The Domestic Life of the Jersey Devil

[sprousebill-blog]

The X-Files: The Jersey Devil

The X-Files: “The Jersey Devil”

Air Date: October 8, 1993

Written by Chris Carter; directed by Joe Napolitano

 In which Chris Carter channels the Kallikaks

Based on the evidence of my Twitter feed, Episode Five, Season One of The X-Files (“The Jersey Devil”) is beloved by neither fans of the classic 90s TV series nor fans of the cryptid. X-Files fans see it as a letdown after the promising four episodes that started the series. Chris Carter, for all his conceptual talent, maybe wasn’t a great screenwriter. Likewise Jersey Devil fans—particularly those who think this smiling fellow is photo realism and not a newspaper editor’s joke—object to the Jersey Devil’s depiction as a kind of feral hominid, particularly in an infamous drawing of the creature that looks like it was done by a five-year old.

I was never a devoted X-Files watcher (or even a casual one) so I can’t speak to the relative merits of the episode, but as a devoted observer of all things Jersey-Devil-related I can say that—at least by the standards of that sad genre—this thing isn’t so bad. And there’s reason to think Mulder and Scully were into some interesting territory with their Jersey Devils as East Coast Cave People idea. Also Claire Stansfield plays the monster that sniffs Mulder. So, bonus.

My problems with The X-Files “Jersey Devil” had mostly to do with its setting in Atlantic City and the surrounding wilderness. Not because the Jersey Devil has nothing to do with Atlantic City. Absecon Island’s first permanent euro settler was Jeremiah Leeds (Mother Leeds anyone?) and the northwest tip of the island sits a mere seven miles across Reeds Bay from the very birthplace of the story in Leeds Point itself. No, my (admittedly idiosyncratic) problem is I that grew up in Atlantic City and its suburbs, so seeing those places represented onscreen by what is very obviously Vancouver and its surrounding wilderness struck me as jarringly Canadian. But I quibble.

The episode begins in flashback. A darkened highway. A family sedan drives through a majestic canyon of trees that looks like the Great North Woods but is supposed to be New Jersey in 1947. In fact our Pine Barrens while a national treasure, are notably smaller and scragglier in the tree department. A sign notifies viewers that we are three miles outside of Atlantic City, which in real life would put you in a salt marsh. Or maybe in Pleasantville.

A jarring blowout. The husband (“Paul! PAUL!”) stops to replace the tire and is dragged into the Canadian wilderness by mysterious hands. A search turns up his partially eaten remains the next day. Meaningful glances, exchanged among law enforcement personnel, hint at what’s to come.

A suspect is eventually tracked to a nearby cave where frightened state police, rather than attempt an arrest, fire their weapons blindly into the darkened cave mouth, killing who or whatever is inside. Which it turns out is a “large naked man” or “beast man” who’d eaten father Paul.

We cut to FBI headquarters in the present day where Special Agent Fox Mulder is reading a magazine, Hanky Panky, whose centerfold claims to have been abducted by aliens. Dana Scully interrupts the porn perusal (“anti-gravity’s right!”) to tell Mulder of new partially eaten bodies found outside Atlantic City. “Not an uncommon place to lose a body part.” Is Mulder always this arch? You’d know better than I would.

Scully first brings up the Jersey Devil (a kind of “East Coast Bigfoot”) as a possible perp, but it is Mulder who makes the 1947 connection, theorizing that someone or something out there is hungry. Presumably he means the grandchildren of the large naked man who ate Paul.

Stock footage of the A.C. skyline and the city’s marketing slogan on an expressway overpass. These slogans—constantly replenished from some deep and mediocre P.R. well—were a constant feature of my childhood. If you look closely you can see the Trump Plaza logo on a parking garage.

We are shown scenes of drunken and homeless people, and the interiors of the casinos. At one point a gambler checks the change-slot of a payphone for stray quarters. Of the A.C. scenes, that moment feels most like home to me.

The Jersey Devil episode is kind of infamous among X-Files fans as the one where Scully goes on a date with a man named Rob (“Scott’s dad”) who she meets at her godson’s birthday party. My read of the literature is that fans, while they appreciated the attempt to give Scully a life outside work, are glad the producers didn’t get too carried away with this stuff.

