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But Sharkey refused to be offended or even mildly discouraged by my resistance. Instead he took my evasiveness as a challenge, probably because I represented the ghost of Clare still haunting him. He'd been happy enough to get her off his back; but he would have liked to score a couple points with her. Getting her protégé to visit his theater, maybe to offer a few approving words was as close as he could come to that. But I wasn't making it easy. I'd disciplined myself. One visit a month to the Ritz, maximum. Enough to stay in touch with Sharkey's bizarre film world without, I hoped, suffering contamination.

Why go at all? Because my fascination for the sleaze and its audience, though strictly rationed, was as strong as ever and not to be denied. These were, as Sharkey never let me forget, Max Castle's people. His films were growing in popularity on the cult film and midnight-movie circuit, where they ran in constant tandem with the trash. In several cities,
Count Lazarus
and
Feast of the Undead
played every Saturday night to full houses of exuberant adolescents who had memorized the screenplay and could recite it back word perfect in chorus, a cinematic ritual that had started with
The Rocky Horror Show.
Around the country, kids were showing up at school costumed like the Count. Popularity like that had to mean something to me. There was a secret about movies waiting to be learned from this audience, but only at a distance. A secret to be learned about myself as well, that too at a distance, standing off from my own vulnerabilities, placing them under glass, studying them as in a clinic.

But even with all the detachment I could summon up, monitoring Sharkey's film scene was an ordeal by disgust. Notch by notch, the Ritz was sinking deeper into the mire. I would have found that hard to imagine a few years before. Watching a cult favorite like Jodorowsky's
El Topo
—it screened regularly once a month—I would have said
this
is the antipodean swamp, the absolute, godforsaken edge of the world. Mayhem, mutilation, rape, surrealistic sadism. Beyond this, nothing.

I was wrong. Beyond that swamp there lay another that was even more fetid, filled with stranger, more menacing, fauna. We were passing through an adolescent punk phase that seemed to have no lower limit. Kids were walking the streets wearing electric-blue Mohawks and swastika tattoos, bones in their noses, nails through their earlobes, hunting for still more outrageous fashions. At the rock clubs, performers dressed like the minions of Satan were biting the heads off live chickens, mice, bats. Only the SPCA seemed to object. When these groups took a name like Human Sacrifice, there was cause for alarm.

This wave of adolescent barbarism could hardly leave the movies untouched. Sharkey even boasted (correctly I think) that movies had led the way. First there were Splatter Films, then Sick Flicks, categories he'd long since come to treat as established genres. “Hell,” he once commented after reading a hair-raising account of a balls-off-the-wall rock concert that featured simulations of dismemberment,
“we were into that years ago.
Night of the Living Dead, The Wizard of Gore.
We're way ahead, way ahead.”

“But what sort of competition is this?” I asked. “To see who's first swimming down the drain?”

“Credit where credit is due,” Sharkey answered with a proud sniff. “I got stuff playing on my screens they could never even so much as try on a stage. They don't have the reality factor.”

Sharkey was right about that. When it came to close-up, hard-focus revulsion, nothing could beat the movies. The most recent item I'd seen at the Ritz ended with the mother of a graphically raped daughter just as graphically castrating the villain with her teeth. On all sides, hoots of delighted approval from an audience of teenage troglodytes munching Big Macs and pizza.

Where did such fury come from? Such vindictive rage? Almost resentfully, I told myself: they don't have the
right
to go so ugly-nuts. They haven't
earned
it. That should be the privilege of age and much suffering.

Or was there, I wondered, some deeper human sensibility rising to the surface here, a thin-skinned, hair-trigger capacity for hurt that would no longer deny itself expression? If so, hurt by
what
? These weren't the casualties of atrocity and historic horror, of which there were many tending their scars with quiet dignity. These were pampered suburban school kids, for God's sake, seemingly unscathed in their enclaves of affluence. Hurt, then, by life itself. Cheated by the act of birth, striking out, hitting back. Was that possible?

