Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 21

TIPS FOR NEW WRITERS

I often get asked if I have any advice for aspiring or newfangled writers. The truth is that I do, quite a bit of it actually, but when the subject comes up, I'm usually unprepared to answer the question. Either it comes at me in drive-by fashion, when I'm walking down the hall or sharing an elevator, or otherwise in a social setting, when I'm half in the bag or have a mouthful of pizza between me and the answer. The present being neither circumstance, I'd like to take a moment to discuss what I think constitutes good advice. It comes from years of experience and by virtue of many, many mistakes, some humiliating, some merely expensive. It is very broad advice -- I have already discoursed on specific writing techniques in this blog, and will do so again in the future -- but it is not without its uses, especially to those new to the game.

1. Write. Writing is like athletics. If you want to be good, you have to practice. I do not necessarily mean the hoary collegiate technique of the writing prompt, but simply writing for its own sake. Write anything. Write ideas. Write feelings. Write opinions. Write nonsense. Keep a journal or a diary and write in it every day. Watch dramatic scenes on television or film and then write them out as if they were a novel. Scribble ridiculous crossover fan-fiction. Just write. Don't necessarily have any objective or purpose in mind. Don't think about whether it's any good. Don't worry about publication. Don't worry about plagiarism or imitating someone else's style. Simply create a playspace within your own head, where you are free to do anything you want, and then do it. Do it badly, do it wrongly, but do it. Discover what works and what doesn't. From all of this, you will not only develop your own voice through trial and error, you will also keep your creative faculty in tone. Writing, I have found, becomes easier the more you do of it. Those who regard every word they produce as solemn and sacred are also the sort who suffer from "writer's block," an affliction which only exists in those who don't keep their creative muscles warm and limber.

2. Read. I have occasionally encountered self-described authors who boast that they never read, but have produced novels nonetheless, conjured out of pure talent. Needless to say (though I will say it anyway), their novels are always and without exception, rubbish. Reading is the key to writing -- period. And one should read everything, from trash to classics, from comic books and screenplays to the throwaway potboilers meant to be abandoned on beach towels or airplane seats. Read erotica, fantasy, mystery, science-fiction. Read autobiographies and biographies and books about war. Read poetry. Read old army manuals. Read. You will never develop a voice of your own until you have listened to a thousand other voices.

3. Finish. Nearly everyone I knew in Hollywood had a half-finished script which was going to turn the industry on its head. Nearly everyone I knew in graduate school had a half-finished novel which was going straight to the bestseller lists. But "going" is a curious and tricky thing, is it not? It implies that one will one day be "arriving." For most of these folks, the day of arrival never came. Great ideas are commonplace, but without ruthless determination, they remain ideas. The true hallmark of a writer is not the ability to conjure a great story, or to outline it in meticulous detail, or to start it in a fury of creative passion, but to finish it. Amateurs are "going," professionals get there. Exactly how they get there I will explain in other points below, but for this one, I will simply say that the goal when one begins is to get across the finish line by any means necessary, and the best way to do this is to remember that a first draft is just that: a first draft. It doesn't have to be good, it has to be finished. A book or a short story which is 99% finished may as well be unwritten. It's an either/or situation. All or nothing.

4. Act quickly on inspiration. Every now and again, a writer gets hit with a really good idea. We know it is a good idea because it excites us, gets us out of bed at 3AM, prevents us from concentrating on anything else. In these circumstances it is crucial to act immediately, or as soon as circumstances possibly allow, and begin writing. Again, it hardly matters if what is set down is any good, merely that it get to paper at once. The initial momentum one gets from a creative epiphany is very powerful stuff, but there is no second wind: that first jolt runs as far as it runs, and then it's up to you to carry it across the finish line, which may yet be many miles distant. It is absolutely fatal to sit on a burning hot idea for too long: it will cool and congeal, and you will lose all impulse to act upon it. That original blaze of enthusiasm, once extinguished, can never or almost never be rekindled.

5. Having said that, sometimes it's okay to let the cookie bake . Not every idea we have comes fully developed. Most come as images, scraps, fragments, titilating hints, which, when we examine them closely, don't have a lot of logic or substance. In some cases these are enough to start and even finish the process if writing a story. Often, however, they are not. I have had ideas which I turned into stories in a few days or even a single day, and others which I turned over in my mind for years or decades before I acted upon them. Many a great idea has been ruined because the author did not give the idea time and thought to develop it to its true potential. So how do we make a distinction? Well, as a general rule, the simpler an idea, the easier it is to act upon; the more complex, the lengthier the process of getting it to paper in a manner which will do it justice.

6. Perfect is the enemy of good. When people tell me, "It's all well and good for you to say 'finish the story,' but how do I do that when I've never finished anything?" Well, for starters, you have to let go of the idea that your first draft has to be good, or even half-decent. Hell, it can be a steaming pile of beetle-infested camel dung so long as it is complete. The purpose of a first draft is to exist. Quality is not the objective but merely completion. To finish a draft is success. Its level of quality is almost irrelevant. I cannot stress this enough.
One of the stigmata of amateur writers is the belief that laboring and sweating over every sentence they write possesses some kind of inherent virtue. This belief, which is often sincere but just as often tied to a form of arrogance, is the main reason most "aspiring writers" are always "aspiring" and never just "writers." Obviously, it is better to produce a good first draft than a bad one, but again, the real goal is to get that damned draft in hand, because...

7. everything can be fixed by the drafting process . There is no story so badly written, so terribly concieved and executed, that it cannot be enormously improved by subsequent drafts. It may take 20 drafts to get to that point, and the point may merely be mediocrity, but vast improvement is always possible. The beauty of drafting is that it is an open-ended process: one can continue it for years if necessary, and if the writer has any talent at all, at some point it will always achieve at least a large portion of its object.

8. Expanding on this, learn how to take criticism. I am referring here to the editing process, which is different, but often intertwined, with the drafting process. I myself usually write three or four drafts before I submit my work to my editor, but every writer has his or her own beliefs on when a story is ready for a second-party review. Regardless of timing, however, at some point or other, be it third draft or thirteenth, a serious writer will hire an editor to review their work, clean up technical errors, and make suggestions about story and style. This is a critical moment, because it is the first time their work is subjected to outside scrutiny, and many of their cherished ideas, scenes, characters and dialog may suddenly be under attack. An amateur writer will always respond defensively and even angrily to this attack, but it is important to remember that such assault is precisely what you are paying the editor for. You do not have to agree with the criticism or take the suggestions, but you must listen, and you must take time to consider the arguments brought against your execution and weigh them carefully. To do this you must get around your own ego, which is often nothing but a nuisance and an impediment. I have often had stormy emotional reactions to the critiques of my editor, but time has shown me that he is right somewhere around 80% of the time. And this brings me to my last point, which is that the writer must trust and respect their editor, and if they do not, they must move on and find and editor with whom they can have a healthy, productive relationship -- but "healthy and productive" doesn't mean smooth and painless. Your editor is paid to give you a beating, but it is a constructive one, and if you can't take it and can't learn how, you really have no business in the realm of traditional publishing.

9. Expanding on this: Writing is the business of rejection. If you intend to go the traditional route, by which I mean submitting short stories and novels to magazines, literary agencies, and traditional publishing houses, in the hopes of seeing them in print, you must steel yourself for plenty of rejection. Most writers are extremely thin-skinned, modestly delusional egotists, and believe everything they produce is genius; but most magazines, agents and imprints are swamped up to their gills in such self-proclaimed geniuses and are looking for any excuse to shitcan your submission and shoot you a form-letter rejection. And when they do this, when they tell you they aren't interested in that story it took you three years to write, you can neither appeal nor retaliate. You simply have to take it, which is incredibly trying. It helps enormously to know, going in, that having doors metaphorically slammed in your face is part of what you are signing on for when you decide to become a writer. That won't make the initial round of rejections any less painful, but it may allow you to endure that pain more stoically, a characteristic shared by every professional writer.

10. Curb your expectations. Very few people understand how little money is involved in the publishing game, whether self, indie or traditional. Self-publishing, whether through Amazon or some other means, is something of a Catch-22 in regards to profits. To sell any books at all, whether print or electronic, takes considerable promotional effort, and these promotions cost money. What makes the matter so damnably difficult are two factors. First, real profit lies in print sales -- paperbacks and hardcovers -- but these are expensive, and unknown authors with no publishing promotional muscle behind them are unlikely to attract many buyers. The logical answer is to discount the print books, but to create a physical book costs a certain amount of money, and the printer has to make a profit, so even if the author is willing to take bare-bones percentages, the printer is not. So what, you say? Most people favor electronic books nowadays? Well, and once again, unknown authors, without publishers behind them, are unlikely to make sales in a glutted market unless they combine paid promotions with self-promotions in which the price of their e-books is reduced to something like 99 cents a copy. Considering the royalty on 99 cents is, viz the Amazon model, about 33 cents a unit, it takes 300 sales to make $100. When one takes into account the fact that most self-published authors average one sale a day,
you see that turning any profit at all is largely a pipe dream.

Micro-and-very small imprint publishing is not much better. These houses do not have much money and they usually lack much influence, which in the publishing industry comes down to advertising and the ability to get bookstores to carry your books. This naturally inhibits sales and forces the author to work as his own promoter -- and authors, often introverts by nature, are notoriously bad at promotion. You may or may not receive a small advance, say $1,000, but your royalties may never exceed this, in which case your total profit for the entire book might stand at that initial $1,000. But even if you get a more substantive advance and the book sells some thousands of copies in a reasonably short time, your royalty percentage would be 20 to 30% for a hardcover sale, 15% for a trade paperback, and (perhaps) 25% for an eBook. But these percentages come from the publisher's revenue on the sales, not the gross profits, so the slice is that much smaller. Example: you get a $2,000 advance on yourr novel, then sell 1,000 books at $10 a copy; your profit is roughly $2,500. However, the advance is taken out of your royalties, so your actual profit is $500.

But what about big-time publishers? The same story obtains on a larger scale. A Big Six publisher may give you a $15,000 advance against royalties, but it will also make you wait up to two years before it can put your book on shelves, because the slots ahead are generally booked out to that length or something close to it. Thus you get a check for $15,000...and then nothing for two years, whereupon the book, at our (very) imaginary price of $10/copy must sell 6,000 copies before you recieve your first royalty check. That averages to $7,500 for the first two years, whereupon you may make absolutely nothing more, ever, if you don't hit the threshold I have described above.

I could go on about this last point, but I don't want to discourage anyone. I am simply trying to lay a few cards on the table in regards to what authors can expect money-wise when they publish. Money can be made, and is made, but it generally not the sory of money that allows one to quit their job or change their lifestyle. Sometimes it is merely cigarette and beer money, and sometimes there is no profit at all, and even a net loss, despite respectable sales, due to the e-book price and royalty structure, versus how much it costs to pay a promotion to sell your book. Novices who blow up the market with their first novels and become hugely wealthy bestselling authors -- J.K. Rowling, E.L. James, Dan Brown, etc. -- are extreme examples, lottery winners, flukes. As the saying goes: you can make a killing in writing, but not a living. Playing cold percentages, t will most likely either be your side-hustle or a hobby.

So there they are. Ten tips for new writers. The thoughts are my own and other writers of greater stature might think very differently, but this is my soapbox, and I preach in my own way. I do apologize for turning the final tip into an essay, but I wouldn't have written it if I didn't think the point needed to be made and made clearly. Writing is not an easy hobby, much less an actual line of work: it helps to understand just what the hell you're getting into before you take the ride.

BOXING AS A BAROMETER OF THE RACIAL STRUGGLE

I happened to be living in Los Angeles when the George Floyd protests swept through the city last year. They were for the most part peaceful, but there were outbursts of fairly severe rioting and looting, especially in my old neighborhood of Mid-City West. I will always remember what it was like to see the vehicles of the National Guard rolling through my streets at night, while in the distance helicopters throbbed and the voices of an angry crowd could be heard, almost like waves at the ocean. It seemed terribly surreal and dystoptian, but in a sense it also seemed overdue.