I’m not going to bore you with the details of the investigation into the homeless killings. But suffice it to say that local law enforcement, in the figure of the comically corrupt Detective Thompson, resents the FBI’s presence and appears to be hiding something.

After being stonewalled by the ACPD, Mulder visits the Pine Barrens crime scene in the company of a cooperative park ranger, who admits he shares Mulder’s suspicions that a tribe of feral beastmen—naked humans with accentuated olfactory organs—have been feeding on the homeless, but the man declines to say more, citing concern for his pension, which would be taken away, presumably, if word got back to the bosses that he was an enemy of tourism. No doubt the Trump administration had a direct line to the state treasurer.

Back in A.C. and flying solo now, Mulder meets a homeless man who shows him a sketch (“stuck in a pocket of a jacket I found”) of the thing that’s been eating the homeless people. This is the infamous drawing that has engendered so much backlash among monster enthusiasts, and in fact it is kind of an amazing artifact to behold, a kind of lazily drawn sketch of a hominid, Jackson Browne hair, addressing the viewer in an attitude that is somewhere between Patterson-Gimlin and Walk Like an Egyptian.

I realize it’s supposed to be a naïve representation, but in hindsight maybe the prop people would have done this differently.

 Mulder spends the night in the homeless man’s lean-to and is sniffed by one of the Jersey Devils who comes to rifle the dumpsters. She flees, and when he whistles at her, as if for a taxi, she pauses to consider his overture, and there’s a definite feeling that love is in the air. But this is abruptly shattered when the ACPD show up and arrest Mulder for vagrancy.

A classic jurisdictional dong-waggling scene ensues, with the corrupt Detective Thompson accusing Mulder of obstruction, and Mulder counter-accusing Thompson of withholding evidence. “You know it’s out there,” Mulder says. Meaning the Jersey Devil.

“Whether it’s Hannibal the Cannibal or Elmer Fudd, I’ve got a job to protect people.”

“Who’s going to be responsible when you lose your first tourist?”

Now, my dad was a cop in the Atlantic City Police Department for 25 years and no one has a bleaker view of the malice and ineptitude of that institution than he does, but this feels like a stretch.

Meanwhile Scully goes on her infamous date with Rob. He’s a financial adviser. She’s wearing a doily with shoulder pads. Plainly not that into Rob, when Mulder interrupts with a phone call, she takes the opportunity to hear about the latest twist in the case—a twist considered sexist by some viewers.

At some point Sculder and Mully pause in their travels to pop in at the University of Maryland and talk some anthropological gobbledygook with a professor there (Gregory Sierra). Here Mulder floats his theory that the Jersey Devils are Piney Neanderthals or whatever. It’s highly unlikely, they admit, but, on the other hand, “…it would be an amazing discovery!” And thus a thousand monster hunters are born.

The trio return to A.C. where the anthropologist can’t understand the hostility of the local police to the scientific mission. But Mulder gets him up to speed on the realities of the cop mind (it’s about protecting tourism). Eventually Mulder and Scully manage to get themselves raided by the S.W.A.T. team. During a chase through a warehouse, Mulder is cross-checked by the Jersey Devil—played the 6’1 Stansfield—who crouches astride and sniffs him.

“She was beautiful!” the smitten Mulder says as Scully saves his jam.

“Yeah well she just about ripped your lungs out.”

“A real live Neanderthal on the loose!”

Although she escapes for a time back into the Pine Barrens of British Columbia (cops reporting a man down and a naked woman on the run), the ACPD eventually puts an end to the string of homeless killings. Not to mention 250-plus years of Jersey Devil sightings and any chance of a Nobel Prize for the University of Maryland. Though maybe not so fast. Perhaps there was an entire family of Jersey Devils. She appears to have been a mother.

When we leave the our protagonists, Mulder has an appointment to see an ethno-biologist at the Smithsonian. “I can’t wait to tell him about this.” (I wonder if the Maryland guy feels jilted.)

“Keep it up Mulder—I’ll hurt you like that beast woman.”

“Eight million years out of Africa, guess who’s holding the door?”  

