The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, Day 22: Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992)

Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992)

Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007)

This'll be a quickie, I promise. There's almost not enough to warrant an article here, but I wanted to point something out to you.

In the early '90s, around the same time I stumbled upon Danny Peary's Cult Movies (1981), I discovered another strange book that changed my mind forever: Robert Anton Wilson's Reality is What You Can Get Away With (1992). Would you believe it was at the same bookstore? That's right. Young & Welshans in Flint, Michigan. I believe that building is an Outback Steakhouse now. 

Robert Anton Wilson was... well, it's tough to describe what he was. Sci-fi author, psychologist, guru, and intergalactic wiseguy. Imagine a hybrid of Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx. He was too intellectually rambunctious to be contained by any one category or genre, so his career went in a lot of different directions simultaneously. (Kind of like Ed Wood's, now that I think of it.) 

Reality—its title inspired by a quote from another visionary fruitcake, Hunter S. Thompson—is one of Robert's many oddball projects to manifest itself over the years. It's presented as "an illustrated screenplay," but it's a script that's meant to be read, not produced. Still with me? To make things even more convoluted, Wilson has added a framing device wherein this unproduced screenplay has been discovered by academics in the distant future. They're puzzling over this artifact from a strange and primitive time, i.e. the 1990s.

But what of the script itself? Well, it's a rapid-fire montage of short (sometimes very short) scenes, all flowing into and out of each other like a dream or a particularly surreal Monty Python episode. Imagine if you got very stoned one night and started flipping through all the channels on your TV. Except that your perception of reality is skewed, so you imagine the characters in movies, TV shows, and commercials saying all kinds of unlikely things. 

If it were actually produced, Reality is What You Can Get Away With would consist of some wholly original footage, plus a generous helping of stock footage and clips from various movies. Those clips would be dubbed with new comedic dialogue, a la What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) or Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection (1985-86). (The future academics I mentioned have a hell of a time understanding this aspect of the script.)

Among the movies Wilson would have ransacked: The Phantom Planet (1961), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), The Third Man (1949), The Outlaw (1943), The Thief of Baghdad (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Woman in Green (1945), Crack in the Mirror (1960), and Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Eddie would be glad to know that two of his cinematic idols, Orson Welles and Jane Russell, play important roles in the film.

Throughout the screenplay, Wilson draws on the iconography of old, cheap science-fiction movies, so it's only natural that there should be some Ed Wood in the mix. The Plan 9 content, however, is fleeting. Early on, the film's protagonist, Ignatz Ratskiwatski, watches a film called Plan 3 from Outer Space on television. 

Much later in the script, Wilson includes a clip from Plan 9 featuring chiropractor Tom Mason filling in for the late Bela Lugosi. The book is heavily illustrated with photos, so I wanted to show you a scanned page from Reality including a picture of Dr. Tom:

A page from Reality.

Wilson's script includes the Plan 9 scene in which the Ghoul Man (Bela Lugosi/Tom Mason) enters the Trents' house and scares Paula Trent (Mona McKinnon) while she's in bed. Paula, identified in Reality merely as a "housewife," rises in terror. But the Ghoul Man, identified as a chiropractor, reassures her with this iconic line: "It's okay, I don't have an erection." (Erection jokes are a motif throughout the script.) Paula then dashes out of the house and into the cemetery, where she promptly runs into Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, who asks to borrow "some sugar... and maybe a few lines of coke." Wilson then cuts to some novelty bumper stickers (including "Campus Crusade for Cthulu").

And that's it. That's the extent of the Ed Wood content in Reality is What You Can Get Away With. It's not much, I understand, but I think it's noteworthy that a major author like Robert Anton Wilson would draw from Plan 9, however briefly, in one of his strangest and most memorable books.