Author: Christopher Bahn

When Senator Norm Coleman takes office in Washington next month, he’ll have some big decisions to make, on everything from war to social security. He may also need to decide on a new dentist, a process that certainly can tax a man’s courage. Norm has already proven himself on that score: In 1999, he underwent a procedure to close the gap in his front teeth. “What’s pain? I’m the mayor,” he said at the time. “I deal with pain all the time.”

Deep down, everyone else is afraid of dentists. The dentistry section in the yellow pages is full of big, bold pleas like, “No Scolding Judgements or Lectures” and “We Cater To Cowards”—selling points that would be bizarre for any other business. Plumbers do not need to run ads that say, “The Plunger Doesn’t Hurt, I Swear to God!”

This is bad. First, it’s bad medicine. Terrified people don’t go to the dentist, or go so rarely that their teeth suffer between visits. Second, it’s a bummer for the dentists. And it’s also bad business. Since insurance companies and government programs pick up less of the tab for your dental work than for other medical procedures, it cuts more deeply into dentists’ bottom line if you can’t bear to have them cut deeply into your molars.

Naturally there’s been considerable effort to change public opinion. “I think in the past, dentists were rougher,” said Jeff Johnson, a dentist in Little Falls. “Dentistry’s kind of a rough thing to start with—banging away and drilling away on your teeth. But if you aren’t conscious of a person’s sensitivity to that, you may not see them again.”

The trend is cheery coziness, the style is basement rec-room. Dentists’ lobbies these days are “more living-room-like and much more comfortable,” says Kimberly Harms, a Farmington dentist. She cheerfully admits that she herself is “absolutely terrified” of having her own teeth worked on, and says her own tendency toward phobia has influenced her practice’s high priority on patient amenities, including a juice bar and a private garden with birds and flowers. “We’re basically looking at the patient at every part of the dental visit and saying, ‘What can we do to make that more relaxing?’”

A lot of patients are agreeable to visual distractions, especially during long sessions. Dr. Harms and Dr. Johnson both offer “video glasses,” sort of eye-phones that attach to a DVD player or a VCR and bedazzle patients with their favorite movies. (Just a suggestion: Don’t request Marathon Man.)

But if dentists want to make sure you know they feel sympathetic, they also want to make sure you feel numb. “I think certainly the public has a lower tolerance for discomfort in recent times,” said St. Anthony dentist Joseph Osterbauer. “What society might have considered a necessary evil, they won’t tolerate anymore.” Nitrous oxide has become common, and many offices now use computer-aided anesthetic injections to reduce pain. Once confined to major oral surgery, powerful knockout drugs like Rohypnol and Halcion are increasingly used for routine dental work. “Sedation dentistry,” as it’s known, is rather drastic. But if there’s no other way you can face the drill, the ADA’s official position is that they’d rather see you unconscious than not see you at all.

How many art-house theaters does one town need? A city’s “real” cultural vibrancy can often be measured by the size of its network of art-house cinemas. While the Twin Cities scene is hardly New York, we’re well ahead of cities of comparable size. Fifteen years ago, the Uptown and University Film Society were about the only choices you had if you wanted to see a foreign or independent film. 1995 brought both the Lagoon and Bob Cowgill’s repertory Oak Street Cinema, which scored big bringing old Bogart movies to new audiences. More recently, the once-rundown Heights, beautifully and painstakingly restored, is performing the minor miracle of making the northern suburbs a hip destination.

The last year brought even bigger changes, the most shocking being the long-delayed merger of U Film and Oak Street. But the really exciting story is that the art film has found inroads into suburban multiplexes like the new MegaStar in Southdale and the venerable Apache in Columbia Heights, taken over in May by Heights owners Tom Letness and Dave Holmgren. Filmgoers who want more than just the blockbusters have more options now than ever. “It’s the rival of anyplace,” says Cowgill.

Of course, there’s a difference between a wealth of choices and oversaturation. For the nonprofits, there’s a finite amount of available funding, and opinion is divided as to whether the Twin Cities area is large enough to support all these theaters indefinitely. Just look at U Film, which took a big hit when the Lagoon opened and siphoned away the occasional long-running hits it relied on. “One should not be misled into thinking that because there are all these screens doing this, that that means it’s easy,” says Cowgill. “The competition is good for the filmgoer and on the whole for the town, but it sometimes makes our hearts palpitate.”

