Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [34]
Outside his house there may have been chaos and sin, but inside was a very different story. His mother, Caroline Craven, ran the place like a totalitarian state: information flow was closely monitored, and order maintained through strict rules enforced by the threat of punishment—the eternal kind. A Baptist pessimist with a ninth-grade education, she had a sad, rigid mouth hardened after a lifetime of tough luck and difficult men. Her anxiety found its expression in her constantly twirling thumbs.
Caroline took care of her husband, who drank heavily and left her right before he died. The rest of her family was filled with heavy drinkers, so she was used to taking care of difficult men. She never remarried or even dated, and instead poured all her energy, love, and moral rectitude into her children, including the delicate youngest child, Wes. To him, her watchful gaze was always disapproving. Battling sin was a fulltime job—it required vigilance. Suspicion swirled around that house, a sense that Catholics were idolaters and outsiders. No cursing! No sex! Forget the movies! Caroline watched Disney cartoons. That was it.
Dan O’Bannon’s father could be scary, too, but he had a wandering, curious mind. The house that Craven grew up in was more constricted. His mother refused to talk about race or sex or politics or anything unpleasant. These taboo subjects, particularly sex, fascinated Craven, but he played the good son and kept quiet. On his mother’s insistence, he went to Wheaton College, a strict Christian school that only reinforced his paranoia. Craven stayed away from movies and attempted not to think of sex. He went to chapel every day. In his first year of school, at the age of nineteen, he suffered a viral infection in his spine that temporarily paralyzed him from the chest down. It hospitalized him for two months, and in that time, his life changed.
His plan to enter the army and become a fighter pilot was abandoned, and he started writing poetry and short stories, some with dark themes. He adored Kafka. It was during his hospital stay that he met his future wife, Bonnie Broecker, a redheaded nurse, who shared his fundamentalist background. When entering his room for the first time, she remembers his mother sitting, sternly, with a downturned mouth, thumbs spinning. Craven plucked at a guitar nearby. He looked fragile, her idea of a sensitive bohemian. She could tell, however, that the mother was trouble.
After dropping out of school, Craven began dating Bonnie, a Wheaton alum with a better attendance record. Soon after they began seeing each other, he was accepted into the Johns Hopkins master’s program in literature, where he studied under Elliott Coleman, a deacon who told him that he needed a more expanded idea of Christianity. Coleman encouraged Craven’s writing, telling him, at one point, that he displayed a “visual” style that would make a great screenplay. Coleman also gave Craven romantic advice, telling him that if he wanted to fulfill his potential, he couldn’t let his long-distance girlfriend get in the way. Craven, under his sway, called her and broke up. Weeks later, he realized his mistake and proposed marriage. They had known each other hardly a year.
Craven seemed different from other boys, and different was what Bonnie was looking for after a life steering clear of sin and obeying her parents. If he had problems with his family, she could fix those. The important thing was to get married and have kids. So they eloped.
As soon as he graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1964, Craven found work as an assistant professor of literature in a small town in Pennsylvania, before moving to a similar job at Clarkson, an engineering school in Potsdam, New York. It was a conservative campus, resistant to the kinds of protests that were exploding at big-city schools throughout the country. Still, Craven managed to find a group of like-minded freethinkers: artists, musicians, and poets who were sympathetic to the antiwar movement and dreamed of