"Come Wander with Me"

People--and that would include me as well--generally trash remakes of pop culture artifacts as gratuitous retreads and white flags waved in the War on Cliche. The older I get, though, the more I have to admit that many was the piece of derivative hackwork that inspired me to seek the font of its inspiration. So the 1983 Landis/Spielberg/Dante/Miller collaboration on Twilight Zone: The Movie had me thirsting for the real deal. Luckily, my PBS affiliate aired The Twilight Zone on Saturday nights, and I generally caught it on the weekends when I stayed with my dad (who was cool enough to present me with a copy of Marc Scott Zicree's The Twilight Zone Companion which for my ninth, tenth, and eleventh years of life was like unto a religious tome to me). Can't recall if they aired one or two episodes per night, but it always left me wanting more.

There was a class and elegance, an earnest to it, and a freshness of mind that inspired me as a kid. Still does to this day. There's just something wondrous and ineffably decent that defies description. I'll do my ode to it at some point in a future blog. This is something different.

One of the things reading Zicree's text helped me to come to terms with is what could be gained by paying attention to context. The episodes in this anthology show were not just stories, but they had recurring themes, special circumstances behind each production, and each season had its own struggles and challenges. (I have since become a "context junkie" with respect to most of the things I enjoy, but this was the very beginning of it all.)

Zicree asserts that this show peaked and jumped the shark after Season Three. I am inclined to disagree. Season Four is pretty thin, since they expanded the episodes to an hour in length, but there are some sure gems, some of my favorite episodes, in the fifth and final season.

One of the "lesser" episodes has haunted me since the first time I saw it. "Come Wander with Me," directed by Richard Donner (of Superman: The Movie and Lethal Weapon fame), originally aired on 22 May 1964. In it, Floyd Burney, who touts himself as "The Rock-A-Billy Kid" goes to a small village where he intends to pillage the locals for their folk songs. We get that this is what he does; he travels to out-of-the-way places, insinuates himself with the locals, buys their songs, and appropriates them as his own, then makes platinum records of them.

Upon arriving in the very small town, he is directed to an old music shop, full of archaic instruments hanging here and there, going to seed. The shop seems empty, so he perversely plays around with the instruments, but as he is doing so a spooky straight-out-of-"American-Gothic" shopkeeper appears out of nowhere. With a little expository dialogue, Burney tries to buy songs off of him. The shopkeeper tersely explains he has nothing Floyd nor any of his peers would be interested in. All of a sudden, Floyd is called away by the strumming of strings and a woman's voice humming a haunting melody.

Floyd does wander...through a wooded area, looking for the source of this enchanting song. Along the way he encounters birds that may or may not be vultures. On his walk, he fails to notice that he passes by a somber female figure, cloaked in black. He also doesn't notice a tombstone that is located in those woods--probably for the best, as it reads, "Floyd Burney, The Wandering Man."

In a few moments, the woman in the black cloak is replaced by Mary Rachel, a beautiful and rather demure young woman, a local. He discovers it is she who has been singing the song. Burney offers to buy it off of her. She is reticent to even sing it for him, since it's "secret; it belongs to somebody," and the Rayford brothers made her promise not to sing it any more. Floyd presses her further and she relents and sings it for him:

"Come wander with me love/Come wander with me/Away from this sad world/Come wander with me".

It seems to be a song of seduction. Burney again presses her to sell the song, but Mary Rachel tells him "It can't be bought; not that way." To convince her he will do the song justice, he sings it back to her and thereafter it as though some enchantment has fallen over her. They make out as the Woman in Black watches.

When the show returns from commercial, Mary Rachel is singing the full song and Floyd is recording it. She is preoccupied with his promises to take her away with him, and he clearly has dollar signs in his eyes, telling her what she wants to hear to get what he wants.

It really gets weird when her fiancee, Billy Rayford, shows up with a rifle in tow. Floyd asks her how Billy knew where to find him and she says, "He always comes here" and beseeches him not to confront Billy, "not this time!" When Rayford threatens him ("I'm gonna take you to my brothers; they know what to do with your kind"), Burney attacks and kills him. Mary Rachel now sings,

"You killed Billy Rayford/Bespoken to me/You killed Billy Rayford/'neath the old willow tree."

