The Fictional Man (11 page)

“Set
’
em up,” he sighed.

CHAPTER SIX

DOLL PUTS KITTEN over his KNEE and SPANKS her – for her part, she SQUEALS and WIGGLES DELIGHTFULLY. We get a GOOD LOOK. RAUCOUS MUSIC PLAYS. Eventually, DOLL PULLS HER ROUGHLY back to HER FEET.

DOLL:

So what do you say now, sugar? Any more big ideas in that pretty little brain of yours about world domination?

KITTEN:

(breathily)

Not a one... Mister Dalton Doll, sir.

They KISS as the DOLLY BIRDS CHEER. Behind them, F.L.O.O.Z.Y.’s VOLCANO BASE EXPLODES.

THE END

N
ILES SLUMPED INTO
the couch, groaning. Get rid of that.

After the fifth pint, he’d made his way home, steeled himself, and started the movie again. With the alcohol in him, it was actually kind of enjoyable, or enjoyable enough – lurid trash, but no more lurid and thoughtless than some things that had come before or after it. Now that he wasn’t being distracted by the ghosts of erections past, he could even see the things in it that had made it his favourite film – yes, even counting
Apocalypse Now
: the avant-garde direction, the high-fashion costumes, the gorgeous op-art of the sets. Joi Lansing’s pitch-perfect turn as the admittedly problematic female lead – even Anouska Hempel turned in one of the better performances of her career, although she’d still done her best to get the film removed from sale in the UK. And Duke Mitchell brought a surprising amount of nuance to the part of Dalton Doll, adding a patina of irony that smartly blunted the worst of the dialogue. Maybe the drink was re-applying the rose-tinted spectacles he’d come to it with, but now that he’d gotten used to watching it with adult eyes Niles had to admit that it was a fascinating piece of work.

The real problem was that he had no way to make Dalton Doll interesting. Maybe – if he took the overtones that Mitchell had supplied as far as they could possibly go – he’d end up with some kind of post-ironic send-up of ‘lad culture,’ twenty years too late to be relevant, or a bargain-basement version of Seth MacFarlane or the Wayans Brothers. If he played it straight – unless it fell into the hands of some kind soul who’d rewrite it and take all credit and blame – it would pretty much kill his screenwriting career stone dead, which would essentially mean no living, breathing Kurt Power, or at least not one that hadn’t been filtered through another writer’s sensibilities.

And the
real
problem – the
really
real problem, to quote Dean – was that either direction would loose a monster onto the world. Oh, Dalton Doll the Fictional would have some safeguards in his personality so he wouldn’t be utterly sociopathic – people had learned their lesson after the first Dracula had died from a garlic allergy, and learned it again after the
Dexter
debacle, and presumably this Sherlock Holmes business would lead to even more safety features – but he’d still be a creep. He’d give interviews and sound bites to the press about feminazis and legitimate rape. He’d write books about how to pick up women by ‘negging’ them in clubs and doing cheap little magic tricks. He’d run for Governor of California.

And if Niles sanded off every last rough, unpleasant edge... what made him interesting? What were his flaws? He couldn’t just be a spy with a drink problem and a voracious sexual appetite – that was James Bond. He couldn’t just be a spoof James Bond with ’sixties overtones – that was Austin Powers. The serious, dark Bond was Jason Bourne, or possibly Ethan Hunt – although nobody talked about him any more, not since what had happened on the set of
Mission: Impossible II
. Aside from Bond as socially backward misogynist – more so than usual – it had all been done, and the misogynist direction was the one Niles was having so much trouble with. It was a mess.

Idly, he let the closing credits wash over him, soothing his mind with the jangling of psychedelic guitars. Was that The Chocolate Watchband? It’d be about the right period... Niles leaned forward, shaking himself awake, studying the credits to see who’d provided the music.

He blinked, rewound the credits a second or two and paused the film.

SCREENPLAY by HUTTON H HOPPER

& JEAN-PAUL VITTI

Based on “THE DOLL HOUSE”

by FRED MATSON

‘Based on’?

