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After that, the game was not Beware of the Rats but Spot the Movie References. The main ones are two Hitchcock films: "Psycho" (Norman and Mother Bates, the creepy house, the corpse-love) and "The Birds." In a passing pretty moment, one rat after another climbs up the back of a couch and perches there, like the crows massing on the "Birds" jungle gym. This is the prelude to the eat-the-bad-guy moment, which is muddied rather than enhanced by too many digitally applied rats. But then, horror movies, like comedies, rarely end as exciting as they begin. It's the nature of the genre.
The film's genuine oddness derives mostly from the presence and performance of Glover, eccentric actor extraordinaire. Curiously unlined and young-looking at 38, he portrays Willard as daft from those first steps downstairs; he already lives in the basement of his derangement. For a foretaste of his Willard, check out his playing of the title character in the recent film adaptation of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." And for hints to Glover's own mindset, do search out his book "Rat Catching," a kind of brilliant-child's defacing of an 1896 English work, "Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching." It's mental deconstruction as its most instructive.
A RAT MOVIE TOP TEN
Here are ten rat movies, memorable for good reasons and bad, and researched mostly in the quivering gut of my recollection:
10. "L'age d'or" by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, 1930. Scorpions battle a rat.
9. "The Abominable Doctor Phibes" directed by Robert Fuest, 1971. Rats attack a pilot in his, er, cockpit.
8. "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" directed by Robert Aldrich, 1962. The revelation of a rat on a silver platter struck the teen me as a major Hollywood shock, and a significant breach of movie decorum — because, unlike the corpse in "Diabolique" or the mommy-mummy in "Psycho," the awful dead thing was real.
7. "The Great Conqueror's Concubine" by Stephen Shin, 1994. Toward the start of this 3hr. imperial epic, the fabulous Gong Li and the nearly-so Rosamund Kwan are bathing in a large wooden vat. Rosamund screams when she spots a large rat swimming toward her. With a what's-the-big-whoop shrug, the Gongster grabs the rodent and tosses it out of the vat. Watching this scene, strong men across Asia fell in love.
6. "Truly Madly Deeply" by Anthony Minghella, 1991. It was supposed to be a tender post-mortem love story: a Brit "Ghost" for grownups. To me, it was a documentary about rat infestation: the huge creatures keep crawling over Juliet Stephenson's bed. (Minghella says he based the incident on the actress' testimony about her own apartment. But still...)
5. Francis Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula," 1992. Van Helsing locates the vampire seemingly sleeping against a wall. The caped figure metamorphoses into a thousand rats, which collapse en masse to the floor and rush toward Van Helsing.
4. "Nosferatu the Vampyr" by Werner Herzog, 1979. They're everywhere! everywhere! (And they were, too: Herzog let loose 15,000 rats in the medieval town of Delft, and not all were recovered.) In one memorable scene, a couple surrounded by rats resolutely finishes an al-fresco lunch before the creatures clamber up the table legs to devour the leftovers. Most "Dracula" movies underline the demon's infectious sexuality. Herzog's, like F.W. Murnau's 1922 original, emphasizes the charnel aspect. As incarnated by Klaus Kinski, this Dracula is a true rat-man.
3. "Rats — the Movie" by James M. Felter. I haven't seen this documentary; I can't swear it was ever released. But the "exhaustive synopsis" on its website suggests a horrifically edifying experience. A study of the rat problem in Washington, D.C., the movie begins on Willard Street (no kidding!) and "an ill-maintained and misused dumpster" that "becomes a Mecca for hordes of hungry vermin. Squeaks and squeals punctuate the social positioning and frenetic acrobatics that fuel a universal cultural phobia: the night is coming alive with RATS." Some of the neighborhood's homeless are used to them: "They crawl right up over your head to get inside those blankets on a cold night. They won't bother you a bit — just crawl in and try to keep warm — just like you. And when you move they just scamper out." Let's go, PBS. Show this soon on "The American Experience."
2. "The Men Behind the Sun" by T.F. Mous (Mou Tunfei), 1988. The most notorious fiction film about rats, though they appear only briefly. Based on the true, and truly deeply mad, experiments by the Japanese physician Shiro Ishii and Squadron 731 in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation of China, this solemn Taiwan-Mainland co-production includes some mighty grisly scenes: of a man whose intestines explode out his anus (faked), of a dead boy slit open to have his organs removed (supposedly using a child who had died the day before). But the big one is when a live cat is thrown into a room filled with hundreds of rats, and eaten alive by the devouring horde. The doctor looks on and offers this moral: "A small rat can beat a cat. Fleas and germs can defeat bombers and guns. This is the basic theory behind 731."
