Screams from the Sky: Taking the Scenic Route with The Psychotronic Man
Art & Trash, episode 35
Screams from the Sky: Taking the Scenic Route with The Psychotronic Man
Stephen Broomer, June 21, 2024
In The Psychotronic Man, Rocky Foscoe, an affable Chicago barber, has a paranormal encounter, when he drives out to the country to drink alone, far from the oppressive confusion of his modern life. His reverie is interrupted and he finds himself flying through the air in his Pontiac. After this, he develops apparent psychic abilities that manifest involuntarily—moving objects, causing chaos, even killing human beings, seemingly through the power of his mind.
In this video essay, Stephen Broomer deals with uniquely leisurely pace of The Psychotronic Man, and situates the film in the Cold War-era paranoia of 1970s American life.
SCRIPT:
In the 1970s, Americans were right to be paranoid: generational and political conflict at home had come to mirror the international conflicts of the Cold War, and to many, neighbour and enemy became indistinguishable. Mass deception was spilling out into civic discourse like skeletons out of the national closet, and it seemed to be happening in slow-motion. Authentic government subterfuge was being exposed and mixed into popular discourse alongside paranoid delusions, a witch’s brew of revelatory scandals, like the Watergate burglary, and spurious fantasies, like that of foreign governments making ‘live prisoners’ out of soldiers missing-in-action. Trust was eroding at the leisurely pace of a drip, the interminable wait of a long con. That erosion of trust in the world outside began also to collapse the traditional framework of the world within: in the aftermath of the bad drug trips of the 1960s and with a newfound awareness of psychological disorders creeping into the general consciousness, Western Man could hardly trust himself. And what makes that Western Man into a Psychotronic Man? Parapsychological research in an era of expanded consciousness had yielded interest in the fantastical notion of the psychic; fringe research into telepathy, telegnosis and telekinesis mirrored theses of Western psychology’s most radical thinkers, the idea of shared organismic energy forces, the question of whether energy forms hidden within the mind could become externalized. Bending spoons and reading minds, self-proclaimed psychics, like psychiatrists before them, were the butt of easy jokes, but they were also a symptom of the curiosity of the twentieth century, a desperate hope for magic and spirit that could confound the paradigms of modern knowledge. The field of psychotronics, coined by Russian parapsychological researchers in the 1950s, aims to study these phenomena. It is not a goofy discourse, but it gives way to sensational speculations about the nature of the human being and the animation of the will.
In The Psychotronic Man, Rocky Foscoe, an affable Chicago barber, has a paranormal encounter, when he drives out to the country to drink alone, far from the oppressive confusion of his modern life. His reverie is interrupted and he finds himself flying through the air in his Pontiac. After this, he develops apparent psychic abilities that manifest involuntarily—moving objects, causing chaos, even killing human beings, seemingly through the power of his mind.
The details of Rocky’s life emerge slowly: this experience and its effect on him is more vital than the details of what took him out to that lonely road. Through encounters with his wife and his mistress, Rocky is shown to be an unhappy man with a juvenile, self-serving sensibility, trapped in circumstances he can’t abide. His new powers inevitably make his life worse, and there’s not even the hint that they could make his life better. Before his encounter, he is already a sponge of grief and agony. The Psychotronic Man moves at an uncommonly slow pace, with gaps of ponderous meditation on the landscape, for example, in the opening sequence, as Rocky drives out of Chicago into the outlying suburbs and farmland. He listens to music and radio chatter, his journey intercut between the inside of his car, the landscape outside of it, and the birds-eye perspective of a helicopter; on arrival, the credits play over autumnal footage of Old Orchard Road, which will be the site of his paranormal confrontation. In total, eight minutes elapse in a grand act of ambient filmmaking. The film will repeatedly take such scenic routes in its structure, an economical form that uses everything that fits and then some, with prolonged sequences that abandon all sense of tension and anticipation. It is a spare, minimalistic form uncommon to genre films, and appears to be born of inexperience and necessity, scraping together the bare running length of a feature film, rough, fast, and cheap, a feature film in which the shadow of the filmmaker often appears, an accident, an error, another psychic energy imprinted on the scene.
