Episode 473 - Jack-In-The-Box

I'm catching up with episodes so I'm too late for the comments conversations, but I had to say something even if no one reads it. This is the same concept as the medieval Arthurian legend of Percival/Parsifal becoming a knight and eventually finding the Grail, written around 1200AD. Percival's mother keeps him deep in the forest and tells him that's the whole world. She's protecting him because his father and brothers were knights and were all killed in combat while Percival was a baby; she's certain he'll become a knight if he discovers the world so tells him nothing about it. One day, when Percival is a young man, knights pass through and he thinks they're angels and insists on going out of the forest to discover what's there. His mother, unable to stop him, gives him a few words of advice then dresses him like a fool so no one will take him seriously. She wants him to be rejected by courtly society. When he leaves she swoons and seems to die. She doesn't appear in the story again and her role is over. The modern interpretation, via Jung, was that the forest is the 'female realm' the growing boy must escape to become a man. There's a great nod to this in the film Excalibur when Percival, a boy living rough in the woods, follows Sir Lancelot who is riding to Camelot. Lancelot tells him it's 20 days travel from the forest and Percival says "20 days? The world's not that big!". In the legend, Percival goes on to become the epitome of knighthood and is destined to find the Grail which heals the kingdom and represents a kind of wholeness of body, mind and spirit. Later legends replaced Percival with Galahad, a character constructed by Christian monks to be a second coming of Jesus who showed all the knights that their focus on combat and respecting noble women was sinful. Galahad sips from the (now 'Holy') Grail and ascends to Heaven; Percival wins the Grail and re-enters the ordinary world with new understanding and the ability to improve it a little, in the classic 'hero cycle' Joseph Campbell wrote about and which George Lucas used for Luke Skywalker's story arc in Star Wars episodes 4-6.

They played that movie at the New Zealand International Film Festival and the entire Greek community turned out to see it because we get so few Greek movies here. There were not many people left by the end of the screening.

Pearce Duncan

There is a Greek movie, Dogtooth, which might have been inspired by this story. In the movie the parents keep their three children in isolation from the outside world. It is not a nice film.

Lars Backstrom

We will be covering The Pit & The Pendulum!

Chad & Chris: I think the "Jack in the Box" story is really interesting & strange. But you missed the timing! Coming just before Halloween? It should have been the vampire story with a Bradburyan twist: "The Man Upstairs"! =o(

Very excited about Poe-vember!! I work at a library and am totally co-opting this idea for one of my book displays. I just made a sign for it in Paint and I am VERY PROUD.

What's the first Poevember story you guys are going to tackle?

Important News Flash: http://www.unexplainedpodcast.com/episodes/2016/3/30/episode-5-extra-what-hides-beneath

My problem is usually I accept a story at face value. Having read a lot of fantasy and sci fi I usually accept things it wasn’t until listening to this podcast that I was introduced to the unreliable narrator. So when I first read the Repairer of Reputations I thought it was just an alternate reality rather than the narrators crazy town! Btw could this story be the inspiration for The Village.?

Andrew Trnacek

I felt so much sympathy for Chris in this one. For almost every book I had to read in high school I would write a long-winded interpretation of the story from my own perspective. Then whenever we would discuss it in class I would quickly realize that I completely missed what was actually happening in the book. It put me off of literature as a whole and now, as a student in mathematics, I hardly read anything except textbooks. I’m glad I have a podcast like this to keep me interested in the kind of stories I love without bearing the ridicule of a professor who already has their own idea about the meaning of a story before I’ve even read it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my higher education, it’s that you shouldn’t feel dumb for having a new idea.

Michael Kelly

Y’all need BAD BOY BUBBY in your lives. Best spin on this story.

Joseph Bromley

For another rendition of the "child raised in an insular world" concept, watch the criminally underrated Brigsby Bear (2017) featuring Mark Hamill. The premise is that the protagonist grew up in a dome-like house in the desert; during which his only social interaction was with his parents and his only cultural reference point was Brigsby Bear, a children's TV show.

Funny you bring up the new Addams Family animated movie. The plot of that movie is Wednesday has been locked up in the mansion her whole life and wants to see the outside world. Morticia is reluctant, recalling the persecution the family faced for being different.

David Halstead

Re the stories y'all mentioned - Emissary is actually really fun and creepy- IMO a much better example of Bradbury using a child's perspective for creepiness. Homecoming featuring the Elliot family is also excellent.

Here here! I loved her reading of the Wallpaper.

More Heather! She’s amazing. My favorite since “The Yellow Walllpaper.”

