Myth Happens

Yesterday in honor of the date, I watched Larry Yust's The Lottery (1969).

I can't remember when I first read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948). It wasn't for school; that was "After You, My Dear Alphonse" (1943). It might have been in one of the classroom anthologies I always read cover to cover no matter what we were actually assigned out of them—Hawthorne, Bradbury. The house being full of almost every genre of fiction but the realistic, I could equally have found it in The Lottery and Other Stories (1949), the same acid-browned paperback that furnished me with the dustily stomach-sinking despair of "The Daemon Lover" (1949), a story which upset me for reasons I would not be able to articulate for decades. Since the inhabitants of the unnamed village in which Jackson set her parable of the homey barbarities we take for granted so long as they don't come too close to home can no longer remember the origins of their annual rite nor even the particulars of its observance which have worn down over the centuries to a black box filled with slips of paper and the corner of a square piled with stones, it makes sense for the story to feel like something I have always known, as it feels I always knew about year-kings, scapegoats. I imagined it in New England even though the text only commits itself to the close-knit markers of rural America, thus occasioning that subset of the onslaught of letters following its publication which concerned themselves with identifying the location of the practice she had apparently, ethnographically described. I wasn't connecting it with witch trials or the Gothic literature of the region or even some vibe of Jackson's North Bennington, the white-spired college town where she would eventually spend the rest of her rather haunted life. The story merely felt as it was meant to: wherever you read it, like something that could happen here.

So much does the same seem true of the version commissioned by Encyclopædia Britannica as part of their Short-Story Showcase (1969–77) that perhaps in an effort to head off a similar outcry of letters from the parents of its student audience, it subtitles its opening wide shot of a well-trodden strip of ground between census-designated houses and the long awning of a shopping center through which a kid in a ketchup-red windbreaker is wandering, The following is fiction. Despite the occasional dramatically high or low angle on the assembled ring of the crowd and the hands and faces singled out within it, the 16 mm cinematography by Isidore Mankofsky looks most—hand-jostled, post-synched, slightly blown out in the blue haze of sun between summer showers—like a home movie, the amateur record of the year's lottery in eighteen minutes of real time. It tumbles among the boys scrapping for the best stones in the rain-drying field, eavesdrops on the girls who watch them as if from the other side of a school dance, the adults who close up shop for the morning, pull up in their trucks, drift over from household chores. "Steve hates to eat those TV dinners. I don't blame him." "I like Miss Spangler better than I did that second-grade teacher." "You ever hear of taxes going down?" "Then I'm going to finish it off with some lace around the sleeves." Once two men emerge across the parking lot, one carrying a black box and the other a wooden stool, the screenplay adapted by Yust will follow Jackson's dialogue almost word for word, but the writer-director's real fidelity to his source material is the plain ordinariness with which the events of June 27, 1969, since the cars and clothes of the film are distinctly contemporary, play out before the camera's unshocked eye. To the citizens of this tiny, blue-collar community gathering without coercion or secrecy, the routine of the lottery with its methodical double-checking of participants and narration of the rules and finally the finish in time to get back to the day's work is as familiar as the civic business of voting, as normal as May Day on Summerisle. The lots are folded slips of college-ruled paper, the fateful black spots rounded casually in with pencil. If the black-painted wooden box in which the lots are stirred and drawn is as old as its chips and scratches suggest, its padlock could and might well have been bought from the nearest hardware store last week. No one even dresses up for the ceremony—Olive Dunbar's Tessie Hutchinson runs up at the last minute explaining with a self-conscious laugh that she "clean forgot what day it was," while William Benedict's Joe Summers is sworn in as master of the lottery in the white shirt and khaki slacks in which the viewer can imagine him at a cookout or a lodge meeting. His white-haired boyish face and scratchy tenor give him both authority and informality as he assumes his office and begins the roll call: "Do you solemnly swear that you will perform without prejudice or favoritism those duties prescribed by custom and dictated by law?" The film does not ignore the tensions underlying the day; it catches solemn faces and nervous fingers, how tightly the little slips of paper are held or turned over and over like dice still falling. "Seems like only last week we got through with the last one," Blanche Bronte's Jean Delacroix murmurs to Irene Tedrow's Mrs. Graves, who answers with the voice of experience, "Time sure does go fast." Drawing for the first time for himself and his mother, Jack Watson—a still-teenaged Ed Begley Jr., barley-blond gawky in his worn-edged denim jacket—stumbles in his nervousness against the box and is not unsympathetically admonished, "Take your time, son!" He hurries back into place without looking at anyone, as if he's bobbled the job of being a man. But no one weeps, no one hides, children hang off their parents' arms with boredom and even adults mutter around the halfway mark of the alphabet, "I wish they'd hurry." Neither the performances nor the photography ever flip into more conventionally signaled horror than the measured and sudden denouement of Jackson's prose. The sky is clouding over as the boys' rough cairn of stones is reached for, but the ritual goes on rain or shine. Joe Summers has already tucked his pencil and the year's list of names back into his shirt pocket, professionally. "All right, folks. Let's finish quickly."

( Attagirl, Tessie. )

It is not inconceivable that I could have encountered this film in its intended environment of middle or high school. I can remember different English classes screening To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Shane (1953), Of Mice and Men (1992), Romeo and Juliet (1968), even a scene from what it took me almost a quarter of a century to determine had been A Tale of Two Cities (1958), since at the time I registered mostly that it did not contain Ronald Colman and was therefore inauthentic. I had no idea of its educational existence until this spring, when it handily turned up on the Internet Archive. It seemed appropriate to wait to watch it in season, which I can only hope does not contagiously throw the viewer's hat into the ring. Perhaps it doesn't need to. We don't live in a different country from Shirley Jackson, setting her ritual tacitly in her own home town. "It ain't the way it used to be. People ain't the way they used to be." I don't know, Old Man Warner. Stones, blood, corn, who's in and who's out, sometimes it feels like the cars and the clothes are the only things that change. Attagirl, Tessie, indeed. This duty brought to you by my prescribed backers at Patreon.