Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations.
Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.
“The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” (1977-1979) is another show that I remember fondly, if very vaguely, from my very early childhood. It ran on ABC for a scant three seasons (over a two-year period), and that sounds positively odd to me, because my memory has morphed it into something that seems like a much bigger part of the 1970’s.
I also remember it being two different shows, but that maybe makes sense — the first season of the program had a weird format in that you saw a standalone adventure of the Hardy Boys one week, and then a Nancy Drew outing the following week. (The characters, of course, were based on the young adult books written respectively by Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene.) They eventually went on to have adventures together, Wikipedia tells me, although Nancy Drew had a reduced role, and was eventually dropped altogether in the third and final season.
Wikipedia also tells me that the show’s third season portrayed the Hardy Boys as … adults? And that they were agents of the Justice Department? And that the Season 3 premiere saw the younger brother’s fiancee killed by a hit-and-run driver? I definitely don’t remember that — and it seems a little darker from what I remember of 1970’s primetime television shows.
I loved the show, even if I was too young to follow its relatively simple stories well. (I would have been in either kindergarten or the first grade.) But it was a program intended for “big kids” (my older siblings had the books), and that made it wonderfully cool to me.
I moved onto the books myself, by the early 1980’s. I loved those too. The two that I remember are “The Secret of Wildcat Swamp” (with the Hardy Boys) and “The Secret of the Old Clock” (with Nancy Drew). It was the Wildcat Swamp adventure that inducted me into the club — you see that snarling mountain lion on the cover? That was utterly enticing to me when I found the book in the bottom of the closet I shared with my brother, when I was … maybe in the third grade, I guess. (It looked a lot like the “saber tooth tiger” baddie in that Aurora model kit that I loved so much.) I kept pondering that scene and wondering what the outcome was. (Did they even have guns?! Would the dad or whoever that was protect them?!) One day, I finally accepted the challenge of reading what seemed like a very long book to me at the time, and I wasn’t disappointed. That’s the power of a good book cover, I guess.
I feel like I should have enjoyed “Hush” (2016) more than I did. It isn’t a bad movie — it’s well made, and it stars Kate Siegel, who this year’s exceptional “The Haunting of Hill House” has led me to really like as an actress. (Siegel also co-wrote the film with director Mike Flanagan, who is her husband and who was also the writer and director of “Hill House.”) Siegel is again quite good, and their collaboration here results in a competent, serious horror-drama with no glaring flaws.
Yet my mind wandered. Even if there was nothing seriously wrong with “Hush,” it didn’t much distinguish itself. Just about everything you watch here is a standard stalker-vs.-lone-woman scary movie, with little in the way of twists or unexpected plot developments.
Yes, the difference here is that the protagonist is deaf and mute, and is therefore less able to defend herself — but Siegel and Flanagan don’t capitalize on that much in conceiving this story. By the end of the film, I didn’t get the sense that the character’s disability even affected the course of the story very much. Events would have unfolded more or less the same way if she hadn’t had this disability. (Or am I missing something?) I also get the sense that the protagonist being an author was supposed to affect her choices and strategies in trying to survive, but that didn’t come across consistently or well. (And it results in “tricking” the viewer at one juncture in a way I didn’t like.)
I can’t actually recommend “Hush” to others because it didn’t thrill me. But I can’t objectively say that it’s a bad movie. So I figure I’ll rate it here a 7 out of 10.
A few random observations:
Siegel is a talented performer. I predict she’s going to go on to great things. Don’t let my lukewarm response to this film dissuade you from catching her elsewhere — especially in “The Haunting of Hill House.”
The story’s antagonist is fairly generic; he appears to be simply be a random serial killer in the script, and we get hardly a hint about his motivations. But John Gallagher Jr. breathes plenty of life into him with a disturbingly authentic, naturalistic performance. He’s also a very good actor.
I saw a plot twist coming that didn’t actually occur, and I wonder if what I saw was a vestige of an earlier version of this movie’s script. (And it isn’t a spoiler if it didn’t happen.) During a stalk-and-talk scene in which the bad guy taunts his victim, he inexplicably addresses Siegel’s character as “Squish.” That sounds like a pet name that parent would give to a very young child. The twist I predicted was this — Gallagher’s character was not a serial killer who selected his victims at random, but a long lost, homicidal brother who was then parodying the parent by invoking the pet name. He was motivated by pathological jealousy after growing up with his disabled sister, who he felt monopolized his parents’ attention and sympathies.
We learn from dialogue that the protagonist became deaf and mute after contracting meningitis when she was a child. I knew that meningitis could make a person deaf (or blind). But … also mute? Why am I skeptical about that? Wouldn’t that only happen if someone became deaf when he or she was a baby — so that the disease could delay key early childhood language-acquisition processes? I have no idea why I am so hung up on this minor bit of exposition. Maybe watching so many zombie or plague movies has made me a stickler for the way diseases are portrayed in a horror story.
I’m very pleased to share here that my poem “This Windy Morning” was published today by The Piker Press. You can find it right here.
The Piker Press is an outstanding online journal of arts, sciences, fiction and non-fiction, and I remain grateful to Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to share my voice with its readers.
(And don’t you just love that artwork they selected?!)
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 