I actually kind of agree- although I think that simplicity is in his stories not his language which is very finely crafted. I think the problem for me is that these short stories don't give him the space to play with that deceptive simplicity contrasted to a novel like Something Wicked This Way Comes where that languid viewpoint fits the scope of his 13 year old protagonists and plays out across a much longer piece of work. Basically with more time to set up, Bradbury can build to something. These stories don't give him the space to work with. Alternatively if you just go with mood pieces like "There will come soft rains", Bradbury can pull it off because there he's constructing a scenario and he lets you infer the story, which he's good at doing. These October Country pieces don't have enough story to tell and I think they're further compromised by a sort of mawkish 1940s sentimentality that can come off as self-indulgent. Having said that I thought this story was genuinely Weird, far better than last week's "Man encounters quarter life crisis and treats women as things for his own gratification"

Sounds like there’s plenty left for a second visit to The October Country next year. Looking forward to 2020’s HPL October - October Country 2: October Harder.

I love the episode and the discussion but I'm still not getting it. RB sets up a pretty dull situation, and then knocks it down. And nothing much interesting happens. There's not really a conflict, or much of a resolution, not that you need either for a good story. There's a simplicity to RB's language, and to his stories, that also doesn't really speak to me. I think I like the metaphorical reading that death is a release from the prison of mundanity. It turns out that "To die will be an awfully big adventure" with policemen, dogs, very few women however. But maybe Death is just another room, hopefully with no more Ray Bradbury stories in it.

Steve

For some reason, the closing lines of this (as read by Heather) were so powerful, I teared up.

Jason Thompson

Yes! As a mother with anxiety, I find this story a great reminder that overprotection has huge risks itself. You literally cannot keep your kids safe. To avoid messing them up by sheltering them, you have to literally and figuratively let them go out in the world and risk being run over by cars.

Christine M

When he looks out the high window, and when he runs through the town hugging fire hydrants and stuff, it really reminded me of the movie Blast from the Past, when the guy emerges from the fallout shelter for the first time in his life and just marvels at the sky.

Christine M

I actually think the text supports this. If his father was God, and he's going to ascend to become God, that could sure imply a sexual relationship with his mother. I also speculated on the final door being the master bedroom. But maybe I've just been watching too much American Horror Story. :)

Christine M

Yeah, I took it that deliveries came to some forbidden door he never saw, so there were oil drips in the driveway.

Christine M

For some reason, I've always read an incestuous motif into the story. I realize there's little to no actual text to warrant such a take on it, but somehow I imagined the final triple-locked door as the door to the couple's bed room, which the boy gets to enter on his 21st birthday, thereby fully assuming the father role in the household.

"The phrase jack-in-the-box was first seen used in literature by John Foxe, in his book Actes and Monuments. There he used the term as an insult to describe a swindler who would cheat tradesmen by selling them empty boxes instead of what they actually purchased." So EA was not the inventor of loot boxes, but these older swindlers? :) I instantly drew the comparison to The Outsider when the boy is rising up through the house as well. Sadly, he was not a zombie. The story would have been more fun then. Instead I kept wondering where the food was coming from, and who was paying the bills for the electricity and water and heat? Did his mother sneak out at times to go to the grocery store? Or to buy new clothes when the boy got too big for his old shirts and pants? I also drew a comparison to The Others, with Nicole Kidman. That is the version of the story Chris was reading, where it *was* all supernatural. I won't say more to avoid spoilers.

Jacks-in-the-box are creepy. Only (homeschooled) children are creepy. Big houses with more locked doors than the Vatican are creepy. Only Bradbury can take such pains to have all these and more in his story and basically end up with another sad sighing tale. No offense to only kids or to anyone homeschooled.

This is a story that has taken on very different meanings for me in different stages of life. When I first encountered it, I was probably a teen or tween and I was thrilled for the boy's escape. Returning to the story as a married man, I wondered if there was some sense to the mother's madness. Now, with a son off at university and another considering boarding school of his own volition, well, I'm struck by my loss of demi-god status and their assumption of something like it.

Was he thinking of that one Stephen King story?

Rick Hound

Idea for new Topics Show: Chad misleads Chris with Metaphors.

*jumps off the roof.

Jeff C. Carter

I thought the story was winding up to a super dark ending: the kid sees the jack in the box down below, free and smiling, and with no understanding of death he jumos

Jeff C. Carter

Crazy story the father was a God and the kid will be the new God. I think that is the main plot of the Bible. Jesus “I’m dead I’m dead ,I finally God I’m dead”

A similar thing happened to me once, but then I told everybody in that supermarket they were wrong, and everybody agreed with me and they applauded.

The path is the driveway of the house. I could see this story being an inspiration for M. Night Shayamalans The Village.

The short story--by Jerome Bixby--would be great to cover on the show. It's a banger: http://ciscohouston.com/docs/docs/greats/its_a_good_life.html

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

I was once in a supermarket and I slipped in some milk and my wiener fell out. Glad to help out.

Dan Pratt

Chad, is it possible you were thinking of the short story that Twilight Zone episode was *based* on? It's quite good, but the sequence of events in it aren't quite the same as the episode even if the premise are identical between them.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)