F
ROM
T
HE
P
ARSNIP
AV Clubhouse
‘TV Review’ section:

DOOR TO NOWHERE, “The Doll House”

(Season 1, Episode 27, originally broadcast 12/5/1961)

AV Clubhouse Grade:
A-

Community Grade:
A
(Sign in to vote)

Reviewed by
Marcus Trowbridge

So what have we got here?

Well, we’ve got William Shatner ramping up his natural tendency to play to the back row just enough to deliver one of the all-time great performances of his career. And we’ve got a guest director in the shape of Christopher Barry – fans of our Classic
Who
Review will remember that name – who allows Shatner to be Shatner when the script needs it, matching him beat for beat as the intensity rises to the final climax, but pulls him back for the quieter moments, including the haunting final shot of Shatner’s soldier turning his wooden rifle over and over in his hands as the sound of cannon fire grows in the distance. (But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.) It’s some of the director’s earliest work, and something of an oddity in that it’s the only work he ever did for a US production company. (For those interested in the bizarre intricacies of the relationship between the BBC and Talisman TV, including the full story of how Barry came to direct “The Doll House” and the ideas it gave him for his work on “The Daleks,” there’s a fascinating blog entry here.)

So with Shatner and Barry we already have lightning in a bottle. But what elevates “The Doll House” to one of the greatest half-hours in television history – if, tragically, one of the least watched – is the writing. Fred Matson, on only his second script for the programme, produces what is easily his best work. proving for the first time that
Door To Nowhere
can be more than just
Twilight Zone Lite
, that it can actually ask the kind of heavy social and existential questions that will go on to make it a distinct show in its own right in the upcoming seasons.

On first glance, the plot relies on a fairly simple ‘twist’ of the kind that
Twilight Zone
has already done better: William Shatner plays a soldier – dressed somewhat incongruously in the manner of a British redcoat – who finds himself, without explanation, in the grounds of a large mansion, run – and ruled – entirely by beautiful young women. There are other redcoats already there, but they seem brainwashed, content to drink tea with the women and take them for promenades around the grounds, while Shatner is keen to return to the war, fighting with his fellow ‘captives’ and even – in the episode’s most queasily visceral moment – driving his bayonet into the stomach of ‘Barbara,’ the Mansion’s apparent ruler. (Barry zooms in sharply at the moment the bayonet plunges in before cutting to Shatner’s face, glistening with sweat, horrified at his own actions. When we cut back to the face of Diana Millay as Barbara, utterly unperturbed – of course, there’s no damage, no sign of any wound – it’s as big a shock to the viewer as the violence itself.)

The incident with the bayonet – Shatner’s first real exposure to the power of the weapon he constantly carries – creates a change in him, and over the second half of the narrative he comes to accept his imprisonment, finally agreeing with his fellow soldiers that an endless life of platonic pleasure in the Mansion is a far better option than returning to a war that he knows almost nothing about.

Of course, no happiness in an episode of
Door To Nowhere
can last for long – its willingness to go for the bleak ending was what marked it out from its rivals even in these early days – and all too soon the soldiers start vanishing from the Mansion one by one, and Shatner learns from Millay that “the one who had you first” has discovered his presence in their idyllic retreat and he must now leave them forever. Shatner tries to resist expulsion – railing against the force that controls him in what has to be one of the most Shatnerian performances of all time – before we cut to an argument between a young brother and sister in a suburban home. The brother rescues the last of his wooden toy soldiers from his sister’s doll house, where she’s been using them to provide romantic companions for her Barbies (or ‘Barbaras’ – presumably Mattel didn’t approve the use of their product). The brother returns the red-painted soldier to his own room, after extracting a solemn promise from his sister that she won’t use his toys for “sissy stuff” ever again. As the boy gloats over his reformed army, talking to them about how he’s gonna “make ’em fight,” we cut to Shatner, marooned on a misty, featureless battlefield, staring at his rifle and the deadly bayonet, listening to the sound of war coming closer. Unlike the very early episodes, when
Door To Nowhere
was still aping its spiritual father, there’s no closing narration here – no cuddly homily to see us into the next programme. We simply fade to black.

