Suspense: One Hundred in the Dark (1947).

I think I've reached the point where I no longer quite understand pop culture.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that pop culture no longer seems to be quite know itself anymore.  Like, I can recall for the longest time there being this sort of homogenization thing going on, where it was this great repository of entertainment past, present, and future.  Everybody had their reference points and this was able to create what I can only describe as a shared language that everybody could join and be a part.  These days, however, I keep getting this sense of fragmentation, like it's all breaking down into niches and sub-cultures.  In some ways, I suppose there might be a possible sense of inevitability to this.  Perhaps its just the nature of the Internet in and of itself to create a kind of niche-ification of public knowledge, even where the books, films, and TV shows we all like are concerned.  My problem with such information siloing is that I'm never quite sure that's a healthy outcome.  Part of what made the analog form of pop culture so awesome was that it lead to this building of a greater sense of community.  In other words, it was something that brought us together, and could have even made us greater than we are now.  The problem of reducing pop culture to a series of mental cubbyholes is that this sense of shared vocabularies and and languages gets lost when you cram it all into this piece of digital shelf space which others can then shove out of sight, and hence out of mind.  It just seems to me like that's the kind of result where it becomes to easy to devalue a story or concept that brought others together.

For instance, I can remember a time when it seemed like J.R.R. Tolkien was everywhere.  Not just confined to an out-of-the-way weblog as the typical thing you expect to find nowadays, either.  I'm talking this guy was everywhere.  This was true not just in terms of the breakout impact of the original Peter Jackson trilogy, either.  Even before all that, right at the very turn of the 20th century into that of the 21st, it seemed as if Middle Earth was busy enjoying its own fan led pop culture renaissance.  You had an endless treasure hoard of popular fan studies, and various scholarly critical texts about Professor T and his writings being placed on retail shelves not just all over the American continent, but also in places like Great Britain, France, India, you name it.  In that sense it was a true international phenomena.  A case of fans worldwide coming together to create a grassroots phenomenon that worked as a shared pop cultural treasure that was able to unite myriads of people the world over in the celebration of nothing more than just a very good piece of literary art.  Are you kind of maybe starting to see what I mean when I talk about the difference between pop culture then from now?  The major difference seems to rest on the fact that the former version of it truly was inclusive.  This updated 2.0 model, however, just seems to exist for the sole purpose of creating a siloing effect on its users.

Forgive me for saying this, yet I don't think Tolkien's works would have stood a chance if this mainframe setup was in place way back when.  He might have still had his fandoms.  However, they would have been reduced to what they are now.  Just a few scattered pieces of get togethers in chatrooms and the odd occasional blog post here and there, and none of it would have reached the fever pitch that would have allowed Jackson and the rest of his cast and crew to mount not just a successful but impactful showing as they wound up with.  Of course, I'm sure others will argue that at least this setup would have meant that none of us would have to sit through the ongoing botch job that is The Rings of Power or whatever the Game of Thrones franchise has become.  I can't help thinking that all of this later stuff is the result of pop culture becoming corporatized a bit too much for its own good, however.  We seem to have stumbled upon a cautionary lesson in allowing our enthusiasms to get perhaps just a bit too popular.  Maybe the real education here is to know when to guard the stories that matter from getting too out of hand.  Whatever the case may be with all that, there are still some aspects of pop culture from the past that have a way of astounding you with their seeming resiliency.

For instance, I am still amazed to learn that there are a great many fans out there of the broadcast medium or format known as Old Time Radio.  I'm talking now about a very specific and identifiable period in the history of American entertainment.  For those who may not have a clue what I'm talking about OTR (for short) is best described as pretty much the first major breakout media format in an era before television or the net.  It belonged to an age when all of the world's news and entertainment was limited to to the contours of a small squat box with speakers in it wired to a transmitter powered often enough by what I can only describe as a variation of the electric light bulb.  It often lit the box up right well enough whenever it was turned on and working to full capacity.  However, the providing of light in a room wasn't the real purpose for this kind of fixture.  It was there to make the box talk.  That's how radio used to work in an pre-wireless era.  Rather, let's say that most of our grandparents did have a form of wireless.  There just wasn't a single scrap of anything digital about it.  It was all analog.