True, these tacky little films were a fringe phenomenon. But new growth, including rot, starts at the fringe, working in, and these days traveling at a dizzy pace. No more than a few years after underground and sexploitation films had pioneered the way, major movies at first-run houses were featuring glossier versions of the same sadistic capers, ghoulishness, kinky sex, diabolical obsession. All of which, once it penetrated the mainstream cinema, was apt to be heralded by leading critics as a bold stroke, a daring innovation, a breakthrough. As if everyone, even the best and the brightest, were just waiting for the barriers to crumble.

And here I was at the poisoned source of it all. In this audience, I sensed I was close to some privileged vision into the troubled soul of the time, a truth with a twisted face. The experience took my thoughts back more than a dozen years to that time when movies still largely belonged to an adult culture and the quaint phrase “art film”
still held a bright promise. Clare, who was the product and still the game champion of that era, had offered me one of my most memorable lessons in film criticism. It might have been a review of the movie I'd seen that day.

At the time I was still an impressionable undergraduate; in one of my film courses, we were using the famous shower-murder scene from Hitchcock's
Psycho
to learn some fundamentals of film editing. The movie was then Hitchcock's most recent release, and this shocking sequence had quickly been identified as a stunning technical tour de force. Enthusiastically, I reported to Clare how my instructor was deftly combing through the seventy—count them, seventy!—separate shots that compose the single sensational minute of film in which Janet Leigh is hacked to bloody ribbons in the tub. Clare greeted my report with a cold stare and total silence. The following week, she rented Hitchcock's
Strangers on a Train
and arranged to borrow a freeze-frame projector. Then she led me frame by frame through the tennis-match sequence at the end of the movie. She did this quite expertly, delineating the thematic contrast between the sunlit tennis court and the murderer's hand reaching down into the dark sewer.

I was deeply impressed by the analysis. Even so, I ventured to say that the effect in
Psycho
was better. Clare scoffed. With her typical perversity, she let me know she deplored the much-praised
Psycho
and insisted that
Strangers
was Hitchcock's last good movie before he turned psychotically self-indulgent.

“But more important than which film is better,” she went on, “is your judgment, Jonny, about what you saw—or
think
you saw. Sure,
Psycho
is razzle-dazzle editing. But did your teacher also call it to your attention that
Psycho
is sick thrills? Never take your eye off the ball, lover. Otherwise, any clever mechanic with a moviola will sucker you in every time. This is a mighty medium. It lends itself to such abuse. Look, I show you a gorgeous sequence from
Strangers on a Train
that has just as much tension, plus elegance, plus symbolic overtones, plus
no
blood. But you tell me
Psycho
is better. Why? It's a crummy script, a contrived plot, badly paced, miserably constructed. So why do you think it's ‘better'—
really
why? Admit it. You're a man, sitting here in the protective dark, watching a naked lady getting knifed in all her private parts. That's cliche porn, no matter how you slice it. Believe me, the guys who applaud such mayhem in the shower would be getting their rocks off if Hitchcock gave them the scene in one long take—in slow motion yet.”

Exasperated, she made a dire prediction.
“Psycho
is the beginning of something very bad. Mark my words. In another few years, every sadistic nut in the film industry is going to be grinding out madslasher-helpless-female-victim flicks, served up with fancy editing. And the same types who are praising
Psycho
will be saluting what they see as ‘film art.' Meanwhile, the women of the world will have to start walking the streets dressed in armor. And after that, it's going to be straight ahead into new frontiers of mayhem. I wouldn't be surprised if there comes a day when they hire disposable extras for guaranteed lethal stunts. Just remember, my dear, the pictures
move
—and that's a good trick. But either they move to tell the human truth or they're
just
a trick. Movement that excites without personal contact—that's a good definition of masturbation. And not caring how you fuck over the person you contact—that's the rape of the mind.”

A month later, Sharkey was at me again, pressing me to pay a visit to the Catacombs. His pink-eyed genius would be on display that weekend. A retrospective screening yet.

“How old did you say he is?” I asked.

“Hard to tell with an albino. Sixteen, seventeen maybe.”