It’s not perfect, of course. In some ways, the episode is a victim of the times – in particular, toy fashions of the period. Barbie had just arrived on the doll scene, but her counterpart for the boys’ demographic – GI Joe – had yet to appear, and it’s hard to watch “The Doll House” in the present day and not feel his absence. (Although having said that, I don’t believe that GI Joe came with a rifle and bayonet permanently attached. The scene where Shatner tries and fails to put the rifle down is one of the most brilliant – and symbolic – moments of the episode.) I’d have liked it if Matson had been slightly more subtle with his names, too – not only does the title of the episode give the game away to an extent, but Shatner’s soldier is actually called ‘Sgt Billy Doll’ in the credits, which is cringeworthy. Thankfully, he’s never fully named in the script.

Probably the biggest problem is the acting. Not all the performances gel – Shatner is obviously magnificent and Millay strikes just the right balance between the peppy innocence you’d want in a “Barbara” doll and the otherworldly qualities you’d expect from the matriarch of a mysterious, possibly alien culture, but the rest of the acting is a little wooden (no pun intended) and in places quite shrill. I’ll single out Ron Howard as “The Boy” – he misjudges the tone of the piece badly, playing the ending as almost upbeat and blunting some of the tragedy in the process. (Though it’s hard to blame a seven-year-old for fumbling such a complex character beat.) More importantly, there are some frankly awful moments with Horace Keefe, easily the worst of
Door To Nowhere
’s regular ‘background players,’ as he overplays the subtext and reads the part of Shatner’s ‘brainwashed’ fellow soldier in an excruciatingly camp lisp, which breaks the tension so badly – as well as being pretty offensive to modern ears – that it drags the episode down from what would have been a solid ‘
A
.’

For the most part, though, this is up there with the best of
Door To Nowhere
’s three seasons, and it’s where we start to see how those seasons are going to shape up. We’ve got the anti-war sentiment that dominated second season episodes like “A Round Of Liar’s Dice” and “What Is That Which The Breeze,” and while it might be stretching things a little to credit Matson with predicting America’s involvement in a ground war in Vietnam, the idea of young men being called to fight in wars they don’t understand the history or even the point of – all at the bidding of overlords who consider them little more than toys to be smashed against one another – is a powerful image that resonates strongly. We also have, arguably, the first of the existentialist questions that grew to take over the programme and inform some of the proto-psychedelic excesses of the third season – “Puppet On A String,” “Eyes Down” and “A Man Of Substance” all draw more than a little influence from this episode’s examination of what human life might look like from a different perspective, and Matson’s Season Three opener “The Fox At Bay” feels almost like a direct sequel, with Jack Warden replacing Shatner as the man lost and alone on a seemingly endless plain as the noises of terrible violence close in on him.

Where this episode stands alone, though – exploring territory no other episode would dare to for the entirety of
Door To Nowhere
’s run – is in its examinations of gender, sexuality and the meaning of masculinity in a world that was on the brink of an explosion of social and sexual freedoms. When Shatner first arrives, he’s belligerent and aggressive, accusing his fellow soldiers of cowardice by leaning on the idea of the ‘real man’ – and here’s where Keefe’s ham-fisted performance does some real damage, shoring up 1950s attitudes of what a ‘real man’ looks and sounds like at exactly the moment the narrative is starting to knock them down – and the clash with Millay, that ends with Shatner essentially attempting to murder her, begins because she offers him a doily for his tea. All through the first act, Shatner is more willing to listen to an absent ‘father’ – the ‘superior officer’ who he believes is waiting for him outside the grounds of the Mansion – rather than the ‘mother’ figure, Millay, who wants nothing more than to see him happy, content and in love. Even after he’s realised that he’s better off in his new surroundings, he openly wonders what he is, if not a soldier. What makes the tragedy of “The Doll House” so acute is that it’s not until Shatner fully accepts the ‘sissy stuff’ he’s been fighting during the whole half-hour, embracing his new identity as one of what Millay calls “the beautiful boys,” that it’s all ripped away from him and he’s brought back, weeping, to what he once thought he wanted.