The Billionth Monkey is the hilarious new weird fantasy novel from Richard Kaczynski.
In this blog, I will walk through the book and, post by post, explore its clues, Easter eggs, and references to popular and nerd culture. Some references are obvious, while others are what Mystery Science Theater 3000 might call "1% jokes."
SPOILERS AHEAD. If you haven't read the book yet, you may want to explore the other pages in the nav bar below.
There are only two acceptable answers to the question, “What’s in the box?”
One is the oft-quoted scene from Dune (1984), in which the inquirer is Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachhan):
The other is this scene from the classic finale of Seven or Se7en (1995):
Don’t click play on the YouTube video below if you haven’t seen the movie, as it’s well worth seeing in its entirety. If you know the film, then press play and reread this scene in The Billionth Monkey for all the little details included in my little homage. (Belanger’s injuries and elastic plasters at this point in our story even match those of Brad Pitt.) It’s one of many reasons that my wife often teased that I was actually writing a screenplay.
OK, I suppose there is one other answer to our titular question… (excuse the subtitles, this is the only version I could find on YouTube):
Who knows? Perhaps The Billionth Monkey has added another acceptable answer to the list.
Trivia: “What’s in the box?” is also the title of a classic 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone.
As The Billionth Monkey rockets toward its conclusion, the pop culture references come fast and furious. None on pages 212–220 qualify for a dedicated post, but here’s a breakdown of what you’ll encounter:
The Tweezer post on page 212 contains only one numerological Easter egg: 121 (from 121 likes) is the valuation of “play” transliterated as פלאי.
Next up on page 214 is the topic of Flemish self portraits, which refers to Nina Katchadourian’s series of cell-phone selfies which she calls “Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style.” It was all the rage on social media when I was writing The Billionth Monkey, so it found a happy home in this scene.
The Fortean Times (page 217) is the glossy British magazine devoted to documenting the world of strange phenomena since 1991. Its namesake is American writer Charles Fort (1874–1932), whose books documented anomalous and unexplained phenomena such as rains of frogs, spontaneous human combustion, ball lightning, UFOs, and teleportation (a term coined by Fort). The magazine’s circulation is approximately 14,000 copies, or 1/28th of the London Times.
This issue of the Fortean Times (#337) just went on sale February 4.
The line “It’s an alien!” (page 217) comes from a gag in BBC’s Doctor Who spin-off series Torchwood. In the episode “Something Borrowed,” Gwen (Eve Myles) remarks “Look. One bit me last night. Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t. I’m pregnant, Rhys isn’t the father, it’s an alien.” Then, pointing to her belly, she reiterates, “It’s an alien!”
“Mr. Undercover” on page 218 is a reference to the famous Tolkien parody, Bored of the Rings. In that book, Frodo’s alias at the Prancing Pony, “Mister Underhill,” becomes “Mister Undercover.” Rather than going with a straightforward Tolkien pun here, I decided to go more obscure!
A rare first edition Bored of the Rings that has not been dog-eared, resin-stained, and turned into a bong.
“No sir, I’m a professor” on page 220 references a classic scene from The Blues Brothers (1980). When the brothers are asked if they’re the police, Elwood replies deadpan, “No ma’am, we’re musicians.”
Before seeing the premiere of the Blues Brothers back when I was a wee nerd, my buddy and I dressed up as Jake and Elwood, went to the mall, and had bogus photo IDs made. I am told that the clerk quit shortly thereafter, saying “Now I’ve seen everything.” On the way to the theater we stopped for White Castle. When the cashier asked, “Are you guys serious?” without skipping a beat I replied, “No, ma’am, we’re musicians.”
Destiny Jones shows off her geek-fu when she refers to Nicholas Young as “Larry Talbot” (page 210). Lawrence Stuart Talbot was the title character in the 1941 monster movie The Wolf Man…along with subsequent sequels such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). He was portrayed in all these films by the great Lon Chaney Jr. This reference is Destiny’s way of connecting Nicholas to her college paper about classic movie monsters.
