Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 12
September 24, 2023
AS I PLEASE XVIII: BLOGUS INTERRUPTUS
As I sit here (very) belatedly writing this, rain is falling, and my cat Spike is perched on my shoulder, making hitting the correct keys very awkward indeed. I am in somewhat of a temper generally, and have decided to begin the process of getting this blog back on its regularly scheduled programming with an As I Please which will perhaps explain why -- why I haven't been blogging as much of late, and why I'm a grumpy sonofabitch today.
* I recently gave a lecture in these very pages about consistency. I was feeling rather smug that in addition to everything else I do, I was able to put out two blogs a week, and on specific dates (Wednesday and Saturday). Lately I have fallen away from that. I want to make excuses, blame my schedule, etc., etc., but the truth is, when it comes to blogging, I would rather publish nothing at all than a blog for the sake of blogging. Maybe that, too, is an excuse, but I don't mean it that way. What I'm driving at here is that while these posts are often fairly raw in their execution, I don't view them as mere content. I flatter myself that I do not produce mere content, but always strive to have something to say, however silly or disagreeable it might be. The actor Rick Moranis once mocked the very idea of blogging as people spewing unedited first drafts of their thoughts onto the internet, and this criticism is frankly quite valid, but I think it an incomplete assessment. Blogs are not meant to be graduate school essays, capable of withstanding academic scrutinty. They are a method somewhat akin to journaling, free-form poetry, etc. by which people can informally tackle topics that interest or concern them. That, however, is not a license to produce crap. So when I don't have a good topic, or don't have the time or the energy to address one properly, I'd just as soon stay silent. This is still an excuse, but I hope one that shades more toward the side of explanation. I will try to get back on track for a twice-weekly production of Stone Cold Prose, but if it proves too much I will surrender and resume a consistent once-a-week schedule. Honest.
* I am grumpy this rainy Sunday morning because the 200 year-old building in which I live has a wonky alarm system which tends to go off, at eardrum-destroying, nerve-shredding volume, whenever water leaks into the structure and touches the wiring. This hideous alarm, far worse than that of a crash-diving submarine or an imperiled Death Star, can only be shut off by the fire department, and because it always strikes during inclement weather, makes evacuating the building (just to get away from the damned noise) extremely unpleasant, especially when it strikes at, say, 330 AM. This vile alarm ruined a much-needed ten-day vacation of mine over the winter holidays of 2022-2023 and drove me to consult my colleagues (prosecutors all) as to whether I could criminally charge my landlord. They responded that I could. However, that very day the problem was -- I thought at the time -- finally solved and after a brief trauma-period in which I spent part of every night waiting for it to go off and thus lost a lot of additional sleep, I gradually forgot about it. Today, around 830 AM, as I sat here in sweats and a T-shirt, trying to write, it reintroduced itself to my eardrums. The old rituals took place: dialing 911, standing outside in the rain in my slippers waiting for the fire department, and fantasizing about tying my landlord to the alarm system so they can experience the full glory of its rich, full-throated song.
* Because I do not want to be grumpy on a Sunday, I will relate a story people who tune into Goodreads will find enjoyable. Yesterday it was also raining, and I took my copy of Evelyn Waugh's MEN AT ARMS to the coffee shop around the corner, sat in their courtyard beneath an awning next to a blazing old outdoor stove of orange clay, and spent the next two hours drinking coffee and reading to the sounds of the falling rain and the crackling flames. A strong smell of woodsmoke (which permeated my clothes) added to the delightful atmosphere. In one of my favorite novels, COMING UP FOR AIR, George Orwell's protagonist, George Bowling, likens the experience of being alone and losing yourself in a novel to "bliss, pure bliss." I cannot disagree. You either understand the feeling I'm talking about, or you don't, and I pity those who don't: but if you're reading this, you almost certainly do, and congratulations and bless you for it. In the world we live in, the ability to escape is more necessary than it has ever been, and we should all remind ourselves periodically that this relief is no farther away than your nearest book.
* Speaking of nearest books: my third CAGE LIFE novel, now renamed DARK TRADE, is at 62,000 words, or roughly 3/4 of the way through its first draft. I began this novel on June 15, and if I can maintain this pace -- always an open question, to say the least -- I'll be done with it by Halloween. I would be lying if I didn't say I was overjoyed by this prospect. Probably the hardest of all the many battles I've had to fight as a writer, either with myself or with others, is the battle against the open-ended project that drags on interminably, month after month, year after year, seemingly without hope of resolution, testing my own resolve to see it through. Indeed, the half-finished or quarter-finished writing project, never to be finished, was the bane of my literary existence for most of my life. I published my first short story at the age of seventeen in a Canadian literary magazine called Green's. I published my second short story in a university magazine called Eye Contact when I was thirty-seven. In the twenty year gap between those two events my sole publications consisted of two letters to the editors of boxing magazines, and I finished exactly one novel and perhaps four or five short stories at the absolute maximum. Like many writers, I was unable to maintain the blaze of enthusiasm I always had at the beginning of a story, and once I went cold, was unable to force myself to finish on sheer determination. Overcoming this tendency, this pathology of failure by virtue of incompletion, was the most difficult of all the tasks I have yet been assigned in life, and it did not happen all at once, but in stages themselves taking years. And even then, when the demon was slain and buried, I came to understand that for the real demons that haunt us, death is but a sleep easily interrupted. Complacency can revive them at any time.
* I am now readying myself for a hike in the rain. It will be muddy and laborious and I will come back soaked to the skin, but my coat smells like woodsmoke from yesterday's fire, I am soon to finish MEN AT ARMS and thus edge a little closer to meeting my (modest) yearly goal in the Goodreads Challenge for the first time in forever, and in my downtime from this downtime, I still have two more MURDER, SHE WROTE television movies to watch left on the DVD four-pack I purchased for a song on Amazon. By the standards of my younger self, this is not much to get excited about, but hey, I'm not my younger self, a fact of which I am continually reminded by photographs, mirrors, and my increasing desire to spend free time watching the television shows of my youth. Youth itself is not nostalgic, it is impatient for the future. Middle age knows the future will arrive far too soon as it is.
*...I have now returned. It was quite the excursion. The woods were entirely empty, and the rain grew more rather than less intense as I tramped through mud and ankle-deep puddles in my decidedly uncomfortable winter boots. While I marched along, I listened to Orson Welles' Mercury Theater Company adaptation of "Dracula" which was originally broadcast on July 11, 1938. It is quite good, especially considering the difficulties presented by such a sprawling story. I particularly appreciated the final sound effect, whose provenance I dug up on Wikipedia: [In a 1940 article for The New Yorker, Lucille Fletcher wrote that "his programs called for all sorts of unheard-of effects, and he could be satisfied with nothing short of perfection." For "Dracula", the CBS sound team searched for the perfect sound of a stake being driven through the heart of the vampire. They first presented a savoy cabbage and a sharpened broomstick for Welles's approval. "Much too leafy," Welles concluded. "Drill a hole in the cabbage and fill it with water. We need blood." When that sound experiment also failed to satisfy Welles, he considered a while—and asked for a watermelon. Fletcher recalled the effect: "Welles stepped from the control booth, seized a hammer, and took a crack at the melon. Even the studio audience shuddered at the sound. That night, on a coast-to-coast network, he gave millions of listeners nightmares with what, even though it be produced with a melon and hammer, is indubitably the sound a stake would make piercing the heart of an undead body.
Well. Now that I have returned and dried myself off, I must continue my middle-aged Sunday in middle-aged fashion: feed the cat, feed myself, finish MEN AT ARMS, and then decide whether to write more or lose myself in yet another MURDER, SHE WROTE television movie. Such is middle-aged life on a rainy Sunday. I guess it ain't so bad. Now if only that goddamned alarm stays silent.
* I recently gave a lecture in these very pages about consistency. I was feeling rather smug that in addition to everything else I do, I was able to put out two blogs a week, and on specific dates (Wednesday and Saturday). Lately I have fallen away from that. I want to make excuses, blame my schedule, etc., etc., but the truth is, when it comes to blogging, I would rather publish nothing at all than a blog for the sake of blogging. Maybe that, too, is an excuse, but I don't mean it that way. What I'm driving at here is that while these posts are often fairly raw in their execution, I don't view them as mere content. I flatter myself that I do not produce mere content, but always strive to have something to say, however silly or disagreeable it might be. The actor Rick Moranis once mocked the very idea of blogging as people spewing unedited first drafts of their thoughts onto the internet, and this criticism is frankly quite valid, but I think it an incomplete assessment. Blogs are not meant to be graduate school essays, capable of withstanding academic scrutinty. They are a method somewhat akin to journaling, free-form poetry, etc. by which people can informally tackle topics that interest or concern them. That, however, is not a license to produce crap. So when I don't have a good topic, or don't have the time or the energy to address one properly, I'd just as soon stay silent. This is still an excuse, but I hope one that shades more toward the side of explanation. I will try to get back on track for a twice-weekly production of Stone Cold Prose, but if it proves too much I will surrender and resume a consistent once-a-week schedule. Honest.
* I am grumpy this rainy Sunday morning because the 200 year-old building in which I live has a wonky alarm system which tends to go off, at eardrum-destroying, nerve-shredding volume, whenever water leaks into the structure and touches the wiring. This hideous alarm, far worse than that of a crash-diving submarine or an imperiled Death Star, can only be shut off by the fire department, and because it always strikes during inclement weather, makes evacuating the building (just to get away from the damned noise) extremely unpleasant, especially when it strikes at, say, 330 AM. This vile alarm ruined a much-needed ten-day vacation of mine over the winter holidays of 2022-2023 and drove me to consult my colleagues (prosecutors all) as to whether I could criminally charge my landlord. They responded that I could. However, that very day the problem was -- I thought at the time -- finally solved and after a brief trauma-period in which I spent part of every night waiting for it to go off and thus lost a lot of additional sleep, I gradually forgot about it. Today, around 830 AM, as I sat here in sweats and a T-shirt, trying to write, it reintroduced itself to my eardrums. The old rituals took place: dialing 911, standing outside in the rain in my slippers waiting for the fire department, and fantasizing about tying my landlord to the alarm system so they can experience the full glory of its rich, full-throated song.
* Because I do not want to be grumpy on a Sunday, I will relate a story people who tune into Goodreads will find enjoyable. Yesterday it was also raining, and I took my copy of Evelyn Waugh's MEN AT ARMS to the coffee shop around the corner, sat in their courtyard beneath an awning next to a blazing old outdoor stove of orange clay, and spent the next two hours drinking coffee and reading to the sounds of the falling rain and the crackling flames. A strong smell of woodsmoke (which permeated my clothes) added to the delightful atmosphere. In one of my favorite novels, COMING UP FOR AIR, George Orwell's protagonist, George Bowling, likens the experience of being alone and losing yourself in a novel to "bliss, pure bliss." I cannot disagree. You either understand the feeling I'm talking about, or you don't, and I pity those who don't: but if you're reading this, you almost certainly do, and congratulations and bless you for it. In the world we live in, the ability to escape is more necessary than it has ever been, and we should all remind ourselves periodically that this relief is no farther away than your nearest book.
* Speaking of nearest books: my third CAGE LIFE novel, now renamed DARK TRADE, is at 62,000 words, or roughly 3/4 of the way through its first draft. I began this novel on June 15, and if I can maintain this pace -- always an open question, to say the least -- I'll be done with it by Halloween. I would be lying if I didn't say I was overjoyed by this prospect. Probably the hardest of all the many battles I've had to fight as a writer, either with myself or with others, is the battle against the open-ended project that drags on interminably, month after month, year after year, seemingly without hope of resolution, testing my own resolve to see it through. Indeed, the half-finished or quarter-finished writing project, never to be finished, was the bane of my literary existence for most of my life. I published my first short story at the age of seventeen in a Canadian literary magazine called Green's. I published my second short story in a university magazine called Eye Contact when I was thirty-seven. In the twenty year gap between those two events my sole publications consisted of two letters to the editors of boxing magazines, and I finished exactly one novel and perhaps four or five short stories at the absolute maximum. Like many writers, I was unable to maintain the blaze of enthusiasm I always had at the beginning of a story, and once I went cold, was unable to force myself to finish on sheer determination. Overcoming this tendency, this pathology of failure by virtue of incompletion, was the most difficult of all the tasks I have yet been assigned in life, and it did not happen all at once, but in stages themselves taking years. And even then, when the demon was slain and buried, I came to understand that for the real demons that haunt us, death is but a sleep easily interrupted. Complacency can revive them at any time.
* I am now readying myself for a hike in the rain. It will be muddy and laborious and I will come back soaked to the skin, but my coat smells like woodsmoke from yesterday's fire, I am soon to finish MEN AT ARMS and thus edge a little closer to meeting my (modest) yearly goal in the Goodreads Challenge for the first time in forever, and in my downtime from this downtime, I still have two more MURDER, SHE WROTE television movies to watch left on the DVD four-pack I purchased for a song on Amazon. By the standards of my younger self, this is not much to get excited about, but hey, I'm not my younger self, a fact of which I am continually reminded by photographs, mirrors, and my increasing desire to spend free time watching the television shows of my youth. Youth itself is not nostalgic, it is impatient for the future. Middle age knows the future will arrive far too soon as it is.
*...I have now returned. It was quite the excursion. The woods were entirely empty, and the rain grew more rather than less intense as I tramped through mud and ankle-deep puddles in my decidedly uncomfortable winter boots. While I marched along, I listened to Orson Welles' Mercury Theater Company adaptation of "Dracula" which was originally broadcast on July 11, 1938. It is quite good, especially considering the difficulties presented by such a sprawling story. I particularly appreciated the final sound effect, whose provenance I dug up on Wikipedia: [In a 1940 article for The New Yorker, Lucille Fletcher wrote that "his programs called for all sorts of unheard-of effects, and he could be satisfied with nothing short of perfection." For "Dracula", the CBS sound team searched for the perfect sound of a stake being driven through the heart of the vampire. They first presented a savoy cabbage and a sharpened broomstick for Welles's approval. "Much too leafy," Welles concluded. "Drill a hole in the cabbage and fill it with water. We need blood." When that sound experiment also failed to satisfy Welles, he considered a while—and asked for a watermelon. Fletcher recalled the effect: "Welles stepped from the control booth, seized a hammer, and took a crack at the melon. Even the studio audience shuddered at the sound. That night, on a coast-to-coast network, he gave millions of listeners nightmares with what, even though it be produced with a melon and hammer, is indubitably the sound a stake would make piercing the heart of an undead body.
Well. Now that I have returned and dried myself off, I must continue my middle-aged Sunday in middle-aged fashion: feed the cat, feed myself, finish MEN AT ARMS, and then decide whether to write more or lose myself in yet another MURDER, SHE WROTE television movie. Such is middle-aged life on a rainy Sunday. I guess it ain't so bad. Now if only that goddamned alarm stays silent.
September 17, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "KINDRED: THE EMBRACED"
In the immortal words of Thomas Magnum, I know what you're thinking. I've already mentioned this show somewhere in my "Gone Too Soon" subseries here on Stone Cold Prose, and am now treading over already-trodden, if unhallowed, ground. This is half true. KINDRED: THE EMBRACED was indeed among the first-season cancellations I have listed and discussed in previous blogs: however, I only lightly touched upon the series, and felt the subject worthy of a fuller examination. With Halloween slowly creeping up on us, I also thought it fitting that "Memory Lane" continues to walk down the path of horror television, a surprisingly rare genre of the medium.
And now, to cases.
KINDRED: THE EMBRACED came and went so quickly in 1996 that if you blinked, you missed it. And it turned out most people did, since it was cancelled after only eight episodes. I myself remember the TV trailers and publicity stills very vividly, but I too must have "blinked" because I never saw any of the shows before they were consigned to the dustbin of TV history. In a sense, I am glad of this, because I believe I would have mourned its demise. Produced by the legendary Aaron Spelling and his less legendary, but no less important partner, E. Duke Vincent, this toothly prime-time soap opera concerned the doings of five vampire clans based in San Fransisco, who were ruled over with some difficulty by a prince named Julian Luna (Mark Frankel). In addition to contending with all sorts of grief from the clans (collectively known as "the Kindred"), Luna makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful human reporter (Kelly Rutherford) who obviously can't be let in on his secret identity, while at the same time, fending off the attentions of a revenge-obsessed cop (C. Thomas Howell), who wants to dust Julian for ordering the death of his (vampire) girlfriend.
The world of KINDRED is a very complex one, based in part off the role-playing game "Vampire: The Masquerade." The city is ruled by its prince, who keeps a counsel of "primogen," or vampire clan leaders, as his counsel. The vampires, though generally at cross-purposes with each other, are generally united in maintaining "the masquerade," i.e. the policy of hiding their existence from humans. They do this by infiltrating human agencies, such as the police, and by spreading their considerable wealth around to shut people up. (Violating the masquerade is punishable by death.) The powers of the vampires are somewhat different than in traditional vampire lore (for one, they can walk around in daylight, provided they've recently fed), and in fact each clan's vamps have somewhat different characteristics (including physical differences in the case of the monstrous Nosferatu). Stand-alone episodes aside, most of the show's drama comes from tension between Luna and his chief rival, Eddie Fiori (the ubiquitous Brian Thompson), who leads the gangsterish Brujah clan and isn't content with his role as second vampiric banana. In addition, there is a Romeo and Juliet storyline between the leader of a biker clan Gangrels, Cash (Channon Roe) and Julian's snarky neice Sasha (Brigid Brannagh) which is terribly overplayed but nevertheless adds depth to the show.
Fans of Spelling's shows will recognize all of his trademarks here – period fashion, gallons of hair gel, extraordinarily beautiful actors who nevertheless look slightly freakish, and lots and lots of soapy melodrama At its worst, this show was embarrassingly bad: the writing, and therefore the acting, were all over the place, Howell was dreadfully miscast, and the vampire makeup on the “Nosferatu” clan looked like something you'd find at the discount bin at Party City the day after Halloween. Nonetheless, I mourned the cancellation of this show: it had such a fabulous premise that it couldn't help but improve from week to week, and indeed, its eight episodes tell a nearly complete story that resolves most of the plot lines, making it satisfying to watch as a kind of unofficial mini-series. Never mind a second season: I'd have been content if this one had simply been allowed to complete its first. Unfortunately, the series' too-handsome-to-be-human star, Mark Frankel, was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after its cancellation, preventing any possible reunion, and in any case “Kindred” died such a quick death that it has only a small cult following and is somewhat unlikely to be tapped for a reboot. Interestingly, Spelling was to try another supernaturally-themed show set in San Fransisco just two years later, and scored a big hit with CHARMED. Fans of "Kindred" will recognize that some of the shots used in the opening season of "Charmed" were actually taken from "Kindred," including the iconic "park bench overlooking the bridge." What's more, just about every (surviving) actor in the cast later appeared on "Charmed" in some capacity or other, including Stacey Haiduk, Brigid Brannagh, Channon Roe, Jeff Kober, Brian Thompson, etc. Many appeared on BUFFY (or ANGEL) as well. It must have been a bitter pill for Spelling to watch BUFFY take off like a rocket not even a full year after this show went off the air, but in fairness, BUFFY was much the superior product in every way. I just wish KINDRED had had time to mature. It was in most ways an objectively bad television show, but was already improving when it disappeared, and its world was a rich, sexy and aesthetically beautiful one. Episodes like "Nightstalker," "Live Hard, Die Young and Leave A Good-Looking Corpse," and the finale, "Cabin the Woods" showed the enormous potential it possessed. The intersection of the supernatural world and the world of cops, reporters and other ordinary people is one which has rarely been explored on television, and that brings me to the deeper end of this particular pool.
At the time of this writing, I cannot think of too many prime-time television shows which fully embraced horror thematically even if they were not striving for scares at every point, and if we set aside anthologies of the HITCHHIKER, FREDDY'S NIGHTMARES, NIGHT GALLERY, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, CHANNEL ZERO, AMERICAN HORROR STORY, etc., etc.) we immediately reduce the smallish total figure. Off the top of my head, I think of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, THE OUTER LIMITS, KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, WEREWOLF, FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES, FOREVER KNIGHT, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, CHARMED, THE X-FILES, SUPERNATURAL, FRINGE and STRANGER THINGS. The various WALKING DEAD shows can be tossed in there as well along with various others, but when we compare however many the final number would be to, say cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows, etc., the outcome is a total massacre. What's more, many of these series have come along post X-FILES and BUFFY, making them much less risky prospects. KINDRED was a brave attempt to revive a genre of storytelling which wasn't anywhere near as popular at the time as it is today, and which was therefore a much bigger risk than, say, 90210 or MELROSE PLACE. It was rather a mess, due to various issues the producers could not or did not overcome before the pilot was shot, but its boldness should not be dismissed out of hand. Horror, as a rule, suffers more than any other genre from good ideas gone wrong: i.e. from bold conceptions which are poorly executed. A lot of this comes from the fact it is not a respected art form and therefore gets little of the time, attention, money and craft your average, generic law-firm or detective show would recieve as a matter of course. Paramount Pictures has made almost a fetish of shitting on fans of the FRIDAY THE 13TH series in part because the suits consider the franchise itself an embarrassment. The stark fact is that horror is often considered to be only a step above pornography no matter the medium by which it is disseminated, be it print or celluloid. Stephen King has railed most eloquently about this, but it hasn't changed the underlying feelings and prejudices regarding horror television.