Others are convinced that, over the long term, more new art houses will nurture a larger audience, which will in turn sustain the older theaters too. “I think the success of Oak Street, of the Heights, helps us,” says Hugh Wronski, manager of the Uptown/Lagoon. “If there’s a good movie, regardless of venue, people will go see it.” For Wronski, the real competition isn’t other theaters, it’s the whole range of entertainment options—things like sunny days and pennant-chasing pro baseball teams.

The metro-area population has risen dramatically over the decades, and more art-house theaters may be a happy, natural consequence. U Film’s Al Milgrom concedes that nationally “the demographics seem to be increasing,” but doesn’t see it happening here, actually. “The audiences that I recall at the Bell Auditorium from the 60s to the 80s doesn’t exist anymore.” The U Film-led Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival has grown steadily every year and now spans more than 120 films over six theaters, making it one of the biggest local events of any kind, but “after film festival time, it’s a tough go,” Milgrom says. He seems to be speaking from bitter experience: After years of on-again, off-again negotiations, the fiercely independent Milgrom consented to a merger with Oak Street. The new organization, Minnesota Film Arts, was formally signed into reality October 16. It was a tough decision for Milgrom, who’s famous for his all-consuming, cantankerous devotion to the society he created 40 years ago. But from a financial standpoint, it just makes sense. It helps that the theaters are philosophically compatible, says Milgrom. The positive effects will largely be behind-the-scenes—greater efficiency in staffing and more streamlined communication with distributors and media.

Up in Columbia Heights, the story isn’t consolidation but growth. The Heights is a remarkable success story. Since Letness and Holmgren bought it in 1998, the innovative programming and the atmospheric auditorium have brought new life to the theater and the entire neighborhood. It’s done especially well with crossover hits like The Straight Story and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, drawing audiences from all over town.

With a newly installed Wurlitzer pipe organ as the final touch in the Heights’ restoration, the owners will now concentrate on sprucing up the Apache, a charmingly kitschy 1968-vintage cinema. Mainstream stuff like Spider-Man and Star Wars will still be the main focus, but art films will get at least one screen, which has taken pressure off the Heights. European import Mostly Martha is currently the Apache’s biggest matinee draw.

As the population in the suburbs has exploded, so has the number of multiplex screens—40 added over the last couple of years in Oakdale alone. Not surprisingly, the offerings have been dominated by major-studio Hollywood hits. But smaller movies have gained a surprising foothold. Places like the Edina 4 and Excelsior Dock have been screening the occasional indie hit for years, but the MegaStar Southdale, which opened a year ago, has made it part of its everyday fare, hitting big with Amelie and In the Bedroom and nabbing a local exclusive for Iris. These are high-profile movies, to be sure—you’re not going to see one of Al Milgrom’s obscure Swedish dramas here. But in its way, it’s revolutionary to have such a heavy focus on smaller, non-Hollywood films at a corporate-chain theater situated in one of our more blue-eyed suburbs.

In the end, the audience is the deciding factor in long-term survival, but it can’t hurt that the general feeling between the various rival operators is collegiality, not enmity. The struggle for market share is inevitable, but even the for-profit theaters go out of their way to help fellow art houses, recognizing that they’re all motivated by a common love of cinema. Change and competition, says Cowgill, “just becomes a new fact of life. Hopefully we can all find a way to survive.”

Frankly, the lady of the house is tired of talking about the ghosts. She doesn’t believe in them. But with wry resignation, she informed The Rake that she would tell us what she knows, and even invited us over to see for ourselves. She’s used to being pestered like this. Making time for writers seeking a solid ghost angle for their annual Halloween stories is the price one pays for living in St. Paul’s most notorious haunted house.

The building is a Romanesque brick mansion on Summit Avenue, built in 1882 by grocery and timber magnate Chauncey Wright Griggs. The massive stonework turrets are striking. It looks like it should be haunted. And so, inevitably, people claimed it was.

At least seven different spirits are said to inhabit the house. These include a maid who purportedly hanged herself over an unhappy love affair in 1915; she made numerous appearances on the staircase. In 1959, residents reported seeing the disembodied, floating heads of a child and a grown man. In the early 50s, a Dr. Delmar Kolb claimed he’d had two bedside encounters with a black-clad figure in a top hat who touched him with “two dead fingers on my forehead.” This ghost was reported so often in later years that residents wound up naming him “George.”