The Holmes & Rahe Stress Scale (page 211) is a colloquial term for the Social Readjustment Rating Scale developed by psychologists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe in 1967 based on the idea that stress predisposes one to illness. The measure consists of 43 stressful life events such as job loss, moving, death of a loved one, etc. Each of these is assigned a predetermined number of “life change units”; in this scale, even positive events like marriage are considered to be stressors. A respondent’s score is based on the number of these events which have occurred in the past year, and the total number of life change units associated with them.
Staniland Wake (mentioned on page 209 of The Billionth Monkey) was an actual person, but you won’t find much written about him on the Web; Oxford Reference says “little seems to be known about his life.” The following paragraph about Wake is a previously unpublished outtake (cut for length) from my paper “Continuing Knowledge from Generation unto Generation” in the Oxford University Press anthology Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (2012):
Charles Staniland Wake (1835–1910) was an early anthropologist who published widely on phallicism and various other esoteric subjects. He presented his researches not only to the Anthropological Society,1 but also contributed to several journals including the Journal of Anthropology, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and American Anqituarian and Oriental Journal.2 He published a number of key books in the literature on phallicism, including Serpent Worship and Other Essays (1888) and, with Hodder Westropp (another member of the Anthropological Society), Ancient Symbol Worship (1875). Several of his papers were collected in the posthumous Sacred Prostitution and Marriage by Capture (1929).3 His other books include The Origin and Significance of the Great Pyramid (London: Reeves & Turner, 1882) and Vortex Philosophy, or the Geometry of Science (Chicago: the author, 1907).
Some books by C. Staniland Wake from my personal collection.
1 In 1871, the Anthropological Society of London and its old rival, the Ethnological Society, merged and formed the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
2 Wake, C. Staniland, “The Influence of the Phallic Idea in the Religions of Antiquity,” Journal of Anthropology 1 no. 2 (1870): 199-227.
Wake, C. Staniland, “The Origin of Serpent-Worship,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1873): 373-90.
Wake, C. Staniland, “The Suastika and Allied Symbols,” American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 16, no. 1 (1894): 41-3.
3 Wake, C. Staniland, Serpent Worship and Other Essays, with a Chapter on Totemism (London: George Redway, 1888).
Westropp, Hodder M. & Wake, C. Staniland, Ancient Symbol Worship. Influence of the Phallic Idea in the Religions of Antiquity, with an Introduction, Additional Notes, and an Appendix by Alexander Wilder, M.D. Second edition (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1875).
Wake, G. (sic) S., Sacred Prostitution and Marriage by Capture (privately printed, 1929).
On page 202 of The Billionth Monkey, Argo refers to the fake Canadian sci-fi movie that was used as a cover for a rescue team to enter Tehran and rescue six American diplomats during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis…a story that was made into a 2012 film of the same name. Interestingly, the storyboards for the movie were taken from concept art that the great Jack Kirby drew in collaboration with Barry Geller for an unmade film adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s Hugo-winning novel, Lord of Light (1967). You can read all about this fascinating tale here and here.
Jack Kirby's Lord of Light concept art—repurposed for the Argo cover story in 1979—was recently published for the first time by Heavy Metal magazine. [Barry Geller very kindly signed this copy for me.]
On page 206, the term “ass monkey” is a fitting #MonkeyReference.
On page 207, Nicholas Young’s remarks about Lilith are culled from midrashic literature. Lilith wasn’t technically a single mom but Adam’s first wife prior to Eve, made of the same clay as he was. The couple quarreled and split over whether she should be equal or subservient to Adam. Her children were not human but demons (hence Nicholas refers to them as having “massive birth defects”). The idea of Adam being a “deadbeat dad” who dumped her and started a new family with a younger model (i.e., Eve) struck me as an amusing way of telling Lilith’s side of things. Nicholas calls him a “dirt bag” because in Hebrew, אדמה, adamah (from which comes “Adam”) means clay, red earth, or soil. His “no sense of right and wrong” refers to God’s prohibition in Genesis 2–3 against eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden.