These protests had very complex and deep-rooted origins, and were no doubt exacerbated by the need of people to expend energy after months of pandemic lockdown conditions, but at the heart of them, obviously, was race. Race is an issue over much of the globe -- including Africa -- but in the United States it has a peculiar character. The U.S. was not the last country in the Americas to rid itself of chattel slavery, that distinction falls to Brazil, but we practiced it so long, and on a scale so vast, that it became part of the social fabric of the nation -- even that quite substantial part of the nation which rejected it. And contrary to popular opinion, racism did not create American slavery. Racism, as a philosophy, was cobbled together as a means of justifying its existence. And it was here, really, that the true poison was introduced into our bloodstream, for the justification persisted after slavery itself was forcibly abolished and destroyed.

The mechanics of racism are now, in 2021, as peculiar as the mechanics of slavery were in 1859. The idea that a person could be bitterly anti-slavery and yet also deeply racist is difficult for the modern mind to grasp, but it was a common syndrome before the Civil War and remained one when the war finally ended. Nobody today would admit that they wanted a return of race-based chattel slavery, but this does not prevent millions from holding opinions almost morally indistinguishable from those of an antebellum slaveowner. Indeed, it is not difficult to coax forth statements even from people who would laugh at the idea that they themselves harbor any form of racism or racial self-loathing (they are ultimately the same), which expose the ugliness of their inner beliefs.

What does this have to do with boxing, you ask? Quite a bit, actually. Sports are and always have been a kind of cultural barometer of the nation which embraces them. In the U.S., a nation which prides itself on its virility, we have had a highly complex relationship with our combat sports, most especially boxing. Boxing, which became fashionable 20 years after the Civil War, was an enormously popular sport with "white America" when racial laws and social mores prevented, or at least made very difficult, whites and blacks from fighting each other. Those who controlled our social order frowned on the idea of white and black fighters mixing it up because they did not want blacks thinking that punching whites in the face was something to be encouraged. Psychology also came into play: one of the means by which slavery and later, Jim Crow, were perpetuated was the idea that the black man, by allowing himself to be enslaved for so long, was not actually a man at all: he he might be physically strong but he was mentally and spiritually weak. He was something less than, inferior, near-human but not quite. The heavyweight champion then, by extension, could not be black, since to be heavyweight champ was by accepted definition to be the man, the ultimate specimen of the sex. This at any rate is a thesis maintained by some who study social phenomena. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. made reference to it, albeit not in the context of boxing.

In point of fact, blacks and whites often fought during the early years of professional boxing, which is generally agreed upon as coming into existence in 1885, when the first heavyweight champion was crowned. Blacks, however, were not "encouraged" to fight for world titles, and many were simply denied the opportunity for the entirety of their careers. Racism itself was not always the main factor: many promoters who would have been happy to book black fighters in title contests were simply frightened of potential race riots. George Dixon, a black Canadian, won the world bantamweight championship in 1888, and as Carolyn Lee Adams wrote:

Dixon’s life was marked by the times in which he lived. Post-Civil War America was rife with fierce racism, and Dixon’s career was a lightning rod for this hate. Dixon participated in a “Carnival of Champions” at the Olympia Club in New Orleans. When Dixon beat the brakes off Jack Skelly, his white opponent, the reaction of the crowd was so dangerously intense that many promotions put a halt to mixed-race bouts.

Further proof of this is offered in the heavyweight championship reign of Jack Johnson. Johnson was the first black man to hold the title, and in the span of his reign (1908 - 1915), he was the target of much harassment and vitriol, even from the government. A black heavyweight champion was intolerable to the social order, and when Johnson was finally knocked out by Jess Willard, a white man, the powers that be made sure no black man would challenge for the crown for many years afterward. Jack Dempsey, a white fighter who held the title from 1919 - 1926, confirmed this in his autobiography. Often criticized for never fighting a black challenger, Dempsey, who had frequently fought and beat blacks as a contender, remarked that it was the politics of boxing which prevented it: his promoters "didn't want another Jack Johnson situation" where the outcome of any fight might end in a race riot.

Eventually they got this "situation" anyway, in "The Brown Bomber," Joe Louis, who was champion so long (1937 - 1949) that the public finally came to accept that the best man -- not the best white man, but the best man -- was going to win and should in fact win. Indeed, as the 20th century hit and then surpassed its halfway mark, a marked racial change slowly began to make itself felt in the boxing world. The sport, which had always had a massive number of whites in every weight class, especially American whites, and in top contention / championship level, began increasingly to become a black and, in the lower weight classes, a Latino concern. The last "lineal" white heavyweight champions of the 20th century were Rocky Marciano (1952 - 1956) and Ingemar Johansson (1959 - 1960). From 1960 - 2009, the lineal title was held exclusively by black fighters. This was bitter medicine to some, but as the years wore on, it became accepted that the time of white Americans, or indeed, any white men period, holding "the most prestigious title in pro sports" was over: done and dusted. It was never, or very rarely discussed in an open way, but many seemed to feel that black men, who were already dominant in basketball and to a somewhat lesser extent football, had now inverted the earlier stereotype of "not being men:" they alone seemed to possess the masculinity necessary to dominate combat sports at the premier level. This surrender of masculine agency by American whites was a curious phenomena, in some sense understandable, in some sense disgusting, and in a final sense slightly amusing, as many disgusting things tend to be. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was taken as a matter of course that one "always bet on the black guy" (one of the biggest laughs in 1988s THE NAKED GUN came when Leslie Nielsen's character uttered this line). Commenting on ROCKY IV (1985), the black director Spike Lee notoriously remarked that "the only way you'll ever see two white men fight for the heavyweight title is in a movie."

The fact that a comment as blatantly racist as this did not provoke much if any outrage or even notice by the big public goes far in underscoring the perculiar dynamics of race in the United States, but it also highlighted the unspoken belief that possession of the heavyweight title by a particular race was still seen as a confirmation of its athletic and masculine primacy. This was doubly bizarre and distasteful when one considers that the idea of national superiority manifesting itself through sports was concieved first by the Nazis, who used the medal count at the 1936 Olympics to tout their theories of Aryan supremacy (though the Jesse Owens story is inspiring, Germany completely dominated the count with 89 medals, 33 of which were gold; the next-highest contender was the U.S., with 56 medals and 24 golds). Later still, the Soviet Communists, who in effect were not less bload-soaked than the Nazis, took up the idea that athletic domination proved the superiority of their ideology. One almost had to struggle to remember that sports are competitions between people before they are confrontations between races or ideas.

As recently as 1996, this mentality was on display with THE GREAT WHITE HYPE, a comedy about an attempt by cynical boxing promoters to create, more or less out of thin air, a white contender to challenge a dominant black champion. It is taken for granted by everyone throughout the movie that such a thing is an impossibility, and indeed it proves to be; yet it is also taken for granted that the public will pay to see the mismatch: whites out of hope for a white champion, and blacks, presumably, to see the white guy get knocked out. The fact that everyone regards these response as natural and inevitable, both in the movie and among the audience, is at the core of the problem.

The individual nature of boxing, and the savagery of it, have been coupled with humanity's curious need to find avatars and proxies, to transpose identity, to choose champions who represent us as people. A nation of tens or hundreds of millions, or even a race of billions, places its hopes within one man, and takes his victory as their victory and his defeat as their defeat. This is fascinating and absurd, and has elements of tragedy in it, as Jerry Cooney, Jerry Quarry and Tommy Morrison could tell you. And it could be argued that the way "white America" adapted to this percieved humiliation was to switch mental gears, and begin to swap racial for nationalistic enthusiasm. Instead of being proud that the heavyweight champion was white, they could instead take pride in the fact that the heavyweight champion was, from 1960 - 1998, always an American. Race did not leave the picture by any means, but at the most convenient possible time it was overlaid with nationalism: and crowds of Yanks chanting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" when an American fought a foreigner were at any rate preferable to mobs screaming racial slurs at a fellow citizen. It was progress of a dubious sort, but it was distinctly progress. Then another curious thing happened. Black men -- whether American or not -- lost what might be called their collective grip on the crown.

It has been said that if you live long enough, you will see the wheel turn all the way 'round.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it unlocked a gigantic population of perspective and actual athletes from both the former Soviet republics and Eastern European countries who had been debarred from professional competition by virtue of Communist ideology. These people -- these white people -- made themselves felt slowly but steadily throughout the 1990s in many sports, but probably none so dramatic as boxing. When Spike Lee made his comment, there was no virtually no prospect of a white man of any nationality taking any version of the heavyweight title. Within a few years of him uttering it, there was no version of that title which was held by a black man. Indeed, the last black champion to hold the lineal heavyweight crown was Lennox Lewis, who retired in 2004. Since then, mostly Ukranian and Russian fighters held the various titles, and the lineal title has been in white hands since 2009. It is presently held by Tyson Fury, a white British gypsy, who took it from Wladimir Klitschko, a white Ukranian. It is a similar story in other weight classes. At the time of this writing, and notwithstanding vacancies, between 140 lbs and heavyweight, there are no lineal black champions at all. This is a state of affairs that was unimaginable only 20 years ago.

Now, you could be forgiven for asking why I claim any of this matters at all. Many factors play into why a man chooses to become a prize fighter, and they are generally economic before they are anything else. The decline of "white fortunes" in boxing for 50-odd years certainly had more to do with a decline in white participation than any other factor, and whites participated less because the economic circumstances of Italians, Irish and other white ethnic subgroups improved, removing the necessity of fighting for a living. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the decline of those white fortunes did not sit well with "white America" and had to be dealt with psychologically, just as it did sit well with "black America" and became part of what might be called black identity. But that is why the subject is in fact important. It matters not because it is happening and has happened, but because the reaction of the world to the shift of control over the "most prized title in sports" from one race to another has mostly been indifference. Nobody, or very nearly nobody, seems to care that Tyson Fury is white, because few people view the possession of his title as proof of anything except that he is the best heavyweight on the planet. There is no significance to him holding the crown beyond that, no racial or ethnic subtext. In the buildups to Fury's two fights with Deontay Wilder, a black American heavyweight, I did not see one mention, anywhere, of the hated and disgusting phrase "Great White Hope." Nor did I even seem much in the way of nationalistic drum-beating, such as I witnessed years ago when Ray Mercer fought Lennox Lewis, or Mike Tyson fought Frank Bruno. Even what is called "black Twitter" took Wilder's loss more with humor than upset: there was some upset, certainly, but Wilder's attempts to make excuses for his defeat were met with ridicule, and no one framed the fight as "Wilder lost" but rather "Fury won." This is telling. When a "side" doesn't want to admit defeat, they always frame the defeat in terms of mistakes their "side" made, and never credit the "enemy."

I view this is a progress. Perhaps it's a sorry commentary on the human race (or just myself), but this seeming breakdown of tribal reactions to athletic contests strikes me as proof that people are waking up to the absurdity of loading deeper meanings into a fight between two men -- and beyond that, seeing a need to identify with a fighter because he shares the same racial characteristics and for no other reason. In time, the racial demographics of boxing champions will shift again, and it will be telling to observe our cultural barometer and gauge the extent to which anyone notices or cares.

As I said at the opening, the mechanics of racism (and by extension, nationalism, which is kissing cousin to racism) are bizarre and complicated. They lie deeply rooted in our history, and often manifest in subtle or unconscious ways. We learned a great deal about how ideas have evolved in this country in 30 years by contrasting the difference in public reaction to the Rodney King beating vs. the murder of George Floyd. Likewise, the means by which athletic contests are reported in the press and discussed on social media can give us a surprisingly clear picture of where we have made progress humans, and where there is still much work to be done.

The Best of the Bad: Death Wish 3

In Sun Valley, California, there is a small, run-down, flybown convenience store owned by a Korean who sits like a judge behind an inch-thick pane of grimy bulletproof glass. Every morning for a year I stopped in this store to buy a small styrofoam cup full of the world's worst coffee. It only cost a few quarters, but even then I was overpaying: the coffee was too strong, too hot, and tasted rather like the contents of an ashtray. Almost any coffee I have ever consumed, including that black muck they sell at 7/11 which resembles boiled mud, is superior in flavor and texture to the stuff I bought from this convenience store. And yet every morning, and sometimes once in the early afternoon, I'd slip away from my desk at Optic Nerve Studios and buy myself another round.

