advancements in the science of creepy puppets - Pin (1988)

bringing a whole new meaning to "they fuck you up, your mum and dad"

And you thought the puppet from The Vourdalak was the weirdest one we were going to talk about this year, oh my sweet summer child. You were wrong. I was wrong. We were all wrong.

Pin says there’s spoilers to follow by the way.

Pin (1988)

Also known as: Pin: A Plastic Nightmare

Written and directed by: Sandor Stern

Based on: the novel Pin (1981) by Andrew Neiderman

Starring: David Hewlett, Cynthia Preston, Terry O’Quinn, Bronwen Mantel, John Pyper-Ferguson, Jonathan Banks

Running time: 102 minutes

Original release date: May 16, 1988

the plot, in brief

In the office of Dr. Frank Linden (O’Quinn) sits a life-size anatomically correct medical teaching dummy. Nicknamed Pin (short for Pinocchio), the dummy is used by the doctor to both provide distraction for his younger patients and teach the doctor’s children, Leon and Ursula, about bodily functions, with the doctor using ventriloquism to make Pin talk.

Unbeknown to the doctor, young Leon - isolated due to his strict upbringing and without any real friends - has come to believe Pin is alive. And as the years progress and he and Ursula grow up, the doll takes over his life… and that of Ursula as well.

okay i’ve waited long enough, would you like to meet Pin?

I cannot decide what it is he reminds me of, it’s either the result of someone yassifying skinless Frank Cotton or someone scrubbing Vision from the Marvel Cinematic Universe too hard.

four things i rather liked about Pin (1988)

Dr. Linden is never ever winning the Father of the Year award, EVER

Pin takes us through Leon and Ursula’s life in a series of episodes as they grow up, and we first meet them when they’re kids. It’s established from the off that the parental relationship is a complicated and tense one: Mrs. Linden (Mantel) is an uptight, controlling woman who forbids the children from much interaction with their peers. Dr. Linden meanwhile is the kind of man who calls the kids to him at bedtime and makes them solve a maths problem in order to win the privilege of a goodnight kiss from daddy. He is a highly inflexible, humourless man except when it comes to teaching his children about anatomy (I am quite certain that he’s violating at least a couple of privacy rules by letting his kids sit in on consultations but HEY HO), which he does by way of Yassified Skinless Frank aka Pin (who is voiced by Jonathan Banks, aka Mike Ehrmantraut of the Breaking Bad-verse).

I highly appreciate that the film pretty quickly and efficiently establishes that Dr. Linden is making Pin talk through some expert ventriloquism. It’s a blink and you’ll miss it cut to his mouth moving just the tiniest bit as Pin speaks, and no more, and that’s all it needs to be. There’s no real explanation for why he does this, or why both Linden parents are so strict and controlling with their kids, but moving forward in the story doesn’t depend on you being told the exact what and why of this dynamic; it just is, and that’s enough.

As a former viewer of Lost (I fell off mid-season three) I was delighted to get to experience Terry O’Quinn here - he nails the kind of icy detachment needed for this role, and while I do think that he is under the impression he is doing a good thing by raising his kids the way he is, he’s also completely blind to just how much that’s not the truth. Especially when it comes to Leon, as we quickly gather.

Why do both of them look like they’re the mascot for some sort of oat or breakfast cereal?

Leon Linden: Professional Menace

As previously mentioned, Leon - who we will later find out has a form of schizophrenia - especially is very isolated from his peers, bullied by the kind of kids who don’t think twice about calling him deeply unpleasant names (by which I mean one kid actually calls him a slur) simply because he’s not been raised to socialize. He gets along well with his sister, in a sort of “we’re in this together” vibe, but for him, his closest analogue is Pin, who he has come to believe is alive. His father doesn’t exactly dispel this belief, doing things like telling Ursula one of her birthday presents is from Pin. This only further serves to fuel Leon’s notions of Pin as an alive thing, a friend and a companion to the both of them.

When Leon turns up at his father’s office one day and ends up alone in the room with Pin, he is forced to hide when once of the nurses comes into the room. Crouched behind a privacy screen, he watches in horror as the nurse… ehm… uses Pin as a sex doll (fucking hell), stoking in him a specific hatred for women who he perceives as engaging in promiscuous behaviour. When Ursula later produces a nudie mag that she got from her friend Marcia, the two are caught out by their mum and are made to sit for a lesson on the birds and the bees The Urge, taught by their father by way of Pin.

IMAGINE being taught about sex by your dad’s ventriloquism dummy who is also an anatomical teaching dummy. IMAGINE.

Anyway, this encounter further warps Leon and as he and Ursula grow up, he becomes increasingly controlling of her as she comes into her own sexually. He beats the shit out of a guy she’s hooking up with, is incredibly off-putting and weird when she confides in him that she’s accidentally gotten pregnant, steals Pin out of the wreckage of the car accident that kills his parents when he’s eighteen (Dr. Linden had earlier that night discovered him having a conversation with Pin and, realising the extent of Leon’s illness, took Pin with him to a presentation he was giving at medical school, with the intent on leaving him there), forces Mrs. Linden’s sister into a fatal heart attack by scaring the bejesus out of her with Pin, gets incredibly angry with Ursula when she gets a job… just menace behaviour, really.

