The Hipsters With X-Ray Eyes
Here’s the tagline: Suddenly he could see through clothes, flesh… and walls! Riveting, eh? Well, what can you say about the ’63 classic, X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES. It’s a bona fide cult classic and it’s hip to dig these days. Hipsters love nothing more than to quibble about the alternate ending and whether or not Ray Milland, the titular man with X-ray eyes, did it all for the money. The answer: of course he did it for the money.
It’s a farce of a fable — a kind of Oedipus Rex for the mid-Sixties zeitgeist. A brilliant researcher, played by Milland, discovers a compound that when squirted on the eyes allows the person to see through a patient. It’s contact lens care sans the contacts. It’s X-ray in a bottle. It’s out there. Of course, his quest to save humanity from incredible suffering backfires, as it should given that it’s a Roger Corman flick.
The good doctor accidentally pushes a colleague out the window at to his death and goes on the lam. He helps diagnose diseases and ends up losing his mind and having to wear dark glasses to shield his sensitive eyes. Did I mention his eyes have turned completely black? He has a turn as a carnie and a gambler before he sets out into the desert to be alone.
When you can see through people, literally, what’s the fun of having them around anymore? But, as movie logic would have it, Milland stumbles upon a tent revival in the middle of the desert. When he tells the preacher that he is beginning to see through the very fabric of the universe, the preachers quotes Bible scripture: “If thy eye offends thee, pluck it out.”
Sound advice. In a fit of relief and madness — of course the two go hand in hand in a Corman film — Milland does just that. He loses his mind, claiming to see through the earth itself, and gouges out his own eyes. Now, the hipster controversy comes with whether or not the alternate ending had him screaming, “I can still see!” Corman denies that was ever said, but the rumor persists.
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