Eight Minutes to Live
The Circuitous Road of the Downward Scream
(This is a chapter from Eight Minutes to Live, by William Wheaton, forthcoming)
The Circuitous Road of the Downward Scream
(Excerpt from The Encyclopedia Of Late 20th And Early 21st Century Film)
The Circuitous Road of the Downward Scream is a 20th century American Experimental film made by Nick Fleck (1950-1987). While largely ignored when Nick Fleck created it in the 1980’s some time, this film has gained a massive reputability since, hailed as it is as a classic by some and as vile and disgusting by others. Nick Fleck’s life was marred by two tragedies that created fodder for his experimental cinematography. The first was that he was allegedly raped as a child by his father, the second was his service in the Vietnam War, where he was likely to have witnessed the massacres of many small children and infants, in particular flame throwers or napalm utilized. Privately funded, Fleck went about trying to decode his own psychiatric problems through the language of ‘”avant-garde” cinema, all through imagery and elements of mid-80’s horror cinema, in particular the influence of the craze for little monster movies sparked by the Spielberg film Gremlins and its darker cousins Ghoulies and Critters. Others have noted a resemblance between The Circuitous Road of the Downward Scream and the film Jacob’s Ladder…However, the plot-line of The Circuitous Road of the Downward Scream can not be said to have as much linearity as those films – this is because Ned Fleck suffered from what modern psychiatry labels “paranoid schizophrenia that is to say that he was in a constant state of fear of “evil spirits” that he felt inhabited his closets or beneath his beds. Ned Fleck did employee hotels in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal particularly during winter in an attempt to capture what he described as “the infinite gray of evil puppets” that his notes describe as “inflicting genital removals and castrations.” He is as a director largely concerned with capturing what he refers to again and again in his notes, as “insidious cold – rain- heroin smells like cat piss.” Many people upon hearing this will say- “that doesn’t make any sense” and “who cares?” They, however, are not Ned Fleck, a nameless veteran of a horrific American military conflict who was the subject of very violent sexual abuse at home as a child prior to his service in the U.S. Marines who spent much of what was left of his adult life wandering through Canada.
Someone in the American film industry really liked his concepts concerning puppetry and special effects, so he was able support himself as a consultant for prospective projects by smaller studios involving the growing craze for PG-13 rated evil little monster films in the early eighties such as Spookies and Munchies. “Ned Fleck is a veritable oil well of new concepts for special effects in these movies. We have to keep funding him to see what he’s going to come up with – we don’t think this film will sell – we’re not that dumb – we do think by throwing him the peanuts he needs to get by we can continue to know how to improve our puppetry and make-up. Have you seen the burnt flesh this guy can make?” said one producer in an interview in Fangora. The films Gremlins, Ghoulies and Critters were in particular inspirations for his work.
The Circuitous Road of the Downward Screams is much more so concerned with “plotlines” involving couples that it would appear are engaging in wife sharing or other “swingers” oriented sexual behaviors surrounding an indoor sauna and what Ned Fleck describes during his narration as “they are doing – what is it they are doing? I can’t…fuck…fuck you! Bitch, gook whore they all must die everyone dies…fuck you – everyone dies…Viet Cong whores die screaming…”
He describes at length during his own narration wanting to “drink napalm” … “I want my own internal organs to be enveloped by a fire a thousand times that of which Carbine Williams intended”. (Many Europeans may be oblivious to this U.S. Historical reference – Carbine Williams was the man who invented the short stroke engine used in American M-1 rifles while in prison for murder. American M-1 rifles shifted the balance of powers during the war against the Nazis.) One particularly bizarre scene that could be viewed as a kind of climax to the film involves a stairway leading upwards in a house that Ned Flick narrates as being “where I grew up, where I was raised” and from down the stairwell comes with a violent jerking motion a nude female zombie with stitches and ripped flesh influenced by the dismembered “Black Dahlia” Elizabeth Smart murder of Hollywood history fame. …”This is the fucking hobgoblin. They are under my bed and in the closet and whispering in the rain about the razor trick Charlie’s been having his whores do.” It should surprise exactly no one that Ned Fleck committed suicide using a firearm. But what is a surprise is that European galleries particularly in the Netherlands have taken to screening the works of this American director for whom otherwise all would be forgotten.
Many have found his work damnable and atrocious, others have described his work as “torturously repetitive.” But for students of cinema and multi-media arts and for those interested in the topics of abnormal psychology his films continue to attract attention, and it would appear sales of a book containing film stills of shots from the film have sold marginally well in European galleries that have shown his films. It is also said that the film may actually also be used in the rumored secret interrogation and cult deprogramming that has arisen in the E.U., Canada and The United States after the massive terrorist bombings in the Netherlands, Vancouver, Montreal and Boston 2032. It is said that detainees are forced to watch the film under the influence of mind-altering “super-psychedelics” while restrained in chairs with iron straps until they admit their allegiances and conspiracy to one or more of a number of cults or terrorist organizations involved in the bombings.
The images of violence and sexual torture contained in the film, which is literally nearly a day long, are said to be of some use in inspiring fear in the detainees that would make them willing to talk. However, is said that many of these “cult members” and terrorists are so devout- and so boring in thought structure as to remain unaffected by the torture. A similar film from the same period is John Bent’s Electric Burns the Mind, whose filmmaker Brent had a similarly tragedy plagued existence terminated in a dramatic suicide.
WW