Many years ago, I pinned a black and white poster to my lounge wall and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of studying it from my armchair opposite. Let me try to explain my fascination.
The poster is dominated by a single still from a 1957 movie, featuring a statuesque woman with porcelain skin. The woman’s eyebrows are arched, intense, curving high on her forehead. Her eyes are sadly hypnotic, her nose regally raised. She gazes straight ahead but to the right, never meeting my eyes.
The woman’s black dress could be a ball gown—or just as easily the tattered garments of an Eastern European serf. There is a tear in the arm of her dress, exposing the white of her flesh. The impression of rags is reinforced by a series of tiny holes close to her waist, rectangular with curved corners, like little flying saucers. The details of her black dress are invisible in the black and white photo. This negative space further highlights the woman’s imperious yet absorbed expression. Her V-neck décolletage hints at a sexual self. Her ivory arms reach together, hands clasped in an incongruous gesture of supplication.
The woman’s black hair falls around her shoulders—except the photo is a night scene, so her hair, too, is an absence. Midnight overlaps her. Mist reaches out from the right. The lighting through the haze shades the woman’s cheek and neck in sharp lines like surfacing bone.
Down the left side of the poster is a sliver of banner. The actress’s name is there—Vampira—beneath the name of Bela Lugosi. The largest part of the banner is dominated by the title of the film: PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.
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Plan 9 From Outer Space was voted the “Worst Film of All Time” at the inaugural 1980 Golden Turkey Awards. The film was produced, directed, written by, and edited by one man, Ed Wood Jnr. Fans of bad movies like me recognise this level of creative control as a sign that the movie might be truly so-bad-it’s-good. Authorship and authenticity are important: it matters that the film was made with love and singular vision.
Vampira plays the deceased nameless wife of an Old Man (Bela Lugosi). Their incongruous 30-year age difference is never addressed. Vampira is resurrected by aliens and used as a zombie assassin in a small American town to persuade humanity not to develop a powerful bomb that will threaten all life in the universe. The plot is by no means the most ludicrous element of Plan 9.
There’s a charming claustrophobia to the movie, with much action set in a graveyard which is obviously a soundstage with limited set-ups. Characters run one way and then back across identical locations. Scenes jump from blackest night to midday and back again.
The set is so badly dressed, it feels like a pantomime—including the spindly branches presumably intended to convey actual trees. A scraggle of white splodges shore up the left side of Vampira on the poster. One long line leans diagonally towards her, blinking out twice in its passage up the poster. These daubs and strokes are reflected light from one of the terrible on-set trees. The dark hues of the photo lend it a Pollockesque attraction.
I’ve seen Plan 9 probably six times, and it was the “bad movie” elements that drew me in. The dialogue is often unspeakable, yet most of the actors speak bravely. My favourite line in the film is the police detective expounding to his admiring colleagues that “Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody’s responsible.” Vampira refused to say anything and her zombie character allows her to get away with that. She later noted that she didn’t have a decent costume for Plan 9 but decided that it didn’t matter as no one was ever going to see her in this movie anyway.
Mostly Vampira is lurching and grimacing in Plan 9. Only in quiet moments, when she is not being directed to kill by her alien resurrectors, does her character lapse into a vulnerable, sleepwalker melancholia. Only in those split seconds do I glimpse the charisma I study in the still poster.
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Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of INXS, bounded into my life at the start of the Need You Tonight video, the first single off the 1987 album Kick. First, he wasn’t there, and then he was. Radiating his persona of confidence and sex. Of cool.
I was smitten. Kick (and Michael Hutchence) became my great loves of the late ’80s, the heart of my teenage years. I soaked in Kick; I wanted to be known by it. I bought the singles to help the chart dominance of Kick, and because the singles had remixes. When I couldn’t find the singles, I created my own clumsy remixes with my double-deck cassette player. When Dad brought home a CD player for the first time, he was mystified as to why Kick was my first CD purchase, an album that I’d already played a hundred times on cassette. I couldn’t explain the pivotal importance of my choice to him; I just stared at him like it was obvious. It was evident to me: I was a fan.
