I’m trapped and there’s no way out. That’s the common theme in Harlan Ellison’s collection of short stories, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream. It is possible that even death won’t end your problems.
The titular story is one that resonates well today. We stand in the shadow of a looming AI tech revolution. Silicon Valley wants to create sentient supercomputers that can think, act, and calculate in mass scales too big for our tiny human brains to comprehend. The thought that computers might dominate and even destroy us is improbable as of now, but it is plausible enough to cause dread and fear in the minds of anybody who thinks about it for a few minutes. In Ellison’s story, an omniscient and omnipotent computer called AM has been created. It learns to hate the human race and kills everybody save for a small group of people. AM keeps them alive simply to torture them. They are imprisoned inside the computer and spend their lives searching for food. None of them like each other. They are also prevented from dying because AM doesn’t want to allow them to escape their pain through death. Since the narrator can’t commit suicide, he does the only thing he can think of to hurt AM. Read it for yourself to find out what happens.
This story is short and direct. It’s like the horror of learning that your head and body will continue living after being guillotined, even though the two are no longer attached. It’s emblematic of a man who feels imprisoned by his own mind and sees no way of solving his problems. The theme of an omnipotent computer isn’t the point of the story; this is really just an allegory about a man who feels overwhelmed by his own self-loathing and mental instability. A deep analytical dive isn’t necessary to understand this. If it has any definite message though, it is that mortality is a necessary part of life.
In one way or another, all the other stories in this collection are about entrapment anddeath. “Big Sam Was My Friend” is about a circus performer who goes in search of his true love. The search makes him miserable and when he finds her, she doesn’t want him. “Eyes of Dust” is about a boy living in a world where anybody who isn’t beautiful gets put to death. The boy is born blind and his parents hide him away in a secret cellar room where he has visions of beautiful things that other people on the planet can’t see. “World Of the Myth” tells the story of a middle aged man who lives a mundane life as an office worker. He fantasizes about an afterlife where he is a heroic dragon fighter, but when he dies he is denied access to this paradise because he hadn’t earned it. He spent his life dreaming instead of pursuing his dreams and so he gets nothing in the end. “Lonelyache” involves a divorced man who seeks liberation from the prison of marriage in extreme promiscuity only to find that sleeping with tons of woman is nothing more than another kind of prison. In “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, a prostitute dies in a casino and her spirit enters into a slot machine. One man begins playing the possessed machine and finds it to be the loosest slot in Las Vegas. He hits the jackpot every time he pulls the lever. Since he is a lonesome drifter with no money, this is like a dream come true. But winning against the odds is just another trap with no way out except death.
Two of these stories, “Eyes of Dust” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, have a bit more depth than the other three which are more surface level and self-explanatory. “Eyes of Dust” is set in a city named Light located on the planet Topaz. Initially the city and its people are described as being purely beautiful. The aforementioned blind boy, hidden away in a cellar, is physically unattractive, therefore his parents keep him secret to prevent him from being killed. He is more soulful and able to access beauty through education and imagination. But when the house he is hidden in burns down, the people of Light discover him and burn him at the stake for not being good looking. This appears to be a direct reference to the way the medieval Catholic church burned heretics and witches during the Inquisition.
At the end of the story, Light is described as an ugly place even though the city itself has not changed, When the existence of the blind boy is revealed, the ugliness of the people of Light is revealed since the execution shows how they are possessed of no inner depth. The blind boy has inner vision which allows him to find inner beauty, but the others lose that possibility by sacrificing him for the sake of maintaining the shallowness of the status quo and the over-valuation of surface appearances. Their exterior beauty is only achieved by suppressing their inner ugliness. At the end of the story when Light is described as ugly, the inner darkness of its inhabitants, as revealed through burning the boy at the stake, causes the subjective perception of ugliness to override the superficial appearance of perfection. We see how the people of Light are trapped by their own lack of depth just the blind boy is trapped because of his blindness even though he can actually see a lot more than they can. Beauty is only skin deep. It’s a cliché, but it is a cliché that is well articulated in this allegory.
