Embracing Insomnia

Argh! Not the National Anthem!

Do you recall the scariest part of the film Poltergeist?

At midnight when the television stations went off the air, they used to play the National Anthem. The music played over a montage of inspiring images that included the Lincoln Memorial and numerous rippling American flags. Then followed, nothing. Static. The television screen filled with that buzzing, blue-grey light, as did the living room. Chaos. The comforting sense of connection with a larger world vanished. And the dread of isolation set in, a dread beautifully exploited by the slogan for the film Alien, “In space no one can hear you scream.” And in Pink Floyd’s album, The Dark Side of the Moon. And the teaser for the film Saturn 3 — “shadow-lock, total darkness, all communication is terminated¹.” Not to mention The Shining.

Yikes. It’s no wonder my siblings and I would steel ourselves to run out of the bedroom to switch off that hissing television set. The comfort of constant distraction vanished at midnight. Anything could happen because your attention was unmoored. Terrors crept in. That’s the core, basic, shared detail that ushers in the scary computer-generated ghost stuff that comes later in the Poltergeist movie.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I’ll always hearken back to the stained-glass windows, to how the medieval artists knew to make everything at eye level hyper realistic. In effect, relatable to the illiterate faithful. If the church goers could recognize and accept the sandals and the hems of cloaks, the weeds and snakes, then as their gaze moved upward, these same folks would accept the miracles of halos and angels. In short: Realistic toenails at the bottom, zany cherubs and doves at the top.

Be it toenails or the broadcast sign-off, it establishes the authority for everything to follow.

In the 1982 version of Poltergeist all of the unreal world is anchored by that loss of connection. The sudden isolation. That’s coupled with the message of cemeteries and memorials and tombs collaged together in the sign-off. A message of death, death, death. Unless I’m mistaken, the family’s television also shows a clip from the 40s film Here Comes Mr. Jordan, about a man who’s unaware he’s dead, at first. All in all, the impossible is based upon the shared fear we felt when broadcasting ended at midnight.

It’s a fear that’s hard to relate to in this everything-all-the-time world. Still, we get a tinge when we forget our phone, or the battery goes dead. No 9-1-1 for you, you’re on your own, sweetheart.

On the bright side, more and more I embrace the fact that 2 a.m. is the only time my mind actually belongs to me. If I can fret, I can write. If I can’t sleep I can still get a cup of coffee and make notes. Or key my existing notes into a file. Or string together a series of paragraphs I’ve already composed on my laptop.

We’re not such unique snowflakes that my fears aren’t also yours. That television sign-off struck fear in all of us. But at 2 a.m. your mind is your own, and you can collect your fears or fantasies, knowing that the sunrise will come. You’re not trapped in The Overlook Hotel or the Saturn 3 space station. With that in mind, the best part of my day comes between midnight and dawn.

It beats what we used to do at 5 a.m. — sit and watch indian head test patterns, waiting for television to begin. Even this beat the terror of being disconnected from the world. As did this. Not that either was any worse than Captain Kangaroo².

1. Chuck knows this because he ushered the Columbia Center Cinema Tri-Plex three hundred thousand times during showings of Alien and Saturn 3.

2. The adult Chuck now finds the idea of an adult male exposing himself to children through a small opening far more disturbing than a midnight montage of death-related images.