*

In its review of the episode, The Onion’s A.V. Club noted that the producers “took plenty of liberties” with the “legend of the New Jersey Devil [sic]” and gave the episode a C overall, calling it the series’ “first semi-dud.” Similar criticisms came from less distinguished quarters. See for instance this guy who told Chris Carter, in a kind of People Online conference call, that “The Jersey Devil is a completely different entity (feel free to e-mail me and I can send you its complete legend).” (I wonder if he ever did.)

But whether fans knew it or not, the idea of the Jersey Devil as a kind of “beast man” has established antecedents in both the folklore and the history of Southern New Jersey. One version of the story I remember growing up involved a child that had been locked away by its parents in the basement. When the parents grew old and died, the child escaped into the woods of South Jersey, where it became known as the Jersey Devil. Stories collected by Herbert Halpert and Henry Charlton Beck in the 1930s and 40s (sincere folklore instead of the media echo chamber) involve similar situations. And if you were to wander around South Jersey today and ask random people in the streets—or in Wawa convenience stores, as I did—about the Jersey Devil, you’d be at least as likely to hear stories of sick or mistreated children as you would to hear about a fire-breathing kangaroo bat. So Kudos to Chris Carter, I say, for highlighting a version of the Jersey Devil story that’s too often deemphasized in pop culture.

Carter’s beastmen-and-women also have antecedents in a certain set of stereotypes that have collected around the inhabitants of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. I refer of course to the infamous “Pineys” of South Jersey myth and legend.

Pineys and the Jersey Devil go together like cheese and toast and have done so at least since the 1850s when the legend of the Leeds Devil first appeared in a magazine article about the “Pine Rats”, scourge of the blueberry and cranberry industries.

In some sense the Jersey Devil is the ur-Piney, born on the fringes of the Pine Barrens, to probable Piney parents, and currently living in the woods. And in the stereotype, the Piney was a kind of failed human, wild man or agricultural pest. In 1912, stereotypes about Pineys were given the veneer of science when a psychologist (or pseudo-psychologist) H.H. Goddard argued that the Pine Barrens had been a catch basin for feebleminded morons (a term he is credited with introducing into English) who were over-represented among the population of the woods, where they effectively represented a different species, “a vigorous animal organism of low intellect but strong physique—the wild man of today.” (Goddard, 1914).

Piney stereotypes were still strong enough in the 1960s that John McPhee was led to observe that there lingered, even among the “gentlest” of people, an idea that the woods contained “a weird and sometimes dangerous people who live in caves, marry their sisters, and eat snakes.”

Do I think Carter was consciously referencing the Goddard/Piney myth? I guess I’d be surprised. But it takes no great anthropological wit to see the parallels between the Piney creation myth and the Jersey Devil story: the poverty, the sprawling families, the sexual incontinence of the mother (Mrs. Leeds), and presto: a failed human, a vigorous animal organism, the wild man of today. And maybe Carter is drawing our attention to this in his focus on the homeless, who form their own neglected underclass in Atlantic City.

From this perspective, 22 years later, the idea that feels most dated about The X-Files’ Jersey Devil story is the conspiracy angle. Not because Jersey Devil conspiracies have gone out of fashion, but because they come now in at least two complimentary flavors: those that suppose a suppression of Jersey Devil evidence to protect tourism, and those that see a motive to invent a Jersey Devil to promote it in the form of monster hunters. Admittedly, these latter type probably spend less at the casinos.

[sprousebill-blog]

The Areas of Whose Expertise?

The Monster Project: Jersey Devil NatGeo WILD October 26, 2013

NatGeo WILD’s take on our favorite cryptid (Monster Project: Jersey Devil) first aired on October 26, 2013, a mere five days before the publication of my splendid book (the book Amazon says “contains real page numbers”) and so I was unable to include it in my material on the epidemic of nonsense documentaries about the Jersey Devil that have been produced in the years since the movie The Blair Witch Project came out (1999) and taught the entertainment industry finally how to capitalize on old-fashioned folklore by sending teams of monster hunters into the woods with night-vision cameras, a meme-set that cable TV executives have been frantically dry-humping into oblivion for last 15 years.

Unfortunate timing for me, undoubtedly, because The Monster Project: Jersey Devil represents the very apotheosis of the genre. Present somewhere is a shark, but whether the Monster Project represents the jumping of that shark, or merely its long, slow descent into the formless void, to become a buffet for crabs, is a question for savvier pop-culture minds than mine. What’s certain is NatGeo established certain outer limits of the pseudo-documentary genre, beyond which further parody is no longer possible.