Between 1939 and 1964, the mansion was home to the St. Paul School of Arts, and ghost sightings were just whispers and rumors told after class. Then it was bought by Carl Weschcke, owner of Llewellyn Publishing, the legendary local publisher of occult books and magazines. Naturally, he spread the word with enthusiasm.

In 1969, Weschcke invited St. Paul Pioneer Press reporters Don Giese and Bill Farmer to spend the night in the room next to the spectral maid’s stairwell. They heard footstep-like noises on the landing, and had “a ‘feeling’ that ‘something’ was on those stairs.” By 4 a.m., rattled and unnerved, they fled. “There is no prize on Earth that could get us to spend a single night alone in that great stone house that seems to speak in sounds we cannot explain or understand,” they wrote. The Rake caught up the other day with Bill Farmer, now an editor for MSP Airport News. With the healing passage of time, he laughed about it. Farmer said what really unnerved him was Weschcke’s decor, which included “kinky witchy stuff” such as leather masks and a coffin. “To spend the night there was enough to give anyone a chill across the spine,” he said. “But phantasmagorical? No.”

The 1985 book Haunted Heartland added a juicy new anecdote to the legend. On a cold February night in 1965, it says, police found a hysterical, near-naked young man staring at a pentagram painted on the basement floor. Over and over he screamed, “I have seen death!” When we conjured Weschcke on the telephone to ask about this incident, he denied knowledge of it. A practicing Wiccan, he did hold rituals in the house. But nothing so dramatic took place there, he said. (St. Paul police records only go back to 1967. It’s not implausible. This was the 60s, after all.)

Weschcke sold the house more than 20 years ago, and the notoriety has dimmed. Nevertheless, it’s a recurring nuisance for the current owners, who asked The Rake not to reveal their identities or the address, and also to discourage uninvited visitors. (You are hereby warned: Stay away!) We can report, though, that the mansion’s current caretakers do have a healthy sense of humor: They keep an “emergency kit” inside the foyer, stocked with anti-vampire wooden stakes, garlic, holy water, and a silver cross. Just so, they’ve never felt anything unearthly in the house, and they fear that encouraging these ghost stories demeans an architecturally significant, historic home.

Presently, the undead do not pose a problem, but reporters and thrillseekers continue to haunt the current owners. When strangers call, they ask about ghosts, and people still drive by and gawk whenever a new story’s published. (Repeat: Stay away, if you know what’s good for you!) On Halloween, the mansion is an irresistible destination. “Last year we had 700 kids. I think they bus them in,” said the householder. “I never have enough candy. And I always buy a lot.”

There is one thing Weschcke and the current owners agree on—that the ghosts, if they ever existed, are probably gone. “Most such manifestations and hauntings, poltergeists and so forth, much of it is a matter of psychic recordings,” said Weschcke, with a nifty post-modern take on the matter. “And like anything else, as time goes by, the media deteriorates.” The current owners said the house was recently given the all-clear by a “supersensitive” visiting clairvoyant. “She was telling me that she feels no vibrations,” said the lady of the house. One of her eyebrows levitated. “Whatever vibrations are.”

Let’s begin at the beginning, even if it’s a little obvious. The classic road movie almost always involves a road trip—that is, a journey by highway. That’s where the word “road” fits into the name, y’know. The road movie is also deeply concerned with freedom—how people die inside without it, but risk getting killed trying to get it. This is a fairly simple blueprint, to be sure, but it allows everything from the earnest social-justice drama The Grapes of Wrath (screening in the series Oct. 27) to Russ Meyer’s deliriously perverse Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Oct. 19). You have to love a genre that does that.

The road trip epic has roots in some of the world’s oldest literature—the Odyssey , the Exodus, “Gilgamesh” are all obvious precursors. Spanish picaresques like Don Quixote were episodic stories of wandering rogues, and they anticipated our latterday obsession with antiheroes. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn brought that motif to the great highway of his time, the Mississippi, and nailed down the basic form that road movies would later adopt—two wayward people make an illegal flight from a corrupt society, and find emancipation (literally, in this case) on the open road.

Social criticism is a vital element here. Contrast that with Westerns, which grow out of the American myth of manifest destiny. You know, taming and colonizing the wide-open spaces. But that’s an essentially optimistic genre. Consider the classic Western hero: the sheriff who brings peace and imposes order on the lawless frontier town. The hero of a road story, on the other hand, is often the guy the sheriff arrests. He rejects society, if it hasn’t already rejected him.

