Author Richard Matheson died on June 28, 2013. He was 87. According to Time,
he wrote 28 novels, 88 short stories and dozens of movie and TV scripts.
Coincidentally,
I read Button, Button for the first time a week prior to his death. I
confess had I not read the short story, I wouldn’t have recognized the name Richard Matheson.
After
some research, I discovered Matheson wrote scripts for some of my favorite
movies and television shows. He created the script for director StevenSpielberg’s 1971 television movie, Duel. He also wrote the scripts for:
Star Trek, The Enemy Within (1966, Season 1, Episode 5)
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
Time
reports
Matheson’s 1954 horror novel I Am Legend inspired the movies Omega Man (starring Charlton Heston, 1971) and I Am Legend (starring Will Smith, 2007). These are all movies and television episodes that I
really enjoyed and I had no idea Matheson wrote them.
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| Courtesy Google Images |
Button, Button,
first published in Playboy in 1971, is the story of a young New York City
housewife given a box with a button on top. To earn $50,000, all she needs to
do is push the button and someone she does not know will die. She and her
husband agonize if the button should be depressed. (SPOILER ALERT – if you don’t want to
know how the story ends jump to the next paragraph) …………… The wife pushes the
button and the husband dies. She is told, “Did you really know your husband?”
Hated the ending … it seems like an easy out. But maybe in 1971, this ending
was a shocker. Perhaps people still lived in a time where the thought of not
“knowing” one’s spouse was inconceivable.
I
decided to compare the short story to its modern-day movie counterpart, The Box.
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| Courtesy Google Images |
The Box,
a 2009 movie starring Cameron Diaz, doing a very poor
Southern accent, and James Marsden, is based on Button, Button. In this version, the couple lives in Virginia and are offered
$1 million to push the button. A box, a pile of money, a young couple, and the
potential death of an unknown are the only things The Box has in common
with Button, Button. I thought The Box was hard to follow (SPOILER ALERT –
if you don’t want to know how the story ends jump to the next paragraph) ……………
… I think the box giver in this story is a demon of some sort who is collecting
information about humans for his employers (it has been suggested that the
employers are aliens). The recipients of the box are the lab rats in an
experiment to see if humans will push the button.
He
wrote over a 140 books, screen plays and short stories. The Daily Mail
considers Matheson a legendary sci-fi writer. I didn’t like Button, Button or The Box but based on what I’ve learned about him, I plan to
read some of his works.
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