On page 208, Nicholas Young’s comment that “I can only influence the weak-minded” alludes to the scene in Star Wars where Ben Kenobi tells Luke that “The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.”
On page 208, Bruiser’s outburst “I like Quasimodo!” is a pop culture twofer. In the classic holiday movie A Christmas Story (1983), a determined Ralphie waits in line to meet Santa Claus and has no little patience for the weird kid in line who remarks, “I like the Tin Man.” He is known only as “Kid with Goggles” in the credits.
For the same reasons that this non sequitur is so hilarious and endearing, so did the Internet take a shine in 2007 to the Zombie Kid Who Likes Turtles. Not only did the video go viral, but it also spawned its own meme.
When two semi trucks collide so hard that they are hopelessly stuck together, they are towed to the junk yard in one piece. Only later, when the cabs are separated for salvage, is a Volkswagen Beetle found crushed between them, its passengers also gruesomely flattened. This urban legend was popular in the 1970s, a time when the Volkswagen Beetle was also a popular car (remember Disney's 1968 film The Love Bug?).
In some versions of this legend, a bad stench emanating from the conjoined cabs is what prompts the salvage workers to separate them, thus leading to a horrible discovery. In a slightly different variation, a semi truck hits a VW Beetle but, because the car is so small, the truck driver doesn’t even notice it stuck to his grille until hours later.
Playing on fears surrounding the disproportionate size difference between vehicles on the road, a modern-day equivalent might pit an eighteen-wheeler against a Smart Fortwo. As someone who was T-boned and pushed across the road by a big rig (curiously enough during the time I was working on The Billionth Monkey), I can assure you the fear is not unfounded. And I was driving a car considerably larger than a Beetle!
The Smart Fortwo would be the modern-day equivalentin the "VW Bug Smash" urban legend.
[Image from pointy-haired-dilbert’s photobucket page, where it is available as prints, cards, etc.]
Neither of these two variations on the urban legend has eve actually happened, although there have been instances of apparently abandoned vehicles being towed away with the body of the driver still inside. See, for example, this North Carolina news story from April 2, 2013.
Such is the urban legend that is referenced on page 200 of The Billionth Monkey.
FOR FURTHER READING
Jan Harold Brunvand. “The Smashed VW Bug.” In Encyclopedia of Urban Legends (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), 391.
The Mothman is a cryptid which, according to Deborah Dixon, is “one of Forteana’s key figures” (195–6). One night in November 1966, two couples driving through a remote area north of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, spotted what appeared to be a man with wings hobbling along the road. Although they drove off frightened, the thing flew after them and chased the car down Route 66 at speeds topping 100 miles per hour.
Over the course of the next year, local residents reported UFOs and more sightings of the mysterious figure, which the media dubbed “The Mothman.” John Keel, a researcher of the unexplained, visited the town and conducted interviews with the eye-witnesses. The results of his investigation—along with his own theories about UFOs, Men in Black, etc.—became the basis of his book The Mothman Prophecies (1975), which was turned into a movie in 2002. By this point, the film bore little resemblance to the original sighting, with the Mothman transformed into an omen portending death. As Dixon notes, the character of the Mothman changed and deviated further with each step of its legend, from the original eyewitness accounts, to the police, to the media representations of the story, to Keel’s interpretation via his theoretical perspective, to the motion picture.
Not The Mothman Prophecies (1975), but The Eighth Tower (1975) is my favorite of John Keel's books.
The release of the movie coincided with the first annual Mothman festival in Point Pleasant. The following year, a twelve-foot tall metallic statue was installed in town.
As with the other legends in the book, I had a lot of fun re-imagining this venerable character for The Billionth Monkey. Making the character female also struck me as a fun and unexpected twist on the gender presumed by the name “Mothman.” And The Billionth Monkey is all about fun.
FOR FURTHER READING
Deborah Dixon. “A Benevolent and Sceptical Inquiry: Exploring ‘Fortean Geographies’ with the Mothman.” Cultural Geographies 2007, 14(2): 189–210.