Burney panics and wants to make a break for it. Mary Rachel continues to use language that suggests that this all has happened before, exactly this way, and that maybe if they only do something differently, it may end differently this time. Floyd isn't hearing it and flees the wrath of the other Rayford brothers, back to the music shop. The shopkeeper seems to know exactly what is going on and refuses to hide him, so Burney flies into a rage and attacks and kills him, then attempts to hide amongst the old instruments. But these old instruments betray him...they inexplicably let out a cacophony that alerts the Rayford brothers to his presence, and they gun him down.

My ten year old self had no idea what to make of this, but I've thought about it quite a bit since then. The young pop star Floyd Burney (played by Bing Crosby's son) comes off as a crass, self-absorbed monster of a man. Like many the entertainer before him, he seeks to go and mine the rich veins of local folk (and though it's veiled, it's strongly suggested, ethnic) traditions for profit. He is a supposed artist that speaks more of commercial rivalries and intellectual property conventions than aesthetics and creative processes. He fixates on his commercial persona and trades on his stage name. He rarely if ever listens to what anyone else has to say, and he treats the locals, in the form of Mary Rachel and the shopkeeper, as objects to be exploited. Floyd Burney is a creature of appetite and what he craves is the inspiration and authenticity that he lacks. He is "The Wandering Man" because he stands for nothing and is No One. He is only what he can steal.

Starved as he is for inspiration, he is called by the siren song of Mary Rachel. He sees it as a prize to be hauled away from Yokel-ville but what it really is is a trap. When he sings the song to Mary Rachel, he takes on the voice of the cosmopolitan seducer--apt, since that is his intent, and doubtless how he proves his virility. Yet, the "hillbilly" environment he seeks to pillage has a life of its own, and we see that it just may have a quite poetic defense against carpetbaggers like Floyd.

Mary Rachel is the story's agent of naturalism. She appears in two guises: the nymphet, and as a sort of "libation bearer". In both guises, she has a meta-consciousness that they are acting out the preset narrative of the song; they have done so before, and they will do so again. In her younger aspect she is the catalyst of the tragedy; her innocence and beauty beckon Floyd hither. She is the object for him to manipulate. He is Adam and the Serpent, but she is Eve and the fruit.

In her older aspect, she bears sorrowful witness to the events in the song and stands watch as it happens, able to do nothing to alter it.

What may be lost during the first few viewings is there are also two Floyds: the one that is young, dumb, and full of you know what, and the other...in the grave.

What brought Floyd down? Like most young men, Burney succumbed to the allure of self-mythologizing. You musta heard of him...Floyd Burney...The Rock-A-Billy Kid? In youth, as in other uncertain stages of life we don't know who we are and don't know if we have "What It Takes," so we invent characters we like and who do have it, and we play them. I've done it. You've done it. Mostly we are able to walk away from it and its occasional excesses having learned something valuable about ourselves, and life.

But you can only get away with it so many times, and outside of his element, this time faking it wasn't good enough. Unlike city folk, nature can distinguish reality from artifice, and the local yokels here weren't so toothless. They saw right through him and weren't going to take his crap. You can be as slick, charismatic, and "rockabilly" as you like, but if you make your bones off of stealing what belongs to the other guy (women, songs) eventually it gets to where you have to pay up. So this time Floyd didn't get what he wanted, didn't get to rip off an identity from someone else, and now he lies in a marked grave that mocks him for not being much of anything at all. And a sad Woman in Black lurks, conflicted, tortured by knowing how the story ends, yet daring this arrogant, silly young man eternally to try it again and again. Come wander with you? Huh. Come Wander With Me.

We see it quite often in the ramshackle distorted egos of artists and celebrities, thrust into the spotlight too soon, or with not enough to say. What do you do when you're not up to the circumstances at hand? Pretend like you're somebody who is. They do this dance so hopefully we don't have to. With any luck, they discard the persona, this false skin, and become more themselves, a more balanced person, built to last and thrive, and less of an improvised caricature. The least fortunate find persona to be a prison they're trapped in, until death. Think of the ones that immediately spring to mind. Robert Johnson. Charlie Parker. Marilyn Monroe. Morrison. Hendrix. Joplin. Elvis. Cobain. Tupac. Real people with real lives who tried to keep it together and couldn't get out of the armor they built, or alive, anyway. Like Floyd, they got their immortality, but at such a price...

The lifelong grind-it-out struggle for authenticity brings to mind the last lines of the legendary commercial for that old "Hey Love" mail order album. Sometimes we see something beguiling and say, "Wow man, that style is awesome; let me borrow it." And generally we can do for a while; but eventually life says to us, "No my brother, you got to get your own."