Format: Comedian Judah Friedlander (30 Rock, The Wrestler), wearing his trademark silly hat, delivers bland one-liners while standing on the edge of a forest (“Anyone ever see the Jersey Devil? You know why you haven’t? ‘Cause we’re in New York”). Interspersed are interviews with eye-witnesses and true believers–the odd skeptic thrown in for objectivity–a set piece on a paranormal museum’s Jersey Devil collection, the requisite Jersey Devil hunt with a monster-hunter crew and the novel touch of a psychic medium’s attempting to communicate with the Jersey Devil’s long-dead mother.

Confession: Of the main segments, I watched fully only two, because I live in Mexico City, where we don’t get NatGeo in my apartment. Also, after fifteen years of this horseshit, the thought of sitting through another Jersey Devil doc is basically unbearable to me. Yet here we are.

Of the two segments, the visit to the Paranormal Museum in Asbury Park was kind of charming. Though NatGeo incorrectly identified the museum as being in Smithville (fully 55 miles south) they dealt tactfully with Kathy Kelly, the proprietor, who brought the audience up to speed on the state of the art (“I would say within the last five or six years, the popularity of the Jersey Devil has just exploded, and people are looking at their world in a different way”) and recited her favorite Jersey Devil story, about a father-son camping trip into the Pine Barrens. This was dramatized in the finest Unsolved Mysteries manner. A young man whittles a stick by a campfire. The father—played it looks like by Russell Juelg, a well-known South Jersey folklorist—tells of the Jersey Devil, which seems to hover around the fringes of the camp as he speaks, illustrating the old superstition that–absit omen–naming calls. In the end the campers are chased from their tent by the imminent flapping of wings, fleeing the Pine Barrens in their four-wheel drive and illustrating the other (reassuring) New Jersey principle that any environment now matter how frightening can be normalized simply by getting into one’s car.

Spot two, the Jersey Devil hunt, was notably less charming. By the time NatGeo got on the Jersey Devil train the usual huntspersons were no longer available. Harry Leeds, the star of so many Jersey Devil entertainments (and a descendant of Mother Leeds herself) had died sadly, and the most knowledgeable crew of investigators, the Devil Hunters group headed by Laura Leuter, had gone into retirement.  Thus we are left with the Southern Jersey Shore Paranormal Research and Investigations group, who didn’t seem very South Jersey to me. Or very investigator-ly.

We are introduced to them before sunset, pre-hunt, where Lori Flurichock, the presiding spokeswoman, makes a kind of Joe Namath-style guarantee that the group will find the Jersey Devil that very night. This is a break with convention, which usually requires a display of token modesty before we set off to win the Nobel Prize and rewrite all the science books.

After a quick pep talk, we plunge into the underbrush where the huntspersons look alternately confused, overwrought and baffled. The sounds of the forest (noises, faint noises in the distance) inspire fear and confusion. Perhaps some of it real.

There are the familiar green-and-black night-vision shots in the classic Blair Witch tradition. The ladies’ faces are broadcast at unflattering angles as they say not very clever things. The night-vision makes their eyes look beady and sinister, the way old pictures of Pineys were doctored to make their subjects look depraved and sinister.

Meanwhile, Friedlander makes borderline insufferable jokes at the expense of the huntspersons, who have been encouraged in this business by the presence of his camera crews. This feels exploitative. Are we watching a fringe nature show, or is this just reality TV, gawking at the hapless locals who are being manipulated for the benefit of the bored and jaded audience at home? My question is not rhetorical.

At one point Kathy or Patty—I couldn’t tell which—appeared to be in genuine distress, announcing that her heart was going a hundred miles a minute, a rare glimmer of humanity in such entertainments. The Friedlander response: “A hundred miles a minute is actually the speed at which the Jersey Devil could chew your intestines.” This is not his finest showbiz hour.

The NatGeo Monster Project is not the first instance of a comedy hipster’s addressing the famous cryptid from New Jersey. I refer of course to Apple spokesman John Hodgman’s 2005 book The Areas of My Expertise which includes the parody folk tale Jesse Lee Bowen and the New Jersey Devil (“Bowen first saw the cloven-hooved, wiry-haired, waist-high New Jersey Devil in the woods behind his home in Englewood”) but the NatGeo thing fails even by that modest standard.