The particular drama I'd like to share with you now comes from the days when the radio was king.  That time was known as the format's Golden Age, when the Theater of the Mind served as America's idiot box of choice.  What's stunning to learn is just how much from that period still survives in archive form, and how much of it has made its way in and onto the digital realm.  It's seems that this easy availability is what accounts for the widespread awareness of a style of entertainment that doesn't even manage to get so much as a passing mention in the news anymore.  It seems to be a testament to the power of online fandom that it can help resurrect the reputation of a long forgotten form of storytelling.  With this in mind, I thought it would be fun to look into a sample offering from the Golden Age of Radio.  It's an episode of an anthology series known only as Suspense.  From what I can tell of this program, there might have been a time when it was the highest rated show on the airwaves.  Whatever the case, tonight, we offer, for our listening audience the story of Owen Johnson's "One-Hundred in the Dark".

The Story.

"Suspense...Columbia's play theater of outstanding thrills.  Produced and directed by William Spier, and scored by Bernard Hermann.  With notable melodramas from fiction, stage, and screen, from the world's great literature of entertaining excitement.  Presented each week to bring you to the edge of your chair...To keep you in...Suspense...".

Conclusion: An Interesting Riff on a Familiar Setup.

There are two things going on with this story.  One of them has to do with the creative strengths of radio broadcasting as a storytelling medium.  The other has to do with the tropes and setups of the Mystery Noir genre.  There's a lot worth discussing here, and we'll start with the most important aspect of this play, which is it's story.  The basic plot of "One Hundred in the Dark" is a pretty standard setup for the genre.  A well-to-do hostess has decided to throw a dinner party for her friends.  She makes sure all the proper arrangements are in place, including the table, plates, forks, spoons, knives, etc.  In addition to this, there's also the matter of how she presents to others at the party.  So with that in mind, the hostess takes the time necessary to make herself look the best.  This includes, in addition to a nice set of rings, one piece of diamond jewelry which is the closest thing she has to a prize possession.  The hostess is just about to put the rings and the diamond on when her guests begin to arrive, and the jewelry is forgotten about while all the social graces in this type of setup are being met.  When all the guests have been settled in comfortably, the hostess goes back to retrieve her accessories.  It's then she discovers that the diamond is gone.  One of the guests stole it from when she had her back turned.

So now the main character finds herself isolated and alone at a party in a house full of guests.  Any one of them could be the thief.  It's even possible that this thief might be the dangerous kind.  The sort of criminal you don't want to mess around with if you want to keep your guts intact and your throat and larynx in proper working order.  Still, that diamond is one of a kind.  Also, if she doesn't do something about it, the guilty party is going to just walk away scott free with someone's stolen property in their pocket.  The hostess will have to think of something fast, because right now she's stuck in a room with not just a thief, but also someone who could, if desperate enough, become a cold blooded killer.  As far as setups for a Mystery thriller go, this one is pretty much simple and straightforward.  The good news about that is it doesn't really need to be anything else to achieve its desired narrative effect.  Owen Johnson's story operates under the same premise as that of films like Night of the Living Dead or the old urban legend about the stalker phone call coming from inside the house.  It's basic premise is centered around the sense of menace and potential threat that comes from being locked in a room with another person, or in this case a group of persons, any one of who could turn out to be a cold blooded killer.

The thrill of suspense and/or entertainment value from this kind of story more or less comes baked in.  It's a natural feature of the trope, and all that's required is a writer with talent enough to either recognize all of the strong points contained within the story idea and play all the necessary key notes in the correct order, or else a more challenging approach is to find a novel spin on the concept that can take it in new and unexplored directions.  From what I can tell, it seems as if Johnson has combined the best of both worlds.  His story winds up being a bit of both columns A and B.  The story's initial setup is familiar, with the protagonist having to find a way towards safety when one of the guests in her house could be a dangerous criminal.  However, it's in the denouement of the drama where Johnson seems to have found an interesting and somewhat novel solution to the central dilemma and mystery at the heart of his tale.  

Here's the part where I think I'm going to have to avoid spoiler territory from now on.  Suffice it to say, I came away genuinely stunned at how well the author was able to ring suspense out of the narrative's final moments.  One final other piece of information that I think is safe enough to reveal is that I knew we might have a real thriller on our hands when the writer allowed the story's climax to unfold in almost complete and utter darkness.  It's just the hostess and her "guests" in a room with all the lights out.  The one source of illumination is a single dinner candle, and all the rest our looming shadows.

