In old movies like The Cat and the
Canary, Ghost
Breakers, and many of the Charlie Chan movies we had
houses with secret passages and portraits hanging on the walls
whose painted eyes were actually peep-holes through which hidden
villains would spy on innocent victims. When we see these things
today, we think of them as being very dated. Today's modern
houses and apartment buildings are devoid of anything sinister
and veiled...unless, of course, those buildings are created by
Ira Levin.
Sliver opens with an un-named voyeur watching the inhabitants of a Manhattan high-rise (a sliver building) on TV cameras. Each apartment in this upper east side building is not only monitored by cameras, but also wired for sound. Even the phone lines are tapped. The un-knowing residents are like ants in an ant farm. In This Perfect Day Levin gave us world that was totally controlled by a computer named UniComp. Even the thoughts of the members of this society were monitored. Here we have one individual who monitors the activities of one building, a sort of smaller and more realistic version of the world we were given in This Perfect Day.
Voyeurs, of course, are evil - right? But when we read a novel, when we watch a movie or TV show, are we not being voyeurs? Are we not observing the lives of people we don't know without asking their permission?
In Rosemary's Baby Levin gave us a building called the Bramford, a Victorian apartment house with such a long history of wicked tenants that the evil seems to have soaked into the carpets of the place. In Sliver we have a modern building, which should be free from such evil, but Levin sends out little electrical wires and sneaks the evil in, right under the noses of the naive little yuppie tenants.
The concept that a house might be evil goes back at least as far as Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher.
Up until now houses were only evil because they had a history of evil events. Levin gives us a building that is actually the instrument of evil itself. What is worse is that using that instrument is addictive like a drug. Even the innocent succumb to it. You will too. This house is the descendant of those houses of the B-movies that you thought were dead and gone and you are just as vulnerable here as those poor people who didn't see what was going behind them, inside the walls...maybe more so.
Of course, if you don't know you're being watched, the building seems quite handsome. If you don't know that there's a little glass thread that comes down from the ceiling into the light fixtures, then the chrome-centered Art Deco lights seem lovely and stylish.
Along comes Kay Norris, thirty-nine, editor at a major publishing house, attractive, looking for an address that matches her social position. This chic fishbowl at 1300 Madison Ave is going to be home for Kay and her cat, Felice.
Kay meets her fellow tenants; Pete Henderson, a handsome guy in his mid-twenties, Sam Yale, who directed television shows in TV's golden age, Hubert Scheer, a writer with a broken leg, and Vida Travisano, a beautiful blonde who lives across the hall. One of them is the voyeur - the rest are part of an on-going soap opera that they don't even know exists.
And to what lengths will the voyeur go to in order to keep this little hobby a secret? The answer will scare the hell out of you.
Levin makes us ask ourselves questions about the guilty pleasures we all indulge in. Is our voyeur really a horrible degenerate for wanting to spy on other people?
Perhaps.
But I remember my grandmother on my mother's side of the family, back in the days when telephones were all on party-lines, wrapping a rag around the speaker of the phone, and listening to the business of everybody in the neighborhood. Most people would describe her as a very religious women who never did any wrong.
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LEVIN DIRECTORY |
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