FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE PT. 6

Though the last essay in this intermittent series came out in November, it really concerned itself with an argument about who was the most centric character of a particular film, and not with the sort of analysis that concerned the first essay in the series.

The analysis in the first FINAGLING essay concerned itself with examples of works in which a "fake phenomenon"-- the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving's story and in some though not all film adaptations of the story, and the two phony bloodsuckers in 1935's MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. Here, I'll address an obscure story that goes against this trope-tendency.

At a time when horror-stories were verboten to all comics-publishers who signed on to the Comics Code, a couple of companies, one of them being the Gold Key imprint from Western Publishing, profited by continuing to circulate terror-tales to a juvenile audience. Naturally, most if not all such stories were much tamer than the gruesome fare that brought the Code into existence in the fifties. But at least the offerings in Gold Key's BORIS KARLOFF'S TALES OF MYSTERY were indisputably in the horror genre, which is more than one could say of the totally bloodless fantasies propounded in sixties titles like HOUSE OF MYSTERY and ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN.

That said, most tales from KARLOFF's were formulaic, and so short that a writer barely had time to set up a situation before it was time to unveil a monster. I imagine at least a few writers may've got bored with the formula despite dependable paychecks, and maybe some author's boredom led him to write "The Return of Bird-of-Fire" (KARLOFF's #52, 1974).

"Return" takes one page to set up the situation: a couple of white explorers land their plane in the Andes Mountains, where an unnamed tribe of Indians has existed for centuries without encountering modern civilization. When the white guys inform the tribe's chief (also unnamed) that there's a great reserve gold in them thar hills, the chief says that he knows all about it, and relates the myth of Bird-of-Fire:

By the third page, the explorers have made many promises about bringing modern benefits to the tribe in exchange for mining the sacred gold. No one in the tribe has a problem with this, until the chief finds out that the white guys are really planning on flying away with a lot of gold and leaving the tribe flat. The fourth and final page shows the tribe taking vengeance:

Short though the story is, a practiced writer could've worked things so that some flaming bird monster really did spell doom for the thieves-- and indeed, this would have been the normal default for stories in KARLOFF'S. So I speculate that a bored writer decided, just for once, that the bad guys would be killed by entirely mundane means, and that the "monster" was just the tribe's projection of their fictional deity upon their own accomplishments.

So as far as the story is concerned, the Bird-of-Fire the focal presence of the story, as the other "fake phenomena" mentioned were in their narratives? Not this time, I would say, because, even though the Indians evidently believe in their god's reality, nothing about the god influences their behavior. They could've shot the plane down had they all been atheists, simply angry at getting ripped off. Certainly the two robbers have no centric charisma either, and that leaves the tribe itself to be the "star" of the story, while their decision to interpret the plane's fiery destruction as the god's vengeance is just an authorial irony that has nothing to do with which character(s) possess the greatest centricity.