So where does that leave us? What is the legacy of this failed and forgotten series, a quarter century down the road? And is there anything to be learned from its demise?
The most obvious bequest of KINDRED is that Spelling was undaunted enough by its failure to produce CHARMED a few years down the road, which by then had had BUFFY to blaze a trail for it. CHARMED was an enormous success and had a huge influence over a whole generation of young women, very few of whom probably knew how many of its guest stars had themselves starred on KINDRED. They were, of course, very different shows: KINDRED took itself with great seriousness, while CHARMED rarely took itself seriously at all. But it seems unlikely to me that you would have had the one without the other. Indeed, setting CHARMED in San Fransisco seems to have been a little bit of a fuck-you from Spelling, and if it was, well, more power to him.
More directly, I look at KINDRED not as a might-have-been or a cautionary tale, but an inspiration and a reminder all at once. It is an inspiration in that it was a long shot to begin with, yet enough people in the notoriously cynical and cowardly citadels of Hollywood chanced it might succeed that it actually saw -- so to speak -- the light of day. It's an inspiration in that its creators, when they knew it was going to be canceled, had the integrity to wind up the story in such as way as to leave its meager audience satisfied rather that simply dangling. And it is a reminder that those who work in the bloody medium of horror need do more than come up with interesting and intriguing concepts: they have to execute them properly. The idea of rival vampire clans secretly holding power in a major American city is a fascinating one: it should have yielded better results. Enthusiasm for an idea is all well and good, but you are judged by how you finish the race, not by how you start it. KINDRED suffered principally from a confusion over whether it was a vampire show or a soap opera with vampire themes, and that was an avoidable pitfall. The time to shake out the bugs is before you finish the pilot, not three or four episodes -- or seasons -- into a series. Some of this, of course, is impossible, but because something is impossible doesn't mean you shouldn't try: the very act will go a long way toward improving you.
Someday, I believe KINDRED will get another bite -- ha ha! -- at the throat of television via the inevitable reboot. And unlike most reboots, this prospect doesn't leave me shivering.
And now, to cases.
KINDRED: THE EMBRACED came and went so quickly in 1996 that if you blinked, you missed it. And it turned out most people did, since it was cancelled after only eight episodes. I myself remember the TV trailers and publicity stills very vividly, but I too must have "blinked" because I never saw any of the shows before they were consigned to the dustbin of TV history. In a sense, I am glad of this, because I believe I would have mourned its demise. Produced by the legendary Aaron Spelling and his less legendary, but no less important partner, E. Duke Vincent, this toothly prime-time soap opera concerned the doings of five vampire clans based in San Fransisco, who were ruled over with some difficulty by a prince named Julian Luna (Mark Frankel). In addition to contending with all sorts of grief from the clans (collectively known as "the Kindred"), Luna makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful human reporter (Kelly Rutherford) who obviously can't be let in on his secret identity, while at the same time, fending off the attentions of a revenge-obsessed cop (C. Thomas Howell), who wants to dust Julian for ordering the death of his (vampire) girlfriend.
The world of KINDRED is a very complex one, based in part off the role-playing game "Vampire: The Masquerade." The city is ruled by its prince, who keeps a counsel of "primogen," or vampire clan leaders, as his counsel. The vampires, though generally at cross-purposes with each other, are generally united in maintaining "the masquerade," i.e. the policy of hiding their existence from humans. They do this by infiltrating human agencies, such as the police, and by spreading their considerable wealth around to shut people up. (Violating the masquerade is punishable by death.) The powers of the vampires are somewhat different than in traditional vampire lore (for one, they can walk around in daylight, provided they've recently fed), and in fact each clan's vamps have somewhat different characteristics (including physical differences in the case of the monstrous Nosferatu). Stand-alone episodes aside, most of the show's drama comes from tension between Luna and his chief rival, Eddie Fiori (the ubiquitous Brian Thompson), who leads the gangsterish Brujah clan and isn't content with his role as second vampiric banana. In addition, there is a Romeo and Juliet storyline between the leader of a biker clan Gangrels, Cash (Channon Roe) and Julian's snarky neice Sasha (Brigid Brannagh) which is terribly overplayed but nevertheless adds depth to the show.
Fans of Spelling's shows will recognize all of his trademarks here – period fashion, gallons of hair gel, extraordinarily beautiful actors who nevertheless look slightly freakish, and lots and lots of soapy melodrama At its worst, this show was embarrassingly bad: the writing, and therefore the acting, were all over the place, Howell was dreadfully miscast, and the vampire makeup on the “Nosferatu” clan looked like something you'd find at the discount bin at Party City the day after Halloween. Nonetheless, I mourned the cancellation of this show: it had such a fabulous premise that it couldn't help but improve from week to week, and indeed, its eight episodes tell a nearly complete story that resolves most of the plot lines, making it satisfying to watch as a kind of unofficial mini-series. Never mind a second season: I'd have been content if this one had simply been allowed to complete its first. Unfortunately, the series' too-handsome-to-be-human star, Mark Frankel, was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after its cancellation, preventing any possible reunion, and in any case “Kindred” died such a quick death that it has only a small cult following and is somewhat unlikely to be tapped for a reboot. Interestingly, Spelling was to try another supernaturally-themed show set in San Fransisco just two years later, and scored a big hit with CHARMED. Fans of "Kindred" will recognize that some of the shots used in the opening season of "Charmed" were actually taken from "Kindred," including the iconic "park bench overlooking the bridge." What's more, just about every (surviving) actor in the cast later appeared on "Charmed" in some capacity or other, including Stacey Haiduk, Brigid Brannagh, Channon Roe, Jeff Kober, Brian Thompson, etc. Many appeared on BUFFY (or ANGEL) as well. It must have been a bitter pill for Spelling to watch BUFFY take off like a rocket not even a full year after this show went off the air, but in fairness, BUFFY was much the superior product in every way. I just wish KINDRED had had time to mature. It was in most ways an objectively bad television show, but was already improving when it disappeared, and its world was a rich, sexy and aesthetically beautiful one. Episodes like "Nightstalker," "Live Hard, Die Young and Leave A Good-Looking Corpse," and the finale, "Cabin the Woods" showed the enormous potential it possessed. The intersection of the supernatural world and the world of cops, reporters and other ordinary people is one which has rarely been explored on television, and that brings me to the deeper end of this particular pool.
At the time of this writing, I cannot think of too many prime-time television shows which fully embraced horror thematically even if they were not striving for scares at every point, and if we set aside anthologies of the HITCHHIKER, FREDDY'S NIGHTMARES, NIGHT GALLERY, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, CHANNEL ZERO, AMERICAN HORROR STORY, etc., etc.) we immediately reduce the smallish total figure. Off the top of my head, I think of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, THE OUTER LIMITS, KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, WEREWOLF, FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES, FOREVER KNIGHT, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, CHARMED, THE X-FILES, SUPERNATURAL, FRINGE and STRANGER THINGS. The various WALKING DEAD shows can be tossed in there as well along with various others, but when we compare however many the final number would be to, say cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows, etc., the outcome is a total massacre. What's more, many of these series have come along post X-FILES and BUFFY, making them much less risky prospects. KINDRED was a brave attempt to revive a genre of storytelling which wasn't anywhere near as popular at the time as it is today, and which was therefore a much bigger risk than, say, 90210 or MELROSE PLACE. It was rather a mess, due to various issues the producers could not or did not overcome before the pilot was shot, but its boldness should not be dismissed out of hand. Horror, as a rule, suffers more than any other genre from good ideas gone wrong: i.e. from bold conceptions which are poorly executed. A lot of this comes from the fact it is not a respected art form and therefore gets little of the time, attention, money and craft your average, generic law-firm or detective show would recieve as a matter of course. Paramount Pictures has made almost a fetish of shitting on fans of the FRIDAY THE 13TH series in part because the suits consider the franchise itself an embarrassment. The stark fact is that horror is often considered to be only a step above pornography no matter the medium by which it is disseminated, be it print or celluloid. Stephen King has railed most eloquently about this, but it hasn't changed the underlying feelings and prejudices regarding horror television.
So where does that leave us? What is the legacy of this failed and forgotten series, a quarter century down the road? And is there anything to be learned from its demise?
The most obvious bequest of KINDRED is that Spelling was undaunted enough by its failure to produce CHARMED a few years down the road, which by then had had BUFFY to blaze a trail for it. CHARMED was an enormous success and had a huge influence over a whole generation of young women, very few of whom probably knew how many of its guest stars had themselves starred on KINDRED. They were, of course, very different shows: KINDRED took itself with great seriousness, while CHARMED rarely took itself seriously at all. But it seems unlikely to me that you would have had the one without the other. Indeed, setting CHARMED in San Fransisco seems to have been a little bit of a fuck-you from Spelling, and if it was, well, more power to him.
More directly, I look at KINDRED not as a might-have-been or a cautionary tale, but an inspiration and a reminder all at once. It is an inspiration in that it was a long shot to begin with, yet enough people in the notoriously cynical and cowardly citadels of Hollywood chanced it might succeed that it actually saw -- so to speak -- the light of day. It's an inspiration in that its creators, when they knew it was going to be canceled, had the integrity to wind up the story in such as way as to leave its meager audience satisfied rather that simply dangling. And it is a reminder that those who work in the bloody medium of horror need do more than come up with interesting and intriguing concepts: they have to execute them properly. The idea of rival vampire clans secretly holding power in a major American city is a fascinating one: it should have yielded better results. Enthusiasm for an idea is all well and good, but you are judged by how you finish the race, not by how you start it. KINDRED suffered principally from a confusion over whether it was a vampire show or a soap opera with vampire themes, and that was an avoidable pitfall. The time to shake out the bugs is before you finish the pilot, not three or four episodes -- or seasons -- into a series. Some of this, of course, is impossible, but because something is impossible doesn't mean you shouldn't try: the very act will go a long way toward improving you.
Someday, I believe KINDRED will get another bite -- ha ha! -- at the throat of television via the inevitable reboot. And unlike most reboots, this prospect doesn't leave me shivering.
September 6, 2023
HAVING A GO AT THE MANOSPHERE
A week or so ago I promised to balance my fiery diatribe (is there ever an ice-cold diatribe, I wonder?) against modern feminism by making sport of the so-called "manosphere." For those unfamiliar with the term, the manosphere is defined by Wikipedia as "a group of loosely associated websites, blogs, and forums all concerned with masculinity and men's issues, and includes input from the MRM, pick-up artists, anti-feminists, and fathers' rights activists." In short, the manosphere is for men the virtual equivalent of the beauty salon used to be for women: a place to vent their frustrations, express their concerns, and seek help with their problems. It contains a vast spectrum of personalities, from the blatantly misogynistic to the gently comedic, from those nursing grievances to those seeking advice, from those looking to cash in on the loneliness and frustration of younger generations of men to those sincerely trying to guide them. In short, it's the usual Mos Eisley mix you find on the internet, neither good nor evil in itself, but containing both and everything in between. I have spent some months terminally online in the hopes of understanding its attraction to men of all ages, and I am ready to report my findings.
It's important to begin by stating that I don't want to get into the chicken-egg argument of "did the internet expose how fucked up everyone is or did it make us fucked up?" because the answer to that question is simply "...yes." The web both exposed the dark corners of our minds and managed to make them all the darker by its very existence. But even if this were not so it would be irrelevant, because we have to look at the situation as it is: how we got here, for once, is of little importance. The manosphere manifestly does not represent the views of all men, because the internet itself only represents the opinions of those who take an active part in it, and those people are often clowns, fools, hucksters or absolute shitheels; but it does provide us with answers to some of the more important questions about those who are terminally online or who draw their opinions primarily from the net and social media.
The first thing that I would say in regards to the manosphere is that there is less overt misogyny than I expected, and far more intelligent observation and criticism. This is not to say that I did not encounter misogyny: I did, and in some quantity and varying levels of intensity, from subtle and backhanded to strident and hateful. But the content creators I sampled, black and white, conservative and moderate, Gen X to Gen Z, male and yes, even female, tended more toward a defensive or even a defeatist attitude toward modern women, than to active antipathy. Their comments were generally marked by some or all of the following:
1. Loneliness.
2. Hostility toward/distrust of modern women.
3. Sexual and socio-sexual frustration.
4. A feeling that masculinity is under attack.
5. Nostalgia for clearly understood sex/gender roles.
6. Frustration over historical gaslighting.
To tackle these in order:
1. When the internet first began to make itself felt in society, there was a near-universal assumption that it would help human beings connect with each other: this assumption was well-founded and, for a time, completely validated. But like any drug, the initial, connective effect of e-mail, instant messaging and chatrooms gradually faded and became curiously isolative in nature over time: in fact, one could argue that the more connected people became with the advent of social media, cell phone apps, etc., the more isolated they became. This seems to be because birds of a feather flock together, and people who feel isolated and alone often seem to gravitate to others who are similarly lonely. This creates an environment where these qualities, and the psychological baggage that comes with them, become normative, accepted, and even lauditory. They make a fetish of their own loneliness, their own social awkwardness and inability to make flesh-and-blood friendships and sexually intimate relationships. And it is from this soil that the more radical, misogynist elements of the manosphere grew their mutated offspring. But this is not the whole or the end of the story. There are many men whose sin is to be basically average -- in looks and earning power -- and who feel as if because they are average, they are ignored by the 90% of women who are gunning for the top 10% of men. Thus they end up being rejected even by even average women. In this they have some grounds for complaint. Modern feminism has all but championed this 90/10 math, insisting that all women, regardless of their looks or attractiveness or baggage or emotional stability, can land a so-called "high-value man," when in fact the supply of such men is necessarily very low, and such men have no obvious reason to commit to any one woman. It has helped create a situation in which neither women nor men tend to ge what they want, which only fuels additional anger toward the opposite sex, and certainly does nothing to ease loneliness. Thus the whole thing has become a self-perpetuating cycle.
2. There is obviously a lot of anger in the manosphere, but it tends to come from different places. The first is rooted in a feeling that women are responsible for placating men's sex drives, the old Beavis & Butt-Head logic of "you made me horny, now do something about it." The second is men who've had bad experiences with women in the past, which some men make a religion which they preach to others who have had similar experiences or fear them. The third is a fear that women are generally only out to marry to gain access to a man's money and property; and will cheat on him, dump him, loot his bank account and take custody of his children the moment it suits their whims. There is a great deal of confirmation bias in this aspect of the manosphere.
3. Sexual frustration is a self-explanatory condition; but this oft-ridiculed issue among men is not less serious because it is the butt of jokes and gaslighting. The sex drive in young males is so intense that if it does not find expression in the act itself, it can lead to seriously distorted thinking, and consequently, to bad behavior over time -- again I reference the incels, some of whom I would categorize as functionally insane. But the real issue is socio-sexual frustration: that the below-average man has no hope of having sex or intimacy with any woman, much less one he finds attractive. That his ugliness, plainness, social awkwardness, and low earning power, are conditions have no remedy. This is, in essence, at the heart of a lot of manosphere anguish: defeatism, depression, hopelessness. This is a mirage, but it is a dangerous one because perception is reality, and the soul is dyed the color of its thoughts.
4. The manosphere definitely has a siege mentality, and it is here that I find the greatest level of justification in male anger and resentment, for there is no question that traditional masculinity has been under attack for decades, even generations, in this country and elsewhere -- George Orwell repeatedly documented how, in Britain, physical courage was subject to ridicule throughout the interwar period of the 20s - 30s, now a full century ago. The sort of man we see so often in commercials -- pale, unshaven, unmuscled, slightly flabby, not very large -- who seems fuddled, somewhat stupid, and most definitely unintimidating, and who mutters "yes dear" a lot while sipping is craft brew, is basically the modern man as modern society seems to want him to be. He is unthreatening, unassertive, unaggressive, and projects neither sexuality nor strength nor any outward sign of intelligence. I am not going to get into the nuances here -- the attack on masculinity is a curiously race-specific thing, and we will have to revisit that issue later -- but it is hard to watch contemporary television or film and not come away with the idea that the contemporary man would be acknowledged as a man by his own grandfather. In fact, men used to be rated by women for their ability to dominate: for their boldness and resourcefulness, especially in a crisis. Now they are condemned when exhibiting these qualities -- as toxic, as feral, as predatory. Obviously this siege mentality has gone too far with some men, who have retreated all the way into misogyny; but it strikes me as sheer foolishness to attack the manosphere here, at the place it is most defensible.
5. As I just mentioned, there used to be a time when men clearly understood what was expected of them and were judged by both women and other men by their ability to meet these criteria. The whole idea of "women and children first" on a sinking ship stems from the idea that the central role of a man is to protect, if need be by laying down his life: 2,900 years ago, Spartan women told their men going into battle, "Come back with your shield or on it." They would literally rather see their husbands, brothers and sons dead than know they had lacked courage on the battlefield. And it was partially to avoid being publicly or privately shamed by women that so many men volunteered for military service as late as WW2. To an only slightly lesser extent this applied to work: a man brought home the bacon for his wife and kids or he was not a man. Whatever pains he suffered on the job, whatever humiliations he had to endure, were his problem alone: to be a man, he had to meet his burdens, period, or surrender claim to manhood. If this seems like a role few people would want, consider that it has long been recognized that in life, happiness tends to stem from knowing one's place in the scheme of things -- one's roles, duties, responsibilities, privileges and powers. Ambiguity means confusion, anxiety, crisis of identity. Men used to know more or less exactly what was expected of them in life. There was a clearly defined role for them to occupy. This has been destroyed. They no longer know what the rules are. God, or nature, has designed them to do certain things, think a certain way, and now they are being told this is wrong and makes them objectively bad or primitive people. Some anger and resentment at this is understandable, because, as Jordan Peterson remarked, "It's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life." To take away the way men define their sense of responsibility is to take away their identity and offer them nothing in return.
6. A highly divisive and controversial aspect of the 'sphere is a belief that the contributions of men to history are being erased, minimized, or rewritten in such a way as to turn positives into negatives. That men have been systematically devalued by the very people who benefit the most from the achievements of men: women. "You live in the world we built!" is common refrain among content creators, and it is not without merit. It was men who killed the enemy, cleared the land, farmed the soil, invented the tools, paved the roads, drove the cattle, built the machines, fought the wars. Yet none of this is permissible to say nowadays, because of the presumption that saying it means women did not also make contributions. Their contributions, however, were of a different sort, and to negate one side of the equation while benfitting from it is gross hypocrisy. An example of this negation might be a man saying "we tamed this land"; whereupon the response is usually of the "yes, by killing the Indians" sort -- as if the person uttering this remark were not also a direct beneficiary of that slaughter.
No discussion of the manosphere would be complete, however, if it didn't dive into its darker waters. There is misogyny in its depths, and indeed, in the shallower end of the pool as well. This manifests in ways subtle and gross. The gross disinterests me because there is no use analyzing it: when someone of the Andrew Tate stripe opens his mouth, you can generally be certain that even when what he says is objectively true, the motive for him saying it is rooted in his dislike and fear of women and his desire, even his need, to see them subjugated. The belief that women should provide "sex, silence, and sandwiches" is not worth discussing, and I suspect his embrasure of Islam has less to do with religious feeling than a desire to find spiritual validation for an indifensible position. More subtle misogyny I found in content that I often frankly enjoyed watching for its humor, insights and penetrating observations: these content creators were generally intelligent, articulate and reasonable in their arguments, but seemingly driven by motives they were not necessarily prepared to confess, or -- to be charitable -- they may not have been aware motivated them. Overall, some of the more common themes I encountered were:
1. Contempt for single mothers on the dating scene.
2. Contempt for men who date single mothers.
3. Contempt for women who are sexually promiscuous.
4. Contempt for women who regret being sexually promiscuous.
5. Contempt for men who get married.
6. Contempt for women who divorce, regardless of circumstance.
7. Contempt for women's perspectives.
8. Distrust of women's motives generally.
9. Goalpost shifting of women's value.
10. Assumption that all women want the same kind of man.
This is a lot of contempt. Some of it is easier to analyze, some of it is not, and I have no intention of tackling this point by point, because it is pointless and distasteful. However, call necessitates response, so I will touch on a few things. For example, many manosphere pundits assume that the demise of any relationship, especially marriage, must be the woman's fault, and while statistics may back this up on the subject of divorce, especially for certain populations, it glosses over the fact that the roots of divorce are often deep and tangled, and that the filing party is not necessarily the guilty one -- there may not even be a guilty one. It doesn't take a great deal of insight to grasp that men burned by divorces or terrible breakups make up a certain segment of the vlogging/podcasting population, and that their grudges and bitterness have shaped their own philosophies toward women.
Goalpost shifting is worth mentioning because it is the process by which some men -- Kevin Samuels comes to mind -- create a playing field by which a woman's value is determined solely by men (specifically "high value" men). This playing field discounts a woman's education and income in favor of her youth, looks, and willingness to submit to a man's authority ("fit, feminine, fertile, friendly"). It is not wrong as a traditionalist outlook on suitability for marriage per se, but it hardly fits the world we actually live in, and its inherent dismissiveness of accomplishment and earning power stinks of gaslight.