On the surface this decision made no sense. Not only did we possess our own coffee machines, there was no shortage of better-tasting options available within a short drive of the effects studio. Yet week in and week out for nearly a year I took my custom to that store, knowing full well it might be robbed while I was there. I did this for one reason and one reason alone: I had developed a taste for it.

We all like things that are bad for us, but most of those things look, taste, or feel good. This coffee looked shitty, tasted worse and gave me mild anxiety attacks. Nevertheless I enjoyed it. It is part of the general perversity of the human condition that it is even possible to take pleasure in what ought to be unpleasurable experiences, and it for this reason that I am a connoisseur of bad movies.

I don't mean bad movies in the ordinary sense. I cannot take any pleasure in films that are merely bad -- The Last Airbender, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Conan the Destroyer, The Specialist, Harbinger Down, 30 Days of Night, Fantasic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Rising Sun, etc. and so on. And I am not referring to the ordinary "guilty pleasure" movie which the viewer knows is trashy, sappy, mediocre etc. but has some kind of sentimental or emotional hold on them. Oh no. The sort of good-bad or great-bad film I am referring to is something quite distinct from the merely shitty or stupid-but-fun. It is a flick which is undeniably, irredeemably awful yet at the same time possesses an enormous charisma -- something that rivets your gaze to the screen, haunts you when the movie is over, and keeps you coming back for additional viewings years or even decades after your first encounter.

It so happens I have a personal Hall of Fame for Great Bad Movies, and after 100+ blogs here on Goodreads I think it's time it and you were introduced with this, the first installment of my BEST WORST MOVIES OF ALL TIME.

I'd like to begin with a personal favorite, one I saw not long after it came out in theaters, one I have enjoyed with guilty relish for no less than 34 years, and recently just watched again. It is (drum roll) Death Wish III.

It will be noted that the original Death Wish (1974) was a very serious film which is in many circles considered a minor classic in its genre. Directed by Michael Winner and starring Charles Bronson, it is the story of a prosperous architecht named Paul Kersey whose family is brutally destroyed by vicious criminals. Kersey, a lifelong pacifist, is unable to achieve satisfaction through the overloaded, broken-down criminal justice system and becomes a merciless vigilante, stalking the streets of New York City with a revolver and very cruel intentions. Death Wish was not really a story of revenge, for Kersey never finds the men who murdered his wife and raped his daughter. Rather, it was an expression of frustrated rage at a skyrocketing crime rate, a backlogged court system, and a perception that the streets of America's cities were owned by the criminal and not the police or the ordinary citizen. Some people labeled the film fascist in sentiment, while others saw it as a brutally frank examination of way high-minded principles collapse at contact with brutal realities. Either way, it is a legitimate movie and a starkly disturbing one.

The sequel, Death Wish 2 (1982), was by no means as composed or purposeful as the first. Indeed, it is mere exploitation. In it, Kersey is once again beset by criminals who destroy what is left of his family, and this time embarks on a quest to exterminate the actual culprits as opposed to any random hoodlum that gets in front of the muzzle of his .38 Detective Special. Although certainly a guilty pleasure -- Charles Bronson is always a kind of savage joy to watch, especially when blowing bad guys into hell -- it lacks the outrageousness necessary to qualify as great bad cinema. Thankfully, the requisite components are to be found in abundance in the sequel, Death Wish 3.

By 1985, the team of Winner and Bronson had evidently given up even making the pretense of having anything meaningful to say about crime, morals, society, or the human need to take revenge. At the same time, they declined the obvious course, which was to simply repeat the admittedly successful mid-level mayhem of the previous two flicks -- in each film, a little over a dozen people are killed. Instead, Winner & Co. charted a bold new course into the unexplored waters of OUTRAGEOUS CARTOON VIOLENCE.

Of course, violence by itself, even cartoonish violence you can't possibly take seriously, doesn't make for a great-bad film. No, and again no. One must mate the cartoon with THE BEST GOOD-BAD DIALOGUE YOU'RE LIKELY TO HEAR. Throw in OVER THE TOP ACTING AT ITS FINEST (even the stunt men in this film overdo it) and A WONDERFULLY FUNKY SOUNDTRACK (by Jimmy Page...yes, that Jimmy Page) you have the great-bad classic that is Death Wish 3.

Like a Mafia debt collector, this flicktoon lets you know right away what its intentions are. Before the credit sequence is even complete, Paul Kersey's best friend Charlie has been beaten to death in his own Bronx apartment by a group of street gangsters. Why? Who cares? Bronson -- I mean Kersey -- has been wronged, and the only option is nuclear. Indeed, the line between Kersey doing nothing and Kersey mowing down every man, woman and child in the room is so fine as to be of questionable existence. But before he can act, he's thrown into jail by devious NYPD Inspector Shriker (Ed Lauter), a frustrated, hard-bitten cop who, realizing Kersey is The Vigilante, wants to blackmail him into tackling the street gang terrorizing his Bronx precinct.

Of course, while Kersey's cooling his heels in jail, he meets Manny Fraker (Gavin O'Herlihey), the sadistic psychopath who runs the gang that murdered Charlie. The best part of Manny isn't his name, which everyone in the movie pronounces "Mandy," it's his reverse mohawk. (That's right, ole Fraker shaved the center of his skull, just so you know he's not only bad news, he's bad taste.) Well, the two men, oddly enough, do not get along. Fraker says things like, "Tell you what, I'm gonna kill a little old lady, just for you. Catch it on the six o'clock news." In response, Kersey says -- well, Kersey doesn't say much. He's the strong silent type. He stares at you, and the stare says, "Prepare to meet your horrible death, you ambulatory jar of street scum."

Accepting Shriker's offer, Kersey takes up residence in Charlie's apartment and proceeds to study Fraker's gang, which conveniently operates directly beneath his window, and even more conveniently possesses a dress code which essentially tells onlookers HELLO, I AM A CRIMINAL DEVIANT: ASK ME HOW I WILL LATER RAPE AND MURDER YOU. The costume designer for Death Wish 3 was, in my estimation, someone who came of age in 1953, right around the time Marlon Brando roared into Wrightsville on his Triumph motorcycle in The Wild Ones, and believed that even in 1985, street gangsters wore leather visor caps, Perfecto biker jackets, studded belts, pastel bandannas, day-glo facepaint, and other shit you'd see in an old video by the Village People. He also assumed that in an age when Mac-10s were readily available, most thugs would still employ that redoubtable weapon of the 50s, the switchblade.

(Incidentally, it still amazes me how much Perfecto biker jackets and switchblades still show up on television when a pill-popping hack writer needs a couple of ready-made goons. As recently as the turn of the millennium, television shows were still putting bad guys in these outfits and carrying these weapons: they may as well have been wearing chain mail and carrying crossbows.)

Kersey opens his campaign against the Sutter Avenue & Belmont gang by buying used car and parking it outside his apartment building. While dining with some neighbors, he hears the car being broken into and goes outside to see two thugs stripping it bare. The following conversation, worthy of Shakespeare, ensues:

WHITE THUG: Let's get the fucking car open!
BRONSON: Excuse me, please. Hey! What's the problem?
BLACK THUG: What?
BRONSON: With the car. What's the problem?
BLACK THUG: Get outta my fucking face!
WHITE THUG: We're stealing the fucking car! What's it to you?
BRONSON: It's my car!
BLACK THUG: (laughing, removing switchblade) Now you gonna die!

With no expression on his face and the most casual of movements, Bronson slips a .38 out of his sport coat and blows both men away, then walks back inside and resumes his dinner.

I think it was at this point, at the age of thirteen, that I realized how good this movie was going to be. I stopped the film, got a bag of Doritos and a Coke, and rewatched this scene, tears of laughter running down my beardless face.

The next act of the film sees Kersey waging low-intensity war against the gang, which is sluggish to realize this enemy is in their midst. The most memorable sequence here, and the most notorious, perhaps, of this notorious film, is known as The Death of The Giggler.

The Giggle has his own Wikipedia entry. Here it is:

The Giggler is a high ranking member of the Street Punk Gang in Death Wish 3. He is called The Giggler because of the way he laughs whenever he commits a crime. He is portrayed by Kirk Taylor.

[I should note here that Kirk Taylor and I used to share a barber when I lived in Burbank, California.]

The Giggler is not only high-ranking, he is popular with his fellows, because he is a very good thief, which is why he is deeply unpopular with the long-suffering local citizenry. In one scene, he escapes Kersey after robbing a woman, and taunts him as he gets away. He should have quit while he was ahead, because later, when he robs Kersey of his camera, our hero responds by removing his .475 Wildey Magnum, which fires a big-game hunting cartridge, and shoots the Giggler in the back, more or less causing him to explode (and also cease giggling). The entire neighborhood pours out into the streets in celebration, including a woman who, standing over the Giggler's mangled corpse, screams in ecstasy: "It's the creep who stole my pocketbook! Dead! Praise God! Praise God he's gone!"

The death of the Giggler makes Manny Fraker very angry ("They killed the Giggler, man...THEY KILLED THE GIGGLER!") He unleashes a curiously elaborate plot to kill Kersey which contains notes of Bond villainy, in that he could simply mow Kersey down with his Uzi, but elects to employ a coked-out assassin who doesn't even have a gun (this assassin is beaten senseless with a tire iron and then thrown off a roof). Fraker finally, successfully retaliates at last by committing various rapes and murders of those close to Kersey, and then kills Kersey's improbably young-and-hot girlfriend by burning her to death in her car. This follows a long tragic trend in the DEATH WISH movies (probably stolen from DIRTY HARRY movies), in that any love interest of Kersey's is bound to die. But killing Kersey's loved ones is less effective than Fraker hopes, and here is where shit gets completely crazy, and DEATH WISH 3 graduates to the realm of the surreal.

Up 'til this point, the movie has been quite violent, but nothing out of the ordinary for an urban "action thriller" of its type. Perhaps eight people have died. But it's now that Kersey gains access to a belt-fed .30 machine gun and a rocket launcher, at the same time Fraker decides to descend upon the neighborhood with a huge army of imported thugs. What follows is more akin to a World War Two movie than an urban vigilante flick. The last 20 - 30 minutes of this movie are a nonstop orgy of violence. Cars and buildings explode. People get set on fire. Whole mobs get mowed down by gunfire, stabbed or beaten to death. Kersey leads the frustrated people of the neighborhood against the Punks, and the Punks lose. One internet genius calculated that over the course of this movie, there are no less than 75 kills over 90 mins, or 0.833 kills per minute; but this does not do the savagery of DEATH WISH 3 any justice, for as I said, over the first 2/3 of the movie there are "only" about eight murders. Therefore the remaining 67 take place in the final act. I'm not sure the opening sequence of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN has a higher body count.

The script saves the best for last. Kersey and Shriker, having shot their guns empty thinning the ranks of the Punks, scramble back to Charlie's for more ammo. There they are confronted by Manny Fraker, who is determined to rid himself of his nemesis once and for all. Unfortunately for Manny, he discovers his pistol is little match for an anti-tank rocket launcher, with the result that he and his reverse mohawk are, in the words of one reviewer, "obliterated." The death of their fearless leader takes the heart out of the remaining Punks, and Shriker allows Kersey a head start out of the burning city. The final shots, as the credits roll, show Kersey calmly carrying his luggage through the smoke and mayhem, with plenty of spring in his step despite having just killed at least 50 people.

Looking back on these hastily-written lines, I can see they in no way do justice to the magnificent mayhem that is this movie. It is truly horrible, despite boasting a fairly impressive cast which includes not only Bronson, Lauter and O'Herlihey, but also Martin Basalm, Alex Winter and Marina Sirtis; and despite being helmed by Michael Winner, a director who was capable of creating films of minor classic status (like the original DEATH WISH and THE MECHANIC). What distinguishes it from a merely bad film, however, is its relentless commitment to its own awfulness. There is no attempt to make the movie "rise above" its subject material and indeed, sequences like the chubby black woman screaming "PRASIE GOD!" over the body of a murdered man consciously invite laughter. So too does the ridiculous costume designs for the villains, which are not as silly, as, say those seen in THE WARRIORS, but are pretty goddamned bad. One gets the sense that a bargain-basement prop house was raided by the producer, which is why the motorcycles look second or third-hand, the outfits are all mismatched, and in the cases of a few extras, some face-paint and a toilet plunger take the place of a leather jacket and a gun.