“A retrospective for a sixteen-year-old?”

“He's been making movies since junior high school. Three, four years.”

“That long?”

“Oh yeah. Like I said … ”

“… the kid's a genius, I know.”

“Right. Like what's-his-name … Baudelaire. Just a kid, wasn't he?”

“You mean Rimbaud.”

“Whoever. That's Dunky's category. Genius child.”

“Sharkey, I'm not going to watch any movies made by someone when he was nine years old.”

“Ease up, pal. He's one of your fans.”

“Oh? How so?”

“He's read everything you've done on Castle. That's why he wants to meet you.”

Well, that did cast a more favorable light on things. Even so, I might have held out indefinitely against Sharkey if it weren't for one respect in which I needed his help. My date with Shirley Temple.

I'd returned from Europe determined to investigate the only movies, other than those of Castle, which I could connect with orphan
filmmakers. I had no trouble locating
The Littlest Rebel.
Sharkey had shown it and many another Shirley Temple opus at The Classic numerous times. The films played for laughs; their sticky-sweet cuteness and soppy innocence lapped over into the sort of campiness that Sharkey's audience of young cynics relished.

The Ritz Brothers, also on my list of must-see Orphans of the Storm classics, were another matter. Having become nobody's idea of a classic, not even Sharkey's, their films were harder to come by. As for
Bird of Paradise,
it took me six months to track the film down. It finally turned up in a sixteen-millimeter television print so butchered that I spent hours repairing it before it could be screened.

But there was something that proved more difficult than locating these films; that was explaining to my learned colleagues what my interest might be in such questionable materials. As they arrived at the Film Studies department, the canisters produced raised eyebrows and snide queries. Especially so when the Ritz Brothers'
Gorilla
turned up in the same delivery that brought one of the senior professors a print of
The Sorrow and the Pity.
The contrast elicited comments even from our department secretary. “Quite a double bill we have today,” she said with pointed sarcasm. I brazened out the embarrassment with feeble explanations, but my courage failed me when it came to screening the films on campus. What if somebody walked in on me in the viewing room? How could I justify the sort of time-consuming, microscopic scrutiny I'd be giving this drivel?

So I turned to Sharkey, prevailing upon him to let me use the Ritz after hours. He was, as ever, compliant, asking no questions. Matters of taste simply didn't register with him.

What I found when I ran the films was the secret cinematic vocabulary I'd learned to look for in Castle's work. Without the benefit of a sallyrand, I could detect little more than surface indications of what lay beneath, but I now knew where to target my attention, and with the aid of a freeze-frame projector borrowed from my school, I was able to pick out the visual cues that marked the orphans' submerged motifs. It was a strenuous exercise that tired the eye, often producing a clanging headache. But after a time I realized, with some pride in the accomplishment, that the hundreds of hours I'd spent studying Max Castle had endowed me with a special facility, a sort of peripheral vision that allowed me to discern what others never consciously saw.

Sharkey, for example, who sat in on the first few
Bird of Paradise
screenings but whose eye wasn't attuned to traces of the
Unenthüllte,
had no idea what I was seeing even when I tried to guide him. Try as he would, he couldn't do more than catch an occasional blur, a suggestive highlight, a squirm of fleeting movement in the deep shadows.

“Tell me again, what're we lookin' at here, man?” he asked, peering, tilting his head this way and that.

“Secret movies,” I answered in a hushed tone, trying to sound as mysterious as possible.

“Far out,” Sharkey responded, also dropping his voice and squinting harder at the screen. “Where are these movies?”

I laid a finger to the center of my forehead. “You've got to have the mystic eye to see them.”

He loved it. “Far out,” he said again and after that asked no further questions.

Applying my mystic eye to
Bird of Paradise
, I found what I expected. The vortex effect that Dr. Byx had let me do no more than glimpse with the sallyrand focused on Dolores Del Rio as she swam from the ship; her lissome torso was subtly transformed by the play of light upon the waves into the funnel of an all-engulfing whirlpool, the cannibalizing vagina sucking her helpless lover into the dark, watery depths.