“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” tells the story of Kostner, a loser who rolls into Las Vegas to spend his last bit of money gambling, and Maggie Moneyeyes, a Native American prostitute who crosses his path in a sense. After growing up in poverty, Maggie enters the world of prostitution as a means of class mobility. When she finishes serving a repulsive client in a Las Vegas hotel, she goes down to the casino to spend her money on the slots. But she dies and her spirit enters the machine she is playing.
This can be interpreted as a bit racist since the association of Native people with mystical powers if a way of fetishizing and exoticizing them. Endowing Maggie with magic powers by turning her into a spirit that possesses a slot machine could be a way of denying her humanity. White people have a tendency to write about non-white people as though they are mysterious creatures found in some distant galaxy in a show like Star Trek. But then again, many Native Americans openly embrace their spiritual traditions and culture. The question to ask is if this story would still have the same impact if Maggie Moneyeyes was written as a white character. I’ll allow you to answer that for yourself.
Anyhow, Kostner enters the casino and plays the slot machine that is possessed by Maggie Moneyeyes’ spirit. And he wins. In fact, he wins big. Then he wins big again and again. Every time he plays he hits the jackpot. Kostner becomes a media sensation and attracts large crowds who watch him win repeatedly. The casino management is suspicious that he is cheating, but they believe the attention to be good publicity for drawing in more gamblers and let him stay. But when Kostner stops playing, he dies.
Maggie and Kostner are thematically linked by their poverty. Both of them end up in the casino because they see having money as a way out of their problems. For them, money is a magic key that opens the doors of their figurative prison cells. I recall Karl Marx saying in Capital that money is a kind of magic that makes people believe they can get whatever they want. But while money may relieve the two main characters from their poverty, it just moves them into another prison cell rather than freeing them. Kostner loses everything when he stops playing and ends up dead; Maggie can only live by being entrapped inside a slot machine. Kostner is the body and Maggie is the soul and through the medium of the slot machine the two are joined.
Maggie is sexualized in her role as a prostitute and Kostner, pulling the lever and depositing coins into the machine, could easily be interpreted as sexualized as well. The big payoff at the end of every attempt could be interpreted as the sexual climax. Playing the slot machine almost has an element of Pagan fertility folk magic in the way that ceremonially seeding an agricultural field field brings forth a harvest. The stronger the magic, the bigger the harvest. Both Kostner and Maggie are sexual outsiders. Remember that Kistner’s marriage failed. It is through their erotic connection, sublimated through the act of playing the slot machine, that they fulfill their needs for both money and companionship. This fulfillment is possible for Kostner in his interaction with Maggie who is both sexualized and supernatural, a meeting place where magic is believed to be possible. But without the slot machine they no longer connect. Therefore their luck and their lives end. The only way out of their trap is death.
Ellison writes an introduction to each story in this short collection. He explains that these were all written as therapy during a time of crisis in his life when he struggled with failed relationships, heavy drug and alcohol use, and other unspecified mental health issues. The connection between his frustrations and the themes in these stories is easy to see. I do, however, find it anooying when an author explains the meaning of their own work as a part of the work. He tells you about the sources of these stories without giving the reader a chance to encounter them on their own terms. This is a small annoyance though. In any case, I think Ellison, with his prickly personality, enjoyed annoying people.
I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream doesn’t offer any profound thoughts. These stories aren’t philosophical screeds. More than anything they are brief outbursts of anger from a man who feels there is no way out of the problems he has. In that sense it succeeds. If you’ve been there before, you can relate. Existence is a prison, but the worst prison of all is the one inside your own mind. Maybe Harlan Ellison could have followed George Clinton’s advice: free your mind and your ass will follow. Sometimes music and dancing are all you need.
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