Assumptions that every woman secretly wants a "Chad" or "Tyrone" -- the wealthy, bad-boy stud horse -- plague the manosphere. This is a fear which stems partially, no doubt, from humiliating anecdotal evidence, but it is nonsense to say it applies to every woman. Women are as diverse in their romantic and sexual tastes as men, and not all of them are vulnerable to surface charm, bleached teeth and platinum credit cards. To assume that the behavior patterns of human females are entirely shallow, sensual and materialistic, and can be predicted in the same manner as birds, or insects, is worth taking the time to laugh at, though I would agree that the misogyny beneath the assumption is not funny at all. Stereotypes, especially negative ones, are a backhanded attempt to dehumanize people. And dehumanization is a path that leads in only one direction.
This at any rate is my takeaway from the manosphere. It is incomplete, scattershot and slovenly, but so is the manosphere. I would not agree with those who condemn it in toto or simply hang the "woman bashing" label on it and then walk away from the discussion, because much of what I found there had substance, and was at least worthy of listening to even if one totally disagrees with the arguments being presented. The internet, in its ideal form, is for discourse and the acquisition of knowledge, and men have every right to meet virtually to seek and give advice, talk about their problems, relate their anecdotes and express their fears. On the other hand, I am not in the habit of whitewashing garbage -- or crap, for that matter, and believe-you-me, there is a lot of crap in the manosphere. Some of it is harmless, but taken as a whole it has a cumulative effect, especially on men who are embittered by bad experience, or adolescents whose raging hormones and social awkwardness make them fertile soil for dangerous ideas to grow. The manosphere is probably necessary, or as necessary as anything can be in the internet era, because it serves as a kind of psychological pressure release valve for bored, frustrated, alienated, leaderless, or simply curious men. But it is not serving these men very well, and is too easily a conduit by which the most desperate of them can be radicalized into dangerous beliefs. It bears study, but it also bears watching.
It's important to begin by stating that I don't want to get into the chicken-egg argument of "did the internet expose how fucked up everyone is or did it make us fucked up?" because the answer to that question is simply "...yes." The web both exposed the dark corners of our minds and managed to make them all the darker by its very existence. But even if this were not so it would be irrelevant, because we have to look at the situation as it is: how we got here, for once, is of little importance. The manosphere manifestly does not represent the views of all men, because the internet itself only represents the opinions of those who take an active part in it, and those people are often clowns, fools, hucksters or absolute shitheels; but it does provide us with answers to some of the more important questions about those who are terminally online or who draw their opinions primarily from the net and social media.
The first thing that I would say in regards to the manosphere is that there is less overt misogyny than I expected, and far more intelligent observation and criticism. This is not to say that I did not encounter misogyny: I did, and in some quantity and varying levels of intensity, from subtle and backhanded to strident and hateful. But the content creators I sampled, black and white, conservative and moderate, Gen X to Gen Z, male and yes, even female, tended more toward a defensive or even a defeatist attitude toward modern women, than to active antipathy. Their comments were generally marked by some or all of the following:
1. Loneliness.
2. Hostility toward/distrust of modern women.
3. Sexual and socio-sexual frustration.
4. A feeling that masculinity is under attack.
5. Nostalgia for clearly understood sex/gender roles.
6. Frustration over historical gaslighting.
To tackle these in order:
1. When the internet first began to make itself felt in society, there was a near-universal assumption that it would help human beings connect with each other: this assumption was well-founded and, for a time, completely validated. But like any drug, the initial, connective effect of e-mail, instant messaging and chatrooms gradually faded and became curiously isolative in nature over time: in fact, one could argue that the more connected people became with the advent of social media, cell phone apps, etc., the more isolated they became. This seems to be because birds of a feather flock together, and people who feel isolated and alone often seem to gravitate to others who are similarly lonely. This creates an environment where these qualities, and the psychological baggage that comes with them, become normative, accepted, and even lauditory. They make a fetish of their own loneliness, their own social awkwardness and inability to make flesh-and-blood friendships and sexually intimate relationships. And it is from this soil that the more radical, misogynist elements of the manosphere grew their mutated offspring. But this is not the whole or the end of the story. There are many men whose sin is to be basically average -- in looks and earning power -- and who feel as if because they are average, they are ignored by the 90% of women who are gunning for the top 10% of men. Thus they end up being rejected even by even average women. In this they have some grounds for complaint. Modern feminism has all but championed this 90/10 math, insisting that all women, regardless of their looks or attractiveness or baggage or emotional stability, can land a so-called "high-value man," when in fact the supply of such men is necessarily very low, and such men have no obvious reason to commit to any one woman. It has helped create a situation in which neither women nor men tend to ge what they want, which only fuels additional anger toward the opposite sex, and certainly does nothing to ease loneliness. Thus the whole thing has become a self-perpetuating cycle.
2. There is obviously a lot of anger in the manosphere, but it tends to come from different places. The first is rooted in a feeling that women are responsible for placating men's sex drives, the old Beavis & Butt-Head logic of "you made me horny, now do something about it." The second is men who've had bad experiences with women in the past, which some men make a religion which they preach to others who have had similar experiences or fear them. The third is a fear that women are generally only out to marry to gain access to a man's money and property; and will cheat on him, dump him, loot his bank account and take custody of his children the moment it suits their whims. There is a great deal of confirmation bias in this aspect of the manosphere.
3. Sexual frustration is a self-explanatory condition; but this oft-ridiculed issue among men is not less serious because it is the butt of jokes and gaslighting. The sex drive in young males is so intense that if it does not find expression in the act itself, it can lead to seriously distorted thinking, and consequently, to bad behavior over time -- again I reference the incels, some of whom I would categorize as functionally insane. But the real issue is socio-sexual frustration: that the below-average man has no hope of having sex or intimacy with any woman, much less one he finds attractive. That his ugliness, plainness, social awkwardness, and low earning power, are conditions have no remedy. This is, in essence, at the heart of a lot of manosphere anguish: defeatism, depression, hopelessness. This is a mirage, but it is a dangerous one because perception is reality, and the soul is dyed the color of its thoughts.
4. The manosphere definitely has a siege mentality, and it is here that I find the greatest level of justification in male anger and resentment, for there is no question that traditional masculinity has been under attack for decades, even generations, in this country and elsewhere -- George Orwell repeatedly documented how, in Britain, physical courage was subject to ridicule throughout the interwar period of the 20s - 30s, now a full century ago. The sort of man we see so often in commercials -- pale, unshaven, unmuscled, slightly flabby, not very large -- who seems fuddled, somewhat stupid, and most definitely unintimidating, and who mutters "yes dear" a lot while sipping is craft brew, is basically the modern man as modern society seems to want him to be. He is unthreatening, unassertive, unaggressive, and projects neither sexuality nor strength nor any outward sign of intelligence. I am not going to get into the nuances here -- the attack on masculinity is a curiously race-specific thing, and we will have to revisit that issue later -- but it is hard to watch contemporary television or film and not come away with the idea that the contemporary man would be acknowledged as a man by his own grandfather. In fact, men used to be rated by women for their ability to dominate: for their boldness and resourcefulness, especially in a crisis. Now they are condemned when exhibiting these qualities -- as toxic, as feral, as predatory. Obviously this siege mentality has gone too far with some men, who have retreated all the way into misogyny; but it strikes me as sheer foolishness to attack the manosphere here, at the place it is most defensible.
5. As I just mentioned, there used to be a time when men clearly understood what was expected of them and were judged by both women and other men by their ability to meet these criteria. The whole idea of "women and children first" on a sinking ship stems from the idea that the central role of a man is to protect, if need be by laying down his life: 2,900 years ago, Spartan women told their men going into battle, "Come back with your shield or on it." They would literally rather see their husbands, brothers and sons dead than know they had lacked courage on the battlefield. And it was partially to avoid being publicly or privately shamed by women that so many men volunteered for military service as late as WW2. To an only slightly lesser extent this applied to work: a man brought home the bacon for his wife and kids or he was not a man. Whatever pains he suffered on the job, whatever humiliations he had to endure, were his problem alone: to be a man, he had to meet his burdens, period, or surrender claim to manhood. If this seems like a role few people would want, consider that it has long been recognized that in life, happiness tends to stem from knowing one's place in the scheme of things -- one's roles, duties, responsibilities, privileges and powers. Ambiguity means confusion, anxiety, crisis of identity. Men used to know more or less exactly what was expected of them in life. There was a clearly defined role for them to occupy. This has been destroyed. They no longer know what the rules are. God, or nature, has designed them to do certain things, think a certain way, and now they are being told this is wrong and makes them objectively bad or primitive people. Some anger and resentment at this is understandable, because, as Jordan Peterson remarked, "It's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life." To take away the way men define their sense of responsibility is to take away their identity and offer them nothing in return.
6. A highly divisive and controversial aspect of the 'sphere is a belief that the contributions of men to history are being erased, minimized, or rewritten in such a way as to turn positives into negatives. That men have been systematically devalued by the very people who benefit the most from the achievements of men: women. "You live in the world we built!" is common refrain among content creators, and it is not without merit. It was men who killed the enemy, cleared the land, farmed the soil, invented the tools, paved the roads, drove the cattle, built the machines, fought the wars. Yet none of this is permissible to say nowadays, because of the presumption that saying it means women did not also make contributions. Their contributions, however, were of a different sort, and to negate one side of the equation while benfitting from it is gross hypocrisy. An example of this negation might be a man saying "we tamed this land"; whereupon the response is usually of the "yes, by killing the Indians" sort -- as if the person uttering this remark were not also a direct beneficiary of that slaughter.
No discussion of the manosphere would be complete, however, if it didn't dive into its darker waters. There is misogyny in its depths, and indeed, in the shallower end of the pool as well. This manifests in ways subtle and gross. The gross disinterests me because there is no use analyzing it: when someone of the Andrew Tate stripe opens his mouth, you can generally be certain that even when what he says is objectively true, the motive for him saying it is rooted in his dislike and fear of women and his desire, even his need, to see them subjugated. The belief that women should provide "sex, silence, and sandwiches" is not worth discussing, and I suspect his embrasure of Islam has less to do with religious feeling than a desire to find spiritual validation for an indifensible position. More subtle misogyny I found in content that I often frankly enjoyed watching for its humor, insights and penetrating observations: these content creators were generally intelligent, articulate and reasonable in their arguments, but seemingly driven by motives they were not necessarily prepared to confess, or -- to be charitable -- they may not have been aware motivated them. Overall, some of the more common themes I encountered were:
1. Contempt for single mothers on the dating scene.
2. Contempt for men who date single mothers.
3. Contempt for women who are sexually promiscuous.
4. Contempt for women who regret being sexually promiscuous.
5. Contempt for men who get married.
6. Contempt for women who divorce, regardless of circumstance.
7. Contempt for women's perspectives.
8. Distrust of women's motives generally.
9. Goalpost shifting of women's value.
10. Assumption that all women want the same kind of man.
This is a lot of contempt. Some of it is easier to analyze, some of it is not, and I have no intention of tackling this point by point, because it is pointless and distasteful. However, call necessitates response, so I will touch on a few things. For example, many manosphere pundits assume that the demise of any relationship, especially marriage, must be the woman's fault, and while statistics may back this up on the subject of divorce, especially for certain populations, it glosses over the fact that the roots of divorce are often deep and tangled, and that the filing party is not necessarily the guilty one -- there may not even be a guilty one. It doesn't take a great deal of insight to grasp that men burned by divorces or terrible breakups make up a certain segment of the vlogging/podcasting population, and that their grudges and bitterness have shaped their own philosophies toward women.
Goalpost shifting is worth mentioning because it is the process by which some men -- Kevin Samuels comes to mind -- create a playing field by which a woman's value is determined solely by men (specifically "high value" men). This playing field discounts a woman's education and income in favor of her youth, looks, and willingness to submit to a man's authority ("fit, feminine, fertile, friendly"). It is not wrong as a traditionalist outlook on suitability for marriage per se, but it hardly fits the world we actually live in, and its inherent dismissiveness of accomplishment and earning power stinks of gaslight.
Assumptions that every woman secretly wants a "Chad" or "Tyrone" -- the wealthy, bad-boy stud horse -- plague the manosphere. This is a fear which stems partially, no doubt, from humiliating anecdotal evidence, but it is nonsense to say it applies to every woman. Women are as diverse in their romantic and sexual tastes as men, and not all of them are vulnerable to surface charm, bleached teeth and platinum credit cards. To assume that the behavior patterns of human females are entirely shallow, sensual and materialistic, and can be predicted in the same manner as birds, or insects, is worth taking the time to laugh at, though I would agree that the misogyny beneath the assumption is not funny at all. Stereotypes, especially negative ones, are a backhanded attempt to dehumanize people. And dehumanization is a path that leads in only one direction.
This at any rate is my takeaway from the manosphere. It is incomplete, scattershot and slovenly, but so is the manosphere. I would not agree with those who condemn it in toto or simply hang the "woman bashing" label on it and then walk away from the discussion, because much of what I found there had substance, and was at least worthy of listening to even if one totally disagrees with the arguments being presented. The internet, in its ideal form, is for discourse and the acquisition of knowledge, and men have every right to meet virtually to seek and give advice, talk about their problems, relate their anecdotes and express their fears. On the other hand, I am not in the habit of whitewashing garbage -- or crap, for that matter, and believe-you-me, there is a lot of crap in the manosphere. Some of it is harmless, but taken as a whole it has a cumulative effect, especially on men who are embittered by bad experience, or adolescents whose raging hormones and social awkwardness make them fertile soil for dangerous ideas to grow. The manosphere is probably necessary, or as necessary as anything can be in the internet era, because it serves as a kind of psychological pressure release valve for bored, frustrated, alienated, leaderless, or simply curious men. But it is not serving these men very well, and is too easily a conduit by which the most desperate of them can be radicalized into dangerous beliefs. It bears study, but it also bears watching.
September 1, 2023
SINNER'S CROSS: READER'S FAVORITE GOLD MEDAL
Every writer has a secret favorite from among his works, a fair-haired boy (or daddy's little girl), but at any rate, one story which is the apple of his eye. For me, that book is undoubtedly Sinner's Cross, my third novel, and the first full-scale exploration into historical fiction that I ever attempted. It was the culmination of a lifetime of interest in the Second World War, running head-on into everything I had ever learned about the craft, and the art, of writing. Like most authors, I am a harsh, even a cruel critic of my own work (nothing that has been said of me by others is half as bad as what I routinely say about myself) but this one seemed special to me from the jump. Of course, I am just a touch biased, but as of yesterday there was some acclamation to justify this feeling. Sinner's Cross earned the following:
WINNER, BEST INDIE BOOK AWARD - HISTORICAL FICTION - 2019 WINNER, BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD - ACTION - 2020
WINNER, LITERARY TITAN BOOK AWARD GOLD MEDAL - 2020
FINALIST, INDEPENDENT AUTHOR NETWORK AWARDS - 2020
READERS' FAVORITE FIVE STARS - 2021
Well, this morning -- which I happened to take off from work after being mentally and morally exhausted by the murder trial I was involved with yesterday -- I got the news that said novel is now a Reader's Favorite Gold Medal Winner in the category of historical fiction. This is probably the most important of the awards I have won, since it involves, for one, flying to Miami this November to accept the medal in person. I mention this in large part because authors, especially authors in the lowest and most ragged edge of the lower middle class of the profession like yours truly, often spend most of our careers struggling in obscurity. These morsels of recognition, which usually come without a corresponding paycheck, are much of what sustains us through the bleak periods when no one is buying the books, no one is publishing reviews or ratings, and in general, the world seems not to give a shit. If you've learned anything from my scribblings here over the years, it's that the whole of the poor, the working class, and the lower middle class of authors -- in other words, the vast majority -- are people who cannot afford to quit their day jobs, and often lose money or or just barely make a profit at what they do. Even the middle class, which many of my colleagues occupy, pays rather poorly and demands the utmost patience with agents and publishers and the snail-like pace with which they hand out checks and block release dates. In short, writing can be a castiron bitch, and while we do not deserve pity or even sympathy, it is important to understand that when we crow a bit about our occasional strokes of good fortune, it is not vainglory or boasting: it is celebration.
My own writing career has been moving steadily in the right direction for the last two of the seven total years I have officially been in the game: but steadily does not mean quickly, and with this award I hope the pressure on the accelerator increases. In the mean time, here is the review that started it all, written by the author Grant Leishman for Readers’ Favorite on New Year's Day, 2021:
Sinner’s Cross: A Novel of the Second World War by Miles Watson is a no-holds-barred account of one of the lesser-known actions in Europe of the Second World War. Prior to the well-publicized and dramatized Battle of the Bulge in the Ardenne Forest, an equally violent and deadly encounter took place in the forests of Hürtgen on the German/Belgian border, from September 19, 1944, to February 10, 1045. American and German troops faced each other in the dense forests of Hürtgen as the winter of 1944-45 descended, where the flower of both country’s youth was sacrificed in a futile battle over an unknown and unwanted piece of land. The author introduces us to both sides of this titanic and bloody conflict. Half the story is dedicated to a group of American G.I.s led by the inexperienced and terrified Lieutenant Breese, facing off against one of the most formidable of Germany’s units, the Paratroopers, led by multi-decorated and seemingly fearless Major Zenger, affectionately known to his troops as Papa. The author takes us deep inside the psyche of these terrified, mud-splattered, and intensely uncomfortable men as they prepare, yet again, for a counter-offensive, which like so many of them seems rooted in both pointlessness and failure. In this maelstrom of battle, blood, and gore, each man must face up to his own personal demons, fears, and horrors and either overcome them or walk away.
Sinner’s Cross is without a doubt one of the most powerful anti-war novels I have ever read. Miles Watson’s incredibly descriptive narrative takes us right into the infernal “hot zone” of the battle and describes the actions and the reactions of the soldiers with sharp, incisive, and incredibly descriptive prose. It is powerful and compelling, as much as it is sickening. What I particularly liked about this book was that the author showed the battle from both sides of the fence. His description of what occurred in the mind of Major Zenger was a clear attempt to remind us that the enemy soldiers were just human beings long before they were Nazis. The German troops were just as horrified, terrified, and tired of the endless battles as the Americans. He did a wonderful job of outlining the different perceptions of war from the psychological makeup of each individual soldier, his needs, wants, and fears. No-one can possibly read this book and conclude that war is, in some way, heroic or worthy of honor. The reality is clearly displayed in the crushed, broken, dismembered, and devastated bodies that would forever lie in the forgotten forests of Hürtgen. A truly powerful novel but one that left me drained by the end of it.
Sinner's Cross
WINNER, BEST INDIE BOOK AWARD - HISTORICAL FICTION - 2019 WINNER, BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD - ACTION - 2020
WINNER, LITERARY TITAN BOOK AWARD GOLD MEDAL - 2020
FINALIST, INDEPENDENT AUTHOR NETWORK AWARDS - 2020
READERS' FAVORITE FIVE STARS - 2021
Well, this morning -- which I happened to take off from work after being mentally and morally exhausted by the murder trial I was involved with yesterday -- I got the news that said novel is now a Reader's Favorite Gold Medal Winner in the category of historical fiction. This is probably the most important of the awards I have won, since it involves, for one, flying to Miami this November to accept the medal in person. I mention this in large part because authors, especially authors in the lowest and most ragged edge of the lower middle class of the profession like yours truly, often spend most of our careers struggling in obscurity. These morsels of recognition, which usually come without a corresponding paycheck, are much of what sustains us through the bleak periods when no one is buying the books, no one is publishing reviews or ratings, and in general, the world seems not to give a shit. If you've learned anything from my scribblings here over the years, it's that the whole of the poor, the working class, and the lower middle class of authors -- in other words, the vast majority -- are people who cannot afford to quit their day jobs, and often lose money or or just barely make a profit at what they do. Even the middle class, which many of my colleagues occupy, pays rather poorly and demands the utmost patience with agents and publishers and the snail-like pace with which they hand out checks and block release dates. In short, writing can be a castiron bitch, and while we do not deserve pity or even sympathy, it is important to understand that when we crow a bit about our occasional strokes of good fortune, it is not vainglory or boasting: it is celebration.
My own writing career has been moving steadily in the right direction for the last two of the seven total years I have officially been in the game: but steadily does not mean quickly, and with this award I hope the pressure on the accelerator increases. In the mean time, here is the review that started it all, written by the author Grant Leishman for Readers’ Favorite on New Year's Day, 2021:
Sinner’s Cross: A Novel of the Second World War by Miles Watson is a no-holds-barred account of one of the lesser-known actions in Europe of the Second World War. Prior to the well-publicized and dramatized Battle of the Bulge in the Ardenne Forest, an equally violent and deadly encounter took place in the forests of Hürtgen on the German/Belgian border, from September 19, 1944, to February 10, 1045. American and German troops faced each other in the dense forests of Hürtgen as the winter of 1944-45 descended, where the flower of both country’s youth was sacrificed in a futile battle over an unknown and unwanted piece of land. The author introduces us to both sides of this titanic and bloody conflict. Half the story is dedicated to a group of American G.I.s led by the inexperienced and terrified Lieutenant Breese, facing off against one of the most formidable of Germany’s units, the Paratroopers, led by multi-decorated and seemingly fearless Major Zenger, affectionately known to his troops as Papa. The author takes us deep inside the psyche of these terrified, mud-splattered, and intensely uncomfortable men as they prepare, yet again, for a counter-offensive, which like so many of them seems rooted in both pointlessness and failure. In this maelstrom of battle, blood, and gore, each man must face up to his own personal demons, fears, and horrors and either overcome them or walk away.