I was fanatical in fact, a religious devotion the like of which I’ve never had outside of religion itself. Michael Hutchence was widely accepted as a rock god by my Generation X cohort, and the fact that he was widely adored helped me to worship him even more. Not deified in the sense of intercessions and answered prayers: I never expected Michael Hutchence to swoop in and make my life better in some way, other than creating unearthly music that I was allowed to listen to. I didn’t call him Michael in my head, that would be too familiar. He was “Michael Hutchence”. That was his name of course, but it was charged with the intensity of a singular icon, like Cher or Prince or Madonna.
Michael Hutchence was a rock god in the way that he seemed above normal humanity. Or perhaps he was a demi-god on his way to full-God status, a heroic figure like Theseus or Perseus, and his path of modern glory was to conquer the Top 20 rather than minotaurs or titans. I could help Michael Hutchence in his quest from afar by buying his music, including the lengthy INXS back catalogue. He’d never know me, but I could help him.
I loved Michael Hutchence in a way that was adoring of his sexuality rather than being attracted to him myself. He never appeared in my fantasies; that would have been even worse than calling him Michael. He rather presented a sexual ideal to me. No one could be more attractive than Michael Hutchence. It must be a wonderful problem to have, I felt, to be so totally hot that everyone agreed you were the hottest. And I would have challenged anyone to a duel if they’d dared to question his supreme virility.
Such was the charisma and sexual allure of Michael Hutchence, it rubbed off on me to a tiny degree, which got me into trouble. I was wearing my INXS Kick t-shirt in a Whangamatā holiday campground when a teenage girl made some admiring remarks about the band. Not used to strange girls talking to me, I managed to mumble some form of response. Sensing weakness, she then asked me for the t-shirt. I couldn’t say anything to that, and my cheeks turned red with the humiliation of being put on the spot, and the mortifying thought of taking off my t-shirt and exposing my naked chest. The difference between me and my rock god couldn’t have been greater. The girl laughed with a friend of hers until I fled, and the next day she called out a sneering comment when I passed her tent. I’m going red in my cheeks now just writing about it.
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Charisma. The X-factor, that indefinable element. The power inherent in the phrase “cult of personality”. Teenagers today call it “rizz”, and they should know—more sensitive to social nuance than anyone else, or at any other time in their lives.
I studied Max Weber in first year Sociology, or perhaps it’s fairer to say that I became conscious of Weber and both excited about—and disappointed with—his thoughts on the power of charismatic leadership. At that age, I was most interested in power as a tool to get me what I wanted. Conscious of a personal lack of rizz (because of incidents like the bullying girl at the Whangamatā holiday camp), I was hopeful of filling that gap somehow.
Weber defined charisma as “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” A key insight is that the charismatic leader (or rock star or presenter or actor; let’s treat “leader” broadly) is conferred their power by their followers. It is the fans who give their love, who lift up their idol, who enable the star to influence them. In other words, it is the fans who hold the source of the power: they have chosen to give power to their adored one. This was a disappointment to me as an 18-year-old because it didn’t tell me how to get the power, only that it was possible and apparently out of reach. I already knew that I lacked the inherently magical qualities of a Michael Hutchence.
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I found the Plan 9 poster in Silvio’s record store on Wellington’s cool Cuba Street, flipping through the metal rack up on the mezzanine floor. Mostly I bought it because it was a Plan 9 poster. I was working to establish myself as part of a tribe: a more sophisticated type of geek who could embrace “bad” movies as well as cultural works that all the geek sub-culture loved. But I like to think that I immediately recognised a beauty in the image, a deeper level of sophistication.
In 1999, I lived in a downtown Wellington apartment. My apartment was needed as the set for an extremely-low-budget movie that I’d co-written. The Plan 9 poster was the only element the set dressers kept in the film from our student flat décor. I’ve often wondered (and I expect to never know) why they kept that poster. Was it the cool of Plan 9 being a bad movie, or was it the beauty of Vampira’s portrait?
Vampira brought a charismatic power to Plan 9, not the other way around. Vampira (real name Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi) already had a degree of subculture popularity by the time she appeared in Plan 9, having been the first horror movie hostess with a self-titled show on television. She was nominated for a Los Angeles area Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Female Personality in 1954.
Yet I know Vampira because of Plan 9, not the other way around. It was my interest in the cinema of director Ed Wood Jnr that brought me to the poster of her. That image is in complete contrast to the silliness of the movie and her role. I am fascinated how something so beautiful can arise from something so ridiculous. How Vampira’s charismatic nature transcends the film for only a split second, but how that is enough for my enduring watchfulness to arise.
