Inside my mind was a human being. It was a person who I once was and who I once could be. This person no longer exists on this planet except as a prisoner of those who hate him. Perhaps a word like hate is too strong a term…. They simply don’t care. As for this man, this human being who once existed as an idealistic young man, as a selfish young man and as a lustful young man, he has been tortured and placed in a cell of his own mind…. It is this place where madness twists the soul and the souls of weaker men are given to being, if not broken, then at times shattered…. And yet then able to pick himself up again and hold himself together if only for a moment of pain. The pain can be unbearable, for if you remember, it is all in the mind. Moment after moment.
Such is the nature of the prison of the closet. For some it is little more than an inconvenience, while for others it is all consuming both in terms of their physical and mental selves. We have seen those who are totally insane and trapped inside their skulls, and I certainly can know the feeling sometimes…. Perhaps not really, but I do get a sense of isolation when there are no others around, but I do not necessarily want to take over the world. It is claustrophobia even on Earth.
I mention the closet when it comes to the semi-cult movie Cameron’’s Closet (1988) as the film is rather an epic on the subject of ‘the closet’ in a rather juvenile sense…. At the beginning of the movie we have young Cameron who has a tortured father in the form of Tab Hunter (1931-2018 cardiac arrest) who is some sort of mad doctor by the name of Owen Lansing who is in turn torturing his son with satanism after young Cameron ventures into his closet and finds not sex manuals but satanic idols which possess the power to give the boy and the cast a bad time for the running time of the movie. Central to the theme of the closet is the fact that actor Hunter was a closeted homosexual for much of his acting life in the 1950s. It was an ‘outing’ in John Waters’ Polyester (1981) which saw the actor finally come to terms with his sexuality. So, Hunter’s angry and symbolically closeted character makes for good wraparound star value which is what they do with marquee names in cheap movies and that is to put the star at the beginning and the end.
Ten-year-old Cameron’s telekinetic abilities have grown “more paranoid over the last three years” but it wasn’t until the night the boy was playing in his own closet that his father said: “It’s dangerous, it’s going too far” about the psychic realm of his closet. Tortured Tab then lulls Cameron to sleep with tales of seagulls and gets out a machete as he goes call his professor boyfriend saying he must “destroy the tape”. Tab Hunter then defiles his son’s closet before a freak accident with the machete in that very closet could possibly scar Cameron for life as his father loses his head. I mean, Cameron’s already got various psychic powers recorded on the tape. Then the main story kicks in with Cameron moving to a new house with his mother and a cop with nightmares is going to investigate the case.
“There’s nothing wrong with my head,” says the cop with nightmares, who obviously has a messed up closet in terms of his working life. And we are not talking sexual closet here. Cameron has no sexual closet as he is not even yet a teenager. The closet is physical and metaphorical in terms of the mind … The closets are our heads and our heads are totally fucked up in some cases during the movie. The movie Cameron’s Closet is like any other cult movie in that itself is closet space which is interesting to keep new information on or to let it scare us to death and give us nightmares. This movie won’t scare you to death…
Meanwhile Cameron’s mother’s new boyfriend is prone to violently bullying Cameron as he cries out “show a little respect!” like a typical father figure type closet case who had in turn been b bullied by his own father…. Cameron retires to his closet to play violently with a wrestling toy in reflection with the behaviour he was just experienced from his carer’s own closet of an angry mind. The closet is a child and within that child is a closet…. That almost seems perfect and unaffected…. And it is central to the formation of a boy’s character. The thing about Cameron’s Closet is it is about to manifest itself into something beyond the child’s mind. The psychic energy which is mainly negative has been pulled from those around him. And it would appear it is the influence of the male figures in his life which have contributed to the horror that is his extremely messy and sadistic closet.
“I’ve been hearing these voices that keep telling me to go fuck myself,” says one policeman of possible remnant after visiting the psychiatrist …. “You don’t hear voices?,” he asks. And he is dismissed as a nut case but seems far more happier than the cop with recurrent nightmares.
“What are you hiding in the closet, anyway” … asks the bullying step-father-boyfriend to Cameron… There is no answer except monsters and those monsters are those who ask the questions in the first place…. as for an answer to the question: “Who were you talking to…?” … “Someone in my closet.”
