ROUTE 66: "IN THE CLOSING OF A TRUNK" (1963)

There are far too many naturalistic psycho-killers out there for my phenomenality-blog to encompass. However, just for variety I'll include one such from the 1960-64 CBS series ROUTE 66. Though most if not all of the episodes were resolutely naturalistic, the scripts, often by series-co-creator Sterling Silliphant, often attempted to infuse the travels of its earnest young men with a rambling poetry more typical of an Ibsen drama than a broadcast TV show. The following is more of a summary than an explication, though it does contain some interpretive sections.

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PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

In this episode, regular hero Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) plays good Samaritan to fifty-something woman Alma (Ruth Roman), whom he meets when she is returning to the fishing-village of her youth to reclaim her father’s property. Tod soon learns that no one in the village will welcome Alma due to her scandalous past. 

Twenty-seven years ago, Alma became pregnant by some youth whose name she never revealed, and who apparently left town unaware of his legacy. Alma then seemingly went mad and beat her father Jim to death with a bludgeon, and then tried to conceal her crime by stuffing Jim’s body in a trunk. Alma was sent to an asylum for almost three decades. Prior to her exile her child Mattie was born, but Jim’s brother Kyle (Ed Begley) raised Mattie in the village, poisoning the young man’s mind against his mother for her patricide. Kyle has also concealed from Alma that Mattie is present in the village, but he doesn’t want to take any chances that she might win Mattie back.

 Therefore, Kyle plants in Alma’s mind the suggestion that Tod may be Mattie. Tod does nothing to encourage this notion, but he can’t bear to leave the pitiable old woman on her own, and because he helps her at her house, Alma quickly buys into the delusion of Tod’s true identity. In fact, when she flashes back to her love affair with the nameless stranger, she imagines him looking like modern-day Tod—which seems problematic given that in present time she’s hanging onto the real Tod and trying to keep her with him as her beloved son.

 Tod rails at Mattie, but the latter refuses to come clean, having experienced the shame of having been called a bastard and taking refuge in Kyle’s paternal care. Kyle finally comes up with a way to mousetrap his addled niece. While Tod is present at Alma’s house, Kyle sends Alma two reminders of her crime: a man-sized trunk containing the same sort of bludgeon Alma used on her father.

Possibly Kyle hopes to simply drive Alma bonkers, but she reacts more extremely. She picks up the bludgeon and strikes at Tod. He avoids her swipes but trips and hits his head. Alma then flashes back to her previous crime, even though she hasn’t actually beat “daddy’s” brains in, and loads the unconscious TOD into the trunk—where, upon awakening, he begins to suffocate, complete with all the usual “Route 66” poetic meditations. To the young Samaritan’s good fortune, Kyle has been watching, and since he doesn’t want a real death on his conscience, he and Mattie rescue Tod and call the authorities. 

Before the cops come, Alma treats everyone to a monologue in which she reveals her reason for having killed her father. It seems that Jim, whose drunken rages had already driven off Alma’s mother, became irate when he learned that Alma was pregnant with a bastard. He threatened to punish her by shoving her in a closet as she had when she was a child. But Alma feared the darkness would harm her unborn child, and thus she attacked Jim, killed him, and (not coincidentally) placed his dead body in the same confinement he’d used on her. The episode then ends with Mattie finally being willing to reconcile with his suffering mother. However, given that Alma attacked her other “son” and tried to suffocate him in a figurative “womb,” Mattie might not actually benefit from mending fences. 

ADDENDUM: I should add that while there's no reason for a viewer to think that Tod looks at all like Alma's dead father-- which might be a reason for her to attack him-- the script makes a point of having Kyle say that Tod rather resembles Mattie. Mattie asks Kyle why their resemblance should matter, since Alma has never seen her son in the flesh. But of course Alma has seen the absent father, and if Tod resembles the son, he could also resemble the father-- and that would make the hoax on Alma a bit more persuasive. This item brings a new interpretation to the attack-scene, though the script does not spell it out. Nowhere in the story does Alma voice any animus toward her unnamed lover, thinking of him only with rosy memories, and it's not even clear whether or not he knew when he left that he had knocked her up. Yet in real life it would be natural for Alma to nurture some resentment of the man who, intentionally or not, deserted her in her travails. Thus Alma's attack on Tod could be more directed at the absent daddy. Alternately, she might even be, in her demented state, somewhat conscious that she's attacking her "son" because he reminds her of the man who left her in the lurch.