Where’s Quicksand When You Need It?
The Midwest, so rich in other natural resources, lacks naturally-occurring quicksand, and so it had to be imported via the movies.
The purpose of the multi-use substance was to instill a kind of cautionary moral dread in viewers by illustrating the fate of characters who strayed from the straight and narrow, sometimes literally, and then found themselves up to their necks in the interesting mixture.
To the Midwest youth its characteristics were a mystery. The young person who knew only mud and water and sand couldn’t on his best day conceive how a mixture of the three could turn into a sucking pit of destruction that pulled you down, apparently, to the center of the earth. But it was in the movies so it must have been true, and was accepted as such by all.
We lack the cautionary powers of quicksand these days – it has been years since it has been seen in the movies, much less played a major part – and the ill effects are starting to show.
Discussing the decline of the American character, perhaps labeled an economic, cultural, and/or moral Death Spiral just so the mind knows where to file it, is a popular sport, and people come at the cause from differing directions.
One fellow might charge out of the gate saying that it was clear that we were on our way to wrack and ruin once we went off the gold standard, while another might date it from the introduction of fluoride into our municipal drinking water systems; by his observation, people just haven’t been thinking right ever since.
Still another points to the improvement in the quality of the beer we drink.
“You didn’t see this kind of frank decadence before the rise of microbreweries, when we all drank the same awful stuff across this great country of ours, from the redwood forest to the New York Island. Beer that bad built character and made a man of you. It was a democratizing force. The rich man in his top hat and three piece suit, the working man sweating under the sun, we all drank the same old awful stuff. It was like going through boot camp together. Those men were my brothers! Now you tell me that beer tastes good? No wonder we’re going to hell in a handbasket. There’s your answer right there.” And he may even slap his hand on the desktop as some people do when they want to accentuate a point.
And so on.
And who’s to say?
It’s an interesting enough subject and it gets people going. I don’t know why it is but people gain a healthy flush in their cheeks and a sparkle in their eye when they’re talking about any inevitable decline and fall. It just seems to perk them up somehow.
But they all overlook quicksand.
A nice depthless pool of quicksand placed artfully in the movie scenery moved the plot along and gave the viewer something to anticipate, as there are very few uses for a pit of quicksand outside of disposing of the bad guy as he tries to make his escape.
We shall picture a bad guy of average height, well-spoken, charming to a degree, wearing a pith helmet, and unable entirely to resist the temptation when no one is looking of seizing the Ruby Lady of Forsakestan, the Sapphire of the Euphrates, or the Ice Spectre of the Steppes, or whatever jewel it is that has been flaunted around by one and all through the entire course of the movie and now has been stolen.
It is directly after lifting the Ruby Lady or the Sapphire of the Euphrates or the Opal Phantom (it just seems obvious that the original owners would be better off naming these stones Vickie or Bill or Joanne, something unobtrusive and non-tempting, but that isn’t their way) from its ancient setting in the granite eye of the statue of the local goddess, and while he is running through the jungle making his escape, it is right then I say that good old quicksand proves why it was selected for this role, by doing no more than sitting there quietly and letting the bad guy stumble into its depths.
There’s nothing good in this for the villain he slowly comes to realize as he thrashes about, only to find that this motion, this very thrashing about motion, only drives him deeper into the depths of the quicksand.
What a spot!
He may wave that jewel around for all he’s worth, promising it to any and all that stroll by, if only they will get him out of the quicksand, but this they are loathe to do, knowing full well from long movie-going experience of their own that this is a sure way of getting sucked into the quicksand yourself, and then there you both are sinking slowly in its deadly embrace, if I can be permitted a moment of poetic lushness in describing it. In any event, he gets no takers.
We never could figure out what you might call the mechanics of sinking in quicksand, as anything that you could get yourself into you surely ought to be able to get yourself out of, as it seemed to our juvenile brains, but we didn’t let the mystery get in our way, and took at face value that once you stumbled into quicksand you were a goner.
This brought home these moral points to the young mind:
· You ought not to steal legendary rubies or other precious stones.
· Punishment always finds the offender of the civic order and gets him.
· And quicksand, though not exactly common in the Midwest and not known at all to the local street repair crews who otherwise see most everything in the terrain category, might nonetheless be waiting for you too, and for far lesser transgressions that jewel thievery.
It was like a portable Hell for transgressors of one sort or another.
This slow demise part was among the very uncomfortable feelings that washed over the young movie viewer, since in addition to its other drawbacks it took its own sweet time in knocking you off.
This introduced the element of boredom into the proceedings, which no one likes to see.
If you are an international jewel thief, renowned for your dash and verve and charm, the last thing you want are people looking at their watches and scuffing their toes in the sand while waiting for your personal extinction. This undercuts the brand you like to project and though people are likely too polite to say so, takes a bit of the luster off your image.
The filmmakers got around this problem by cutting away as often as they could to scenes of the hero and heroine leaping from pyramid to pyramid or skittering across the backs of sleeping crocodiles like people jumping from one ice floe to the other in winter, and all sorts of other high-pitched action, which took care of the problem of pace, at least for a while.
But then it was only courteous to turn the camera back to the bad guy in the quicksand, and if the motion picture is true to nature at all, he has only sunk another inch and a half in the interval of what seems like a couple of hours, a scenario no one is going to call the very height of dramatic tension.
This is starting to resemble other famous occasions of pure tedium, such as watching paint dry or viewing a soccer match broadcast in a language that you don’t understand or even one that you do.
Even he, the bad guy, is starting to look disengaged from it all, as if he is mentally seeing if he can name the capital of all fifty states to pass the time, or if he can recall what the War of 1812 was all about anyway.
Things have gone entirely off the rail pace-wise when we see him starting to look at his watch, as has been known to happen.
This as much as anything drew the viewer away from a life of misdeeds, and provided the correct moral environment that is so important at that stage of his development.
I suppose a day or so after the movie proper is over we can at last picture in our minds the image of the fellow’s pith helmet floating on the surface of the quicksand, with nothing as ordinary as a head to fit it on anymore, but we will have made the right decision long before this point and decided to stay on the straight and narrow.
That’s a theory anyway, but I have to say that the fluoride in the water guy makes some interesting points.