The fact that people talk to someone in their closet, whether it is their own self in their head, whether it is a voice or voices from over the hill or down the road which we may or may not want to call remnant or Red Planet, or is it something more disturbed in the sense that nothing is there, or perhaps something imagined and evil is actually there? Take your pick. Is there really a self that you talk to, or is it simply a great void of embarrassment? The self…. Yes, I’m sure I’m there.
Meanwhile, the concept that a child with psychic ability can inadvertently turn negative energy from a violent or closeted adult into his own negative energy is typical of unfortunate learned experience is the individual and remains another cornerstone of the movie. The male adult characters in Cameron’s Closet appear to be more narcissistic in nature rather than thoughtful and nurturing and are thus more destructive in terms of other male characters such as the moralistic cop and the female characters which don’t seem to count in this movie.
The devil worship angle with the small idol kept with Cameron’s toys in his closet gives us the idea that various objects can carry associations or fetishist connotations which carry associations of either good or evil. They could also carry bad feelings left over from other people… Like you wouldn’t keep a Manson knife around the house?…. Is it true that the object alone does not carry memory but only the people who pass between it? Thus you would throw out memories of a bad relative.
What you keep in your closet is likely to influence the outcome of your future or your children’s future…. Just don’t leave possible demonic objects around just like in Cameron’s Closet. The outward thrust of the closet theory is that the bedroom for the child, the posters, the books, the toys spill forth from the leftovers of the closet and its is detritus which remains like the turd monster which reveals itself momentarily before Cameron is almost decapitated by his ceiling fan.
Do we really expect to find treasures in our physical closet, just like our mental closet, it is littered with junk that we’d rather forget.
“What were you and Lansing Owen doing to that boy?” Is the question on everybody’s lips as Tab Hunter’ partner opens up: “He believed he could open u the vast unused power of the mind… which was done best through the mind of a child which had not yet learned its limitations.”
The thought that a child’s mind is sacrosanct and deserves that sanctity for as long as possible while creating it’s own closet for private thought and play has been despoiled by the two interfering scientists and the karma this wreaks is another cornerstone of Cameron’s Closet.
As for the nightmare prone policeman, he goes through a cathartic sequence with his latently homosexual buddy although it is hardly in the sexual sense. The film, incidentally, is thoroughly Italian with the production littered with Italian names including the Italian looking Gary Brandner (1930-2013 oesophageal cancer) who wrote The Howling trilogy and was responsible for the screenplay for Cameron’s Closet. The director was Armand Mastroianni (1948-) who made He Knows You’re Alone (1980) before moving on to generally television.
As we later learn in the movie, Cameron can throw images with his mind, something akin to the voices and images of remnant. People are still getting murdered by what appears to be by a “demon from the depths of hell.” Can we compare this to the terrorists of remnant who can bully and throw images to the point where a person trapped in their closet has no other choice but to commit suicide? There are those on this planet with closets of their own it would seem which are totally evil and yet not self destructive and they in turn destroy the innocent or even the guilty and less strong. Cameron on the other hand is a benign form of image thrower until he has been simply pushed too far.
Add a sexual level and the closet may very well have an amoral level… as I am certain it does in every day life. But add the reality of the streets and the closet is little more than respite for those who want to play out their deepest darkest fantasies on the streets. For the criminal, the closet is the last place of respite… or escape or plans for that latest fantasy. As for the mad, it can no longer be that place for escape and instead can only be escaped from. Thus the fine line between criminality and madness. For the thinker, it can be claustrophobic as well as liberating. For the sexually inclined it is a masturbatory hell, or simply a little black book of bodies to look back on.
The closet can become a hell for those who are trapped within or those who do not really believe in its existence. Out of the closet and you are into others! Hide your Harry Potter books there, or the hell of hallucinatory HP Lovecraft monsters tentacles and all…. To unforgettable childhood abuse both sexual the physical…. The closet forms us and is probably nothing more than our collective demons, which are led by one demon, sometimes disembodied and often in hiding known as the self.
Make what you will of the end of the movie Cameron’s Closet but there is a sequence where Tab Hunter returns as a demon which goes to show that every boy should beware his father figure in terms of forming his character as a psychic killer – of each other…. Cameron meets The Gatekeeper at the end of this journey and this satanic Zuul sees the boy able to shut his closet door and become able to control it. It is an ending of sorts to control the ravings and nightmares of the closet.
Cult Film Alley 