Ursula Linden: Just Very Tired of This Shit

Meanwhile, Ursula experiences issues when she’s perceived as sleeping around at school. She accidentally gets pregnant, as mentioned, and when Leon insists on asking Pin for advice instead of immediately going to the doctor with her, she discovers that Leon has picked up ventriloquism skills of his own, and runs off upset when she puts the pieces together. Pin, after all, doesn’t speak to them when their father isn’t present…

Dr. Linden does help with providing her the abortion she requires, but performs the procedure with Pin in the room, which… okay, sure. When Aunt Dorothy (the aforementioned sister of Mrs. Linden) moves in, insisting Ursula needs a feminine presence in the house, she finds some support with her when she floats the idea of the job at the library. But Leon, who believes Ursula is being negatively influenced by her, literally scares her to her death, yet again robbing Ursula of someone to talk to who isn’t her increasingly controlling brother.

She does remain working at the library, and it’s here that two significant things happen: 1) she meets a handsome and kind athlete named Stan Fraker (Pyper-Ferguson), who she quickly falls in love with, and 2) she begins to research what could be going on with Leon, coming to the conclusion that he has a form of paranoid schizophrenia.

The toll of Leon’s general vibe and attitude begins to wear on Ursula, and when she goes on a cinema date with Stan, Leon retaliates by calling up Marcia for a date of his own (it tickles me that they’re watching a screening of Scanners, it really does, I’d recognise that mall anywhere), but ends up also scaring the shit out of her when he follows her around the house with Pin in a motorized chair, leaving Ursula to comfort her friend as she walks in after her date.

Things deteriorate further from there as Ursula is unnerved when she comes home one night to Leon having fitted Pin with latex skin and a wig, and it makes for a sublimely uncomfortable dinner scene as Ursula is forced to eat and listen to Leon talk about his (AWFUL) poetry as THIS is sat there looking at her:

Why does it look like they put a wig on a melted Kryten from Red Dwarf. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING.

Anyway, Ursula brings Stan over to meet Leon and Leon appears to be gravely upset by Stan… being nice to Pin. He later reads some of his (AWFUL) poetry out for Ursula and Stan and Stan rightly points out in private conversation with Ursula that there is more than a shade of incest tinting Leon’s writing so that’s now also a factor I guess.

Things come to a boil when Leon - under the conviction that Stan is a gold digger after Ursula’s inheritance, and is planning to put Leon in a sanitarium - lures Stan over to the house under the guise of planning a birthday party for Ursula. Leon drugs Stan (ineptly) and the two fight, with Leon bludgeoning Stan over the head with a sculpture. His plans to dump Leon in the river are interrupted by Ursula coming home early, and he has no choice but to hide Stan in a woodpile while trying to convince his sister that Stan just had to go off and see a sick friend.

Ursula quickly figures out that he’s lying, and runs out of the house when Leon blames everything on Pin. As Leon is rightfully told by Pin/himself that everything he’s done he’s done to further his own selfish motives, Ursula storms back in brandishing an axe…

the art of the tease

The film begins with a gaggle of pre-teen boys, staking out a house. They’re daring each other to get closer, in the way that you would do if the house in question was a) haunted, b) the site of an unspeakable crime a la the Myers house in Halloween or c) currently inhabited by someone who may or may not chase you down the street brandishing a large chainsaw if they see you.

One of them eventually braves it, spurred on by his mates and by the fact that there is a figure sat in one of the windows, unmoving. Is the figure alive? Is it an apparition? We don’t see the figure in full but we hear a voice telling the child to leave immediately, which he does, before the film flashes back to fifteen years prior.

It’s not until the ending that we realize who is in the window: Leon. Having gone through a complete psychotic break watching Ursula take an axe to Pin, the Pin side of his personality completely took over. Now, he sits unmoving, much like Pin, watching from the window. Ursula, now married to Stan (who miraculously is still alive), visits him, and when he tells her that he misses Leon a great deal, she tearfully replies that she does too. It’s an effective way to tease the ending without giving anything much away, and it provides a final gut punch to take us out with.

Is Pin the perfect portrayal of someone succumbing to schizophrenia? No, absolutely not. Does it take some admirable, risky swings? Yes, specifically because the film makes it crystal clear that Pin is not a real thing. Everything that happens happens because of the power of the mind, because of the tension created by Leon’s fabricated reality around Pin, coating the film in a thick air of mounting paranoia. There is no villain here. After all, Pin is only given a voice through the medium of ventriloquism; he is not a sentient being, he is not telling Leon what to do. And that is what gives Pin a unique level of tragedy - there is only Leon’s mind, twisted by his upbringing, by his mental illness, by his own loneliness. And therein lies the horror.