The list is a quixotic and startlingly thorough record of sinking scenes in scripted TV and feature films, as well as commercials, video games, reality shows, cartoons, documentaries, and music videos.
Crypto has identified wet jungle quicksands and dry desert pits, bogs and quagmires, areas of wet cement—even scenes of people sinking into giant vats of caviar. For those with "the interest," the guide serves as an enormous Netflix queue, a sort of collector's catalog or a fetish to-do list.
For everyone else, it's a sui generis chronicle of America's preoccupation with quicksand. If Carlton Cuse of Lost is right that adventure gags must evolve, then Crypto's List is the nearest we have to a fossil record. With some careful parsing of the data, it's possible to trace the evolution of quicksand on a graph—to plot its cultural importance from one decade to the next.
We can take just the full-length films on Crypto's List, for example—more than in all—and count how many were released in each era. That gives a sense of how much sinking appeared on-screen at any given time. Then we might compare the number of movies with quicksand to the total number of films released and calculate a percentage for each decade. The volume of Hollywood production waxed and waned and waxed again over the years. The chart below shows the results of this analysis, using the information from Crypto's List combined with overall industry numbers from the Motion Picture Association of America.
For more information on this graph—and a few caveats—read this sidebar. As a child of the Reagan years, I thought I'd seen the glory days of quicksand: What depths we reached, at The Neverending Story , when Artax sank in the Swamps of Sadness , and what joy at seeing Buttercup saved from the muck in The Princess Bride I know my brother spent hours dodging pools of deadly tar in Pitfall! And according to Crypto's List, quicksand was all over daytime television, too—showing up six times in The Smurfs , three times in The Transformers , and three times in G.
There was even an episode of Knight Rider where Michael had to rescue Kitt from a quaking bog. But for all that, the quicksand of our youth was already an endangered resource. By the time I entered junior high, the gag had been relegated to self-conscious horror flicks and zany sitcoms like Perfect Strangers and Small Wonder. Quicksand was ironized and depleted. Across the s, it appeared in roughly one of every 75 films released in the theaters.
That's more than twice as much quicksand as we have today but less than half the total from just a few years earlier. So when was the gimmick at its peak? In the s, quicksand was everywhere. It turned up in B-grade cinema and television—the Monkees once ran afoul of it—but also in legitimate, mainstream work.
Lawrence of Arabia had quicksand and earned seven Oscars. There was even quicksand in the art house: The hero of Woman in the Dunes , a blast of existentialism from Japan, spends much of the movie trapped in a sand pit. He escapes at one point, only to fall into quicksand.
In total, nearly 3 percent of the films in that era—one in 35—showed someone sinking in mud or sand or oozing clay. Compared with every decade before or since, quicksand ruled the screen. It's fitting that one of the earliest known depictions of quicksand comes from one of the earliest known comic strips —a foot-long piece of linen embroidered with wool yarn nearly 1, years ago. The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest, and in one panel, Harold, later King of England, pauses to rescue a pair of soldiers who have become trapped in the mud near Mont St.
Five hundred years later, the image of quicksand had become commonplace in European literature. In The Faerie Queene , Spenser placed it "by the checked wave … and by the sea discolored: It called was the Quicksand of Unthriftiness. His recipe for epic verse tells how to sketch a tempest: "Mix your clouds and billows well together till they foam, and thicken your description here and there with a quicksand. During the Age of Discovery , quicksand lived on ocean coastlines, not in the jungle or beneath the dunes.
Spenser and Shakespeare put theirs alongside "a whirlpool of hidden jeopardy" or between the "ruthless sea" and a "ragged fatal rock. But the saltwater peril stood in for more figurative anxieties: Explorers who ventured around the globe might disappear into a foreign landscape, gone native or something worse.
Mutton-chopped Brits were being engulfed by African wilderness ; the spread of civilization came with a fear of getting stuck. For Americans, too, quicksand had a way of showing up when we pushed our borders into the unknown. The more conspicuous the entanglement, the more likely we were to visualize it as a real-world danger: In the 19 th century, sinkholes dotted the literature of manifest destiny and the untamed West ; in the 20 th century, quicksand took over at the movies while the nation fought a colonial war in a vine-filled jungle overseas.