Sinner’s Cross is without a doubt one of the most powerful anti-war novels I have ever read. Miles Watson’s incredibly descriptive narrative takes us right into the infernal “hot zone” of the battle and describes the actions and the reactions of the soldiers with sharp, incisive, and incredibly descriptive prose. It is powerful and compelling, as much as it is sickening. What I particularly liked about this book was that the author showed the battle from both sides of the fence. His description of what occurred in the mind of Major Zenger was a clear attempt to remind us that the enemy soldiers were just human beings long before they were Nazis. The German troops were just as horrified, terrified, and tired of the endless battles as the Americans. He did a wonderful job of outlining the different perceptions of war from the psychological makeup of each individual soldier, his needs, wants, and fears. No-one can possibly read this book and conclude that war is, in some way, heroic or worthy of honor. The reality is clearly displayed in the crushed, broken, dismembered, and devastated bodies that would forever lie in the forgotten forests of Hürtgen. A truly powerful novel but one that left me drained by the end of it.
Sinner's Cross
August 31, 2023
WHAT MEN REALLY THINK ABOUT FEMINISM
George Orwell once remarked that the word "fascism" had, in his era, been so overused that it had lost all meaning and devolved to the level of a mere insult. If you didn't like someone's political opinions or personal behavior, you called them a fascist. Fifty years after Orwell's death, I happened to be physically present when Bill Maher shouted that very word at one of his guests on the show Politically Incorrect, and even in the context of the conversation, it was clear that he meant it as an insult and not as an identification. Old George had been right again.
The casual overuse of certain words, especially words with complex or unclear meanings, often leads to a further unclarity, which, in time, renders them effectively meaningless. I say that a word is effectively meaningless when its use necessitates an explanation of the word itself, i.e. the word cannot be defined in mere self-context, it must be defined fully after its use with, you guessed it, yet more words. If I say "barn" or "shark" or "green" or "exhausted," these words require no further explanation. Each brings its definition clearly to mind. But if I say "fascist," "socialist," or "capitalist" -- to give but a few examples -- well, these words have been so debased over time that they have lost their definitions entirely: a right-winger and a left-winger are talking about very different things when they say "socialism," just as a right-winger and a left-winger are talking about very different things when they use the word "nationalist," "patriot," or even "freedom."
"Feminism" is a word which, in the last few decades, has lost any meaning it had when it came into common coinage some decades ago. One definition is "the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes," which seems clear-cut enough...until you ask what "equality" actually means, whereupon the entire definition instantly becomes meaningless, because "equality" is also a term which requires further explanation, or at least context.
To be sure, feminism has changed markedly since the Women's Liberation movement came about during my childhood. The feminists of my early youth were fighting and arguing for things which were fairly easy to understand whether you agreed with their aims or not. I myself agreed with their aims insomuch as I understood them as a boy, and later, as a hormone-addled teenager. And what those aims boiled down to in my mind anyway was simply this: "We want all the rights and privileges presently accorded to men. We don't want any bars to education or business or anything else simply because we are the opposite sex. We want the freedom to choose whether we stay in the home as wives and mothers or pursue careers in professions and vocations traditionally reserved or dominated by men, and not be held back in those trades by anything except our level of ability." That at any rate is how I defined feminism in, say, 1985 or 2001. It is also how most of the men of my generation -- X -- would have defined it if you'd asked them to do so. Some might have been angry about it if they themselves favored the traditional male-female roles Women's Liberation was in rebellion against, but they would have been fairly clear about its actual goals.
I can however break this down even more simply. The feminism that I understood and agreed with meant:
1. Equality of opportunity.
2. Freedom of choice.
3. Equivalency.
4. Logic.
I could get down with that. I still can. Most men of my era did, and do, whatever jokes we may have made in arguments with our mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, friends, or co-workers. As Orwell once pointed out, the sex war is at bottom a joke. We don't really take it seriously because we understand that at the end of the day, men and women are two peas sharing a pod. We need each other, and that means growing with each others' needs. All the insults, name-calling, and crude remarks men make about women, and women about men, are a form of kabuki, of theater, designed to disguise this obvious fact. The sex war is little more than a junior high school dance, with buffoonery and bravado disguising intense feelings of interest and excitement.
Please understand: I am not pretending I didn't have some reservations and questions about feminism in its older guise. "Equality" between men and women is not a physical reality, after all, because the sexes are physically different and therefore unequal. We have different hormones, different musculatures, different organs: facts which, incredibly enough, it is unpopular to say in this mentally challenged age. But I had no problem with female firefighters, policemen or soldiers, provided they could meet the same physical standards the men had to meet: on the other hand, I did not want the standards lowered simply to accomodate women. And to their credit, most women didn't seem to want the standards lowered, either, because up until about a decade ago feminism accepted the idea that inequality did not mean injustice: it was simply an acknowledgement of black-and-white biological facts. Hence the pre-modern feminist slogan which went, "Equal pay for equal work? NO! Equal pay for EQUIVALENT work." This was logic in action: acknowledging the differences between the sexes but refusing to accept them as the basis for a misogynistic culture which places impassable barriers on social, educational, and economic opportunities. Again, it was something I could get behind. A woman might not, for example, meet the physical requirements of a regular combat infantryman, but she could serve ably as a sniper or a fighter pilot. This is what I mean by "equivalency."
Having recently emerged from a very deep dive on the internet, during which I studied for some months both the "modern male" and "modern female" perspectives, I would say this unequivocally about the word "feminism" today -- and I hasten to add that I believe my views are shared by most of the men I know in my own rough age bracket, nearly all of the men in the bracket above mine, and many some years below us both:
I hate it.
I hate it, friends and neighbors, because if I had to boil it down to its substance, it stands for:
1. Equality of outcome.
2. Freedom from responsibility.
3. Misandry.
4. Mysticism.
5. University socialism.
The first category is called "equity" today. "Equity" has a lovely sound to it, but what it means in practice is that any oucome which denies the pure physical equality of men and women must be altered via legal or procedural processes to produce the ideologically sound result. Hence the sight of the U.S. Army Rangers lowering their brutally difficult standards so women can earn the coveted "Ranger" tab -- and this, in the face of explicit recommendations from the senior NCOs in the Pentagon, warning our leaders not to do this: not out of misogyny, but concern for what lowered standards will do in real-world future terms, also known as "consequences."
This brings me to #2, the idea that freedom of choice carries with it freedom from responsibility. Perhaps the most common attack made on women by men on the internet today is "accountability is women's kryptonite." At first I dismissed this as mere misogyny, but when applied to many modern feminists, it is true. Indeed, the one serious problem I have, retroactively, with the feminism I grew up with and still support is that it sold women a deliberate lie, to wit, that it is possible for a woman to be both a traditional wife and mother on the one hand, and a successful corporarte businessperson on the other, without consequences. Many very successful corporate women have come out in recent years admitting that they accepted this lie and paid for it dearly in terms of broken marriages and estranged children. The old arrangement -- man brings home bacon, woman cooks it -- was primitive and restrictive, but it had the advantage of laying down clearly-defined expectations and responsibilities. It also tacitly acknowledged that life was heavy, and required two people to handle the load. Divide the responsibilities differently, a la "Mr. Mom," and the burden was still lighter for both partners. What mattered was not how the labor was divided but that it was divided. Yet a very common refrain on the female side of the internet is "I don't need a man" -- the "boss babe/diva/slay queen mantra" of the "strong, independent woman."
As a guy who grew up and came up with Princess Leia, the many Angels of Charlie, the Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley and Buffy Summers, I never had problem one with strong women. I daresay I was more than a little turned on by a badass, fast-lipped, physically capable lady, even as a small boy. Independence was another matter. To stand on one's own in life is very difficult and often quite needless. Just as Leia had her Han Solo, Sarah Connor her Kyle Reese, and Buffy Summers her Angel, I became confused by this need to insist that men were useless adjuncts to a woman's life, basically ornaments or pets, or even further (these are very common sentiments among men who are misogynists, incidentally) that men were garbage, scum, trash, filth, villains through and through. This latter sentiment is a direct result of modern women believing #2, that actions do not have consequences, that you can chase Chad for years and then, when the chlamydia and unwanted pregnancies finally take their toll, suddenly find a nice, safe, well-heeled, boring man to venerate and marry you. Discovery that this is not the case, that if you burn your 20s partying ceaselessly and sleeping with all and sundry, that Mr. Right will not be waiting for you with a ring and a bouquet of roses on the other side of 30, seems to come to some of these slay queens as a terrifying, rage-inducing shock. The late Kevin Samuels used to deride what he called the "Tyler Perry/Sex and the City fantasy," and this was in part what he was talking about.
Now, as someone with libertarian leanings, I am all for personal freedoms, and that includes sexual freedom: but sexual freedom, like every other kind of freedom, comes with consequences. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome, and freedom of choice does not mean freedom from consequence. The cognative dissonance, emotional upheaval and dissatisfaction of so many women I see railing on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc., etc. seems to come directly from the idea that feminism means a happy ending regardless of how you choose to behave. It expressly does not. What it means in either its older or newer guise is simply a wider set of possible outcomes for your wider set of choices. And many of those possible outcomes are bad. The older generation of feminists did largely undertsand this. When the Equal Rights Amendment was being proposed in the late 70s/early 80s, it explicitly stated that women would have to register for the draft. In essence, it beat its breast and said, "We want equivalent status in society, and we will take the equivalent consequences that result from that status." In practical terms that meant death on the battlefield, or at least years of harsh military service. That is a healthy, adult view of life. Modern feminism, or what passes for it, takes the direct opposite view, a spoiled-brat position that "I want what I want when I want it and will never have to pay for it, because nothing is my fault."
Another knock on modern feminism is its obvious misandry, its shrill insistence that men are the source of all of women's problems, when in fact it is the poor choices many women make in regards to men that is the source of their personal woe. The cry of "where are all the good men?" tends to come loudest from women who have deliberately allowed themselves to be used by the worst manhood has to offer, over and over again; meanwhile, the good men they claim to want are the same ones they yawn off, year after year. The internet has apparently convinced millions of women that they deserve a man who is 6'3," built like an athlete, hung like a porn star, and earns a minimum of six figures. This is as moronic -- and unrealistic -- as the belief I see among incels and deluded, misogynistic men, that they somehow deserve beautiful, voluptuous, virginal, submissive women despite being out of shape, jobless, living with their folks, lacking social skills, etc., etc. The critical difference, however, is that women control access to sex. An incel is just that: involuntarily celibate. He wants to get laid, but cannot, usually for the reasons I just mentioned. Very, very few women legitimately fall in this category. It is merely that their standards don't correspond with reality, and having embraced an ideology that tells them they can have anything they desire simply because they desire it, a violent cognative and emotional dissonance ensues.
This brings me to #4 of modern feminism, which is mysticism. Being something of a pagan at heart, I rather enjoy studying and practicing mysticism, but like everything else in life it comes with consequences, especially when one neglects the fact we live in the real world, a world of solid objects, harsh realities, and unbreakable scientific laws. Mysticism plays out nowadays largely in terms of the belief that what we most want in life is available to us if we simply wish for it hard enough -- we can manifest reality through desire alone. Never mind planning and executing; just want something bad enough and the universe will give it to you. For whatever reason, this idea has taken a much deeper root with young women than with young men, who seem to take an opposite view (you get nothing in life you really want). But the consequences of all this talk about "manifesting" things are painfully apparent, in that it too discourages accountability. You may have done nothing to improve yourself or your life, but somehow, magically, it will land in your lap, via the power of manifestation. And because this is so, there is no need for introspection or self-improvement or even hard work. You are free to ignore, and even to fetishize, your negative traits, personality disorders, or mental illness. Why not? Past is not prologue, and what failed yesterday, and for the previous 28 years, will somehow succeed tomorrow. You can manifest it! It goes without saying (though I will say it anyway) that this is irresponsibility at its most refined. It once again discourages any idea of consequence or accountability, especially for the failure to act, to plan, to be honest with oneself. It throws out logic and science in favor of a Disney-style happy ending which, for most women, is not coming. It cannot come, because for every Prince Charming, there are nine potential princesses. By definition, eight of them must be left out in the cold.
The last category is what I call "university socialism." I mean that feminism is now bound up with a curious type of quasi-socialist propaganda being taught at universities, which lays all blame for all inequality, injustice, misogyny, etc., etc. at the feet of capitalism and Western civilization as a whole, but specifically, men, and even more specifically, white men. This is mere misandry buried under a blizzard of pseudoscientific, neo-Marxist verbiage designed to give it credence and weight. It also serves the dual purpose of taking away any lingering sense of personal responsibility its adherents might be tempted to feel about their own decisions. They are now armed with a system of belief which absolves them of everything.
By now many of you are dismissing me as a misogynist myself, a wolf in sheep's clothing. I would counter that by asking a question. How many women who have fully embraced the form of "feminism" I am describing here do you know who are actually happy? Now ask yourself how many do you know who are taking antidepressants, antianxiety medication, seeing therapists, and/or seem to be angry, lonely, bitter or frustrated much of the time? I happen to have a very large circle of female friends, from the ages of 58 to 23 years of age, with the majority falling in the sub-30 category. The ones who are happiest, or seem happiest anyway, are almost entirely those whose definition of feminism falls in the "older" category, the one which believed in equality of opportunity and freedom of choice, accepted personal responsibility, and rejected misandry in the same way they rejected misogyny. And yes, what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose: the many younger men who I see embracing misogyny (and I will discuss this in a separate blog) are even more miserable than their female counterparts. They are men (I use the term generously) who have lost all joy and hope in life and exist in a purely negative space which is half-delusional, half-real, with the real half being, ironically, self-created. The general, paradoxical attitude of despair and entitlement, victimhood and arrogance, cuts across the sexual line: it applies equally, though in different ways, to both men and women. But this article is about feminism in its modern guise, and these are the thoughts of a 50 year-old man who has watched it devolve from a positive to a negative in his own lifetime, and who would like to see it rise up from its own ashes into the liberating, empowering force it was meant to be. In short, I attack modern feminism because I am a feminist. The freedom to try is perhaps the most precious freedom there is: no one should be denied that. But no one can be guaranteed success, either, and as Wesley said in The Princess Bride, "Anyone who says different is selling you something."
As for modern men, I will have a go at them come Saturday, and rest assured, I will pull no punches there, either.
The casual overuse of certain words, especially words with complex or unclear meanings, often leads to a further unclarity, which, in time, renders them effectively meaningless. I say that a word is effectively meaningless when its use necessitates an explanation of the word itself, i.e. the word cannot be defined in mere self-context, it must be defined fully after its use with, you guessed it, yet more words. If I say "barn" or "shark" or "green" or "exhausted," these words require no further explanation. Each brings its definition clearly to mind. But if I say "fascist," "socialist," or "capitalist" -- to give but a few examples -- well, these words have been so debased over time that they have lost their definitions entirely: a right-winger and a left-winger are talking about very different things when they say "socialism," just as a right-winger and a left-winger are talking about very different things when they use the word "nationalist," "patriot," or even "freedom."
"Feminism" is a word which, in the last few decades, has lost any meaning it had when it came into common coinage some decades ago. One definition is "the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes," which seems clear-cut enough...until you ask what "equality" actually means, whereupon the entire definition instantly becomes meaningless, because "equality" is also a term which requires further explanation, or at least context.
To be sure, feminism has changed markedly since the Women's Liberation movement came about during my childhood. The feminists of my early youth were fighting and arguing for things which were fairly easy to understand whether you agreed with their aims or not. I myself agreed with their aims insomuch as I understood them as a boy, and later, as a hormone-addled teenager. And what those aims boiled down to in my mind anyway was simply this: "We want all the rights and privileges presently accorded to men. We don't want any bars to education or business or anything else simply because we are the opposite sex. We want the freedom to choose whether we stay in the home as wives and mothers or pursue careers in professions and vocations traditionally reserved or dominated by men, and not be held back in those trades by anything except our level of ability." That at any rate is how I defined feminism in, say, 1985 or 2001. It is also how most of the men of my generation -- X -- would have defined it if you'd asked them to do so. Some might have been angry about it if they themselves favored the traditional male-female roles Women's Liberation was in rebellion against, but they would have been fairly clear about its actual goals.
I can however break this down even more simply. The feminism that I understood and agreed with meant:
1. Equality of opportunity.
2. Freedom of choice.
3. Equivalency.
4. Logic.
I could get down with that. I still can. Most men of my era did, and do, whatever jokes we may have made in arguments with our mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, friends, or co-workers. As Orwell once pointed out, the sex war is at bottom a joke. We don't really take it seriously because we understand that at the end of the day, men and women are two peas sharing a pod. We need each other, and that means growing with each others' needs. All the insults, name-calling, and crude remarks men make about women, and women about men, are a form of kabuki, of theater, designed to disguise this obvious fact. The sex war is little more than a junior high school dance, with buffoonery and bravado disguising intense feelings of interest and excitement.
Please understand: I am not pretending I didn't have some reservations and questions about feminism in its older guise. "Equality" between men and women is not a physical reality, after all, because the sexes are physically different and therefore unequal. We have different hormones, different musculatures, different organs: facts which, incredibly enough, it is unpopular to say in this mentally challenged age. But I had no problem with female firefighters, policemen or soldiers, provided they could meet the same physical standards the men had to meet: on the other hand, I did not want the standards lowered simply to accomodate women. And to their credit, most women didn't seem to want the standards lowered, either, because up until about a decade ago feminism accepted the idea that inequality did not mean injustice: it was simply an acknowledgement of black-and-white biological facts. Hence the pre-modern feminist slogan which went, "Equal pay for equal work? NO! Equal pay for EQUIVALENT work." This was logic in action: acknowledging the differences between the sexes but refusing to accept them as the basis for a misogynistic culture which places impassable barriers on social, educational, and economic opportunities. Again, it was something I could get behind. A woman might not, for example, meet the physical requirements of a regular combat infantryman, but she could serve ably as a sniper or a fighter pilot. This is what I mean by "equivalency."
Having recently emerged from a very deep dive on the internet, during which I studied for some months both the "modern male" and "modern female" perspectives, I would say this unequivocally about the word "feminism" today -- and I hasten to add that I believe my views are shared by most of the men I know in my own rough age bracket, nearly all of the men in the bracket above mine, and many some years below us both:
I hate it.
I hate it, friends and neighbors, because if I had to boil it down to its substance, it stands for:
1. Equality of outcome.
2. Freedom from responsibility.
3. Misandry.
4. Mysticism.
5. University socialism.
The first category is called "equity" today. "Equity" has a lovely sound to it, but what it means in practice is that any oucome which denies the pure physical equality of men and women must be altered via legal or procedural processes to produce the ideologically sound result. Hence the sight of the U.S. Army Rangers lowering their brutally difficult standards so women can earn the coveted "Ranger" tab -- and this, in the face of explicit recommendations from the senior NCOs in the Pentagon, warning our leaders not to do this: not out of misogyny, but concern for what lowered standards will do in real-world future terms, also known as "consequences."
This brings me to #2, the idea that freedom of choice carries with it freedom from responsibility. Perhaps the most common attack made on women by men on the internet today is "accountability is women's kryptonite." At first I dismissed this as mere misogyny, but when applied to many modern feminists, it is true. Indeed, the one serious problem I have, retroactively, with the feminism I grew up with and still support is that it sold women a deliberate lie, to wit, that it is possible for a woman to be both a traditional wife and mother on the one hand, and a successful corporarte businessperson on the other, without consequences. Many very successful corporate women have come out in recent years admitting that they accepted this lie and paid for it dearly in terms of broken marriages and estranged children. The old arrangement -- man brings home bacon, woman cooks it -- was primitive and restrictive, but it had the advantage of laying down clearly-defined expectations and responsibilities. It also tacitly acknowledged that life was heavy, and required two people to handle the load. Divide the responsibilities differently, a la "Mr. Mom," and the burden was still lighter for both partners. What mattered was not how the labor was divided but that it was divided. Yet a very common refrain on the female side of the internet is "I don't need a man" -- the "boss babe/diva/slay queen mantra" of the "strong, independent woman."
As a guy who grew up and came up with Princess Leia, the many Angels of Charlie, the Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley and Buffy Summers, I never had problem one with strong women. I daresay I was more than a little turned on by a badass, fast-lipped, physically capable lady, even as a small boy. Independence was another matter. To stand on one's own in life is very difficult and often quite needless. Just as Leia had her Han Solo, Sarah Connor her Kyle Reese, and Buffy Summers her Angel, I became confused by this need to insist that men were useless adjuncts to a woman's life, basically ornaments or pets, or even further (these are very common sentiments among men who are misogynists, incidentally) that men were garbage, scum, trash, filth, villains through and through. This latter sentiment is a direct result of modern women believing #2, that actions do not have consequences, that you can chase Chad for years and then, when the chlamydia and unwanted pregnancies finally take their toll, suddenly find a nice, safe, well-heeled, boring man to venerate and marry you. Discovery that this is not the case, that if you burn your 20s partying ceaselessly and sleeping with all and sundry, that Mr. Right will not be waiting for you with a ring and a bouquet of roses on the other side of 30, seems to come to some of these slay queens as a terrifying, rage-inducing shock. The late Kevin Samuels used to deride what he called the "Tyler Perry/Sex and the City fantasy," and this was in part what he was talking about.