These darker, more cynical tales flourish in the worst of times. The 1930s were especially fertile days, and the road movie evolved into its modern form then, in the midst of socialist grumblings, massive population movement, and a little thing we like to call the Great Depression. It was also when the Western’s central premise/promise failed, in a tectonic cultural shift that divided the Old West from the modern age—the rise of the national highway system. That’s the moment when, spiritually speaking, we ran out of frontier. (Until the Space Race, of course, but that’s another chapter.) By the time highways connected everything, American civilization had achieved a decisive domination over the New World wilderness. The American dream of endless expansion wasn’t endless anymore. The teeming masses yearning to breathe free, who used to just pick up and move when times got bad, were more mobile than ever, but with nowhere left to run and hide. The road movie was what happened when the desperate refugees in The Grapes of Wrath followed the tried-and-true advice to Go West and discovered, with a rude shock, that California was already full of Californians.

We should say here, too, that there is also an inherent connection between the road movie and the coming-of-age story, with its themes of finding one’s true nature and place in life. It’s the common ground between, say, The Catcher in the Rye and Easy Rider (Oct. 28-29). And the road movie often shares film noir’s most defining aspects: the deep pessimism and paranoia, the anti-authority complex, the realistic depiction of violent crime, and the creeping sympathy for the outlaw and the derelict. The road movie is the most anarchistic of genres, embracing rebellion for its own sake.

The Joads in The Grapes of Wrath go through five flavors of hell before they find their promised land, but they get there more or less intact. Most road-movie protagonists have a rougher time, especially at the hands of people who are jealous of their autonomy, or fear their long hair. Hippie-hating townies have murderous contempt for the Easy Rider trio simply because they exist. On the flip side, Robert Blake’s careerist cop in Electra Glide in Blue (Oct. 28-29) finds that corrupt authority is just as soul-corrosive even when you’re on the “right” side of the law. Of course, even when you know the characters are hurtling toward certain, bloody destruction, the trip is often exhilarating; it’s that whole live fast, die young thing.

There’s an unusual subtype that pops up with surprising regularity: the pair of lovers who go hell-bent on a violent cross-country crime spree. The French, with their effete way of inventing a foreign phrase to describe every little thing, call this subgenre amour fou . It first shows up in road movies’ first wave during the 1940s in movies like Gun Crazy (Oct. 21-22), and They Live By Night (Oct. 30-31), and reaches its zenith in Arthur Penn’s 1967 masterpiece Bonnie and Clyde (Oct. 14 and 17), rocketing Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty on a wild bender of bank robberies across the Depression-era Great Plains. Later, the amour fou incorporated psychos and serial killers with Terence Malick’s Badlands (Oct. 14 and 17), and, more recently, Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers .

The divisive chaos around the Vietnam War fueled a renaissance for the road movie—this time typified not by Robert Mitchum’s felonious bootlegger in Thunder Road (Oct. 21-22) but by the Merry Pranksters’ acid tests and day-glo psychedelic school bus. It captured the widespread distrust of authority, and the new tribalism that flowered at Woodstock. Jack Kerouac and his countercultural heirs were big believers in the open highway as a means of rejecting the old society and creating a new one—it’s integral to Beat literature and all that followed it. That’s why the disaster-fated motorcycle trip in Easy Rider works so well in exploring how the innocent dreams of the hippies had, by 1969, gone bad. It is also the quintessential example of the form. When I say “road movie,” you think of Peter Fonda roaring down a desert highway as Steppenwolf erupts from the soundtrack. Despite its disjointed plot and 60s indulgences (like the tiresome LSD sequence) it’s probably the most incisive critique of American culture the genre’s given us since Henry Fonda, Peter’s dad, took his turn as Tom Joad.

That second heyday faded by the end of the 1970s, though the form has never died away completely. New subspecies have developed, like offbeat send-ups such as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Oct. 25-26) and Raising Arizona (Oct. 18-20), and the nightmare surrealism of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Oct. 18-20).

In these days when creeping authoritarianism is (allegedly) the less distasteful alternative to terrorism, and the new information culture trades the car in for the modem as a vehicle for journeying into self-discovery, the road movie is mutating again. But it will never lose its relevance. It too perfectly encapsulates that ornery American belief in the primacy of personal freedom—and that spiritual place where the rubber hits the road.

“Road Reels” screens at Oak Street Cinema, October 11-31.

Christopher Bahn is a contributing editor at The Rake.