John Manderino: Here There Be Monsters

My 2017 book, Seduced by Mrs.Robinson, gave me the opportunity to praise in print a recent memoir by a Maine-based writer named John Manderino. His Crying at Movies was an inspired comic summation of his own life, with each key episode tied to a movie-going memory. For instance, after his first youthful sexual encounter went badly, he sought performance tips from the lusty Swedes by watching Elvira Madigan. (Alas, it didn’t help.) Then, when he was a lowly college sophomore, a senior asked him out because she adored The Graduate and thought he resembled Dustin Hoffman. Manderino was not flattered. In his mind, “Benjamin was short and looked like a rodent.” Still, he was attracted to the young woman, and so he managed to convince her that he was indeed sweet, sensitive, and depressed, just like Ben. In the next chapter we found them in bed together.

Manderino wrote Crying at Movies in 2008. Eight years later, he published another short story volume, one that pays an eccentric kind of tribute to things that go bump in the night. It’s called But You Scared Me the Most. The title comes from a Randy Newman tune, and the collection riffs on monsters, both those encountered on a movie screen and those who surround us in everyday (and every-night) life. More often than not, we are the monsters ourselves, learning to proudly fly our freak flags, no matter who is watching. There is, for instance, the eleven-year-old boy who celebrates Halloween by turning into a vampire. And, in a delicious story called “Wolfman and Janice,” a suburban housewife joins her spouse by transforming into a werewolf. (By this point, he’s already eaten the neighbor’s cat.)

Some of the stories explore characters who are shaped by their interaction with screen monsters and other grotesques. The Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein’s monster, Boris Karloff as The Mummy, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon all make appearances, as do such long-ago pop culture icons as Kukla (of TV’s Kukla, Fran, and Ollie), a bickering Barbie and Ken, and Señor Wences’ creepily literal hand-puppet, Johnny. In such stories a human character’s response to these famous fantasy figures makes clear to us the challenges and confusions within his (or her) own life. But Manderino also sometimes gets into the head of a fantasy being, like Bigfoot (or – charmingly – an aged Nancy Drew, still struggling to sleuth out things that have gone missing.)

One of the earlier stories, “A Certain Fellow Named Phil,” begins with the first-person confession of a murder. The victim, though, turns out to be an inflatable sex doll. I’m wondering if John saw, and enjoyed, my favorite film on this topic, 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl, then gave his version a more morose ending. The final story of the collection, “The Witch of Witch’s Woods,” captures the eerie uncertainty that was an attraction of The Blair Witch Project. But the most cold-blooded story of the lot, the blandly-titled “Bob and Todd,” may contain nothing menacing at all. In this tale of a hitchhiker picked up along a highway, the driver may or may not be hauling his wife’s body along with a load of athletic shoes. That’s for him to know and his passenger to  obsess about. I can imagine this as a one-act play, something on the order of Albee’s The Zoo Story. Or, of course, it could be the genesis of a very cool and creepy movie.

I’ve never met John Manderino in person, and that’s probably a good thing. I think he’d scare me the most.

Crying at Movies: What’s Grief Got to Do With It?

The other day, on my gym’s treadmill TV, I tuned in to the climax of Father of the Bride Part II. In case you missed it, that’s the one where Steve Martin’s wife and his daughter are both unexpectedly giving birth at the same hour, in the same hospital. Poor Steve dashes back and forth between the two delivery rooms, trying desperately to remain calm. And then, suddenly, he’s holding two not-small-enough-to-be-newborn bundles in his arms, one wrapped in a pink blanket, one swathed in blue. Watching Steve Martin’s character beam from ear to ear, and hearing him announce to the world that life doesn’t get any better than this, I could feel tears welling up in my eyes.

Here’s what made this strange: on the Sunday before I got the weepies watching Father of the Bride, I had buried my ninety-six-year-old mother. The seven days between her funeral and my trip to the gym had mostly been spent greeting well-wishers and making poignant visits to the home in which I grew up. That week -- preceded by long hours of watching at a dying woman’s bedside --was stressful in the extreme. And I had loved and admired my mother very much. But during the solemnities of her burial service and all the condolence visits that followed I remained dry-eyed. So why did I choke up when an on-screen character experienced an improbably happy turn of fate?

It’s partly that I’m a sucker for happy endings. In movies I cry easily, but usually not when life on screen turns sad. Growing up, I loved the cinematic version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. There’s a point in the middle of that musical when a leading character dies, and a kindly neighbor folds the pregnant widow in her arms as she warbles, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” It’s an undeniably heart-wrenching moment. But my tears do not flow until the end of the movie, when Billy Bigelow’s sad and lonely young daughter is finally accepted by her classmates, to a reprise of the same song. At that point, when life becomes sunshine and rainbows, I predictably turn into a regular Niagara. Perhaps it’s because I realize that life’s perfect moments are all too fleeting. When they’re captured on film in all their transient beauty, my tear ducts are wholly beyond my control.

A while back, I read a clever memoir by a writer named John Manderino. It’s called Crying at Movies, and it traces his development from boy to man in terms of his obsession with motion pictures. Often this involves his strong emotional response to oldies like It’s a Wonderful Life, King of Kings,  and Wuthering Heights. In Manderino’s telling, his relationship with the woman who later became his wife nearly died aborning because he was devastated by Brief Encounter, while she condemned it as a sappy story in which Celia Johnson wore a ridiculous hat. 

I can’t explain why Manderino cries at movies, though rarely in other circumstances. He himself has a curious theory, though: “It’s because there’s no theme music in real life. Seriously, I think it’s because there’s no background music.” He cites the long-ago funeral of his father, who had died suddenly of a heart attack. The funeral parlor was crowded with weeping friends and family, yet he found himself dry-eyed, and totally ashamed of that fact. “But then the organist started playing ‘Amazing Grace,’ very quietly, very tenderly, and I fell apart.” Why? Who can say? But a word from Noel Coward seems apt here: “Strange how potent cheap music is.”