Today I reviewed the 1962 film TALES OF TERROR, the fourth of Roger Corman's cycle of Poe-or-Poe-curious movies. I noted in the earlier essay that anthology films have to receive different critical estimation than other forms of anthology:
...the problems of what I'll call "non-centric serials" are nothing next to that of anthologies in the medium of cinema. In other media-- I'm thinking primarily, though not exclusively, of prose, comics, and television-- every story within a serial anthology stands on its own. However, a film-anthology represents a concatenation of stories that cannot stand apart from one another, unless they are surgically separated. In some anthologies, the stories are not associated in any way, except by dint of appearing in the same collection. Some are tied by virtue of being adaptations of the work of a single author, as is the case with 1963's TWICE TOLD TALES, and some are associated through a common framing-device, as in 1945's DEAD OF NIGHT, where all of the stories may been dreamed by a single interlocutor, leaving it unclear as to whether the stories "really" happened or not within the film's diegetic reality.
I later reflected on the possibility that the second of the two SIN CITY films, subtitled A DAME TO KILL FOR, might actually be best ascribed to the phenomenality of "the uncanny" even though it contains one indisputably marvelous element-- that of Hartigan's nearly impotent ghost. What I called "the thematic underpinnings" of Frank Miller's SIN CITY world align much more with the uncanny than with the marvelous, and thus I considered the possible that the one marvelous element might be deemed of marginal significance.
I have no problem with rating the phenomenality of TALES OF TERROR as dominantly marvelous, since only the second of the three segments, "The Black Cat," is uncanny in nature. But if I were rating each of the segments separately in terms of their complexity of symbolic discourse, "Morella" would be "good," "The Black Cat" merely "fair," and "M. Valdemar" would come in as "poor." Yet I chose to rate the entire anthology-film as "good." My rationale for this decision-- the 'aspirin" that relieves me of my analytical headaches-- is that I've already rated some extended sequences of related stories as mythically "good" even when they contain portions of the whole that are less-than-good.
A pertinent example appears in my review of the 1983-86 color-comics series COYOTE, as written by Steve Englehart. These sixteen issues necessarily comprise a "centric serial," in that all of the stories are centered upon main hero Coyote, and so the form of this sequence of stories is radically different from the "non-centric" film TALES OF TERROR, which is very loosely tied to other "Poe-cycle" productions in that all are "adaptations of the work of a single author." Yet the same principle seen in COYOTE applies, and in the same manner. Thus Englehart and his collaborators begin COYOTE on an extremely high note of mythicity, but the symbolic discourse crests at one point and the serial ended on a lower note:
Englehart also worked the continuity of the “Djinn” story into Coyote’s mythos reasonably well, but over time the writer created too many wild subplots, so that the series came off as belonging to the “everything plus the kitchen sink” school.
My entire reason for championing complex symbolic discourse has been to throw a light upon this particular aspect of the creative process, which can develop in any form of literature, "high" or "low." I consider that once an author has reached a high amplitude in his symbolic discourse, he's achieved much of the "high spirits" that Nietzsche found so instrumental to creativity-- and thus, even if later segments of the same project may not rise to the same heights, the later segments are somewhat ennobled by their connection to the earlier ones, at least in THE COYOTE SAGA. And for analogous reasons, TALES OF TERROR gets a "good" rating just because "Morella" shows writer Richard Matheson at his best, even if he doesn't sustain it for the later parts of the film.
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