That, to me, is a signal that Johnson has a sure grasp of the kind of material he's serving up for his readers.  He seems to have an intuitive awareness that the Mystery Noir story is little more than a sibling of the original Gothic, or Horror genre.  It's this tacit understanding of the material he's working with that allows Johnson the imaginative capabilities necessary to let the story stretch its generic legs as far as it needs in order to achieve its dramatic goals.  It's the same creative objective to be found in thrillers like Audrey Hepburn's Wait Until Dark, a movie whose central premise reads almost like a riff on Johnson's short story expanded into feature length format.  I'm unaware of anything like an actual film version of "One Hundred in the Dark", though it would be interesting to compare the two if one where to be found or made.  What unites each of these efforts is the same understanding that the Noir is just another form of the scary tale, and that it means the sub-genre has to rely for a lot of its effectiveness on one of the central notions that helps to create Gothic fiction as a whole.  It is nothing more than a keen understanding of what it means to be afraid of the dark.  In particular, the fear of who or what might be lurking in the shadows.  The  final result is a very well told. suspense story     

It's the kind of fair you'd expect to find on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  One of those cozy mystery thrillers that you can just kick back and relax to for the sake of pure enjoyment.  The program's director, William Spier can be congratulated for giving his listeners a taught and well written adaptation of Johnson's original story.  It's as near a perfect example of the classic Noir thriller as one is likely to find out there today.  Beyond all this, what's remarkable about the story is it's ability to entertain without ever once showing us anything like a traditional stage and cast of characters.  In other words, what we've got on our hands is a story with a unique ability to succeed despite the lack of the conventional trappings that most audiences claim are necessary ingredients in being able to engage with any given narrative.  There seems to be this unspoken rule that unless the visuals are compelling, the story itself counts for nothing.  It's an argument that keeps getting more ironic and self-defeating every day as more time goes on.  As the stylistic elements of one film become so bland and confined to whatever the contemporary formula conventions of "correct" cinematography are, the easier it gets for the look of one film to more or less blend into that of the next one to come along.  And then the process just repeats itself with whatever comes next.  That's not good filmmaking, it's a form of creative fatigue.  Besides which, even the presence of good visuals isn't enough to guarantee a good story.

"One Hundred in the Dark" seems to have come from a time when people had a better understanding of such issues.  For instance, if you go back and look at a lot of the films from the era in which this radio adaptation was made, you'll soon discover that in the strictest sense, there's nothing much to look at.  The black and white cinematography of most films from that time end up looking more like an ongoing series of late night TV shows more than anything else.  However, what makes so many of them compelling is the skill that goes into the writing.  It's like there was an unspoken rule at work back then.  The idea being that we seem to have just enough room for either the visual or the textual aspects of artistic creativity, and very rarely enough leftover for both at once.  If this is the case, then give me a well written prose line over a flashy looking visual any day of the week.  This is the part where the radio drama can be said to come into its own.  What I find myself liking about this particular audio medium the more I go on is the way it has of forcing you not just to use your Imagination in the visualization of the stories and characters conjured up by the mere spoken words of the actors.  It's also about the way it teaches the audience how to be comfortable with the poor and meager shadows that most of us are left having to visualize in our minds.  It allows us to be comfortable with the fact that all storytelling is artifice from start to finish, and that perfect cinematic realism is a chimera at best.

It's the ability of radio drama to teach us how to be comfortable with the inherent artificial nature of all fiction that can help us better learn to appreciate the true literary qualities of any narrative, regardless of medium.  It might sound like an exaggeration to claim that all of this is what's going on in just a simple, random, radio play.  However, I'd argue this is what happens in all good audio dramas.  It's not something confined to just a handful of episodes out of a hundred.  One of the great things to be said about early wireless shows like Suspense is that it remained capable of presenting stories of a consist quality week after week.  Any veteran TV showrunner will tell you just how hard and difficult that can be.  Part of the reason William Spier was able to maintain this quality in his own program was because he seems to have been one of those literate creative types who knew that in order to be a good radio presenter, you also had to be something of a good reader.  In other words, it helped to spend your leisure time pouring through old pulp detective magazines in search of good copy material for next week's broadcast.  It was this attention to good literature that allowed Suspense to be as good as it was. 

The result was one of the standout programs of the Golden Age of Radio.  It was a show from a bygone time which manages to achieve the truly remarkable feat of being able find a new audience for itself with each generation of listeners.  This, to my mind, is one of the true tests of staying power required for a good work of art.  Rest assured, then, that this is not the last time we'll be hearing from this program at The Scriblerus Club.  This is one of those shows with a legacy worth unpacking one bit at a time.  For now, it's enough to state the fact that "One Hundred in the Dark" is one of those longer overlooked gems that deserves to be rediscovered.  It's a great way to learn about the old virtues of suspense.