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It’s my wife Helen who points out to me a link between charisma and hair, and I immediately agree. Vampira’s long black hair is central to her mystique, the witchy vibe, the sheer length. The invisibility of her hair in the Plan 9 poster adds to the intrigue of the image, a clear absence that leaves me searching for some gap between her tresses and the black of night.
Michael Hutchence’s locks were at the perfect length for the zeitgeist at the release of Kick. He stood out from any other long-haired rockers of the time because his hair was brown and most of all, because it was curly and cascading. His hair was like a seventh band member; I was dazzled how his curls moved in the videos for the singles off Kick. He flounced with that hair. He moved like he was constantly in a shampoo commercial.
One thing about hair is that its mutable. It follows—and is shaped by—the path of cool (unless you are David Lynch). My relationship with INXS changed quickly. I was profoundly disappointed by their next album X. But I was hardly the only one; Kick was the cultural peak for INXS. When the next album Welcome to Wherever You arrived in 1992, I didn’t buy it. And I was conscious of not buying it. I was over my infatuation with INXS. I was excited to be over my obsession; I had transcended. I was now better than INXS.
During the 1990s, Michael Hutchence cut his hair short, which I took as a further signal that he was no longer in step with real cool. He was stripped of something powerful without his long brown locks, a modern-day Samson.
And then, on November 22, 1997, Michael Hutchence died. His death was paparazzi fodder. They’d been hounding him and his partner, Paula Yates. The story doing the rounds, apparently pushed by the grieving Yates, was that Michael Hutchence had autoasphyxiated himself and died accidentally. Sexual hijinks gone wrong. It fitted the standard narrative of the rock god, another Jim Morrison lost young.
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Plan 9 was one of the heights of bad movies for me in my twenties and thirties. I returned to watching Plan 9 around the height of my insomnia in my mid-forties. I was falling apart, sleeplessness muting my mind and sapping me of sanity and escape. I watched non-taxing comedies (the Pink Panther movies) in our lounge, and I relied on Plan 9 to give me the simple joys it had before. And it did.
Except I was getting more than the disjointed scenes and unbelievable dialogue. There was something desperate in the look of a cop on duty alone in the cemetery. The bluster of the hero confronting the villain felt impassioned rather than wooden. Was it possible, I wondered, that I was enjoying the movie more for what it was doing right, rather than got wrong? Was it possible that Plan 9 was a “good movie”?
I rewatched Plan 9 when I was out of my insomnia, and I am currently of the opinion that Plan 9 is not a good movie. There are certainly places where Wood achieves genuine tension. There’s some competent acting. But Plan 9 falls short so often and in so many places. Some of these failures used to amuse me but now they bore; others I soak into like a cosy blanket. Oh, it’s this bit, I think. I love this bit.
Bela Lugosi, like Vampira, avoided any dialogue in Plan 9, because he died before filming. Ed Wood inserted footage from an unrelated project and heralded Plan 9 as Lugosi’s last appearance. This footage depicts Lugosi in his famous Dracula outfit, so the Old Man in Plan 9 also wears a vampire cape. Wood asked his chiropractor to stand in for Lugosi during new scenes, the cape held up to his nose to disguise the deception. This doesn’t work (which is the delight).
The ironic thing now for me is that the scenes with Bela Lugosi are those that really work. They weren’t meant to be in Plan 9, but I watch them, and I feel the genuine grief the Old Man feels at the loss of his Vampira-wife. They have become the most affecting elements of Plan 9 for me. I feel the charisma of Lugosi’s performance, freed from the demand that it be perceived as ridiculous. What further new response might I find inside Plan 9 in the future? I’m looking forward to finding out.
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In 2019, I went to see Mystify, a documentary on Michael Hutchence directed by his friend Richard Lowenstein. Mystify was named after a song on Kick. Helen and I nearly didn’t bother going, we only made up our minds on the day. The film was one of many in the Wellington Film Festival and was shoved away in a tiny basement cinema at The Embassy. This for a man who had commanded stadiums in his day.
Watching the docu, I was struck by something I’d never expected: my own resemblance to my former idol. Michael Hutchence and I were far more alike than I’d ever dreamed.