Now, as someone with libertarian leanings, I am all for personal freedoms, and that includes sexual freedom: but sexual freedom, like every other kind of freedom, comes with consequences. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome, and freedom of choice does not mean freedom from consequence. The cognative dissonance, emotional upheaval and dissatisfaction of so many women I see railing on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc., etc. seems to come directly from the idea that feminism means a happy ending regardless of how you choose to behave. It expressly does not. What it means in either its older or newer guise is simply a wider set of possible outcomes for your wider set of choices. And many of those possible outcomes are bad. The older generation of feminists did largely undertsand this. When the Equal Rights Amendment was being proposed in the late 70s/early 80s, it explicitly stated that women would have to register for the draft. In essence, it beat its breast and said, "We want equivalent status in society, and we will take the equivalent consequences that result from that status." In practical terms that meant death on the battlefield, or at least years of harsh military service. That is a healthy, adult view of life. Modern feminism, or what passes for it, takes the direct opposite view, a spoiled-brat position that "I want what I want when I want it and will never have to pay for it, because nothing is my fault."
Another knock on modern feminism is its obvious misandry, its shrill insistence that men are the source of all of women's problems, when in fact it is the poor choices many women make in regards to men that is the source of their personal woe. The cry of "where are all the good men?" tends to come loudest from women who have deliberately allowed themselves to be used by the worst manhood has to offer, over and over again; meanwhile, the good men they claim to want are the same ones they yawn off, year after year. The internet has apparently convinced millions of women that they deserve a man who is 6'3," built like an athlete, hung like a porn star, and earns a minimum of six figures. This is as moronic -- and unrealistic -- as the belief I see among incels and deluded, misogynistic men, that they somehow deserve beautiful, voluptuous, virginal, submissive women despite being out of shape, jobless, living with their folks, lacking social skills, etc., etc. The critical difference, however, is that women control access to sex. An incel is just that: involuntarily celibate. He wants to get laid, but cannot, usually for the reasons I just mentioned. Very, very few women legitimately fall in this category. It is merely that their standards don't correspond with reality, and having embraced an ideology that tells them they can have anything they desire simply because they desire it, a violent cognative and emotional dissonance ensues.
This brings me to #4 of modern feminism, which is mysticism. Being something of a pagan at heart, I rather enjoy studying and practicing mysticism, but like everything else in life it comes with consequences, especially when one neglects the fact we live in the real world, a world of solid objects, harsh realities, and unbreakable scientific laws. Mysticism plays out nowadays largely in terms of the belief that what we most want in life is available to us if we simply wish for it hard enough -- we can manifest reality through desire alone. Never mind planning and executing; just want something bad enough and the universe will give it to you. For whatever reason, this idea has taken a much deeper root with young women than with young men, who seem to take an opposite view (you get nothing in life you really want). But the consequences of all this talk about "manifesting" things are painfully apparent, in that it too discourages accountability. You may have done nothing to improve yourself or your life, but somehow, magically, it will land in your lap, via the power of manifestation. And because this is so, there is no need for introspection or self-improvement or even hard work. You are free to ignore, and even to fetishize, your negative traits, personality disorders, or mental illness. Why not? Past is not prologue, and what failed yesterday, and for the previous 28 years, will somehow succeed tomorrow. You can manifest it! It goes without saying (though I will say it anyway) that this is irresponsibility at its most refined. It once again discourages any idea of consequence or accountability, especially for the failure to act, to plan, to be honest with oneself. It throws out logic and science in favor of a Disney-style happy ending which, for most women, is not coming. It cannot come, because for every Prince Charming, there are nine potential princesses. By definition, eight of them must be left out in the cold.
The last category is what I call "university socialism." I mean that feminism is now bound up with a curious type of quasi-socialist propaganda being taught at universities, which lays all blame for all inequality, injustice, misogyny, etc., etc. at the feet of capitalism and Western civilization as a whole, but specifically, men, and even more specifically, white men. This is mere misandry buried under a blizzard of pseudoscientific, neo-Marxist verbiage designed to give it credence and weight. It also serves the dual purpose of taking away any lingering sense of personal responsibility its adherents might be tempted to feel about their own decisions. They are now armed with a system of belief which absolves them of everything.
By now many of you are dismissing me as a misogynist myself, a wolf in sheep's clothing. I would counter that by asking a question. How many women who have fully embraced the form of "feminism" I am describing here do you know who are actually happy? Now ask yourself how many do you know who are taking antidepressants, antianxiety medication, seeing therapists, and/or seem to be angry, lonely, bitter or frustrated much of the time? I happen to have a very large circle of female friends, from the ages of 58 to 23 years of age, with the majority falling in the sub-30 category. The ones who are happiest, or seem happiest anyway, are almost entirely those whose definition of feminism falls in the "older" category, the one which believed in equality of opportunity and freedom of choice, accepted personal responsibility, and rejected misandry in the same way they rejected misogyny. And yes, what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose: the many younger men who I see embracing misogyny (and I will discuss this in a separate blog) are even more miserable than their female counterparts. They are men (I use the term generously) who have lost all joy and hope in life and exist in a purely negative space which is half-delusional, half-real, with the real half being, ironically, self-created. The general, paradoxical attitude of despair and entitlement, victimhood and arrogance, cuts across the sexual line: it applies equally, though in different ways, to both men and women. But this article is about feminism in its modern guise, and these are the thoughts of a 50 year-old man who has watched it devolve from a positive to a negative in his own lifetime, and who would like to see it rise up from its own ashes into the liberating, empowering force it was meant to be. In short, I attack modern feminism because I am a feminist. The freedom to try is perhaps the most precious freedom there is: no one should be denied that. But no one can be guaranteed success, either, and as Wesley said in The Princess Bride, "Anyone who says different is selling you something."
As for modern men, I will have a go at them come Saturday, and rest assured, I will pull no punches there, either.
August 26, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: OLD FRIENDS
On February 14, 2016, my first novel, Cage Life, hit the figurative, and in a few cases, literal stands. It was a story combining traditional crime-noir and thriller elements with the world of sports entertainment -- specifically mixed martial arts -- and it introduced a whole slew of characters to the world, of which I subsequently became quite fond. What carried the book to the success it eventually enjoyed was not, I believe, the story I was telling per se, but the authenticity of the characters and the world in which they lived. They were authentic in terms of research, but moreso in terms of what they represented. The protagonist was a fictionalized version of myself, and his troubles and exploits metaphors for the arcs of my own life. It was this quality that allowed me to put myself in his shoes completely when he was doing things I had never done. Hemingway once famously remarked that a man shouldn't write what he doesn't know, but I have found that a man can write what he doesn't know quite well, provided the emotional substance of what he is writing is true.
Cage Life was followed in short order by a sequel, Knuckle Down, which is much the superior novel in many ways, in part because the most difficult work -- creating the characters, building the world -- had already been performed, leaving me free to concentrate on the story. And in fact writing that story pushed me to my limits, because the intricacies of the plot demanded much more of me this time around: I constructed it as a mystery rather than a thriller, and mysteries, it turns out, are goddamned difficult to write. In a thriller, the protagonist is usually trying to prevent something from happening, or to escape a circumstance. This is a straightforward assignment and largely a matter of keeping the pedal down from first word to final period. I don't mean it is easy; but it is simple, which does make the process easy-er. Mysteries written at the pace of thrillers are like trying to defuse a bomb while someone is shooting at you. I suffered, really suffered, writing this novel, because I thought it was going to be a complete piece of shit. When somehow a novel I felt was truly great -- if I do say so myself -- emerged from this confusion and despair I was as baffled as I was happy. But I was also exhausted, morally and mentally. And I wanted nothing more to do with gangsters for a long, long time.
In the years following the release of this novel I have been a very busy boy. I have published a very large number of novels and novellas, and written more which have not yet seen the light of day: but always, in the back of my mind, there was the knowledge that I must reunite with the world of Cage Life. It was not merely that I had left the audience, such as it is, hanging as to the ultimate fate of my protagonist, or that I wanted to come back to the place where I had started my writing career (also, such as it is); but because Cage Life is a series, and a series of a very peculiar and definite form at that. Unlike many, it is not meant to spin itself endlessly, with a protagonist-hero who never ages, never changes, never learns or grows. No, I wrote the first book with the conscious knowledge that I was telling a story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. How many books it would take to get to that end I had no idea and still don't, but I do know that the central theme here is redemption, and redemption is a process. It doesn't happen overnight, and it is not generally the process of a single epiphany. With all respect to Ebenezer Scrooge, it takes time to turn a life around, and the very act of turning around implies a change of direction. The Mick who finishes this series will be a profoundly different man than the one we met in Cage Life.
I mention all this because upon the completion of Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicle of Magnus a few months ago, I found myself completely at sea in regards to my next project. I tried three (or was it four) different ideas without sufficient success, and was just beginning to worry when I said to myself, "It's been seven years...maybe I should pay Cage Life another visit." And for the last 75 days, that is what I have been doing. I am now a hair under 50,000 words deep, roughly 3/5 of the way to the finish line. It was remarkable how quickly I was able to gather momentum and roll with the plot I had concocted, but perhaps I should not be surprised, given my familiarity with the world and, of course, Mickey, who I see, in a less idealized form, every time I look in the mirror. If I don't fuck this up, I should complete the first draft before the end of the year. That would be very special indeed, for it would mean that I wrote two, and completed three, novels in a single calendar year: a truly extraordinary achievement, especially for a guy who, at one point, used to go years at a time without completing anything, not even a single short story.
The Cage Life series will always have a great sentimental value for me, because, while they lack the profundity I strive for with my historical fiction and fantasy, they are emotionally honest books that look at life from the perspective of someone who has fallen very far and is now, slowly and clumsily, climbing back into the light. Their first purpose is simply to entertain, but if I have done my job correctly and the reader is inspired enough to look a little deeper, there is more. And I hope to share this more with you in 2024.
Cage Life was followed in short order by a sequel, Knuckle Down, which is much the superior novel in many ways, in part because the most difficult work -- creating the characters, building the world -- had already been performed, leaving me free to concentrate on the story. And in fact writing that story pushed me to my limits, because the intricacies of the plot demanded much more of me this time around: I constructed it as a mystery rather than a thriller, and mysteries, it turns out, are goddamned difficult to write. In a thriller, the protagonist is usually trying to prevent something from happening, or to escape a circumstance. This is a straightforward assignment and largely a matter of keeping the pedal down from first word to final period. I don't mean it is easy; but it is simple, which does make the process easy-er. Mysteries written at the pace of thrillers are like trying to defuse a bomb while someone is shooting at you. I suffered, really suffered, writing this novel, because I thought it was going to be a complete piece of shit. When somehow a novel I felt was truly great -- if I do say so myself -- emerged from this confusion and despair I was as baffled as I was happy. But I was also exhausted, morally and mentally. And I wanted nothing more to do with gangsters for a long, long time.
In the years following the release of this novel I have been a very busy boy. I have published a very large number of novels and novellas, and written more which have not yet seen the light of day: but always, in the back of my mind, there was the knowledge that I must reunite with the world of Cage Life. It was not merely that I had left the audience, such as it is, hanging as to the ultimate fate of my protagonist, or that I wanted to come back to the place where I had started my writing career (also, such as it is); but because Cage Life is a series, and a series of a very peculiar and definite form at that. Unlike many, it is not meant to spin itself endlessly, with a protagonist-hero who never ages, never changes, never learns or grows. No, I wrote the first book with the conscious knowledge that I was telling a story that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. How many books it would take to get to that end I had no idea and still don't, but I do know that the central theme here is redemption, and redemption is a process. It doesn't happen overnight, and it is not generally the process of a single epiphany. With all respect to Ebenezer Scrooge, it takes time to turn a life around, and the very act of turning around implies a change of direction. The Mick who finishes this series will be a profoundly different man than the one we met in Cage Life.
I mention all this because upon the completion of Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicle of Magnus a few months ago, I found myself completely at sea in regards to my next project. I tried three (or was it four) different ideas without sufficient success, and was just beginning to worry when I said to myself, "It's been seven years...maybe I should pay Cage Life another visit." And for the last 75 days, that is what I have been doing. I am now a hair under 50,000 words deep, roughly 3/5 of the way to the finish line. It was remarkable how quickly I was able to gather momentum and roll with the plot I had concocted, but perhaps I should not be surprised, given my familiarity with the world and, of course, Mickey, who I see, in a less idealized form, every time I look in the mirror. If I don't fuck this up, I should complete the first draft before the end of the year. That would be very special indeed, for it would mean that I wrote two, and completed three, novels in a single calendar year: a truly extraordinary achievement, especially for a guy who, at one point, used to go years at a time without completing anything, not even a single short story.
The Cage Life series will always have a great sentimental value for me, because, while they lack the profundity I strive for with my historical fiction and fantasy, they are emotionally honest books that look at life from the perspective of someone who has fallen very far and is now, slowly and clumsily, climbing back into the light. Their first purpose is simply to entertain, but if I have done my job correctly and the reader is inspired enough to look a little deeper, there is more. And I hope to share this more with you in 2024.
August 24, 2023
QUESTIONS FOR A BAD DAY
I am curious about something. When you are having a really bad day -- what in the 90s was referred to as "a day from hell" -- are you the sort who:
A) Wants to be actively cheered up by others through positive words and actions;
B) Wants others to commiserate with you i.e. express pity and sympathy and give you a shoulder to cry on;
C) Wants to recuperate emotionally on their own, i.e. "hit reset" and start over again with no help at all
D) Wants others to make you feel better by telling you they are doing even worse.
I'm curious about this because I had a shit day today. It was not shit the whole way through, but at the end of it, which is now, I likened it to losing a 15 round unanimous decision: I finished on my feet, but I lost, and I know I lost. And throughout the day I reflected on the various means by which people tried to cheer me up and which I tried to cheer myself. I settled for C, which is probably my default, though I admit for many years my default was B, i.e. seeking pity or at least an ear in which to vent; and to my complete unsurprise, I rediscovered that D only makes me feel worse. By no means does it help me in the slightest when you try to compete with my misery by telling me yours is worse.
Now, does this indicate some (additional) psychological failing on my part? Shouldn't the knowledge that huge numbers of people are dying in wars and famines, or just generally have wretched lives, give me a sense of perspective and shock me back into the realization that I, simply by virtue of being American, probably have it better than 90% of the people on this planet? That I have employment, a home, enough food, clean water, a car, conveniences, friends, and enough money and free time to indulge my passions, most notably writing, and that a crappy day doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things?
The answer is probably yes to all of this. "First World Problems" do tend to sound trivial and embarrasingly trifling when compared with the existential woes which grip billions living on this planet, who by random chance or God's design were born into abject poverty and war. But here is the problem. I don't live in the Third World. I live here, in America. I'm not being bombed, shelled, strafed, or sniped. There are no land mines buried beneath the trails I hike. I am untroubled by famine or plague and am reasonably free to express political and other types of opinions without governmental persecution. I'm a white, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual American distinguished by my rather unusual side-hustle, and I have the sort of problems that come with that particular set of baggage. In other words, I have no frame of reference by which to calculate what a "bad day" really is by the standards of, say, a Ukranian or a Yemeni, and I am scared shitless of having one.
In our society, we are now judged to some extent by the amount of hardship and victimhood we have experienced. Why this happened I don't know, but I do know it happened within my lifetime. The things people used to be ashamed of -- prison time, drug addiction, scandal -- now land people music deals, book deals, reality television shows. And it so happens that despite having had a rather interesting life, and having taken my fair share of knocks literal and figurative, I don't know what true hardship or suffering really is past some of the things I have discussed here previously: I've gone hungry for long periods of time, seen death up close, known personal tragedy and heartbreak, but nothing, really, which would intimidate or impress others I've known who've been homeless, served in wars, grappled with addiction, battled cancer. It's a sliding scale, and I'm on a rather comfortable end of it. Nobody is asking me to make a rap album, and I ought to be grateful for that. And I am...now. Now that I am at home and thoroughly wound-down. But I wasn't today, when I was blowing my circuits over all the petty, shin-banging obstacles that were in my way.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that at the age of 51, I am still looking for means by which I can keep perspective, and therefore, cool, in the face of all the annoying, aggravating, frustrating and pettifogging nonsense which life tends to throw at us. I am still groping for the tools to deal with adversity as it happens and not hours later, when the emotional damage is done. I find myself reminded today of song lyrics I heard in college which struck me, then as now, as having been written for me personally:
I was looking back on my life
And all the things I've done to me
I'm still looking for the answers
I'm still searching for the key
The wreckage of my past keeps haunting me
It just won't leave me alone
I still find it all a mystery
Could it be a dream?
The road to nowhere leads to me
The curious thing about bad days generally is the way they shift the way we look at life. I don't just mean that because we are in a temper or depressed we see life in a negative manner. I mean that they tend to slow things down, bring a certain stillness, a certain thoughtfulness, to our existence. A bad day is rather like sitting alone in a cafe on a cold, rainy Monday afternoon and staring out the plate-glass windows at people as they scurry past. It is sad and discouraging, but it forces you think about life in a way you would not when things are going your way and the sun is shining. It makes you contemplative, teaches lessons the way failure teaches lessons. I'm not exactly sure what I learned today, if anything, but I do know that I am curious enough as a result to keep asking questions...which, I'm reliably informed, is a fairly respectable way to get answers.
Not such a bad day after all.
A) Wants to be actively cheered up by others through positive words and actions;
B) Wants others to commiserate with you i.e. express pity and sympathy and give you a shoulder to cry on;
C) Wants to recuperate emotionally on their own, i.e. "hit reset" and start over again with no help at all
D) Wants others to make you feel better by telling you they are doing even worse.
I'm curious about this because I had a shit day today. It was not shit the whole way through, but at the end of it, which is now, I likened it to losing a 15 round unanimous decision: I finished on my feet, but I lost, and I know I lost. And throughout the day I reflected on the various means by which people tried to cheer me up and which I tried to cheer myself. I settled for C, which is probably my default, though I admit for many years my default was B, i.e. seeking pity or at least an ear in which to vent; and to my complete unsurprise, I rediscovered that D only makes me feel worse. By no means does it help me in the slightest when you try to compete with my misery by telling me yours is worse.
Now, does this indicate some (additional) psychological failing on my part? Shouldn't the knowledge that huge numbers of people are dying in wars and famines, or just generally have wretched lives, give me a sense of perspective and shock me back into the realization that I, simply by virtue of being American, probably have it better than 90% of the people on this planet? That I have employment, a home, enough food, clean water, a car, conveniences, friends, and enough money and free time to indulge my passions, most notably writing, and that a crappy day doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things?
The answer is probably yes to all of this. "First World Problems" do tend to sound trivial and embarrasingly trifling when compared with the existential woes which grip billions living on this planet, who by random chance or God's design were born into abject poverty and war. But here is the problem. I don't live in the Third World. I live here, in America. I'm not being bombed, shelled, strafed, or sniped. There are no land mines buried beneath the trails I hike. I am untroubled by famine or plague and am reasonably free to express political and other types of opinions without governmental persecution. I'm a white, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual American distinguished by my rather unusual side-hustle, and I have the sort of problems that come with that particular set of baggage. In other words, I have no frame of reference by which to calculate what a "bad day" really is by the standards of, say, a Ukranian or a Yemeni, and I am scared shitless of having one.
In our society, we are now judged to some extent by the amount of hardship and victimhood we have experienced. Why this happened I don't know, but I do know it happened within my lifetime. The things people used to be ashamed of -- prison time, drug addiction, scandal -- now land people music deals, book deals, reality television shows. And it so happens that despite having had a rather interesting life, and having taken my fair share of knocks literal and figurative, I don't know what true hardship or suffering really is past some of the things I have discussed here previously: I've gone hungry for long periods of time, seen death up close, known personal tragedy and heartbreak, but nothing, really, which would intimidate or impress others I've known who've been homeless, served in wars, grappled with addiction, battled cancer. It's a sliding scale, and I'm on a rather comfortable end of it. Nobody is asking me to make a rap album, and I ought to be grateful for that. And I am...now. Now that I am at home and thoroughly wound-down. But I wasn't today, when I was blowing my circuits over all the petty, shin-banging obstacles that were in my way.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that at the age of 51, I am still looking for means by which I can keep perspective, and therefore, cool, in the face of all the annoying, aggravating, frustrating and pettifogging nonsense which life tends to throw at us. I am still groping for the tools to deal with adversity as it happens and not hours later, when the emotional damage is done. I find myself reminded today of song lyrics I heard in college which struck me, then as now, as having been written for me personally:
I was looking back on my life
And all the things I've done to me
I'm still looking for the answers
I'm still searching for the key
The wreckage of my past keeps haunting me
It just won't leave me alone
I still find it all a mystery
Could it be a dream?