But it gets worse. The script, if you want to call it that, is awash with howlingly bad lines, the scraped-thin story is full of absurdity and plot holes, and the film's moral seems to be the best way to deal with criminals is to indiscriminately fire machine guns at them. Indeed, it is taken as a fait accompli that the system is hopelessly broken and that only vigilantism can produce results: "I hate creeps, too," Shriker tells Kersey early in the flick. "But I can't do anything about it: I'm a cop!" Moreover, neither Fraker nor Kersey avails themselves of the numerous opportunities they have to simply shoot the other one dead on the street at almost any point in the movie. It's simply an excuse for 90 minues of vicarious, cathartic carnage. One is supposed to leave the theater feeling purged. And the curious thing is, one does. This abysmal belch of a movie, which is stupid as well as irresponsible and silly, is also incredibly satisfying to watch. It plays on the hatred we all have of bullies, as well as the secret belief, shared by all men, that if we could just slaughter criminals instead of giving them due process, our world would be a much better place.

It's probably a mistake to read anything deeper into a movie like this, but I will try. It's often said that vigilante films are an expression of fascist sentiment. This is probably true, but it is not the whole truth; this must include an admission that they are also a very healthy way of releasing fascist impulses within ourselves. Films like Sidney Lumet's THE OFFENCE or William Wellman's THE OX-BOW INCIDENT take hard looks at vigilantism, and show us the potential consequences of circumventing due process. Even the original DEATH WISH contained a discussion of the moral quandary vigilantism poses to those who would take up the noose in the name of justice. But the DEATH WISH 3's of the world serve a different purpose, which is perhaps a not less necessary one. They let us release all of our pent-up aggression against the bad people of the world, and all of our frustration with the sprawling abstraction known as "the system" without actually harming anyone. Surely that gives me an excuse to watch the fucking thing once a year?

Many years ago, writing a review of DW3 on Amazon, I penned the following poem. Of all the hundreds of Amazon reviews I've written, this is the only one I ever put to verse. I think it sums up the flick better than this entire blog. Here it is:

We are the nameless gangsters

of Center Avenue and B

we wear facepaint and rob all day

no bloody good are we

Our leader's name is Mandy Fraker

he does a lot more than talk

he kills treacherous Hector with a knife

and wears a reverse mohawk

But Fraker's reign was blighted

like medical waste on a beach in New Jersey

by the vigilante, that man named Paul

that man named Paul Kersey

Paul Kersey it must be said

was not as young as he could be

his mustache was gray, his gait was slow

but his Wildey was a sight to see

He put the fat guy's head through prison bars

and shot those car thieves dead

and when the Giggler from him tried to take

he giggled his last instead

A tunnel great the Wildey blew

trough Giggler's heaving breast

he fell to the ground spitting blood out his mouth

and began his eternal rest

"THEY KILLED THE GIGGLER!" The punk did scream

yes they killed him, just like a rat!

which prompted our leader Mandy Fraker to say:

"They had no business doin' that."

So upon Paul Kersey we chose to unleash

a villain known to all as CUBA

but Kersey beat his ass with a big tire-iron

threw him off the roof and said "BOO-YA."

At long last we'd had quite enough of this spit

and summoned our gang army in all of its glory

looking like roadies from that band Judas Priest

and rejects from West Side Story

Our colorful crew might have scared those old folks

made even old Bennett say, "Fargit!"

but all it did to that man Paul Kersey

was present one big hell of a target

And when that blond thug had his Excellent Adventure

and Counselor Troi had "expired"

Fraker and Kersey they had their showdown

and the great rocket launcher was fired

Mandy was blown all over the Bronx

and the old folks' hearts did quicken

and for us in the gang we had but one consolation

our leader takes exactly like chicken!

AS I PLEASE VI: STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS EDITION

As I write this, a thunderstorm rumbles outside my windows. I will let my thoughts follow the sound.

I know that there are many here in the East who view thunderstorms as annoyances, inconveniences, or just flat-out pains in the ass. If you own a dog, for example, a bad thunderstorm will drive them into a state of panic. Likewise, if you live in certain areas, such a storm almost invariably knocks out the power, if only for a minute or two. And of course if you're driving, or just planted a garden, or were eating al fresco, the arrival of the storm will throw a proverbial monkey wrench in your plans. But I for one am grateful to have them again. In the thirteen years I lived in on the West Coast, I heard thunder exactly twice, and on neither occasion did it happen to rain. The thunderstorm as I understand it simply does not exist there.

Returning to the East after such an interval, I was struck by the many small differences between this part of the country and that one. The sky there is bluer, the clouds whiter, and the horizon much larger. The natural vegetation, such of it as exists, is of the desert variety -- cacti, succulents, palm trees. The air is always dry, and the sunlight much more powerful. In the early evenings, the sun turns white as it sets, and casts an appropriately whitish haze over the palms and the buildings. This haze is probably caused by pollution, but it is highly atmospheric and quite beautiful, rather like the filter-laden cinematography of a Tony Scott film.

I never met Tony Scott. I never met his more famous brother Ridley, either, but I worked for him, albeit in a curiously roundabout way. For some months, I labored long and hard doing post-post production on Prometheus. My job was to review every frame of B-roll footage shot on that movie, which amounted to several thousands of hours. (For the uninitiated, "B-Roll footage" is defined by Wikipedia thusly: "In film and television production, B-roll is supplemental or alternative footage intercut with the main shot.") I watched the footage and labeled it. When I was done, I was re-hired and asked to re-watch all of it, except this time, I was asked to look out for anything which might be useful in a "Making Of" documentary and then to mark it and dump it into Final Cut Pro. Since much of what I watched was actors like Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pierce and Michael Fassbender muttering things on hot mikes that they never, ever intended for anyone else on this planet to hear, I was often greatly amused and sometimes mildly shocked by what I heard. Over time, I grew to know them intimately without ever meeting them. I became, in a sense, both their confessor and their stalker, their psychiatrist and their peeping tom. When they argued, when they joked, when they made plans to have a drink after work, when they gossiped about other actors, I heard it all. It was like this with the entire cast, the crew, and yes, "Rids" himself -- that's what his friends call Ridley Scott, and in a sense I am his friend even if he isn't mine.

Sometimes I think about the knowledge I have of all these people, and the weird, one-way sense of intimacy I have with them, and the old Van Halen song "I'll Wait" comes into my head.

You've got me captured I'm under your spell
I guess I'll never learn
I have your picture yes I know it well
Another page is turned
Are you for real, it's so hard to tell
From just a magazine
Yeah, you just smile and the picture sells
Look what that does to me
I'll wait 'til your love comes down
I'm coming straight for your heart
No way you can stop me now
As fine as you are
I wrote a letter and told her these words
That meant a lot to me
I never sent it, she wouldn't have heard
Her eyes don't follow me
And while she watches I can never be free
Such good photography!

This is the classic obsessed-fan song, written before the internet even existed and made stalking people so much easier than it was in 1984. There is a sadness to it, a sense of hopelessness ("I never sent it/she wouldn't have heard/her eyes don't follow me") but also a faint but discernible sense of menace. The subject feels imprisoned by his own love, which of course is not love but obsession; at the same time he feels empowered by it, entitled by it. He's coming for her, this woman of his fantasies, and she cannot stop him. Fucking brilliant. But David Lee Roth has never had an equal when it comes to lyrical wordplay. I do believe that in high school, I would have sold my soul to see him sing with Van Halen, but alas, Sammy Hagar was at the helm, and remained there for many, many years. However, while I am not patient, I am persistent, and in 2015, I finally got my high school wish, and saw the re-united band, with Wolfgang Van Halen in place of Michael Anthony, rock the Hollywood Bowl for the finale of their North American tour. A friend of mine at the show said he'd seen Van Halen play seventeen times over the years, and never heard Eddie play better than he did that night in his own backyard. I say "backyard" because Eddie & and the boys were really from Pasadena.

Now, that same friend once drove me to Pasadena on Halloween Night. We had just seen the classic 1978 horror movie on a revival run at the AMC in Burbank, and he desired to show me all of its shooting locations. Halloween was set in a fictional Illinois town, but shot mostly in Pasadena. Thus it was that I ended up standing, bathed in the glow of a full moon, in front of the notorious Meyers House, which is now an insurance office but looks exactly the same today as it did in '78, right down to the interior. I am not easily spooked anymore, but when I went around the side of the house and peered through the window, just like Michael does at his sister in the film's opening, and saw that the interior looked just about the same as it had IN the damned film, I was overtaken with a case of the creeps. I guess you never entirely recover from the things that scare you as a child. But as another friend of mine pointed out to me years ago, exactly what scares you falls into one of two general camps.

The first type of horror, he posited, is based on things which can actually happen in the real world. Fatal Attraction, Jaws, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas, The Shining, Alien, The Vanishing, When A Stranger Calls, Halloween, and even A Nightmare on Elm Street are all movies which play on our natural, animal fear of being stalked and hunted and killed. The second type of horror is based on things which cannot happen in real life, but which play on our superstitions and perhaps more intangible dread, not of death per se, but of what may wait after it: The Exorcist, The Ring, The Changeling, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, The Omen, Hellraiser, Insidious, The Conjuring, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Candyman, The Blair Witch Project, etc., etc. It was my friend's contention that people tended to be frightened of one general scenario or the other: either the lunatic in the woods, or the ghost story. I myself fall into the former category. The lunatic with the axe, who attacks without warning and for no discernible reason, is much more frightening to me than the ideal of demons or ghosts.

Having said that, I once lived in a haunted house. Many years before it had been a funeral home, and various fittings for the crematory remained in its vast basement. It was a huge, cavernous old beast of a property, so large the landlord subdivided it into no less than five apartments, each with multiple tenants. We referred to it as "The Church" because a cross made from railroad ties had been fixed to its upper story. I was warned before moving in that it was frequented by ghosts, but shrugged the stories off as nonsense. Then, one night in the middle of a terrific blizzard, I had the most curious experience. On that particular weekend I was alone in the place, my two roomates being away, and The Church not being in the best neighborhood, I made sure to lock the main door, which opened into an alley, and then to lock my hallway door and finally, to double-lock the door which opened directly onto the sidewalk. I also placed a large Special Forces knife by my bedside, and went to sleep. Some hours later I woke to a fantastical scene: the street door was ajar, and the ice-cold air pouring in through the crack was meeting with the raw heat of the radiator to create billowing, smoky clouds of pure white. Sitting up in bed and grasping for my knife, I saw also that the hook which secured the inner door was no longer snugly in its eye bolt but jittering almost nervously against the door. I jumped down, knife in hand, and flung the street door open. In front of me was an absolutely pristine vista of pure snow, probably ten inches deep. Not one footprint marked that pure, unbroken surface. What's more, I knew that even the landlord could not unlock the deadbolt of my door from the outside, as it was blind-headed. The only explanation was that someone, perhaps a pranking roomate, had opened it: but my interior door had also been locked, which would have made that impossible. I replaced and relocked the street door and then went through the apartment, checking everything for an intruder, and arrived finally in the kitchen. Here was the only other door, and it was still locked. It opened into a kind of wooden vestibule, a mud room of sorts, albeit one without an outer door. I entered the mud room and before me lay more deep, utterly pristine snow. No one had come this way, either, not even a cat.

Relocking everything, and keeping my knife ready, I eventually went back to bed, wondering that the hell had just happened. I had no explanation then, and I don't have one now, either, except that a ghost may have been involved. The spirit haunting the place was reputed to be mischievious, and he certainly had his fun with me that cold and snowy night.