The use of soil dynamics as a metaphor for Vietnam began early in the s. Lucien Bodard's The Quicksand War was first published in ; two years later, peacenik pamphleteers decried the " Quicksand in Vietnam.
While images of quicksand proliferated on the silver screen, intellectuals debated " the quicksand model " and " the quagmire myth " of U. The two words— quicksand and quagmire —are etymologically distinct but were used interchangeably at the time. There was even some real quicksand—the literal kind—associated with Vietnam: In , the AP reported that an Army Private had been awarded a medal for heroism after pulling his sergeant from a deadly quicksand pit. Indeed, the fear of quicksand was so entrained in the nation's psyche that it seems to have infected another grand project of U.
A group of scientists led by Cornell astronomer Thomas Gold and NASA mathematician Leonard Roberts warned that the lunar surface might be so battered by galactic flotsam as to comprise a dangerous, powdered sand. Their theory—which predicted doom for a lander—was presented to the Senate in Two years later, Gold told reporters, "If I were at the controls of an Apollo vehicle hovering over the moon, I would not be willing to settle down for fear it would sink too much.
Did Hollywood quicksand offer some catharsis, then, by giving form to the nation's colonial anxieties? Or did quicksand somehow flow in reverse, from the movie gag to the metaphor?
The obsession with sinking in all its varieties—cinematic, metaphorical, astronomical—may reflect something deeper still: a sense of upheaval and a search for steady ground. On Aug.
In an era of radical change, the perils of muck and dust must have seemed self-evident. The landscape was shifting beneath our feet. If we can explain the rise of quicksand by lumping it in with hula hoops, the Apollo missions, and other icons of the s, then we've answered just half the question.
What explains quicksand's fall? Is this a story of natural selection—an idea, once so well-adapted to its environment, that lost its niche? We know the gag limped its way through the s, beyond Vietnam and through the end of the Cold War. Was this merely its dwindling path to extinction?
Or did something else hasten its demise? The quicksand fans have their own theories, of course. In his teenage years, "Jesse" set off in search of deep mud on an almost weekly basis. His favorite destinations were the outdoor quarries where sand is washed and prepared in giant hollow berms hundreds of feet long and 30 feet deep. Such imaginative games were more accessible to children from rural areas, he suggests; the fantasy of wilderness peril makes more sense if you grew up near the wilderness.
Quicksand, then, might be another victim of urban sprawl. It's true that the spread of American cities into the countryside does overlap, more or less, with the decline of the adventure gag. More than 10 million acres of forest were turned into buildings, lawns, and pavement over the course of the s and s. At the start of quicksand's halcyon era, one-third of Americans were living in the suburbs. By , when the gag was nearly done for, that number had grown to one-half. Yet experience tells me that city kids are no less susceptible to the pull of quicksand.
I have my own memories of playing out melodramatic movie scenarios just a few blocks from where I grew up, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My own personal Disneyland, if you want to call it that, was not an enormous pit of sand slurry out West but a modest sandbox in Riverside Park.
The kids in my neighborhood had no trouble imagining jungle adventures in the playground. Sometimes we poured water in the sand to make the danger seem more real. As it happens, there's another recent trend that's worth considering when it comes to quicksand—and one that bears on the games we played in city parks. In the s, when I was born, roughly sandboxes could be found in public playgrounds around New York City. By , just 44 remained. In Brooklyn, where I live now, the number dropped to four.
Over the course of my childhood, then, and through the concurrent decline of quicksand in the movies, the number of sandboxes in the nation's largest city dropped by 95 percent. The sudden disappearance of sandboxes wasn't unique to the Big Apple, either. The playground accessory had been invented more than a century earlier by the German educator Friedrich Froebel.
One early mention comes from , when an associate of Froebel's asked him in a letter, " Might not a plane of sand be made a useful and entertaining game? By the s, 58 percent of well-off families had their own sandboxes. Fifty years later, the sandbox culture dissolved all at once. In , a geologist and medical doctor named Mark Germine published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine describing an analysis he'd performed on several bags of commercial sand.
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