The road to nowhere leads to me
The curious thing about bad days generally is the way they shift the way we look at life. I don't just mean that because we are in a temper or depressed we see life in a negative manner. I mean that they tend to slow things down, bring a certain stillness, a certain thoughtfulness, to our existence. A bad day is rather like sitting alone in a cafe on a cold, rainy Monday afternoon and staring out the plate-glass windows at people as they scurry past. It is sad and discouraging, but it forces you think about life in a way you would not when things are going your way and the sun is shining. It makes you contemplative, teaches lessons the way failure teaches lessons. I'm not exactly sure what I learned today, if anything, but I do know that I am curious enough as a result to keep asking questions...which, I'm reliably informed, is a fairly respectable way to get answers.
Not such a bad day after all.
August 19, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "ANGEL"
If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. -- Angel
I find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse. -- Riley Finn
ANGEL was one of the more unlikely television shows of its time. To understand this, it is necessary to grasp that the show from which it was spun off, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, was derived from a second-rate feature film of the same name, debuted almost five years after that movie had disappeared at the box office, and was itself a low-budget, mid-season replacement whose debut season totaled only twelve episodes. Hell, BUFFY was even shot on 16mm film. Nothing about it augered well for success. Life would not be worth living, however, if every long shot missed its mark, and the ultimate success of BUFFY allowed ANGEL to take wing. Before we can take this particular trip down the Lane, however, it's necessary to give some background.
BUFFY was the story of Buffy Summers, a suburban teenage fashionista with a sarcastic tongue, a big heart, and a decided taste for quirky pop culture references. By day, Buffy was a mediocre student at Sunnydale High School in Southern California: by night she was the Slayer, a supernaturally-powered warrior with the strength and skill necessary to fight the vampires, demons, witches, and various other monsters which happened to plague her adoptive hometown. BUFFY operated from the first principle that since real life high school is basically hell, Sunnydale High should would be a metaphor for this harsh reality, literally sitting on the mouth of hell itself, with the monsters metaphorically standing in for the various angsts, fears and phobias of teenagers everywhere. What set BUFFY apart from most superheroes -- Spider Man would be an exception -- was the fact that her powers did not spare her the suffering of the ordinary 16 year-old girl. She agonized about clothing choices, wept over boys, endured bullying from bitchy classmates, caught hell from her divorced mom for flunking classes. Her woes were exacerbated rather than eased by her calling as a Slayer, and she often rebelled against the constraints imposed upon her by her duties, leading to yet more groundings and embarrassing "go to the principal's office" moments. In this way, Whedon was able to create a show about a young vampire huntress which may in fact be the most eloquent comment about high school ever put on film.
As the title suggests, BUFFY balanced comedy with horror -- always a very difficult task, but in this show's case, one which was brilliantly carried off by a small team of superb writers. And these writers saw from the outset that while the attractive Buffy would naturally draw male attention, she needed one abiding love interest who could intrigue her, challenger her, and altogether beat her at her own game. His name was Angel.
Angel is introduced in the pilot as a handsome, mysterious, not terribly friendly stranger who drops in from time to time to issue cryptic warnings, make Buffy's heart flutter, and then slip off into the shadows. We later learn that he himself is a vampire originally known as Angelus, one who in his bloodsucking days was so vicious even other vampires were afraid of him, until at last he crossed the wrong gypsy, who cursed him by restoring his soul, and thus his conscience. Haunted by remorse, he now works for good, and thus befriends Buffy and ultimately falls in love with her. Unfortunately for the two of them, the gypsies wrote some fine print into his curse: if he ever knows a moment of true happiness, he will lose his soul and once again become evil. So naturally, when Angel and Buffy finally get it on is BTVS season 2, Angel becomes Angelus again, commits a bunch of horrible murders, and is ultimately sent to hell. When he returns in Season 3, soul restored once more, he realizes he can never be with Buffy, lest he risk becoming evil, and departs for Los Angeles to start his unlife over again.
Such is the in-universe backstory. In the real world, Whedon and Greenwalt had decided in Season 3 of BUFFY that David Boreanaz, the actor who played Angel, had enough charisma and acting chops to carry his own series. So they put ANGEL together, and armed him with a sidekick drawn from BUFFY's ranks: Cordelia Chase, the beautiful, bitchy nemesis of Buffy played by Charisma Carpenter, who has gone to L.A. from Sunndale to seek fame. There they encounter Doyle (Glenn Quinn), an enigmatic, offbeat Irishman with connections to "the powers that be," who guides him on his quest for redemption by showing him visions of people in distress who require his help. Angel, who is famous for brooding, sulking, and lurking in shadows, doesn't really want the job, but ultimately comes to accept it as the only possible path to redemption for all his innumerable sins. So he forms a detective agency which "helps the helpless" by socking evil, in human and demonic form, on its collective jaw. Meanwhile, he reflects on something called the Shanshu Prophecy, which hints that one day, as the apocalypse looms, he may recover his humanity, and be able to live a normal life -- presumably running off into a literal sunset with Buffy.
From the outset, ANGEL was a show of a very different character from its progenitor. BUFFY could be, and increasingly was, dark in tone as it continued its seven year-run, but ANGEL never pretended to be anything else. The comedy was always there, but the series, from the pilot onward, placed all of its Tarot cards on the blood-spattered table. On its surface, ANGEL was a sarcastic, supernatural take on Los Angeles itself: many episodes ridicule the city's traffic, its prices, and its culture, especially as it pertains to the entertainment industry. It was also a savage roast of the legal profession generally and lawyers specifically: Angel's principal nemesis is not a demon or a vampire or a secret brotherhood of assassins, but a downtown law firm called Wolfram & Hart, whose unseen "senior partner" is presumably the devil himself.
Deeper than this, however, ANGEL was a study of good and evil, specifically the similarities between the two in methodology, the way they seem to feed off of and require each other; and the emotional, physical, spiritual and psychological toll of fighting evil when evil seems to be everywhere and tireless. The existential woe that Wheedon only occasionally touches upon in BUFFY rings like a dirge all throughout ANGEL. Our grim-jawed hero is often exhausted by his ceaseless battle, and is so courageous in large part because he secretly (and sometimes openly) longs for death. Not every soul he reaches out to protect is saved or even wants to be saved, he occasionally makes huge mistakes which cost lives or damage people irreparably, and his past is continuously reaching out to haunt him -- sometimes literally. Even more, he begins to hate his enemies at Wolfram & Hart so deeply that he plays very roughly indeed with them, in one episode simply walking away while several dozen of them are slaughtered by vampires as they plead for his help. At different times he deliberately alienates or harms his friends, sacrifices innocent lives for the greater good, and causes the deaths of evildoers simply because he feels they have it coming.
Cordelia, too, undergoes a difficult journey. Vain, shallow, selfish and prone to tactless cruelty, we watch her humiliated again and again as she tries and fails to break into the acting world. Ultimately burdened with Doyle's visions, which cause her excruciating pain and threaten her life, she begins to accept her role as a "champion" of the helpless, but like Angel, she often craves release from her responsibilities, often through romantic dalliances that inevitably end in failure. And like Doyle before her, she is also called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed, sacrifice is a recurring theme in the series: its fifth, final, and arguably best season, is a kind of scorched-earth campaign against the viewer, mercilessly killing off beloved characters at such a pace that it almost resembles an installment of FRIDAY THE 13TH. I am trying to avoid as many spoilers as possible, but when one lists the regular and recurring characters on this show -- and it's quite a list -- the ones who survive even to the last, very ambiguous, frame do not make extensive reading. Indeed, the show's whole fatalistic, existential tenor can be summed up in this exchange between Angel and a lawyer from Wolfram & Hart:
Angel : You're not gonna win.
Holland Manners : Well... no. Of course we aren't. We have no intention of doing anything so prosaic as "winning." [Holland laughs]
Angel : Then why?
Holland Manners : I'm sorry. Why what?
Angel : Why fight?
Holland Manners : That's really the question you should be asking yourself, isn't it? See, for us, there is no fight. Which is why winning doesn't enter into it. As a corporation, we go on... no matter what. You see, Angel... our firm has always been here on Earth... in one form or another. The Spanish Inquisition. The Khmer Rouge Genocide... one of my favorites. I personally was there. We were here when the very first modern cave man clubbed his neighbor on the head with a rock for stealing his dinner. See, we're in the hearts and minds of every single living being on this planet. And that, friend, is what's making things so difficult for you. That is the source of Wolfram & Hart's power. You see, the world doesn't work in spite of evil, Angel. It works with us. It works because of us.
Like all long-running shows, ANGEL changed course more than once. The original cast of three ballooned at times to as many as seven or eight regulars, the standalone, task-of-the-week style of the first season gradually became overshadowed by increasingly complex, season-long story arcs, and by the fourth season the show had become, in the words of one of its own characters "a convoluted, supernatural soap opera." Sometimes the darkness of the plotlines could be almost impenetrable: poor Wesley Wyndham-Price (Alexis Denisoff), who starts as a stammering bungler used mostly for comic relief, becomes unrecognizably bitter and violent, kneecapping or stabbing people who displeased him, and while it often made for great drama, it was just as often depressing. Thankfully, some budget cuts forced upon it by the network prompted Whedon and Greenwalt to course correct for what became the final season: Angel and his surviving cohorts found themselves not warring with, but in charge of, Wolfram & Hart, and joined by the insolent punk vampire Spike (James Marsters), who was always good for cutting one-liners and assorted mayhem. This also gave J. August Richards, who played the uneducated street thug Charles Gunn, a chance to do some ferocious acting when he accepts, against his better judgment, a devil's bargain "upgrade" to become a genius lawyer. Inded, the final season, even more nihilistic than the others, took on the idea of whether any compromise with evil is even possible. Its answer was emphatic, but not easy to watch. I remember finishing the series finale feeling as if I had just watched the end of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" several times over after my dog died. BUFFY's final episode was apocalyptic and bloody, but ultimately left the heroine completely in charge of her own destiny, with most of her nearest and dearest still breathing. Not this time, kid. ANGEL began on a very dark note in "City Of....", with our titular hero failing his first mission. It ended like a goddamned Leonard Cohen lyric:
You want it darker/we kill the flame
So where does that leave ANGEL, twenty years after it went off the air? What is its legacy, and is it still relevant?
I have occasionally stated that living in the shadow of BUFFY did not stunt ANGEL's growth, and this is true: at its best it was as good as its progenitor, with some episodes ("The Prodigal", "Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?", " "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco", "Tomorrow", "The Girl In Question") rising to truly dizzying heights of brilliance, pathos, tragedy, humor, or at least palm-tingling suspense. Indeed, the second season of the show is almost cruel in the way it increases the stakes in every episode, deftly moving from present to past as it at first sketches and then paints, in blood, the long history of Angel's relationship with Darla (Julie Benz), the beautiful, sadistic vampire who sired him centuries before. On the other hand, there is no question that the show struggled at times, and became increasingly dense and unapproachable to viewers tuning in for the first time: the fourth season is ultimately a mess, the villain was a bust, Charisma Carpenter's unplanned real-life pregnancy forced the writers to scribble in yet another supernatural baby story (the third of the show's five year run), and ultimately led to her departure after an ugly fight with producers -- the consequences of which came back to haunt Whedon many years later. It is for certain that ANGEL produced nothing like the cultural resonance of BUFFY, which not only changed the way most films and television shows are written, but also gave birth to a whole slew of imitations. ANGEL certainly did nothing of the sort. Its brooding tone and tendency to fall into moral ambiguity are common nowadays, but don't find their roots here.
This is not to say, however, that the show lacks a legacy. If BUFFY was the perfect metaphor for high school and, to some extent in its fourth season, college, ANGEL is an equally perfect metaphor for the terrible struggles people undergo in Los Angeles trying to live their dreams or find their purpose while simultaneously trying to hold onto basic values, or simply survive. BUFFY always struck me as a deeply personal show, told from the outcast's perspective: Buffy and her friends Willow and Xander, and even their stuffy patriarch Giles, are all essentially outsiders looking in, not only at normal life, but at acceptance: loneliness and rejection, both social and that brought about by duty, are recurring themes for all of them. ANGEL goes even further into this territory, as it is clearly an analogy and an allegory both. Whedon and Greenwalt are pointing at the city in which they live, the industry in which they work, the metaphorically bloodsucking lawyers and studio suits they have to deal with, and offering a kind of primal scream of existential anguish, broken up by outbursts of hysterical laughter at the absurdity of it all. Hollywood is, after all, a place where dreams go to die, and ironically, the ones that die the hardest are often the ones which come true. Every character in ANGEL -- Cordelia, Doyle, Gunn, Wesley, Spike, Fred, Harmony, Lindsey, Kate, Holtz, Lila, Darla, Drusilla, Connor, Holland, and Angel himself -- are all looking for something, questing for something, desirious of something, and nearly all of them get it. How they "get it" is another matter entirely.
If the age we live in has a central theme, it is probably cynicism, the quality of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. ANGEL is not a cynical show. It holds price and value in equal esteem, and sometimes it has to be reminded, painfully, of the former. Its hero is a vampire, but the series has a beating heart. Running from 1999 - 2004, it reflects the deeper angst of a transitional age: night was falling on the prosperous, happy-go-lucky 90s, and while nobody could see the shape of the post 9/11 future, it looked decidedly more frightening than the immediate past. Something had gone wrong with the rosy outcome we were promised and expected. Tribulations had begun, apocalypse was coming, and we would be in need of champions. But the champions would not be our father's champions: they would reflect the spirit of this new era. They would be dark, they would be brooding, they would crack jokes at inappropriate times, they would occasionally flee from their responsibilities, and often fight very dirtily indeed. They would fight this fight because it needed fighting, because it was the right thing to do, but they did not expect to win, and they did not expect to survive.
On that score alone, I would say ANGEL is more relevant than ever. Like Wolfram & Hart, it will go on...no matter what.
I find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse. -- Riley Finn
ANGEL was one of the more unlikely television shows of its time. To understand this, it is necessary to grasp that the show from which it was spun off, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, was derived from a second-rate feature film of the same name, debuted almost five years after that movie had disappeared at the box office, and was itself a low-budget, mid-season replacement whose debut season totaled only twelve episodes. Hell, BUFFY was even shot on 16mm film. Nothing about it augered well for success. Life would not be worth living, however, if every long shot missed its mark, and the ultimate success of BUFFY allowed ANGEL to take wing. Before we can take this particular trip down the Lane, however, it's necessary to give some background.
BUFFY was the story of Buffy Summers, a suburban teenage fashionista with a sarcastic tongue, a big heart, and a decided taste for quirky pop culture references. By day, Buffy was a mediocre student at Sunnydale High School in Southern California: by night she was the Slayer, a supernaturally-powered warrior with the strength and skill necessary to fight the vampires, demons, witches, and various other monsters which happened to plague her adoptive hometown. BUFFY operated from the first principle that since real life high school is basically hell, Sunnydale High should would be a metaphor for this harsh reality, literally sitting on the mouth of hell itself, with the monsters metaphorically standing in for the various angsts, fears and phobias of teenagers everywhere. What set BUFFY apart from most superheroes -- Spider Man would be an exception -- was the fact that her powers did not spare her the suffering of the ordinary 16 year-old girl. She agonized about clothing choices, wept over boys, endured bullying from bitchy classmates, caught hell from her divorced mom for flunking classes. Her woes were exacerbated rather than eased by her calling as a Slayer, and she often rebelled against the constraints imposed upon her by her duties, leading to yet more groundings and embarrassing "go to the principal's office" moments. In this way, Whedon was able to create a show about a young vampire huntress which may in fact be the most eloquent comment about high school ever put on film.
As the title suggests, BUFFY balanced comedy with horror -- always a very difficult task, but in this show's case, one which was brilliantly carried off by a small team of superb writers. And these writers saw from the outset that while the attractive Buffy would naturally draw male attention, she needed one abiding love interest who could intrigue her, challenger her, and altogether beat her at her own game. His name was Angel.
Angel is introduced in the pilot as a handsome, mysterious, not terribly friendly stranger who drops in from time to time to issue cryptic warnings, make Buffy's heart flutter, and then slip off into the shadows. We later learn that he himself is a vampire originally known as Angelus, one who in his bloodsucking days was so vicious even other vampires were afraid of him, until at last he crossed the wrong gypsy, who cursed him by restoring his soul, and thus his conscience. Haunted by remorse, he now works for good, and thus befriends Buffy and ultimately falls in love with her. Unfortunately for the two of them, the gypsies wrote some fine print into his curse: if he ever knows a moment of true happiness, he will lose his soul and once again become evil. So naturally, when Angel and Buffy finally get it on is BTVS season 2, Angel becomes Angelus again, commits a bunch of horrible murders, and is ultimately sent to hell. When he returns in Season 3, soul restored once more, he realizes he can never be with Buffy, lest he risk becoming evil, and departs for Los Angeles to start his unlife over again.
Such is the in-universe backstory. In the real world, Whedon and Greenwalt had decided in Season 3 of BUFFY that David Boreanaz, the actor who played Angel, had enough charisma and acting chops to carry his own series. So they put ANGEL together, and armed him with a sidekick drawn from BUFFY's ranks: Cordelia Chase, the beautiful, bitchy nemesis of Buffy played by Charisma Carpenter, who has gone to L.A. from Sunndale to seek fame. There they encounter Doyle (Glenn Quinn), an enigmatic, offbeat Irishman with connections to "the powers that be," who guides him on his quest for redemption by showing him visions of people in distress who require his help. Angel, who is famous for brooding, sulking, and lurking in shadows, doesn't really want the job, but ultimately comes to accept it as the only possible path to redemption for all his innumerable sins. So he forms a detective agency which "helps the helpless" by socking evil, in human and demonic form, on its collective jaw. Meanwhile, he reflects on something called the Shanshu Prophecy, which hints that one day, as the apocalypse looms, he may recover his humanity, and be able to live a normal life -- presumably running off into a literal sunset with Buffy.
From the outset, ANGEL was a show of a very different character from its progenitor. BUFFY could be, and increasingly was, dark in tone as it continued its seven year-run, but ANGEL never pretended to be anything else. The comedy was always there, but the series, from the pilot onward, placed all of its Tarot cards on the blood-spattered table. On its surface, ANGEL was a sarcastic, supernatural take on Los Angeles itself: many episodes ridicule the city's traffic, its prices, and its culture, especially as it pertains to the entertainment industry. It was also a savage roast of the legal profession generally and lawyers specifically: Angel's principal nemesis is not a demon or a vampire or a secret brotherhood of assassins, but a downtown law firm called Wolfram & Hart, whose unseen "senior partner" is presumably the devil himself.
Deeper than this, however, ANGEL was a study of good and evil, specifically the similarities between the two in methodology, the way they seem to feed off of and require each other; and the emotional, physical, spiritual and psychological toll of fighting evil when evil seems to be everywhere and tireless. The existential woe that Wheedon only occasionally touches upon in BUFFY rings like a dirge all throughout ANGEL. Our grim-jawed hero is often exhausted by his ceaseless battle, and is so courageous in large part because he secretly (and sometimes openly) longs for death. Not every soul he reaches out to protect is saved or even wants to be saved, he occasionally makes huge mistakes which cost lives or damage people irreparably, and his past is continuously reaching out to haunt him -- sometimes literally. Even more, he begins to hate his enemies at Wolfram & Hart so deeply that he plays very roughly indeed with them, in one episode simply walking away while several dozen of them are slaughtered by vampires as they plead for his help. At different times he deliberately alienates or harms his friends, sacrifices innocent lives for the greater good, and causes the deaths of evildoers simply because he feels they have it coming.
Cordelia, too, undergoes a difficult journey. Vain, shallow, selfish and prone to tactless cruelty, we watch her humiliated again and again as she tries and fails to break into the acting world. Ultimately burdened with Doyle's visions, which cause her excruciating pain and threaten her life, she begins to accept her role as a "champion" of the helpless, but like Angel, she often craves release from her responsibilities, often through romantic dalliances that inevitably end in failure. And like Doyle before her, she is also called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed, sacrifice is a recurring theme in the series: its fifth, final, and arguably best season, is a kind of scorched-earth campaign against the viewer, mercilessly killing off beloved characters at such a pace that it almost resembles an installment of FRIDAY THE 13TH. I am trying to avoid as many spoilers as possible, but when one lists the regular and recurring characters on this show -- and it's quite a list -- the ones who survive even to the last, very ambiguous, frame do not make extensive reading. Indeed, the show's whole fatalistic, existential tenor can be summed up in this exchange between Angel and a lawyer from Wolfram & Hart:
Angel : You're not gonna win.
Holland Manners : Well... no. Of course we aren't. We have no intention of doing anything so prosaic as "winning." [Holland laughs]
Angel : Then why?
Holland Manners : I'm sorry. Why what?
Angel : Why fight?
Holland Manners : That's really the question you should be asking yourself, isn't it? See, for us, there is no fight. Which is why winning doesn't enter into it. As a corporation, we go on... no matter what. You see, Angel... our firm has always been here on Earth... in one form or another. The Spanish Inquisition. The Khmer Rouge Genocide... one of my favorites. I personally was there. We were here when the very first modern cave man clubbed his neighbor on the head with a rock for stealing his dinner. See, we're in the hearts and minds of every single living being on this planet. And that, friend, is what's making things so difficult for you. That is the source of Wolfram & Hart's power. You see, the world doesn't work in spite of evil, Angel. It works with us. It works because of us.