In those days we heard sirens all the time, and I'm hearing some now, as the thunderstorm's violent, lightning-struck fury eases to a gentle rain. It's curious how memory works that way, connecting past and future in a kind of circuit. A few minutes ago I was sitting here, a middle-aged man with my shirt off, writing away in 97 degree temperatures that only broke when the storm did; and yet in my mind, it was freezing cold, that special kind of sharp, bracing cold you get during a heavy snowfall when the wind is steady, and I was a half-naked 20 year-old college kid clutching a knife and looking for a ghost. Interestingly, the distance between where I sit now and where I stood then is, according to my computer, exactly one mile. One mile, but half a lifetime. I did not know it then, but I had already written three stories which eventually ended up in my short-story collection Devils You Know: "The Action," "Shadows and Glory" and "Roadtrip." At the time only one had been published, and I was still struggling hard with my own nature. Even as a drunken 20 year-old college student with failing grades and a permanent erection, I knew that anything which distracted me from my true calling was a waste of time, and worse than that, self-destructive. This knowledge poisoned all of my pleasures, but it did not prevent me from seeking them. And for many years to come I was to wage a merciless war with myself, a war that could not have a winner but only degrees of loser, before I finally acknowledged what those close to me had known for years: I was a writer. However I labeled myself, whatever job I might possess at the time, I was a writer first and foremost and that was where my destiny lay. But destiny is a curious thing. Everyone has one, but few of us embrace it, and there is no compulsion to do so. There is not even a penalty which one can conventionally measure for refusing. Nor is there a visible reward for accepting the obvious, not even something as ill-defined as "happiness." Because embracing one's destiny does not necessarily make one happy: it simply solves a puzzle. It quiets down an argument. It signs a treaty that ends a stupid war and encourages the former combatants to plant gardenias in the muzzles of their cannons while they share a pint of beer. That's all it does. There's no parade, no bag of gold. You just get to do the thing you're supposed to be doing, that you were put on this earth to do. That's all. And that should be enough. Sometimes, it even is.

The storm is now over, as is this rambling exercise in discursion. I offer it merely as an example of how my own consciousness, a writer's consciousness, moves from subject to subject within his own mind, occasionally forming a coherent, narrative circle but just as often cracking away like a badly planned fireworks show. Or a summer thunderstorm. The trick, I suppose, is to get from it whatever you can.

GOOD WOLF/BAD WOLF: OR, HOW TO BE HAPPY IN HELL

12/8/21 NOTE: I am reluctantly removing this entry after deciding it is not in keeping with the spirit of this blog. I knew what I was trying to say here, but what ended up on the page was so far removed from those sentiments that you would need a bloodhound to find them. This is a thing that happens to writers sometimes. We begin with clear intensions, but the path we travel is so tangled by emotion that we end up in a completely different and much darker place. There is a dose of irony in this, because I have often blogged about the dangers inherent in erasing the past, even when it is embarrassing, ugly, or in this case, just incoherent and silly, but as a writer I also feel as if something as personal as a blog must reflect the actual personality of that writer and not his shadow aspect. Put another way, God put erasers on pencils for a reason.

I may return "Good Wolf/Bad Wolf" here after reshaping it to fit my original intent, or I may simply consign it to the electronic ether. Until then this note will serve as an explanation for the big ol' gap in my archives.

ALL THE WAY UP: THOUGHTS ON A LIFE LIVED COMPLETE

Cohn: I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
Jake: Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

William Smith died the other day. His passing got a little ink, literal and figurative, but largely went unnoticed and uncommented upon. This is the way of celebrity, especially in Hollywood, where fame burns down to quickly-forgetten ashes; but it is even more harshly true of those in the business who are not famous, merely familiar.

You know who I'm talking about – sort of, anyway: Those actors whose names you don't know, but who seem to turn up everywhere: television shows, commercials, classic films and others not-so-classic. Except perhaps in some long-forgotten youth, they are never the stars, but move around them in either friendly or antagonistic orbits. They play bad guys, crusty homicide detectives, curmudgeonly or doting dads, stern judges, old friends, kindly uncles, buffonish politicians, shrewd reporters, irascible neighbors, mediocre generals, long-suffering bosses. There is seldom glory in their roles: if they aren't being shot dead or beaten up, they are quite frequently the butt of insults and ridicule, and when they play a good guy (or gal), they are always to the left or the right of the hero, never in the center of the frame. They carry his coat, reload his gun, jump in front of the bullet meant for his body. They wash out his mouthpiece or sign his check or light his cigar and tell him he (or she) done good.

The catch-all term for this sort of thespian is “character actor.” The term doesn't make any sense, since every actor is playing a character...but never mind that. My point is merely that character actors may make a living, even a very good living, and end up with their name in hundreds of credits and even some legendary moments in cinematic and television history; but somehow no one ever seems to know, or even care, much less recall, what their names are when they walk off the stage for the last time. I suppose there is an implication in the shortness of our memory and the disrespect that underlies it: that somehow these folks, despite all of their success, aren't really worthy of serious attention. They aren't sexy, glamorous, charismatic, or even terribly interesting – not compared to the stars, anyway. They're just there, reliably, like an old pair of boots.

I myself have always had a fascination with character actors. Even as a small child I loved the way they kept turning up in the re-runs of my youth, so familiar and yet so unknown. I noted that some tended to play a type of character while others were more diverse in their appearances. I noted as well that some were better actors or had more presence than others. But I liked and respected them all. There was one, however, who caused me more fear and awe than he did affection, and his name, I eventually learned, was William B. Smith.

Smith was perfectly engineered by nature to play bad guys. He was huge and heavily muscled, with a savage-looking face and a hoarse, growling, rusty voice; and his eyes looked as black as the devil's. There were times when he would smile at the protagonist of a movie or a TV show and it was like the smile of death, if death also happened to be a sadistic psychopath. When I was growing up, William Smith turned up everywhere, and sometimes I wondered what he was like in real life: an arrogant thug, like the characters he usually played? A tough, tactiturn professional, like Charles Bronson? A slow-witted trouper, not villainous but not so terribly bright, either?

When I took it upon myself to learn more about the life of William Smith, at first I could not actually believe what I was reading. It sounded so much like a badly-drawn hero in a badly-written movie that I had to double and triple-check my sources before I came to believe what I was reading. No human, or at any rate very few humans, could crowd so many accomplishments into the 88 years they spent turning oxygen into carbon dioxide as did this man: off the top of my head (among actors anyway) only the late Sir Christopher Lee comes to mind as a life as fully realized as Smith's was. He was not a bull-fighter, but he was damned near everything else you can think of, and contrary to what poor pathetic Jake says in THE SUN ALSO RISES, he did live life all the way up. And then some.

Most of the following information comes directly from Smith's website, but I have taken some pains to verify it, at least as much as time has permitted. Even with the occasional possible error, however, it is a staggering record of achievement, something to both humble and inspire. I do not think Smith would be offended by my plagiaristic reworking of his biography here:

Smith was born in 1933 on a ranch in Missouri. He learned to ride “almost before he could walk” and his knowledge of horseflesh was to come very much in handy in later life. When his family moved to Southern California, he ended up as a studio extra in movies like “The Ghost of Frankenstein” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” He was too young to serve in WW2, but enlisted in the Air Force in 1951. It is unknown if his affinity for languages was discovered there or earlier in his schooling, but he achieved fluency in five languages, including Russian, German, French and Serbo-Croatian. He was recruited by the fledging National Security Agency (NSA), and during the Korean War, he flew secret surveillance-gathering missions over Communist-bloc nations.

After military life, Smith “continued the education he began while in the service, studying at Syracuse University, the University of Munich, the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally at UCLA where he graduated Cum Laude with a Master’s degree and worked toward a Doctorate. Bill would also later teach at UCLA.” He was not, however, merely a bloodless, ivory-tower intellectual. He was Air Force Light-Heavyweight Boxing Champion, a champion discus thrower at UCLA, and a two-time 200-lb. World Arm Wrestling Champion. He was also an outstanding bodybuilder (more about that later). While living in California he volunteered as a firefighter, specializing in battling SoCal's notoriously dangerous and violent wildfires.

Smith was working toward a doctorate when he was re-discovered by Hollywood. During this early period of his acting career he was busy on many TV series, including classics like “Perry Mason” and “The Mod Squad” (and camp-classics like “Batman”), but was also very popular in Westerns, appearing in “Daniel Boone,” “Wagon Train,” “The Virginian,” and “Gunsmoke.” In 1965, he secured a starring role on “Laredo.”

During the 1970s, he transitioned from playing cowboys to playing bikers, appearing in a staggering eleven motorcycle movies, generally as a gang leader. Throughout that decade and all through the 80s he was a much-demanded bad guy on TV, appearing on “Kung Fu,” “Columbo,” “Mission Impossible,” “Ironside,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “The Rockford Files,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Kolchak, The Night Stalker,” “Police Story,” “Logan’s Run,” “Vegas,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Dukes of Hazard,” “Simon & Simon,” “Buck Rogers” and “The A Team.” He was also a regular on “Hawaii Five-O” in its final season. In 1982 he had a memorable role in CONAN THE BARBARIAN as Conan's intimidating but thoughtful father, who teaches Conan the “Riddle of Steel.” (For my money, this enigmatic speech is one of my favorite moments in cinematic history.) Other classics/notorious films in which he made his presence felt were “Any Which Way You Can,” “Red Dawn,” “Rumblefish,” “The Outsiders,” and the cult-classic “Maniac Cop.”



Smith's visible toughness was backed up by his physical prowess as an athlete. In addition to his other accomplishments, he was a black belt in Kung Fu and Karate both, and “among his outstanding feats of strength are strict reverse curl of his own body weight and 5,100 continuous sit ups.” He appeared as a cover model for numerous bodybuilding magazines. Among his various accolades:

A Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Bodybuilding and Fitness (1995)
Honorary Member, Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures (2000)
Golden Boot Award in 2003 (for his contributions to the Western genre)
Southern California Motion Picture Council Award in 2005
Silver Spur Award in 2008 (again, for his contributions to Westerns)
Muscle Beach Venice Bodybuilding Hall of Fame in May (2010)

I think this would be enough for any man, but not for William Smith. Because for all the muscles, the martial arts, the growling villain roles, behind even his obviously powerful intellect, lay the soul of a literal poet. Smith composed poetry for much of his life, which he published in a volume rather prosaically entitled THE POETIC WORKS OF WILLIAM SMITH: THE WORDS AND IMAGES OF A HOLLYWOOD LEGEND.

I do not yet own this book (gimme time) but I was able to peruse a sampling of his poetry via his website. Two of them struck me with particular force. The first, “Ode to a Mirror,” for its brilliant point of view: that of the mirror and not the people who gaze into it:

I know a thousand faces that don’t know me
I have seen ’em all, sad and gay, caged and free
Blue, moist eyes crying and yearning for love
Brazen, black ones glaring coldly above
Selfish, evil souls have rehearsed before me
Revealing their greedy plots to me only
So many times I’ve tried to reach out
To aide and soothe those riddled with doubt
There were those who thought they had it all
Sad, puny wretches with hearts so small
And then those poor bastards who were driven
Hoping that their sins would be forgiven
They’d cry and weep ’bout their lonely past
Swearing that their lives were pure and chaste
Yet only to themselves do they lie
And only by themselves will they die
But when out of rage they shatter me
My crumbling pieces shall set me free
Never more will I mirror their sniveling frailty
For my shards mean not seven years, but eternity

The second, “The Reaper,” affected me because I know that Smith, who shot his first movie around 1942, and his last in 2020, had thought a great deal about the decline of his body, the death of old friends, and what it meant to be in the final act of his life. In this poem he examines perhaps his own attitude toward impending doom, at once sad and cynical and jauntily defiant:

I remember when my friends and I
Thought that youth and games would never die
We cherished the girls, grog and laughter
Ribald at night, meek mornings after
But now malt’s too strong and girls too young
All our stories old, our song’s been sung
We mumble in search of long dead wit
Humor now is the daily obit
Our high is sharing a friend’s demise
He was a fine lad, echo our lies
While we gloat that it’s him not me
Knowing that they always fall by three
Wallowing secure ’cause Sam was third
Surely there’s time ’fore my taps are heard
Then there’s news of the death of old Hugh
Well, hell, that clown never paid his due
Nights alone you feel the Reaper’s chill
Then at dawn there’s a fine, undead thrill
Check pulse, poke liver, no pain, no fear
Hit the bars ’cause he’s dead, you’re still here
No canes or taxis for you today
On this fine and smogless first of May
Jauntily out the door to the street
Gaily you greet all those that you meet
Then as you stroll you think of old Hugh
The wind sighs, “He was younger than you”
As a maverick tear rolls from your eye
You know you gotta laugh instead of cry
You’ve done some bad and you’ve done some good
You wouldn’t change things even if you could
’Cause through the years you’ve run a good race
The Reaper chased and couldn’t keep your pace
So toast those that live and those that die
And while you can, spit in the Reaper’s eye.