A hypothesis I’d like to see someone test someday: Audiences were more offended by Friedlander’s hipster costume than they were by the decision to send a professional comedian to investigate the Jersey Devil, which may at any rate be seen as a rare moment of candor in an otherwise low, dishonest decade and a half since Blair Witch.

There has always been an element of social-class tourism in big-time media’s transitory dalliances with the Jersey Devil story. Which is maybe why Friedlander’s mesh hat and mom jeans struck such an aggressive note. The middle or upper-middle class hipster pursues ironically what, he imagines, the working-classes pursue in sad sober earnest. I quote from the comments section, a certain “Chris Frost.”

“The whole thing is treated with such a snarky hipster contempt that it makes you want to punch your TV screen.”

Bless.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/wild/the-monster-project/episodes/jersey-devil/

[sprousebill-blog]

Announcement: Critical Essays In Jersey Devil Studies

Courteous Reader,

It is nearly two years since I published a little book called The Domestic Life of the Jersey Devil, a work so scandalous and indeed overflowing with heresies and innovations that it has been ignored, with a few polite exceptions, both by the New Jersey history establishment and by the cryptozoological community, whose long-held assumptions on that infamous monster the book ventured so impolitely to challenge.

By way of celebrating the second anniversary of my enchanting book’s publication—which has changed my (dismal) career prospects not one bit—and by way of marketing the thing in the run-up to Halloween, it is my intention to publish here at irregular intervals over the next two months some little critical essays on the recent (and not-so-recent) work done by my peers in that robust and vibrant field of Jersey Devil studies.

Cynical people may say that, since I will be writing about my rivals, such work must be inherently conflicted, and I acknowledge that it does represent an inversion of the natural publishing order, where one is more apt to find flattering commentary written by an author’s covert allies than candid criticism written by his or her competitors. But I make no claims to objectivity, only transparency.

TV drama, faux-documentary, the podcast, the odd scholarly performance, maybe a song or two—these will constitute the varieties of monster phenomena to be considered here. Contestants will be judged on the quality of their bullshit, that ineffable blend of authoritativeness and abject nonsense that students of the Jersey Devil have come to know so well. It is my hope that, through the diligent application of a principle, we may uncover some new developments in the field, and perhaps expose some old ones. I am not optimistic.

Yours in truth,

Sprouse

nA�� @�

[sprousebill-blog]

My uncle, the Jersey Devil: One man's quest to set the record straight on a N.J. legend

Wherein two skeptics go hunting for the Leeds Devil on the outskirts of the Pine Barrens

(please buy my book)

[todaysdocument]

Aftermath of Hurricane Diane, August 20, 1955

Hurricane Diane struck the Atlantic coast from August 17 through August 19, 1955. Coming only days after Hurricane Connie, the storm resulted in extensive flooding as rivers overflowed and dams collapsed, and caused over 180 deaths and widespread damage across the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.  

Flooding in Easton, Pennsylvania during Hurricane Diane, 8/20/1955. Series: Civil Defense Photographs, 1951 - 1961. Record Group 304: Records of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, 1947 - 1962  

Road Destruction, Holyoke, Mass. 8/20/55; 6-7 Jackson St. Washout. Series: Historical Photographs of Flood Events, 1927 - 1984. Record Group 77: Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, 1789 - 1999  

Flooding at Warren Street in Trenton, New Jersey during Hurricane Diane, 8/20/1955.  Series: Civil Defense Photographs, 1951 - 1961. Record Group 304: Records of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, 1947 - 1962

Flooding at Main Street in Winsted, Connecticut during Hurricane Diane, 1955. Series: Civil Defense Photographs, 1951 - 1961. Record Group 304: Records of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, 1947 - 1962

More photos from Hurricane Diane and the Flood of 1955 in the National Archives Catalog

[sprousebill-blog]

Onward, Into the Fog

Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice"

Vintage Al Cabal on a summer romance

[memewhore]

[sprousebill-blog]

Growing up with the Jersey Devil

[hot-leaf-juice]

we live in the generation of innovation

[shockingly-illogical]

This little cutie was sitting on the wall next to our front door. After a little research, I found he is a pink legged tiger moth.