Like all long-running shows, ANGEL changed course more than once. The original cast of three ballooned at times to as many as seven or eight regulars, the standalone, task-of-the-week style of the first season gradually became overshadowed by increasingly complex, season-long story arcs, and by the fourth season the show had become, in the words of one of its own characters "a convoluted, supernatural soap opera." Sometimes the darkness of the plotlines could be almost impenetrable: poor Wesley Wyndham-Price (Alexis Denisoff), who starts as a stammering bungler used mostly for comic relief, becomes unrecognizably bitter and violent, kneecapping or stabbing people who displeased him, and while it often made for great drama, it was just as often depressing. Thankfully, some budget cuts forced upon it by the network prompted Whedon and Greenwalt to course correct for what became the final season: Angel and his surviving cohorts found themselves not warring with, but in charge of, Wolfram & Hart, and joined by the insolent punk vampire Spike (James Marsters), who was always good for cutting one-liners and assorted mayhem. This also gave J. August Richards, who played the uneducated street thug Charles Gunn, a chance to do some ferocious acting when he accepts, against his better judgment, a devil's bargain "upgrade" to become a genius lawyer. Inded, the final season, even more nihilistic than the others, took on the idea of whether any compromise with evil is even possible. Its answer was emphatic, but not easy to watch. I remember finishing the series finale feeling as if I had just watched the end of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" several times over after my dog died. BUFFY's final episode was apocalyptic and bloody, but ultimately left the heroine completely in charge of her own destiny, with most of her nearest and dearest still breathing. Not this time, kid. ANGEL began on a very dark note in "City Of....", with our titular hero failing his first mission. It ended like a goddamned Leonard Cohen lyric:
You want it darker/we kill the flame
So where does that leave ANGEL, twenty years after it went off the air? What is its legacy, and is it still relevant?
I have occasionally stated that living in the shadow of BUFFY did not stunt ANGEL's growth, and this is true: at its best it was as good as its progenitor, with some episodes ("The Prodigal", "Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?", " "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco", "Tomorrow", "The Girl In Question") rising to truly dizzying heights of brilliance, pathos, tragedy, humor, or at least palm-tingling suspense. Indeed, the second season of the show is almost cruel in the way it increases the stakes in every episode, deftly moving from present to past as it at first sketches and then paints, in blood, the long history of Angel's relationship with Darla (Julie Benz), the beautiful, sadistic vampire who sired him centuries before. On the other hand, there is no question that the show struggled at times, and became increasingly dense and unapproachable to viewers tuning in for the first time: the fourth season is ultimately a mess, the villain was a bust, Charisma Carpenter's unplanned real-life pregnancy forced the writers to scribble in yet another supernatural baby story (the third of the show's five year run), and ultimately led to her departure after an ugly fight with producers -- the consequences of which came back to haunt Whedon many years later. It is for certain that ANGEL produced nothing like the cultural resonance of BUFFY, which not only changed the way most films and television shows are written, but also gave birth to a whole slew of imitations. ANGEL certainly did nothing of the sort. Its brooding tone and tendency to fall into moral ambiguity are common nowadays, but don't find their roots here.
This is not to say, however, that the show lacks a legacy. If BUFFY was the perfect metaphor for high school and, to some extent in its fourth season, college, ANGEL is an equally perfect metaphor for the terrible struggles people undergo in Los Angeles trying to live their dreams or find their purpose while simultaneously trying to hold onto basic values, or simply survive. BUFFY always struck me as a deeply personal show, told from the outcast's perspective: Buffy and her friends Willow and Xander, and even their stuffy patriarch Giles, are all essentially outsiders looking in, not only at normal life, but at acceptance: loneliness and rejection, both social and that brought about by duty, are recurring themes for all of them. ANGEL goes even further into this territory, as it is clearly an analogy and an allegory both. Whedon and Greenwalt are pointing at the city in which they live, the industry in which they work, the metaphorically bloodsucking lawyers and studio suits they have to deal with, and offering a kind of primal scream of existential anguish, broken up by outbursts of hysterical laughter at the absurdity of it all. Hollywood is, after all, a place where dreams go to die, and ironically, the ones that die the hardest are often the ones which come true. Every character in ANGEL -- Cordelia, Doyle, Gunn, Wesley, Spike, Fred, Harmony, Lindsey, Kate, Holtz, Lila, Darla, Drusilla, Connor, Holland, and Angel himself -- are all looking for something, questing for something, desirious of something, and nearly all of them get it. How they "get it" is another matter entirely.
If the age we live in has a central theme, it is probably cynicism, the quality of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. ANGEL is not a cynical show. It holds price and value in equal esteem, and sometimes it has to be reminded, painfully, of the former. Its hero is a vampire, but the series has a beating heart. Running from 1999 - 2004, it reflects the deeper angst of a transitional age: night was falling on the prosperous, happy-go-lucky 90s, and while nobody could see the shape of the post 9/11 future, it looked decidedly more frightening than the immediate past. Something had gone wrong with the rosy outcome we were promised and expected. Tribulations had begun, apocalypse was coming, and we would be in need of champions. But the champions would not be our father's champions: they would reflect the spirit of this new era. They would be dark, they would be brooding, they would crack jokes at inappropriate times, they would occasionally flee from their responsibilities, and often fight very dirtily indeed. They would fight this fight because it needed fighting, because it was the right thing to do, but they did not expect to win, and they did not expect to survive.
On that score alone, I would say ANGEL is more relevant than ever. Like Wolfram & Hart, it will go on...no matter what.
August 17, 2023
AS I PLEASE XVII: INCHWORM EDITION
Today I reflect on a whole series of random nonsense, thus alleviating my overcrowded brain of some of its freight of thoughts, observations, woes and worries. You know the drill.
* On the way home from a hike in the woods, I discovered an inchworm on my hand. I was determined to find it a home but damn was that little guy impatient. He was crawling every which way trying to find a plant, even rearing up to look for one. At long last I arrived home, and gave him over to the potted plants by Market. He was initially unimpressed but eventually found a leaf which met his minimum standards. What a fussy little beast. Anyone else would have smashed him or thrown him out the window: I went to great lengths and some discomfort to find him a home. I suppose I am a terrible, disgusting hypocrite. I wash beef blood off counter, cook bone broth, stock the fridge with chicken and pork. All remnants of living things with at least as much a right as I have to be here, maybe more. Simply by being a carnivore I feed a system which condemns them to pain, fear, misery and death. I hate that they suffer simply so I can live. But I won't stop eating them, and assuage my conscience with small acts of mercy. Today, for example, I found a plant out back of my building, abandoned by someone who I suppose had moved out, and dying of thirst: I brought it a full glass of water. I'll bring it another tonight or tomorrow. Maybe I'll even adopt it, though I must first determine the species, because my cat likes to eat plants and if this one is toxic to felines it's a no go.
* Right there my hypocrisy is exposed again. I have had Spike the Cat for 17 years. He has received far more love, care, and attention than most human beings ever will, and the expense involved in feeding him, providing him with clean litter, shots, flea treatments, and occasional medical care must add up to tens of thousands of dollars at least. If someone tried to harm him, someone would quickly shed this vale of tears for the next plane of existence. I am certain Spike has a soul, more certain than I have one, actually. Yet does a cow have less feelings than a cat? Does a pig? I would never harm a duck, but I have often eaten duck in restaurants. It's curious, how we call ourselves "animal lovers" because we care for those few animals we don't actually want to eat, while ignoring the suffering of the rest.
* Thinking of the thirsty plant makes me remember something that happened many years ago in Los Angeles when I was temping for a dreadful company in Woodland Hills called Great American Group. I shared an office with a woman named Karen who was easygoing enough when it came to my work, but also incredibly particular about, well, everything else. One day I noticed a dying plant on one of the vacant desks in our room. I tested the soil and it was powder-dry: the poor thing hadn't been watered in weeks. I told Karen I was going to water it, and she instructed me not to bother. "We'll get bugs," she insisted. I then offered to take it into the hallway, where a large number of ferns were located and which were watered regularly by the cleaning staff. She refused this, stating "It's not your plant, you can't move it." When I asked whose it was, she said, "Some woman who doesn't work here anymore." I saw at this point she simply wanted the plant to die, or was so cold-hearted she could not be troubled to melt the occasional ice cube from her 32 ounce soda into its potting soil. Not on my watch. I lingered in the office after it closed, slipped the plant into the hallway, watered it, and then tucked it between some ferns to ensure it would recieve regularly H20. Karen never noticed. And I never forgot how a person I thought rather decent had no compunction about watching a living thing die of thirst out of sheer laziness. (Karen, who was morbidly obese and lived off soda and hot pockets, couldn't go two hours without food.)
* Speaking of food, I am now down 12 lbs after sixty-one days on my new regimen. One of the things I have learned, or rather re-learned, is how little food even an active man needs in a day versus how much we think we need. Prior to tracking my water intake, calories, macros, etc. I would estimate that I was eating at least 3,000 calories a day, probably closer to 4,000 when I was drinking beer, and was not always satisfied even with this. I now eat 2,100 or less (adjusted upwards for exercise), am more active than ever, and am only occasionally hungry, because I eat less carbs, which digest quickly, and more protien and fat, which leave me feeling full. Obesity is a huge problem in this country, but the individual is somewhat less responsible than I would have insisted just a year or two ago: the stuff we see in stores, especially convenience stores, is basically nothing but fat, salt, and bad carbs, and is heavily processed and treated with chemicals in the bargain. Why, the other day I saw a pile of half-size Kind bars on a counter. I'm not talking the full-sized ones, which are barely a snack as it is: these were half the normal size, basically stuff you could pop like candy. Each had 90 calories. I could eat an entire box of blueberries for about 120. Hell, I could eat a large grilled pork chop for 118. Things we barely think would have any calories at all are insanely rich in them. A single tablespoon of my favorite salad dressing has 100 calories, and its all fat. Who the hell puts one tablespoon of dressing on anything?
* I was once told by a boxing coach, "A boxing ring is one of the most honest places in the world. If you've done the work, it will show. If you haven't, that will show, too." It's the same with our bodies. We cannot control our genetics, whether we go gray or bald, develop certain health issues, etc., but we have a huge influence over our flexibility, strength, weight, energy level, and so on. A few months ago I ran into a man with gray hair, a craggy, double-chinned face, a medicine ball gut, and bad posture. I figured him for his late fifties, possibly sixty, but he told me he'd been born in 1971, which means he was no more than 52 years old, i.e. one year less than I, who is usually mistaken for 5 - 7 years younger than I am. Now, some of this is luck-of-the-draw genetics, but a lot of it is simply the consequences of bad choices. He smoked, he ate garbage, he drank soda and beer in quantity, and he didn't exercise. Sooner or later that kind of lifestyle catches up to you. God knows life is only worth living if you enjoy all it has to offer, and that includes cheeseburgers, brew and chocolate cake: but if you put in the same work and care on your body you do with your car, sound system, job, etc. you are bound to reap some dividends, and the older you get, the more dividends you will reap. My mum is 84 and going extremely strong, and not just because of great heredity: she walks every day, swims all summer, does yoga, reads, tackles Sudoku, teaches English to Chinese-speakers and Spanish to English-speakers. Self-care is an investment.
* That probably sounds like preaching and/or boasting on my part, so let me attack myself in various ways for your entertainment. First, I'm only on my seventh book of the year, The Rise and Fall of Stalin by Robert Payne. It's a good book, but a very thick one, and depressing, because Stalin. I promised myself I'd beat the Goodreads Challenge this year and set very modest goals, but so far I am behind schedule as I have been every year for the past, oh, four or so. If I fail again I don't know what I'll do. I can't set the bar much lower than the twelve or so books I signed up to read.
* I am further violating one of my own sacred rules by going back and forth between Cold Day, Cruel World, the third novel in my CAGE LIFE series, and a black-comic WW2 novella which is going to be entitled either Blitz Baby or Capricorn Burning. Dividing creative energy is seldom a good idea and usually delays the outcome of both projects, but I can't seem to help myself. I'm alwasy preaching about discipline, so this is pretty pathetic. But I can't seem to stop myself. Like the inchworm, I am always looking for a better perch.
* On the way home from a hike in the woods, I discovered an inchworm on my hand. I was determined to find it a home but damn was that little guy impatient. He was crawling every which way trying to find a plant, even rearing up to look for one. At long last I arrived home, and gave him over to the potted plants by Market. He was initially unimpressed but eventually found a leaf which met his minimum standards. What a fussy little beast. Anyone else would have smashed him or thrown him out the window: I went to great lengths and some discomfort to find him a home. I suppose I am a terrible, disgusting hypocrite. I wash beef blood off counter, cook bone broth, stock the fridge with chicken and pork. All remnants of living things with at least as much a right as I have to be here, maybe more. Simply by being a carnivore I feed a system which condemns them to pain, fear, misery and death. I hate that they suffer simply so I can live. But I won't stop eating them, and assuage my conscience with small acts of mercy. Today, for example, I found a plant out back of my building, abandoned by someone who I suppose had moved out, and dying of thirst: I brought it a full glass of water. I'll bring it another tonight or tomorrow. Maybe I'll even adopt it, though I must first determine the species, because my cat likes to eat plants and if this one is toxic to felines it's a no go.
* Right there my hypocrisy is exposed again. I have had Spike the Cat for 17 years. He has received far more love, care, and attention than most human beings ever will, and the expense involved in feeding him, providing him with clean litter, shots, flea treatments, and occasional medical care must add up to tens of thousands of dollars at least. If someone tried to harm him, someone would quickly shed this vale of tears for the next plane of existence. I am certain Spike has a soul, more certain than I have one, actually. Yet does a cow have less feelings than a cat? Does a pig? I would never harm a duck, but I have often eaten duck in restaurants. It's curious, how we call ourselves "animal lovers" because we care for those few animals we don't actually want to eat, while ignoring the suffering of the rest.
* Thinking of the thirsty plant makes me remember something that happened many years ago in Los Angeles when I was temping for a dreadful company in Woodland Hills called Great American Group. I shared an office with a woman named Karen who was easygoing enough when it came to my work, but also incredibly particular about, well, everything else. One day I noticed a dying plant on one of the vacant desks in our room. I tested the soil and it was powder-dry: the poor thing hadn't been watered in weeks. I told Karen I was going to water it, and she instructed me not to bother. "We'll get bugs," she insisted. I then offered to take it into the hallway, where a large number of ferns were located and which were watered regularly by the cleaning staff. She refused this, stating "It's not your plant, you can't move it." When I asked whose it was, she said, "Some woman who doesn't work here anymore." I saw at this point she simply wanted the plant to die, or was so cold-hearted she could not be troubled to melt the occasional ice cube from her 32 ounce soda into its potting soil. Not on my watch. I lingered in the office after it closed, slipped the plant into the hallway, watered it, and then tucked it between some ferns to ensure it would recieve regularly H20. Karen never noticed. And I never forgot how a person I thought rather decent had no compunction about watching a living thing die of thirst out of sheer laziness. (Karen, who was morbidly obese and lived off soda and hot pockets, couldn't go two hours without food.)
* Speaking of food, I am now down 12 lbs after sixty-one days on my new regimen. One of the things I have learned, or rather re-learned, is how little food even an active man needs in a day versus how much we think we need. Prior to tracking my water intake, calories, macros, etc. I would estimate that I was eating at least 3,000 calories a day, probably closer to 4,000 when I was drinking beer, and was not always satisfied even with this. I now eat 2,100 or less (adjusted upwards for exercise), am more active than ever, and am only occasionally hungry, because I eat less carbs, which digest quickly, and more protien and fat, which leave me feeling full. Obesity is a huge problem in this country, but the individual is somewhat less responsible than I would have insisted just a year or two ago: the stuff we see in stores, especially convenience stores, is basically nothing but fat, salt, and bad carbs, and is heavily processed and treated with chemicals in the bargain. Why, the other day I saw a pile of half-size Kind bars on a counter. I'm not talking the full-sized ones, which are barely a snack as it is: these were half the normal size, basically stuff you could pop like candy. Each had 90 calories. I could eat an entire box of blueberries for about 120. Hell, I could eat a large grilled pork chop for 118. Things we barely think would have any calories at all are insanely rich in them. A single tablespoon of my favorite salad dressing has 100 calories, and its all fat. Who the hell puts one tablespoon of dressing on anything?
* I was once told by a boxing coach, "A boxing ring is one of the most honest places in the world. If you've done the work, it will show. If you haven't, that will show, too." It's the same with our bodies. We cannot control our genetics, whether we go gray or bald, develop certain health issues, etc., but we have a huge influence over our flexibility, strength, weight, energy level, and so on. A few months ago I ran into a man with gray hair, a craggy, double-chinned face, a medicine ball gut, and bad posture. I figured him for his late fifties, possibly sixty, but he told me he'd been born in 1971, which means he was no more than 52 years old, i.e. one year less than I, who is usually mistaken for 5 - 7 years younger than I am. Now, some of this is luck-of-the-draw genetics, but a lot of it is simply the consequences of bad choices. He smoked, he ate garbage, he drank soda and beer in quantity, and he didn't exercise. Sooner or later that kind of lifestyle catches up to you. God knows life is only worth living if you enjoy all it has to offer, and that includes cheeseburgers, brew and chocolate cake: but if you put in the same work and care on your body you do with your car, sound system, job, etc. you are bound to reap some dividends, and the older you get, the more dividends you will reap. My mum is 84 and going extremely strong, and not just because of great heredity: she walks every day, swims all summer, does yoga, reads, tackles Sudoku, teaches English to Chinese-speakers and Spanish to English-speakers. Self-care is an investment.
* That probably sounds like preaching and/or boasting on my part, so let me attack myself in various ways for your entertainment. First, I'm only on my seventh book of the year, The Rise and Fall of Stalin by Robert Payne. It's a good book, but a very thick one, and depressing, because Stalin. I promised myself I'd beat the Goodreads Challenge this year and set very modest goals, but so far I am behind schedule as I have been every year for the past, oh, four or so. If I fail again I don't know what I'll do. I can't set the bar much lower than the twelve or so books I signed up to read.
* I am further violating one of my own sacred rules by going back and forth between Cold Day, Cruel World, the third novel in my CAGE LIFE series, and a black-comic WW2 novella which is going to be entitled either Blitz Baby or Capricorn Burning. Dividing creative energy is seldom a good idea and usually delays the outcome of both projects, but I can't seem to help myself. I'm alwasy preaching about discipline, so this is pretty pathetic. But I can't seem to stop myself. Like the inchworm, I am always looking for a better perch.
August 8, 2023
NARCISSISM: MY STORY
Today is my birthday, and I was going to use that as an excuse to once again put off my post about narcisissts and my experiences with them. It's not a fun topic to discuss, though it is a very important one given the steady rise of this particularly odious personality failing. However, I'm tired of making excuses in this department, so here we go. I'm gonna keep this short, simple, and to the point.
Like many people I thought for many years that narcissism simply meant vanity, coupled with the shallowness and self-centeredness that vanity usually brings. Had I known what narcissists really were, and the damage they were capable of doing, I'd have spared myself a great deal of suffering and pain.
Narcissism is classified as a "personality disorder" rather than a disease. It is believed to be created by environment: there is no gene for narcissism and it is not hereditary. Professionals say it is often the result of a particular type of parenting that teaches children to be entitled, to lack empathy, to crave attention and adulation, and to get what they want no matter what the consequences to others. I believe this to be true, but I also believe -- anecdotally but totally -- that it can develop in children who are excessively bullied by parents or peers (or both). As evidence of this I am going to cite just two examples from my own experience. I could use more, but I believe these two will be sufficient. And all I can bring myself to deal with today.
I met "Pamela" in my early 20s. She was beautiful, a sharp dresser, a good student, former queen bee of her sorority, and yet extremely grounded when it came to the practical details of life, hailing from a working class background. We dated, moved in together, and very nearly got engaged. The first six months of our relationship were incandescent. Even then, however, I noticed a few behavioral traits I'd never encountered before, traits that became steadily more prominent over the next two years. She sometimes spoke casually of an incdent in which she and her friends had bullied another girl so badly in high school over some minor incident that the girl had to transfer, and she related the story with faint amusement. She did not apologize for anything, ever, and when she made mistakes, immediately became angry and looked for someone or something to blame. She occasionally fell into terrible moods, especially when under pressure, and would treat me viciously during these periods: when they lifted there was never any remorse or even acknowledgment that they had occurred. She was relentless with emotional button-pushing, and would do so for hours at a time without letup: her stamina for this sort of bullying was almost without limit. And she escalated even the most minor disagreements into ugly arguments, sometimes refusing to speak to me for days over things so trivial I could barely remember what they were when the smoke cleared.
The latter half of our relationship saw this behavior increase, with additions. She was openly obsessed about appearances and how our relationship looked to others while seeming to care very little about its actual state. I began to notice that she remembered things to suit her mood, and frequently employed negation during arguments: she would deny I had done this or that thing for her, knowing that it was a lie and knowing that I knew, and doing it anyway and insisting it was true. A cycle developed whereby we would disagree over something inconsequential, an argument would ensue, it would escalate to a day or even week-ruining level, and then, simply for the sake of peace, I would apologize, and everything would go back to normal and sometimes even to the honeymoon phase. These phases were wonderful and always convinced me that our relationship was not doomed but merely undergoing all the usual frictions that occur when two people integrate their lives together. But they never lasted. And as time went on, they grew shorter.