Smith passed away, fittingly, in the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital on July 5, 2021. I imagine that his body, laid into a casket or committed to flames, was completely exhausted, worn out, used up – not by age, but by the sheer wear and tear of living life all the way up. And never mind the goddamned bullfights.

GUNS, BRIDGES AND LIES: THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI VS. THE GUNS OF NAVARONE

Reality, to some degree, lies in our perception of reality. We may act on false information or even a false world-view, but those actions are real, and so are their consequences. A man who believes his wife is betraying him may be merely paranoid or delusional, but if he shoots his wife as a result of these feelings, his paranoid delusions have led to a very real and tragic outcome.

This maxim applies equally to history. Our perception of it may be entirely wrong, but if we cling tightly enough to that perception, whatever lessons and morals, whatever strength, pride and identity we draw from our history becomes real in the sense that it colors who we are and how we proceed forward into the future.

I have recently had occasion to contrast two famous works of literature which became even more famous films: THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI (a 1952 novel which became a 1957 movie), and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (a 1957 novel which was adapted into a movie in 1961). In reading these books and watching these films again, I have been reminded quite jarringly of the way the Second World War has been depicted by those in the former Allied countries versus the way it actually unfolded. In other words, the Anglo-American perception of the war as it is depicted in popular culture vs. what roughly might be described as "the truth." More interestingly, I have been reminded that the Anglo-American viewpoint is hardly the only one and that "the truth" tends to change when the nationality of the writer in question shifts to a country whose experiences with war, and hence their own self-perception, are different.

To begin with, let us look at THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI, first as a novel and then as a film.

The novel was written -- this is very important -- by a Frenchman named Pierre Boulle. Eventually translated into English, it became a massive bestseller and has never gone out of print. Comparatively few people have read it, however, as opposed to seeing the epic, Oscar-winning film directed by David Lean, and they might be shocked to see how different the two pieces of work are, most especially in terms of their endings.

The story of KWAI is simple. During WW2, a group of British prisoners-of-war are forced by their sadistic Japanese captors to build a railway bridge over the Kwai river in Siam. The British officer in charge, Colonel Nicholson, initially refuses to cooperate because he doesn't like the way his officers and men are being treated, but proves immune to the threats, beatings and forced starvation inflicted upon him by his captor Colonel Saito. Under pressure from his superiors to finish the bridge on time, Saito eventually capitulates and allows Nicholson to more or less run the project himself any way he wishes. However, in achieving this victory, Nicholson becomes obsessed with the completion of the bridge, quite forgetting in his focused madness that it will be used to ferry Japanese troops and supplies for the conquest of Burma, i.e. to help the Axis win the war.
Meanwhile, a three-man team of British commandos has been tasked to infiltrate the area and blow up the bridge. The startling climax of the book sees Nicholson thwart the attack to save his beloved bridge, which suffers only modest damage. To make matters worse, two of the three commandos die (one at the hands of Nicholson himself) and the surviving Britisher returns to Calcutta a traumatized man, realizing that he failed his mission because he "killed the wrong colonel."

The novel KWAI is full of fascinating cultural criticism and subtext which has no place in this discussion, but its ironic outcome -- the bridge still intact, most of the characters dead, nothing really gained, and few lessons learned -- reflects in some senses the brutal experiences suffered by its author during WW2. Boulle fought with the Free French forces in Indochina and the Resistance in Vichy France and was himself made a slave laborer. He understood what it was like to be part of a defeated nation and to be put to work like a mule to serve the needs of his foreign conquerors. He also understood that war is fought on a psychological and moral plane as much as it is fought with explosives and bombs. Some of the most devastating passages of the novel occur when Joyce, the youngest of the commandos and the most inexperienced, tries to work himself up into slitting a Japanese soldier's throat with his killing knife but finds himself unwilling to do so, because the act is simply too horrible to contemplate. * Finally, he grasped that the level of righteousness of a cause has nothing to do with whether the cause itself will be successful, and that one can draw morals -- perhaps the most important morals -- from battles lost.

Lean's epic adaptation of KWAI is quite a different picture. For starters, one of the British commandos, Shears, is now American, following the somewhat egocentric impulse of this nation to insist nothing good could happen in that war unless we were a part of it. The crucial difference, comes at the end of the story. Colonel Nicholson initially frustrates the destruction of the bridge, but at the last moment, as a Japanese troop train is chugging across the span, has a sudden moment of clarity. Summoning all his dignity, he marches to the plunger which will detonate the bridge, is hit by mortar fire, and falls dead on upon said plunger, blowing the bridge and the train to pieces.

Hollywood's interpretation of KWAI, one which ended with both a satisfying explosion and a moment of redemption for Nicholson, does not make the movie less satisfying than the book; indeed, it arguably makes it far more satisfying. But it robs the film of some of its inborn moral power and certainly of Boulle's intent, which was among other things to demonstrate the ironic, often futile nature of military and even human endeavours. It also falls much more squarely with the Anglo-American perception of our conduct during the war. In the novel, Nicholson dies seemingly without having grasped the magnitude of his treason, or even that he committed treason at all; in the film, he grasps it fully and dies the appropriately heroic-tragic death. This ending is entirely in keeping with the Kiplingesque tradition which fires his character in the novel, but which Boulle also explicitly ridicules through the voice of the surviving commando, Warden. Boulle's message has been skillfully adjusted to suit the perception audiences had of the war: things might have gone sideways here and there, and war itself might be madness, but in the end, British grit and American know-how (do I have that backwards?) always prevailed.

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE -- both novel and film -- are quite different kettles of fish from the atmospheric and thoughtful KWAI. Alistair Maclean, the author of GUNS, was likewise a veteran of WW2, but his combat experiences were at sea and quite divorced from the works for which he is most famous. As a writer, too, he was not in Boulle's league: while talented, he was something of a hack and his pulpish style -- violent, vapid and two-dimensional -- did not win him much admiration from critics. However, he did not lack for imagination in a derivitive sort of way, and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE reflects this.

In the story, a small team of Allied commandos -- British, American and Greek -- are tasked with destroying a mighty German gun emplacement on the island of Navarone in mid-late 1943. Failure to take out the guns will result in the slaughter of a British naval task force which is trying to evacuate 1,200 British soldiers from a Mediterranean island, as well as the trapped garrison itself. The commandos must evade German capture, contact the Greek resistance, and nose-out a traitor in their own ranks before infiltrating the massive gun emplacement, blowing up the guns, and making their escape.

This brief description is not meant to be dismissive. It's merely that unlike Boulle, Maclean was not really capable of either subtext or deeper characterization in his stories: the fact that this simple action novel is reputed to have "his most well-drawn characters" is rather more an indictment than a compliment. In his defense, however, Maclean was not trying to dive into the human condition or make profound statements about life, humanity or war. He was simply an author of page-turning potboilers, who understood that his audience wanted plenty of action, delivered by protagonists who were fearless, invincible and always three steps ahead of the enemy. In that regard he knew exactly what he was doing... which is why Hollywood rather fell in love with him, especially when his stories were set in the Second World War.

There is no great need to try and note the differences between Maclean's novel and J. Lee Thompson's adaptation of it for the screen, because far from possessing the differences which mark the two versions of KWAI, both the book and the movie NAVARONE are essentially the same thing. In NAVARONE, our heroes are simply men on a mission, presented with an unenviable and seemingly impossible task, which they nonetheless carry off with a great deal of aplomb, if not without some degree of loss. I don't remember the novel very well, but the film is quite vivid in my mind, and it is a very damned good one. The cast is formiddable, the action sequences memorable, and the performances are strong all the way around, most especially that of David Niven as the high-strung British explosives expert who gets all the best lines ("After examining this ship, sir, I feel compelled to tell you that I can't swim") and throws a positively epic tantrum in the film's last act.

So what is my beef with NAVARONE? Well, as one reviewer put it, "'The Guns of Navarone' concerns an island that does not exist and a battle that did not occur.'" Lost as we get in the drama and violence and intrigue of Maclean's tale, it's easy to forget that his work is not a fictional take on a historical event, but a work of complete fantasy twice over. Not only is there no island of Navarone in the Mediterranean Sea, the battle which comes to a victorious conclusion at the end of the book/movie never happened. It is based on a real one -- the Dodecanese Campaign -- but that campaign, which took place over some weeks in September and October of 1943, ended in complete victory for the Germans. Viewed through this particular lens, NAVARONE becomes part cultural curiosity, part cautionary tale. Let us tackle these things in order.

Cultural Curiosity (1): In America, one does not sell tickets by showing Allied defeats, unless -- DUNKIRK comes to mind -- they are dressed up as victories. For example, the superb epic war movie A BRIDGE TOO FAR did only lukewarm business in America (as opposed to Europe) because American audiences found the subject matter, the disastrous Battle of Arnhem in 1944, to be uncomfortable viewing. Since the war was actually a going concern, which is now more than 75 years ago, American audiences have only seen the backs of the Nazis, and indeed, watching the endless stream of flicks on this subject since about 1940, one would get the impression that the Germans never won even a single skirmish in the entire conflict. A film about a tragic, unecessary miltary fiasco simply did not compute. The inability of the American people to process defeat in almost any form, but most especially military defeat, is one of our most outstanding cultural characteristics, and has led to a number of curious psychological and social phenomena. One of these phenomena is an increasing devotion to past victories, and no past victory is as satisfying for us collectively as that in World War Two. Therefore our depictions of that war must be in keeping with our historical knowledge of it; and since Americans cannot read, our historical knowledge comes largely from Hollywood, whose perceptions of the war are simply warmed-over mid-1940s propaganda. Thus the legerdermain of Maclean, who comes in and writes an entertaining fantasy in which historical outcomes are simply reversed to suit our wishes, in much the same way Tarantino kowtowed to the Weinstein brothers and wrote a movie in which a handful of Jews (American Jews, of course!) win the entire war and kill Hitler in the bargain. This leads us directly to our...

Cultural Curiosity (2): Both KWAI and NAVARONE revolve around commandos sent to perform a very dangerous, perhaps even suicidal mission. Boulle being French, and a partisan himself, he was perhaps less enamored of such soldiers and more prone to see them for what they really were, which is also perhaps why his commandos fail in their mission end up mostly dying. But Maclean was British, and like all Anglo-Americans was positively enamored by the idea of these "special" soldiers, employing them in at least three of his novels. I am convinced that Anglo-American fascination with, and deification of, what we now call Special Forces is rooted deeply in our shared histories. The British, being for 300 years the rulers of a worldwide empire, gradually came to learn from hard and bloody experience that conventional warfare was often ineffective, and gradually aped the methods used by hostile native populations to fight back against them. By WW2, the British positively excelled at unconventional warfare, and delighted -- despite their reputation for fair play -- in using it against their enemies, cruelly and without mercy. In America, where conventional warfare had been problematic from the start, these lessons were learned much earlier and more quickly, and were a major factor in eventual American independence from Britain. Colonial Americans never really had a sense of "fair play" but embraced Native American tactics of stealth, ambush, sneak attack and everything else the Europeans considered dirty, dishonorable and underhanded. Because of this, we have always lionized the men who slit throats, shoot people in the back and stick explosives up tailpipes, far more than we respect "ordinary" soldiers, who have to fight the enemy on much more even terms. The list of "men on a mission" commando films produced in the United States since WW2 must be staggering indeed, but as they have evolved, they have become far less about overcoming impossible odds (underdog theme) than about asserting total dominance over the enemy (bullying theme). NAVARONE is a brutal and not a very realistic movie, but it is practically a documentary when compared with WHERE EAGLES DARE, a 1966 Maclean novel in which a small team of Allied agents parachute into Germany, ostensibly to rescue an American general who knows the date, time and place of the Allied landings in France. The novel's main character, Major Smith, is not only fearless but seemingly both omnipotent and omniscient: there is never a moment in the entire story in which he is not master of the situation. And yet at least in the novel he has recognizable human qualities: in one scene he saves a German soldier from burning to death in a wrecked car simply out of compassion, while in another he renders German officers unconscious with drugs rather than simply killing them, which would have been much more expedient for him.
The movie version of this novel, which debuted in 1968, scrapes both the character and the entire cast of any human characteristics whatsoever: Smith slits throats with every evidence of pleasure, shoots men in the back as casually as you'd light a cigarette, and in the film's climax, kills someone who is begging hysterically for mercy. Yet even this sado-masturbatory sequence pales in comparison with the lengthy, utra-violent escape scenes which follow it, in which four or five Allied commandos fight off at least a hundred German soldiers, killing most of them without any loss to themselves before they make their final escape. Watching the movie, I was struck by how tedious this infallibility became: endless streams of bullets endlessly missing our heroes, who themselves never miss a shot -- and never reload, either. This need not only to win, but to humiliate, to dominate, torture and destroy the enemy without harm to oneself -- in other words, to bully with impunity -- is not only bad drama, it has distinct overtones of fascism and sadism, and it is a feature of the modern American psyche. And this is doubly bizarre when one rememberes that the fascists in these movies are supposed to be the enemies.

