so closely resembles what we have already witnessed masquerading as commonplace.
Torso Hell is a parable. The story begins in Vietnam where five young men are literally blown into pieces in an attack in the jungle. Miraculously they all survive, but the main character is a “complete quad — no arms or legs, just a torso.” When the doctors try to put the pieces back together they sew one of his limbs onto each of the other four guys. When they recover none of them know what has happened, and each thinks he is the only one still alive. The Torso recuperates in a hospital in Japan where a young nurse teaches him Eastern philosophy. After two years in a Veterans hospital the evil half-sister of his dead mother gets legal guardianship and brings him home to her boarding house in “some little shit town out in New Mexico.” As soon she