I tried every tactic I could think of to bring our relationship to a healthier plane, including quiet, heart-to-heart talks in which I pleaded with her to get help so we could have ordinary, tension-relieving tiffs like normal couples and not turn every disagreement about who took out the garbage last into the third world war. During these talks I admitted every fault of my own I could think of (and there were many, of course) just to make sure she didn't feel attacked, and it always worked, or seemed to. She was quite adult and reasonable at these times, but they never had a sequel. They never achieved anything or had any lasting impact at all. We would once again have a brief honeymoon phase and then the same old cycles would begin once more. I was to experience this shallowness of affect, also a psychopathic trait, later, with other narcissists.
By now I was showing definite signs of psychological damage. I had so much repressed rage from the countless fake apologies I'd been forced to make over the previous years that on two occasions I exploded completely, shouting at the top of my lungs in frustrated rage like an absolute madman. I had undergone some pretty terrible bullying between the ages of 11 - 13 or so, and as a result had an incredible sensitivity toward perceived bullying as an adult: I eventually realized that I had "married" a bully as well. A woman with almost zero empathy who sometimes displayed discernible cruelty. A woman who lied and distorted reality to suit moods and her needs. A woman who was abusive in a nonphysical way but could not stand even slight criticism in return. Who did not know how to argue like an adult. Who seemed to genuinely not know the difference between truth and lies. Who had more regard for the opinions of strangers than the well being of the man she lived with, shared a bed with, said she loved. And I do think that she loved me in her way. But sadly, the emphasis was "her way" and not love.
Our breakup was every bit as bad as you would expect. She initiated it because I lacked the courage, all of mine having been systematically destroyed over the previous four years. And yet once she started the process, she could not seem to go through with it and hopes of reconciliation were constantly dangled before me. (Years later, I heard she blamed this on me, too, saying, paradoxically, if only I'd moved out sooner we might have salvaged everything.) Curiously enough, at one point, after a great deal of suffering that dragged on for months, we made a reasonable peace. I moved out. We stayed in touch to discuss practical matters and even just to say hello. And then, for no reason I could discern, she turned vicious once again over the matter of some shared property: a computer I believe. I knew she didn't give a damn about it: she could barely type. It was just a pretext to fight, to blow the already charred bridge to bits. I didn't know it at the time, but this apocalyptic sort of behavior, burning everything to the ground and salting the earth after, is characteristic of narcissists generally, both in moments of absolute victory and absolute defeat. When they win, they rub it in endlessly, so as to cause the loser maximum pain and humilation. When they lose, they wreck everything in sight, like a child knocking over a game board. They cannot endure failure.
It's worth noting that "Pamela" did not grow up in a Trumpian environment of power, wealth, and privilege. Quite the contrary. She was, however, subjected to a great deal of bullying from her father, some of which I witnessed firsthand when visiting her home. And I believe the traits which were inflicted upon me during our relationship were a direct result of this bullying: those attacked unjustly can develop a sort of violent, emotionally allergic reaction to criticism, even if it is mild and delivered diplomatically and with love, seeing it simply as a form of attack. They can have serious issues with anger, especially the expression of anger in appropriate, healthy ways. They often compensate for being made to feel worthless, ugly, stupid, etc. by adopting self-aggrandizing behaviors such as never being wrong, and by lying about the past when it is too embarrassing or painful to remember: also by being obsessed with appearances and the opinions of others, including people they scarcely know. They manipulate others out of percieved self-protection, and most sadly, they often imitate the behaviors of those who tormented them, most notably bullying others, especially those closest to them.
Many years after "Pamela" had mercifully left my life, I was living in Los Angeles and working in the make-up effects industry in various flunky capacities. A friend of a friend hired me to work in the video games industry on the side, and this side gig rapidly began to consume more and more of my time. It was there, working for a very successful trailer house, that I encountered "Mr. Jayne," who held the august title of "director" although his job, boiled down to its essence, was to pull footage of free or scripted gameplay and then edit it into video game trailers. Unlike "Pamela," "Mr. Jayne" did not make a favorable impression. Indeed, the one really redeeming quality he possessed was that his cards were more or less on the table from the start: he was cold, rude, self-absorbed, arrogant, scheming, manipulative, malignant, treacherous, and as abusive as he could get away with. The test for classic narcissism is in fact as follows:
Sense of self-importance
Preoccupation with power, beauty, or success
Entitled
Can only be around people who are important or special
Interpersonally exploitative for their own gain
Arrogant
Lack empathy
Must be admired
Envious of others or believe that others are envious of them
Of the nine points of this "SPECIALME" scale, Mr. Jayne hit on eight. He did not need to be around people who were important or special. Quite the contrary. He hated any sign that colleagues or underlings had any personality or ability at all. He sought total subservience, total obedience. He wanted the crew to do exactly as they were told, keep silent unless asking or answering a question, eat when he was hungry, and go home when he himself was tired. I have worked on sets, on locations, in make up effect studios, and in seven different trailer houses, and I never met anyone with less concern for his crew's physical needs -- food, rest, bathroom breaks, comfortable chairs, reasonable temperatures. On a number of occasions he was reprimanded by his boss for suggesting he be allowed "to fire someone at random the first day of a shoot, so the rest would fall into line," but the reprimands had no effect and he never stopped making suggestions of that type.
Of course, Mr. Jayne's desires and reality did not generally correspond. His co-workers hated him and did him as much dirt as they could, though in the habit of narcissists, he seemed to be better at kicking it. He even went into his colleagues offices at night to secretly look at their work, which he would then criticize in private e-mails to the bosses, suggesting they be fired or demoted or have work taken away from them so he could work more. And indeed, he probably put in 100 hours a week, year in and year out, mainly because by the time he was at double overtime, he was making something like $140/hr.
His crew, meanwhile, was an uncontrollable, loud, vulgar, boisterous, undisciplined, semi-anarchic mob who pushed back and sometimes shouted back when he became intolerable. I myself had to be restrained from hitting him at least once, and after some years I was blacklisted by him in punishment, a blacklist which held until he himself was fired, whereupon I returned to spit on his figurative grave. Working with him for those years, however, was very nearly unendurable. Jayne, a glorified footage-puller, seriously believed himself a director on par with Scorsese or Spielberg. He must have known how loathed he was, and there were times I actually pitied him because his suffering in this regard was visible and even sad: but his behavior never improved. He was forever driving us, exploiting us, denying us credit, and treating us as if we were service robots rather than human beings. At one point he created his own team of silent, spineless minions to work on his projects: these guys were the absolute pick of the litterbox, without personality or fire or even intelligence, qualified only in that they were utterly subsurvient. To his dismay, however, he discovered what many a narcissist before him has discovered, if not necessarily acted upon: that surrounding himself with mediocrity only hindered his insatiable ambitions. He had to weigh his fear of being outshined or pushed back upon with his need to have people around him who could actually do their jobs. It must have cost him some sleepless nights, trying to grapple with this self-created problem. I suppose narcissism, in its way, is its own form of purgatory: the way out is clear, but they can't or won't take it.
Jayne, like all bad pennies, turned up at another studio with a long list of demands in one hand and a blacklist in the other, and Hollywood, which rewards behaviors punished almost everywhere else in the Western world, including prison, caved in to him. I mercifully never encountered the man again, in large part because I was on that blacklist, but I heard that he brought a level of toxcicity to his new employer no one there had ever experienced before. As with the previous company, he managed to destroy the morale of everyone he worked with, without any real consequences to himself. And in fact, whenever his name comes up among old co-workers of mine, "toxic" and "toxicity" are two of the words which are unfailingly employed: "radioactive waste" was my favorite, however, because it was accurate.
Working with "Jayne" was a nuisance and often a nightmare. I was spared deeper trauma because it was a work situation and as a freelancer in a very loose, undisciplined environment, I was able to give him enough shit to visibly hurt or anger him on many occasions and thus keep my self-respect, which I had once lost for a time thanks to "Pamela." But my victories over him were always fleeting and without lasting affect. He did not learn lessons from failure. He did not draw conclusions from defeat. He simply kept on keeping on. Even his superiors usually crumpled before him. The sheer tenacity of narcissists, the stamina they have for argument and vendetta, is well beyond that of the ordinary person. Because they lack shame, because they are self-obsessed, because they equate accepting even a miniscule criticsm as a reflection on their worth as a person, because they see being hated and raged against as a form of attention not much less valuable than being adored or loved, and because they are emotionally retarded and primitive, they can persist in their game of checkers long after you have resigned your game of chess. In a sense, the only way to truly win an argument with a narcissist is to get in the last word and then knock them unconscious, something I often contemplated in "Jayne's" presence. It would have been enormously pleasurable to do so. But it would not have changed anything. Narcissists can perhaps help themselves if they are not too far gone to do so, but it requires an understanding that they are defective human being, and that they require outside help, and these are two things most of them will never do.
In the age we live in, where people with seriously defective personality traits have normalized those traits through the internet, more people than ever are suffering from the trauma narcissists inflict. Everyone reading this has encountered their share, and some have been seriously harmed by the encounters. I submit this mainly because I have only very recently come to an understanding of what narcissism is, and how it effected and affected me: if I'd been able to spot the red flags, I might have spared myself some serious pain. If this can help even one person escape a bad situation before it really gets hold of them, it was worth the discomfort of breaking open the box that reads "Memories: Do Not Open."
Like many people I thought for many years that narcissism simply meant vanity, coupled with the shallowness and self-centeredness that vanity usually brings. Had I known what narcissists really were, and the damage they were capable of doing, I'd have spared myself a great deal of suffering and pain.
Narcissism is classified as a "personality disorder" rather than a disease. It is believed to be created by environment: there is no gene for narcissism and it is not hereditary. Professionals say it is often the result of a particular type of parenting that teaches children to be entitled, to lack empathy, to crave attention and adulation, and to get what they want no matter what the consequences to others. I believe this to be true, but I also believe -- anecdotally but totally -- that it can develop in children who are excessively bullied by parents or peers (or both). As evidence of this I am going to cite just two examples from my own experience. I could use more, but I believe these two will be sufficient. And all I can bring myself to deal with today.
I met "Pamela" in my early 20s. She was beautiful, a sharp dresser, a good student, former queen bee of her sorority, and yet extremely grounded when it came to the practical details of life, hailing from a working class background. We dated, moved in together, and very nearly got engaged. The first six months of our relationship were incandescent. Even then, however, I noticed a few behavioral traits I'd never encountered before, traits that became steadily more prominent over the next two years. She sometimes spoke casually of an incdent in which she and her friends had bullied another girl so badly in high school over some minor incident that the girl had to transfer, and she related the story with faint amusement. She did not apologize for anything, ever, and when she made mistakes, immediately became angry and looked for someone or something to blame. She occasionally fell into terrible moods, especially when under pressure, and would treat me viciously during these periods: when they lifted there was never any remorse or even acknowledgment that they had occurred. She was relentless with emotional button-pushing, and would do so for hours at a time without letup: her stamina for this sort of bullying was almost without limit. And she escalated even the most minor disagreements into ugly arguments, sometimes refusing to speak to me for days over things so trivial I could barely remember what they were when the smoke cleared.
The latter half of our relationship saw this behavior increase, with additions. She was openly obsessed about appearances and how our relationship looked to others while seeming to care very little about its actual state. I began to notice that she remembered things to suit her mood, and frequently employed negation during arguments: she would deny I had done this or that thing for her, knowing that it was a lie and knowing that I knew, and doing it anyway and insisting it was true. A cycle developed whereby we would disagree over something inconsequential, an argument would ensue, it would escalate to a day or even week-ruining level, and then, simply for the sake of peace, I would apologize, and everything would go back to normal and sometimes even to the honeymoon phase. These phases were wonderful and always convinced me that our relationship was not doomed but merely undergoing all the usual frictions that occur when two people integrate their lives together. But they never lasted. And as time went on, they grew shorter.
I tried every tactic I could think of to bring our relationship to a healthier plane, including quiet, heart-to-heart talks in which I pleaded with her to get help so we could have ordinary, tension-relieving tiffs like normal couples and not turn every disagreement about who took out the garbage last into the third world war. During these talks I admitted every fault of my own I could think of (and there were many, of course) just to make sure she didn't feel attacked, and it always worked, or seemed to. She was quite adult and reasonable at these times, but they never had a sequel. They never achieved anything or had any lasting impact at all. We would once again have a brief honeymoon phase and then the same old cycles would begin once more. I was to experience this shallowness of affect, also a psychopathic trait, later, with other narcissists.
By now I was showing definite signs of psychological damage. I had so much repressed rage from the countless fake apologies I'd been forced to make over the previous years that on two occasions I exploded completely, shouting at the top of my lungs in frustrated rage like an absolute madman. I had undergone some pretty terrible bullying between the ages of 11 - 13 or so, and as a result had an incredible sensitivity toward perceived bullying as an adult: I eventually realized that I had "married" a bully as well. A woman with almost zero empathy who sometimes displayed discernible cruelty. A woman who lied and distorted reality to suit moods and her needs. A woman who was abusive in a nonphysical way but could not stand even slight criticism in return. Who did not know how to argue like an adult. Who seemed to genuinely not know the difference between truth and lies. Who had more regard for the opinions of strangers than the well being of the man she lived with, shared a bed with, said she loved. And I do think that she loved me in her way. But sadly, the emphasis was "her way" and not love.
Our breakup was every bit as bad as you would expect. She initiated it because I lacked the courage, all of mine having been systematically destroyed over the previous four years. And yet once she started the process, she could not seem to go through with it and hopes of reconciliation were constantly dangled before me. (Years later, I heard she blamed this on me, too, saying, paradoxically, if only I'd moved out sooner we might have salvaged everything.) Curiously enough, at one point, after a great deal of suffering that dragged on for months, we made a reasonable peace. I moved out. We stayed in touch to discuss practical matters and even just to say hello. And then, for no reason I could discern, she turned vicious once again over the matter of some shared property: a computer I believe. I knew she didn't give a damn about it: she could barely type. It was just a pretext to fight, to blow the already charred bridge to bits. I didn't know it at the time, but this apocalyptic sort of behavior, burning everything to the ground and salting the earth after, is characteristic of narcissists generally, both in moments of absolute victory and absolute defeat. When they win, they rub it in endlessly, so as to cause the loser maximum pain and humilation. When they lose, they wreck everything in sight, like a child knocking over a game board. They cannot endure failure.
It's worth noting that "Pamela" did not grow up in a Trumpian environment of power, wealth, and privilege. Quite the contrary. She was, however, subjected to a great deal of bullying from her father, some of which I witnessed firsthand when visiting her home. And I believe the traits which were inflicted upon me during our relationship were a direct result of this bullying: those attacked unjustly can develop a sort of violent, emotionally allergic reaction to criticism, even if it is mild and delivered diplomatically and with love, seeing it simply as a form of attack. They can have serious issues with anger, especially the expression of anger in appropriate, healthy ways. They often compensate for being made to feel worthless, ugly, stupid, etc. by adopting self-aggrandizing behaviors such as never being wrong, and by lying about the past when it is too embarrassing or painful to remember: also by being obsessed with appearances and the opinions of others, including people they scarcely know. They manipulate others out of percieved self-protection, and most sadly, they often imitate the behaviors of those who tormented them, most notably bullying others, especially those closest to them.
Many years after "Pamela" had mercifully left my life, I was living in Los Angeles and working in the make-up effects industry in various flunky capacities. A friend of a friend hired me to work in the video games industry on the side, and this side gig rapidly began to consume more and more of my time. It was there, working for a very successful trailer house, that I encountered "Mr. Jayne," who held the august title of "director" although his job, boiled down to its essence, was to pull footage of free or scripted gameplay and then edit it into video game trailers. Unlike "Pamela," "Mr. Jayne" did not make a favorable impression. Indeed, the one really redeeming quality he possessed was that his cards were more or less on the table from the start: he was cold, rude, self-absorbed, arrogant, scheming, manipulative, malignant, treacherous, and as abusive as he could get away with. The test for classic narcissism is in fact as follows:
Sense of self-importance
Preoccupation with power, beauty, or success
Entitled
Can only be around people who are important or special
Interpersonally exploitative for their own gain
Arrogant
Lack empathy
Must be admired
Envious of others or believe that others are envious of them
Of the nine points of this "SPECIALME" scale, Mr. Jayne hit on eight. He did not need to be around people who were important or special. Quite the contrary. He hated any sign that colleagues or underlings had any personality or ability at all. He sought total subservience, total obedience. He wanted the crew to do exactly as they were told, keep silent unless asking or answering a question, eat when he was hungry, and go home when he himself was tired. I have worked on sets, on locations, in make up effect studios, and in seven different trailer houses, and I never met anyone with less concern for his crew's physical needs -- food, rest, bathroom breaks, comfortable chairs, reasonable temperatures. On a number of occasions he was reprimanded by his boss for suggesting he be allowed "to fire someone at random the first day of a shoot, so the rest would fall into line," but the reprimands had no effect and he never stopped making suggestions of that type.
Of course, Mr. Jayne's desires and reality did not generally correspond. His co-workers hated him and did him as much dirt as they could, though in the habit of narcissists, he seemed to be better at kicking it. He even went into his colleagues offices at night to secretly look at their work, which he would then criticize in private e-mails to the bosses, suggesting they be fired or demoted or have work taken away from them so he could work more. And indeed, he probably put in 100 hours a week, year in and year out, mainly because by the time he was at double overtime, he was making something like $140/hr.
His crew, meanwhile, was an uncontrollable, loud, vulgar, boisterous, undisciplined, semi-anarchic mob who pushed back and sometimes shouted back when he became intolerable. I myself had to be restrained from hitting him at least once, and after some years I was blacklisted by him in punishment, a blacklist which held until he himself was fired, whereupon I returned to spit on his figurative grave. Working with him for those years, however, was very nearly unendurable. Jayne, a glorified footage-puller, seriously believed himself a director on par with Scorsese or Spielberg. He must have known how loathed he was, and there were times I actually pitied him because his suffering in this regard was visible and even sad: but his behavior never improved. He was forever driving us, exploiting us, denying us credit, and treating us as if we were service robots rather than human beings. At one point he created his own team of silent, spineless minions to work on his projects: these guys were the absolute pick of the litterbox, without personality or fire or even intelligence, qualified only in that they were utterly subsurvient. To his dismay, however, he discovered what many a narcissist before him has discovered, if not necessarily acted upon: that surrounding himself with mediocrity only hindered his insatiable ambitions. He had to weigh his fear of being outshined or pushed back upon with his need to have people around him who could actually do their jobs. It must have cost him some sleepless nights, trying to grapple with this self-created problem. I suppose narcissism, in its way, is its own form of purgatory: the way out is clear, but they can't or won't take it.
Jayne, like all bad pennies, turned up at another studio with a long list of demands in one hand and a blacklist in the other, and Hollywood, which rewards behaviors punished almost everywhere else in the Western world, including prison, caved in to him. I mercifully never encountered the man again, in large part because I was on that blacklist, but I heard that he brought a level of toxcicity to his new employer no one there had ever experienced before. As with the previous company, he managed to destroy the morale of everyone he worked with, without any real consequences to himself. And in fact, whenever his name comes up among old co-workers of mine, "toxic" and "toxicity" are two of the words which are unfailingly employed: "radioactive waste" was my favorite, however, because it was accurate.
Working with "Jayne" was a nuisance and often a nightmare. I was spared deeper trauma because it was a work situation and as a freelancer in a very loose, undisciplined environment, I was able to give him enough shit to visibly hurt or anger him on many occasions and thus keep my self-respect, which I had once lost for a time thanks to "Pamela." But my victories over him were always fleeting and without lasting affect. He did not learn lessons from failure. He did not draw conclusions from defeat. He simply kept on keeping on. Even his superiors usually crumpled before him. The sheer tenacity of narcissists, the stamina they have for argument and vendetta, is well beyond that of the ordinary person. Because they lack shame, because they are self-obsessed, because they equate accepting even a miniscule criticsm as a reflection on their worth as a person, because they see being hated and raged against as a form of attention not much less valuable than being adored or loved, and because they are emotionally retarded and primitive, they can persist in their game of checkers long after you have resigned your game of chess. In a sense, the only way to truly win an argument with a narcissist is to get in the last word and then knock them unconscious, something I often contemplated in "Jayne's" presence. It would have been enormously pleasurable to do so. But it would not have changed anything. Narcissists can perhaps help themselves if they are not too far gone to do so, but it requires an understanding that they are defective human being, and that they require outside help, and these are two things most of them will never do.
In the age we live in, where people with seriously defective personality traits have normalized those traits through the internet, more people than ever are suffering from the trauma narcissists inflict. Everyone reading this has encountered their share, and some have been seriously harmed by the encounters. I submit this mainly because I have only very recently come to an understanding of what narcissism is, and how it effected and affected me: if I'd been able to spot the red flags, I might have spared myself some serious pain. If this can help even one person escape a bad situation before it really gets hold of them, it was worth the discomfort of breaking open the box that reads "Memories: Do Not Open."
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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