This is bears repeating. At some point or other, there must be a code of conduct among heroes or protagonists which distinguishes them from the villains: otherwise what's the point of the story? What value is there in watching one group of morally retarded sadists slaughtering another, less capable group of the same? And whereas war movies, even silly ones, were once about "us versus them", there is now less of an "us" and more of a "him" -- "him" being the invincible archetype who goes through his movie on God mode with infinite ammo. It's no longer sufficient for a small band to defeat, or achieve a moral victory (a la the Alamo), over a much larger one; now a single man must do the work of an entire army and thus prove his superior manliness and the righteousness of his culture and cause. To observe the antics of Major Smith and his arguably even more sadistic sidekick, Lieutenant Schiffer, one is tempted to wonder why the war even needed to be fought. Just unleash these two trained animals on the bad guys, the subtext seems to murmur, and everyone else can stay home.

This brings us to the cautionary tale. There is a saying, a very recent one, that Orwell's "1984" is meant as a warning and not a manual, but it is not a saying which many Americans have yet taken heed. Our ability to not draw conclusions from specific evidence is profound and terrifying, and it extents its tendrils into many other aspects of our cultural life. We also also have a horrible power to cherry-pick the morals from stories whose entire message is pointed in a different direction ("If we'd just let the military do what it wanted in Vietnam..." is one of my favorites). In the case of KWAI, the movie producers shifted the book's events by just sufficient enoug of an azimuth to alter its meaning without changing the main thrust of the story. The result, as I said above, is more satisfying but somewhat less profound. In NAVARONE, the entire story seeks to obfuscate a humiliating a real-life defeat by replacing it with a made-up victory, thus robbing us of the lessons we might have learned by studying it.

Of course the films, and some of the books, that I have referenced are, of course, merely entertainment, but they are also propaganda of a sort, and like all propaganda is designed to argue for a particular type of philosophy, ideology or viewpoint. That viewpoint, roughly speaking, is this:

1. The Good Guys (always "we"/"us") are invincible. We are stronger, braver, tougher, more resourceful and smarter than our enemies and will always prevail in the end.

2. If history did not actually turn out the way we wanted it, then history needs to be rewritten to correspond to #1.

3. Because our enemies are evil, we are not bound by any traditional set of morals or standards when fighting them. We can violate the Geneva convention, use the white flag to commit ambushes, assassinate enemy leaders in underhanded ways, put on the enemy's uniform to spy on him, kill prisoners of war, shoot women in the back, torture people for information, mutilate corpses for purposes of intimidation, burn women alive, firebomb civilian targets -- in other words, commit every evil in the calendar, so that from a moral standpoint we are indistinguishable from the Bad Guys; yet at no point will any of these atrocities threaten our moral position. We will remain Good. Put another way -- it's not an atrocity if "we" do it.

4. The Good Guys do not win because they are good, they are good because they win. I am going to write this again in capitals: THE GOOD GUYS DO NOT WIN BECAUSE THEY ARE GOOD, THEY ARE GOOD BECAUSE THEY WIN. It is not the merits of their cause or their personal codes of honor, but their might and invincibility which bestow their virtue. The behavior of the Good Guys in movie like WHERE EAGLES DARE, THE DIRTY DOZEN or INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is just as bad as that of the Nazis. There is almost literally nothing to choose between them for tactics or morality. In the end, we know who the Good Guys are because they win -- a classic Fascist position, quite literally out of Hitler's actual playbook, "Ich Kamph."

At this point it may be said that I am making (far) too much of this, but I believe a serious study of this type of film and of the literature from which it springs, along with the differences (or lack of difference) between the two, brings specific societal and cultural problems into sharp relief. The first is that we seem to be deliberately losing the moral of our stories when they are uncomfortable; the second is that we have embraced, through our popular entertainment, a Fascist outlook on life while simultaneously boasting of our victory over Fascism. And one of the central tenants of Fascism is that there is no such thing as objective truth or moral force in the world: there is only power, and the running narrative of the powers that be.

The dangers of this type of thinking are not readily obvious, but they are tremendously dangerous, and history provides us with many examples of their power. After WW2 ended, a whole genre of literature emerged in postwar Germany, which today is known as Landser-hilfe. The theme of these novels was always the same, and can be summed up in the apotheosis of "Landser" novels, CROSS OF IRON: the German soldier was a tough, resourceful, ultimately honorable man, contemptuous of the Nazis and the SS but loyal to his country, unfortunately led by cowardly careerist officers and callous, high-living generals, themselves pawns, albeit willing ones, of the evil demon, Hitler. This sort of book was so popular, even with foreign readers, that to this very day there remain enormous sections of the public in every nation who believe it to be an accurate depiction, and it helped craft a narrative that allowed Germans to shift the entire responsibility for everything evil done in their name to a select few scapegoats. (A similar sleight of hand was utilized by the Nazis themselves after the First World War, when they blamed German Jews for the defeat of their country during that war.) However, this depiction was not true, and the authors of the "Landser-hilfe" knew it: During the war, the Gestapo kept a close watch on the mail sent home by German soldiers, and as late as July of 1944 concluded that loyalty to and belief in Hitler was self-evident in more than 90% of the letters they examined. The truth -- that most who served Hitler served him willingly -- was not palatable to postwar Germany, so it was submerged in a comforting lie.

Nobody likes to admit defeat, and no one enjoys the humiliation that often comes with it. On the national scale, our reluctance to accept failure as failure and shame as shame tends to lead us to try to alter history to dress up defeats as victories, and to slap gloss over our hurts until they take on an alluring luster. I am all for entertainment and escapism, and I am all for celebrating those moments of our history which brought out the best in us as a people. There is a definite place for swagger in our movies and novels about history. But there is also a place, a large and important one, for realistic and responsible takes on it, which allow us to learn from things we otherwise might want shoved under the rug.

HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES

I'll note you in my book of memory.
-- William Shakespeare

Now that I have moved back to Pennsylvania, I find it a little easier to gain perspective over the more than 12 years I spent in Hollywood, and a little easier to talk about it. Not that I found it emotionally difficult before, but for some months after I made the transition from West to East, I deliberately kept my mouth shut about my former life there. I neither wanted to seem as if I was bragging, nor start my new life on the wrong foot by nostalgifying a period which, while intensely interesting and full of dazzling experiences, does not deserve nostalgia. Hollywood, as a town, is a noisy, shabby, tawdry-looking place in which a little grandeur and glamor stand out amidst all sorts of squalor; rather like a birthday cake in pile of garbage. Hollywood, as an industry, is just that: an industry. The product it produces may be glamorous, but the process by which it is made is merely a great deal of hard work salted with a thick layer of political and personal intrigue. In other words, it's like any other profession you care to name: the only real difference being that the outside world doesn't really accept this. I know that this is true, because no one I have encountered here since arrival understands why anyone "who did that for a living" would ever leave.

In a few months, however, it will be a year since I moved East, and that is enough time for the emotional dust to settle and for me to gain some perspective on the time I spent there. And what I see is that, aside from a number of gripes and grudges I have about the way the business is run, and the sort of people who are permitted to run it, I have a trove of terrific memories I can share with those curious about how the sausage known as the film and television industry is actually manufactured.

This particular story took place in 2011. At that time I had lived in Los Angeles for four years, and had gone from the ususal temp jobs, to full-time employment with a small make-up effects studio, to semi-unemployment when that studio eventually began to circle the drain. I also worked part time in the video game industry, helping make trailers for Call of Duty, but at that point the work was spotty and inconsistent. In a constant fret about my finances, I played the ancient Hollywood game, otherwise known as "waiting for the phone to ring again." One day it did.

As you all know by now, I keep a journal of sorts. The following is taken from the entries made on February 2 - 5 of 2011. I have altered them to remove certain names, and to add information here and there to provide a little context; otherwise they are exactly as they were originally written.

"M. called today and asked me if I wanted to take three days’ work for Masters FX. He offered thirty dollars an hour, which translates to $45 and finally, $60, since a day on location is never going to be shorter than 12 - 16 hours.So, after brief consideration, during which my natural laziness and cowardice tried to override my common sense, I said, 'Hell yes.'

"I then rang G. [my former boss at the other studio] who had made the generous offer of $10/hr for two half-days this week, and told him I was no longer interested in his $80, preferring the $2,000 - 3,000 I'd probably make at the other gig. After this unpleasant little chat, I called M. again and asked for details.

"He told me that TRUE BLOOD was shooting a very expensive episode in the Palmdale desert, and he needed all hands on deck. Instead of simply working out of Masters’ shop in Arleta, I’d be at the location until Friday. So I packed my things, got a fitful sleep, and climbed out of bed around seven o’clock the next morning. [My girlfriend] brought me coffee and a bagel and packed snacks in my kit, and before I knew it I was driving north on the familiar route Hollywood –101 -170, before ending up at Master’s FX. It’s more or less the standard MUFX shop, though it has extensive office space on the second floor. I began working right away, with C., a short blond bearded guy who was very friendly and talkative. He worked usually as a voice actor, and later I discovered he’d not only studied martial arts in Japan but fought there. Our assignment was to fill innumerable syringes with two different types of silicone, one a toxic pinkish color (B), the other a purplish one (A), then tape the syringes together into “kits” of two, and box them for travel. This took about three hours. I couldn't help but notice that J.J., one of the guys who used to work with at the old shop, was also present: this is a small business. Eventually we finished, and I helped M. load his car, whereupon we headed out for Palmdale – or rather, to the desert near Palmdale, which is where the scenes were being shot.

"It was a long drive up the 5 freeway, into desert scenery straight out of the Old West or Africa – dusty flat plains, tumbleweeds, scrub-brush, tan hills spotted with brownish vegetation, snow-capped mountains in the distance. After more than an hour, much of which was spent plodding down a straight road flanked on either side by immensities of browish-tan wasteland, we abruptly came upon what was called “base camp” – a collection of trailers laid out in a row, a tent, additional trailers of various sizes serving various purposes, trucks, vans, and numerous parked cars, all forming a sort of minature town a la McMurdo Station in Antarctica, except this was desert a la North Africa. There I was introduced to many people, most of whose names I immediately forgot, except for L., a Masters’ employee who was the only other 'MUFX tech' and who therefore became my partner for the rest of my stay there. L. was a good partner to have: she’s friendly and cute, which isn’t a bad combination. The really cool thing from my standpoint, however, was that I was actually listed on the Call Sheet. This official acknowledgement of my part in the crew of television show was more than I’d ever gotten in seven months of working at the old studio.