Quizzed in 1991 about this two-minute scene by critic Donato Totaro, Mous replied: "I know the English love animals — I like animals too. As the director, that scene has a meaning — it's up to you to discover what it means." He squirmed and added, "I'd like to change the subject, if at all possible." No question that Mous meant "Men Behind the Sun" as a serious indictment of Japan's wartime outrages. Also no question that the cat-rat scene could bring pleasure only to sadists... and rats. But if the latter keep watching the film, they'll get a jolt. At the end, the same creatures who devoured the cat get set on fire and burned alive. Interestingly, not many viewers have complained about the wanton destruction of all those rats.
1. "Der Ewige Jude" / "The Eternal Jew" by Fritz Hippler, 1940. The vilest of all Nazi anti-Jewish hate films. The entire "documentary" is revolting: it finds Jews ugly, unclean, pestilential, and hopes the German moviegoer will too. In the most infamous sequence, shots of rats are intercut with scenes of Jewish life, as the narration reads: "Wherever rats appear they bring ruin, by destroying mankind's goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly, and cruel, and are found mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious and underground destruction — just like the Jews among human beings." It is a mark of the popular view of rats that, of all the egregious lies spread in "The Eternal Jew," this is the one to stick for more than 60 years.
Interviewed shortly before his death last year by Adam Tanner, Hippler went the only-following-orders route: "I just did what Goebbels told me. I didn't want to debate this topic with Goebbels because it would have been useless. Of course I didn't feel that one could compare Jews with rats." Of course he didn't. But rather than debate the subject, Hippler went ahead and fashioned one of the most odious films ever to stain celluloid.
MY NEIGHBORS
On September 11, 2001, New York City was attacked by vermin 500 feet up. That was novel. We are used to pests scurrying below eye-level: on subway tracks, down our alleys, through the flowerbeds in front of the Plaza Hotel. The largest rat I've ever seen in person was trying to squeeze into a crack in the Time + Life Building on 50th Street.
I occasionally see rats in my Manhattan neighborhood, Tribeca. A flourishing family lives in a building on Worth Street between West Broadway and Hudson. Once a rat scurried under my feet as I walked by the house with my wife and our friend Jim Hoberman. Since then, I've noticed them quite a few times; they seem to know of my scholarly interest and emerge to perform. One evening not long ago, after I rode past in a taxi without seeing the usual occupants, I stepped out at the end of the block and nearly trod on a dead rat by the curb.
Rats, like humans, like good food. When the posh restaurant Bouley was housed in the building adjoining ours, and the staff refused to keep their garbage properly encased in metal cans, Tribeca got a much larger, plumper, more sauntering species of rodent: gourmet rats. (Was David Bouley breeding them for feeding his customers?) I have often seen rats scurry from a cellar in a house between restaurants on Greenwich Street, and from beneath the flower boxes outside the Odeon Cafeteria into the gutter.
Do rats have the same fondness for children? That suspicion keeps the Pied Piper exterminators busy around Public School 234 — where late one night I saw a swarm of them crossing Greenwich Street toward that building — and around Washington Market Park, where the occasional sight of a dead rat is both encouraging (the poison is working) and revolting (ugh! a dead rat!). The nearest greenery to my home is Duane Park, a triangular sliver that is much admired by architecture historian Paul Goldberger, and which faces the high-rise residence of AOL Time Warner boss Dick Parsons. There I sometimes hear the rustle, see the slinking of rats. But the more evident marauder is pigeons, thanks to the sandwich crusts left by lunchers and the feed spread by misguided bird fanciers. One summer afternoon I saw, twice, pigeons hop from the ground onto lunchers' laps to peck and pilfer their food.
The existence of rats in Tribeca long predates the neighborhood's recent flourishing into the upper-middle-class. In the 19th century the area was known as Washington Market; butter-and-egg businesses, vegetable wholesalers, meat packers guaranteed an underground economy of rodents. The New Yorker reporter Joseph Mitchell wrote about them in his classic 1945 essay "Rats on the Waterfront" — required reading for a lonely night when the floorboards start creaking. (Try finishing this sentence without slipping deeper under the covers: "a stableboy tried to kill a rat with a mop; it darted up the mop handle...") Much of Mitchell's piece is set in Washington Market and its northern sibling, Gansevoort Market: "Before this part of the market was abandoned, in 1942, the rats practically had charge of it. Some of them nested in the drawers of desks. When the drawers were pulled open, they leapt out, snarling."
I'm 46 years beyond my first reading of "The Graveyard Rats." Yet these creatures still snarl in my dreams. And now that I've unburdened myself of my phobia, Doctor, do you think I'll sleep soundly any time soon? Or could it be that, these days and nights, rats are not what worry a Lefty peacenik like me?