For one thing, Michael was shy. He suffered from stage fright but still wanted to get up there and perform. He got a huge buzz out of the spotlight. I could totally relate. I’d done Theatresports, I’d done Toastmasters. I loved the applause and attention of being seen despite my desperate fear of being laughed at.
Michael was literate, a little pretentious. He talked about philosophy to impress the girls he was into. This was when he was a teenager heading into his early twenties, the age when I would have done the same thing at university.
Michael was the lyricist for INXS; words were his thing. I’m a writer; words, too, are my medium. Michael was ambitious; he wanted to do things for which he’d be really remembered. How I can relate to that ridiculous need. Pop music wasn’t enough for Michael: it wasn’t meaningful enough to be loved for pop songs. When he cut off his hair, he tried to ditch his image and joined an act called Max Q. Michael was sick of being “Michael Hutchence”. The idea with Max Q was that no one would know it was him, but the record company wouldn’t let him get away with that.
Michael apparently was a romantic, a one-woman man. Despite the temptations that must have come with the fame and lifestyle, he was faithful to the woman he was with. I couldn’t claim the temptations, but I understood the sentiment. Michael was a homebody, happier hanging around home with the woman he loved rather than meeting strangers at a party. Again, I sympathised. Michael was also someone who loved experiences, highs, and hedonism. I get that too.
Michael really felt the loss when his fame began to slip away, which was an element of his charismatic allure. He was sensitive, exposed to the cruelties of others. Noel Gallagher dissed him at the 1996 Brit Awards, declaring, as he was accepting an award from Michael, that "has-beens should not be presenting awards to gonna-be’s”. Michael treated it well on stage but was badly hurt. When I felt worldly success sliding away from me in my life (I was a writer for TV and film until I wasn’t), I felt the punch in the guts. Michael got it a lot worse, considering the millions of fans he had to lose.
Michael was hard on himself. He got depressed, particularly after a head injury (which thank God has never happened to me). Michael needed to be loved. He felt desperate when he felt cut off from the people he loved and needed love from. Michael found the darkness in the minutes before dawn, those hours that I know can be the hardest of all. And Michael ended it all then. His suicide wasn’t an accident, not sexual hijinks gone wrong. Whereas I called the Crisis Response team instead and got the drugs I needed to put me right.
The Mystify documentary made me feel that I wanted to be there for Michael when I wasn’t, and that so many of us “fans” had abandoned him. Worse, we’d scorned our former idol from a distance—he’d become a figure of cultural fun, hence the paparazzi harassment.
I also realised that we could have been genuine friends, Michael and I, if we’d ever met. Now we never could. It’s a source of regret for me now, carrying its own fascination.
The song Mystify wasn’t a standout track for me on Kick in 1987. I liked it but the song was just one piece in the flow of the album. The only specific memory I have around Mystify back then is hearing a ZMFM DJ wonder whether INXS would release it as a fifth single off Kick. The DJ was all in favour and so was I. To my mind, Kick needed to continue its cultural conquest. Mystify wasn’t released as a single in New Zealand, although it was internationally. Kick inevitably slid out of public view, and soon enough I moved on too.
Much of Kick sounds a little tinny to me now. There’s a sheen to the production that comes off a little shallow and binds the music to a late ’80s timeframe. Mystify somehow lifts free from those restraining elements. The song feels contained and independent—from the album but not solely of the album.
It’s the lyrics, the vibe, of Mystify that keep this track most alive for me. The song is about worship embodied in sexual desire. The young me questions how Michael Hutchence could possibly worship someone else. The current me recognises the pleasures and perils of losing your own identity in the adoration of another, in the giving over of power to the charismatic relationship. Mystify is all in for exaltation. The capturing of a perfect eternal moment, the suggestion that such a moment can offer such value that it transcends, remains.
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It is a mysterious thing what we are drawn to and why. Would we ever really want to get to the bottom of our attraction; would it end the pull if we did? The charisma of the Plan 9 poster partly arises from a conflict between opposing strengths: the iconically “bad” status of the movie contesting the beauty of the image taken from it; the cheap conditions of the production contrasting against the elegance of Vampira’s poise.
Yet I also have a direct interest in the beauty of the shot; how the multiple elements come together just right. And in the beauty of Vampira. Beauty fuels charisma and charisma enhances beauty. Both remain aloof, hanging out together at the edge of my words, never to be fully pinned down.