I Click, Therefore I Amazon

An example, one of probably close to a hundred since I've joined one-click: I write a piece for The Post about Japanese soldiers who've been so demonized in World War II movies and do a little research initiative into my memory for movies that contradict that cultural paradigm. Out of the files from the early '60s comes a memory of "Red Beach," and star-director-handsome guy Cornel Wilde sitting on the couch next to a black-and-white Johnny Carson talking up his war flick. Dan and Doc and Ed and maybe Zsa Zsa were there too, I think. So I roam over to Amazon, type in "Red Beach," and it politely informs me of my faulty memory: it's "Beach Red," starring Wilde, Rip Torn, Burr de Benning and Patrick Wolfe. There it is. Lord, it's there. Why does it have to be there? Why, why, why?

But it's there and I feel my trigger finger mosey to left-click (well-worn left click, I might add) on my mousy-thing, I feel it yearn and ache to acquire, it has become the whole focus of my being, there's no discipline anywhere on the horizon and I cannot disobey my finger. It controls. It has no mercy and no judgment.

CLICK!

A couple of days later it arrives, along with some other World War II relics from the '50s that I couldn't resist either, like Tony Curtis and Frank Lovejoy in "Beachhead," and does anybody but me remember ultra-cool New York tough guy Frank Lovejoy, who was Lee Marvin before there was a Lee Marvin?

So . . . the anticlimax. The two discs arrive and are dully seated in the DVD player and launched. I make it about an hour into "Beach Red" before the ridiculous '67 haircuts on the GIs pushes me out, and have even less luck with "Beachhead," where Curtis's Bronx accent is too distracting, and I remember a later scene where he swims into the ocean and sinks a Japanese destroyer with a grenade and I somehow don't want to see that. Too '50s. Grenade, destroyer? Nah, couldn't be done; they didn't even do that one in the war comics of the '50s!

It services all your needs, even those you didn't know you had. It takes any whim, turns it to curiosity, then to desire, then to necessity, then to addiction. It takes you out of the now, a large room with many people typing hard, to the wherever, an amorphous, neon twilight of the lurid, the wanton, the craven, the berserk and the heavily armed -- oh, that would be my imagination. But the agile dance of links to links to subjects to genres is something so spontaneous -- it seems to match the rhythm of randomly firing synapses -- that somehow you never know where you're going but when you get there, you realize that's where you wanted to go. I recently voyaged off into the cattle drive known as "Western themes from the '50s and '60s," hardly, I'm guessing, a popular destination.

Somewhere I heard a snatch of Tex Ritter's great rendition of "Do Not Forsake Me," the "High Noon" theme song, and I was from that moment a gone man. I had to hear the whole thing, which, only a click away, I did. It's a great piece of American art, with its broken little squeaks of anguish and its lonely refrains of dread and yearning as a man of duty faces death even though he sure as hell doesn't want to (would you if you were 51 and just married lush, 23-year old Grace Kelly?). Tex gets a dignity and a pain into the words that Fred Zinnemann never got into the movie; in fact, Tex makes a better Will Kane than Gary Cooper ever did.

But . . . that song set me off. Soon I yearned to hear "The Magnificent Seven," "How the West Was Won," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" ("He was the bravest of them all"), and so forth. Unfortunately there wasn't a CD titled "Steve Hunter's Coolest Western Hits" so to hear "Liberty Valance" I had to click either the collected Gene Pitney (after severe brainwashing in the '60s, I couldn't listen to "Town Without Pity" one more time!) or a late James Taylor cover. James Taylor? JAMES *&)({$181}%$#@! TAYLOR! With the high, noble, slightly globed forehead and the thinning hair and the sincere eyes? Are you kidding me? But -- CLICK! -- and James Taylor was at my doorstep in three days and, truth be told, of all the covers of the western songs, his was about the best; he got down and hard with it, and got the melancholy and irony.

But it goes on: To get a first-rate Elmer Bernstein "Mag7" I had to put up with Hugh O'Brian himself singing "The Legend of Wyatt Earp" and no less than Johnny Cash cranking out, in some forgotten and hopefully mean-drunk-fueled recording session at the same time, "The Rebel -- Johnny Yuma." And -- no, no, I'm not going there, I'm not telling any of these fine upstanding Washington Post readers about my next discovery, Marty Robbins and CLICK "Gunfighter Ballads." (Marty Robbins, "Big Iron" and "El Paso," was a great singer, by the way.)

This wisdom, of course, arrives with a cost. You pull into a tollbooth with Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson singing "My Rifle, My Pony and Me," and you get a very strange look from the toll taker.

Recounting this, I'm getting a weird movie vibration somehow. It sounds so familiar, yet so long ago. Let's see: We are now at a place in history and technology where, basically, we can have anything we want with the touch of a button. No, Amazon hasn't perfected Cocktail.com in its "More to Explore" subdivision yet -- oh, thanks, Jeeves, yes, the Makers and Water is just what I clicked -- but it all has the hazy recollection of some . . .

And now I realize: We have become the Krell.

Do you remember the Krell? They sprang out of Fred Wilcox's 1956 sci-fi masterpiece "Forbidden Planet," an advanced race whose members were evidently shaped like a sea elephant topped with Zippy's pinhead. They built the "great machine" which could give them anything they wanted. That is, if they could dream it, if their imaginations could conjure it, the Great Machine in the center of Altair-4 would present it. Here's the laugh: The Krell had discovered everything except the subconscious. They never figured on the rage of the id, the vast hunger of the libido, the power fantasies of the ego and in a single night, their mighty and benevolent civilization was torn down and they were themselves murdered savagely, every last one of them, by the dark killers in the reptile zone of their own ancient brain.

We: Krell.

One-click is having everything, that's what's so subtly disturbing about it. It makes getting too easy, and removes it from the cause-effect grid, from consequence, gravity, physics, morality, even looking for parking.

It's . . . oh, wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it stars the first Leslie Nielsen in his stern commander persona, the great lollipop Anne Francis, a va-va-voom gal with a hint of Bronx toughness underneath, and the great, underrated Walter Pidgeon as the wise but flawed Dr. Morbius. You know, that was a great movie.

CLICK!

Click, there goes another $19.49, plus shipping.