Director James M. Sell and writer-producer-star Peter Spelson made The Psychotronic Man as a response to the era’s paranoia, entrapment, and curiosity about the paranormal. It is a portrait of the baby boomer’s experience of the sobering despair of the 1970s. Rocky Foscoe, both a family man and a ladies’ man, becomes a violent, supernatural force whenever he feels cornered. One might consider him a fictional composite of many flower children who found themselves entering the 1970s with newly adult responsibilities and an awareness of the failure and impotence of the social movements that had shaped their youth. There’s no evidence that Rocky was ever so hip, but he is the right age to have had hopes that were universal to his generation, hopes that involved, if not free love and free expression, at least an optimism that life would continue to improve, that the war would be over abroad and at home, values to which a dead-end job and a dreary life would readily seem anathema. When he’s possessed with psychotronic energies, a green pulse overtakes the screen, an enlivening but dreadful glow, like the stuff of Kirlian photography: it is a cliché of science-fiction that the movie image should so reflect the biophysical transformation of the subject, and here it is also an intrusion that unsettles the equilibrium of the mise-en-scene, a pulse of colour to tell the audience that something’s coming. There’s an irony to this warning sign, given that Rocky Foscoe is in his sorry personal situation for having been incapable of anticipating the wrong turns of his life. Rocky’s sense of entrapment begins in the interior details of his sordid life, and expands to become externalized, as when he’s hunted by police and government agents, the use of a wide-angle lens throughout to suggest the eye of this dreadful psychic energy is a potent metaphor. The extreme distortion of the wide-angle lens becomes like an embryonic container, bending and squashing vast spaces along its curves, making faces comically bulbous while at the same time increasing the sense of distance between foreground and background. These unnatural distortions are most apparent in the film’s final act, when Chicago’s skyline seems to bend over Rocky’s pursuers. Its distortion expresses the natural state of a trapped man, bent in captivity, prisoner of the sphere, only in The Psychotronic Man, it is more often aimed outward, at Rocky’s victims.
The story moves steadily in this brief gap between Rocky’s first encounter and its prolonged climax: it alternates between the barber’s attempts at understanding what is happening to him, which leaves a trail of bodies, and the investigation of his crimes. When the police at last identify their suspect, a final chase begins, first by car, then on foot: the chase, like the film’s prologue, has an uncommon ambience about it, with unnaturally long takes that allow fugitive and pursuers to pass through the frame. The chase becomes a strange procession, low on action, slow in pace, at times, literally, in slow-motion shots that, like the green flashes, seem to be romantic expressions of Rocky’s energy force. The chase goes through a series of transitions: the car chase ends in a fiery explosion; the foot chase ends, twice, each time with Rocky cornered, each time, with his powers emerging to hypnotize, confuse and kill his pursuers. When the extended climax is extended further by slow-motion techniques, more than simply reflect Rocky’s state, these shots suspend the viewer in what becomes, so like the prologue, a state of non-anticipation. As the chase goes on, and on, and on, it becomes parodic, a film in the aftermath of The French Connection, in which the cinematic construction of the chase was mastered, as well as a contemporary of the greatest of Chicago-set cinematic car chases, the climax of The Blues Brothers. The Psychotronic Man plays out in a real time that is strained and stretched, and in doing so, it begins to resemble that interminable waiting that had defined 1970s American experience. If this is taken as a subtle critique, consider its relation to authority on a smaller, more local, more direct scale: Richard Daley, who had been Mayor of Chicago until his death in 1976, had felt that the city had an image problem that was being advanced through violent movies, and in his attempts to put down that rebellion, the city became hesitant to issue permits to independent movies, a practice that continued in the years following his death. This chase, with its realistic gunplay, disruptive staging, fake police cars and SWAT team, was shot illegally, without permits or prior notice, a practical act of rebellion.
At the climax, the police are ordered by a government agent to take Foscoe alive; he has been under surveillance, in the hopes that he can be weaponized, that he, for all of his flaws and grief, represents a hope for America’s worst spycraft ambitions in the Cold War. The police respond to this command cynically, preferring to shoot Foscoe from off of a building, as if he was King Kong. When King Kong fell from the Empire State Building in a hail of dogfight gunfire, when beauty killed the beast, he landed in the street below, his corpse gawked at by the crowd; when Rocky Foscoe, the Psychotronic Man falls, he doesn’t land at all: he plummets and disappears, mouldering in the mind, yet he still goes marching on. Like a tabloid undercurrent in a true crime headline, the corpse vanishes, last seen walking. In the epilogue, Foscoe is on foot in the tranquil foliage of Old Orchard Road, breaking that autumnal peace in a series of rapid cuts that close in on his wild eyes, haunting the site of his rebirth.