"Anyway, we worked at Base Camp for some time, doing what I can’t recall, before heading to the hotel around five o’clock. (I say “I can’t recall” because while I was already addled from nerves and lackof sleep, I was to become increasingly so over the next few days. When you stay up without rest for days at a time, your sense of time becomes distorted. Throw in severe conditions and physical fatigue and you have a perfect storm for what I refer to as 'surreality,' a dream-like state in which many of your higher brain functions cease to operate.)

"The drive to the Palmdale Hotel was not a lot of fun. It was probably twenty-two miles from Base Camp. My GPS went in and out, and the setting sun caused me to miss at least one turn – annoying enough at the best of times, worse because L. was following me. When at last we arrived at the Palmdale, the confusing entryway design caused me to miss the turn, whereupon we squandered and additional ten minutes making a huge erratic loop back to the place. At last we checked in, and at this point I had already worked a full day…but really, the day hadn’t started. I went into the hotel lounge and saw [various big names in the effects business] ate dinner and had a few beers with L. and M. I then tried to get to sleep, and failed. This was critical, because I was already tired, and we had a 1:30 AM call for a 2:15 AM set appearance. Finally, at midnight, I simply got out of bed, washed up (forgot my toothpaste), dressed in layers, and went over to M.'s room. From there we went to the lobby, onto the bus, and back to Camp. I was surprised how bitterly cold it was, but the best was just beginning, because when we got off the bus a half hour later, I felt as if I were in Siberia, not the California desert.

"The Camp, at night, looks like an excavation site in some forbidden wilderness. Lights blaze, generators rattle and hum, trucks grundle about, and everyone is carrying equipment, or dragging it, or looking for it, or cursing it. Around this halo of light and activity is absolute blackness and nothingness – the whole world seems to have ceased to exist, and there are not even any stars. Worse yet is the intense, almost unbelievable cold. It was 22◦ at 2:15 AM, and while there was no wind, my clothing was inadequate because I had forgotten gloves – a particularly galling mistake, since I just got a new insulated pair at Christmas. Furthermore, I spent virtually the whole night and much of the morning out of doors, so while the rest of the camp was cozy in their trailer-wombs, I was shivering outside, drinking lukewarm coffee and trying not to freeze. At last a pretty-eyed P.A. named J.C. wrangled me some gloves, and I began to recover my sense of feeling. She also offered no objection when I asked if I could give her a hug of gratitude.

"I know I worked during the night, but most of what I remember was huddling by totally inadequate heating units with a few like unfortunates who didn’t merit trailers. It was unbearably cold, 17◦ to be precise, and I took to wearing latex gloves beneath my cloth ones in the hopes of making my hands sweat. This idea failed miserably.

"Come the daybreak, the temperature somehow fell another five degrees, and things became really interesting. I didn’t take proper meals, but simply snatched random items off the Craft services table, which was manned by a fiery red-faced Australian with a bristling mustache. As a result of what I ate, or perhaps what I drank – or didn’t get enough of (water) – I suffered from a temporary constipation that bloated me like a beer barrel, but my problems were minor compared to others on set, who got food poisoning from their own Craft station.

"What was happening here, near as I can recall, was preparation for the shoot. A large number of actors had to be transformed into goblins, which required extensive prosthetic application to the face and hands and exposed flesh, not to mention wigs and costumes. Even with the huge army of make-up artists which M. had assembled, who filled every station in three different rtailers, this was a tremendous task and pushed everyone to the dropping point. My main memory of the night that is not attached to trying to keep warm is running about in the fine, icy sand, carrying Supersol or 99% alcohol or Myristate or zip-loc bags full of Goblin fingers up and down trailer steps. With the sun up and glaring over the mountains, the workday simply continued as if nothing had happened, even though the goblins eventually had to depart for set. The reason for this was that once they returned, a whole equally enormous logistical task remained – removing their prosthetics without damaging them, so they could be reused at the next day’s shooting. By this time it was hard to imagine that it wasn’t the next day; we’d already been on set for six or seven hours, had gotten no sleep beforehand, and were now being sun-blasted and wind-burned as well as continuously dehydrated by the arid Palmdale air.

"As taxed as I was by this point, and by the points that came after, I kept recalling two important things. The first, from the book HARDCORE ZEN, was the principle of trying to live within the moment. The second, from the essay ACTION!, was the statement that “the margin lies between where a man thinks his limit is and where it actually resides.” I knew I was beat-ass tired, but I was also taking an odd sort of pleasure in being tested. True, the previous hours had proven I wouldn’t have lasted a half an hour on the Eastern Front circa 1941, but it was nice to know that I could still function even after 16 ½ hours at the helm when I hadn’t actually slept since Tuesday night....

"I have a jumble of context-free memories from this time: looking at the call sheet and seeing it contained advice about what to do if you were bitten by a rattlesnake; going to the Craft services table in the middle of a freezing night to grab a snack and finding the jam frozen solid, the peanut butter chilled to a spoon-snapping consistency of damp cement, and the bread slices as hard as stone; trying to remember to yell "Coming up!" as I mounted the steps of a trailer so I wouldn't get smashed in the face by a swinging door; blundering into the wardrobe trailer on some errand or other and being amazed by the staggering amount of costume clothing hanging from its racks; doing a sommersault I learned in Aikido class for the amusement of some make-up effects artists, because lack of sleep had turned me into a ten year old.

"The last three or four hours before we returned to the hotel were pretty tough. A fat, mentally deranged and extremely annoying make-up artist spent much of that time waddling after me, making shrill and unreasonable demands she had no authority to make. At last I lost my temper with her, whereupon she became all sweetness and light. But for a few minutes I was wondering if I hadn't just snapped my way out of a job.

"When at last – at long last – all the 'midground' and 'background' goblin-actors had been de-goblined, and everything made ready for the next morning’s business, we went home. That sentence, of course, fails entirely to convey the enormity of the work involved, but there it is. By this time the sun had set, and the temperature plummeted once again to below-freezing levels. L. and I were trapped on the bus (“people mover”) with a whiny stunt man. I had been warned that, contra stereotype, stunt men were inveterate whiners, but I didn’t believe it until I met this idiot, R. His whining, which had alienated the make-up artists, included complaints that 'he only had nine hours turnaround time' between going to bed and set call. Since he was getting dropped off at his own hotel first, I couldn’t help but barking to L., 'Why the fuck do we get dropped off last, when we only get four hours turnaround time?'

"The only interesting thing this twit said was in reference to Mike Massa, who is the stunt coordinator on TRUE BLOOD. I know Massa’s work from ANGEL, where he was also a double for David Boreanaz. He said Massa was cool, which reinforced what M. later told me – that Massa is not only good at his job, he’s good to work with.

"This night – I guess it was Thursday – I actually slept. Thankfully, M. informed me as I was going to bed that crew call had been pushed to 3:36 AM, which meant an additional, and precious, two hours of sleep. Despite a bus-snafu in the morning, I was in very good spirits when we reached Base Camp, full of energy and resolve not to fuck up. This mood was enhanced by a proper breakfast served at the catering area, directly across the road from set. This catering truck, which stood next to an enormous expanding trailer (called a lunchbox trailer) set up as a restaurant, served impressive food. There were numerous meal choices as well as buffet tables and at one point, even a fellow who constructed custom-ordered smoothies. Eating there made me realize why some people live their whole lives within the movie business: it is a hermetically sealed world, a sort of iron sphere whose interior is cushioned by velvet. You work hard in short bursts, but the rest of the time the majority of your needs – snacks, water, meals, even moving from point A to point B, are taken care of by other people. Anyone inside the sphere is in, be he a lowly P.A. or a lofty A.D.; anyone outside the sphere is out, and kept out by a sophisticated, cunning and eldritch system designed to prevent any mixture between the worlds. The only way inside is to know the right person, who can navigate this complex minefield for you; once there your work-ethic, personality and skill at policraft will decide if you stay. But getting even to that perilous point is largely a matter of Who You Know. If it weren't for M., I wouldn't be here.

"The last day dawned – literally. And with the exception of the final three hours or so, it was easy. We did very close to nothing, and aside from two trips to the set, which could only be reached by chuffing my way up a steep, winding, sand-covered hill to a rocky outrcrap, and during which they were shooting rather ridiculous scenes with the goblins, I seldom had to move from the wardrobe trailer in which I sought refuge. In fact, hours were spent in the first trailer, simply jawing with various people taking their ease whilst waiting for the goblins to return. At one point about five of us were in there, talking about everything from conspiracy theories to UFOs to movie stories. I heard some really fabulous tales about, for example, James Cameron and Stan Winston. I wouldn't be me, however, if I hadn't nearly fucked myself with a classic blunder.

"From day one, I'd been warned that the 1st A.D. [first assistant director, the number two man on set] was unusually testy even for a 1st A.D., and to steer clear of him; but as I had no interaction with the man, whoever he was, I disregarded this warning. Well, on one of my trips to set, I rode over on a people mover with a guy I'd never seen before and some young women who might have been script girls or P.A.'s -- I had no idea. Punch-drunk from lack of sleep, I was in a chatty mood and rambled on about nothing while the guy next to me gave me irritated, bewildered looks, as if to say, 'Why the fuck are you talking to me?' But I kept talking, and even asked him what the weather was going to be like...because if it was shitty, no doubt the 1st A.D. would be a real monster and wreck the set. He rather peevishly told me the weather would be fine, thank you, and finally we got to set. No sooner had we climbed out of the mover than two Teamsters roared past in dune buggies. They were drag racing each other rather than doing whatever the hell they were supposed to be doing with those machines, and the guy I'd just annoyed for the past five minutes with my blather erupted in a rage, shouting that the Teamsters were idiots and possibly in need of new jobs at Wal-Mart. He then stormed off as the big, strong Teamsters sheepishly slunk away, looking like whipped dogs. I now realized, too late, that the man next to me had been the 1st A.D. and I had essentially asked him to fire me, but for some reason he had refrained. (Possibly it was like the instance back in the 15th century where the famed man-eating wolf Courtaud was confronted by a lost baby sheep who, mistaking the killer beast for its mother, cavorted happily around the monster while the rest of the wolf pack waited for their king to tear it to pieces. But Courtaud seemed to be confused by this display of affection and allowed the sheep to romp around him until it finally got bored and wandered off. Evidently blissful ignorance is a handy weapon.)

"At last we had to get up and work, which we did, frantically, 'wrapping' the trailers. This means picking them clean of equipment and cleaning them, then packing the remaining trailer with all the goods which will be used when shooting resumes on Monday at The [Warner Hollywood] Lot, Stage #4. I finished my evening scrubbing leather seats with paper towels soaked in 99% alcohol, and then, after some last-minute paperwork in the AD trailer, bussed home in an exhausted but satisfied silence. After relieving my bladder in the hotel bathroom I hopped in my car, fired up The Shadow, and blasted down the 15, 5, 170 and 101 to the Highland exit. Despite the cold air I put the top down and laughed as I swung across Hollywood Boulevard. Amidst the neon lights and flashbulb marquees were throngs of tourists and club-hoppers and wannabees, not suspecting that the unshaven, red-eyed man in the watch cap and rumpled, dust-covered clothing, driving the old Chrysler, was part of 'the glitz and glam of Hollywood.'"

All of this was ten years ago, and at the risk of failing to cliche at the right moment, it does not seem like yesterday. It seems like, well, ten years ago; but it was an important piece of personal history: my first time "on location." And it marked the point at which I began to break free of the contraints imposed on me by certain people in my professional life, who -- up 'til that point -- had successfully made me dependent upon them for work.

I confess, as I sit here tonight in my apartment in this obscure, medium-sized town, in a state nobody ever seems to think about until Election Year, that sometimes I wonder if Hollywood is finished with me, and me with it. Truth be told, I don't believe so. There are possibly -- probably? -- fresh chapters to write, a few years down the road, when whatever purpose it served to return here is satisified. In the mean time, where the industry is concerned, what I have is memories, which I am now free to share with you.

D-DAY: A STRANGE NOSTALGIA

Hiraeth (noun). A feeling of longing for a home that never was. A deep or irrational bond felt with a time or era.

Yesterday was the 77th anniversary of Operation Overlord, better known to Americans as D-Day. Coming as it does in a time of national upheaval, many look back upon this critical historical moment with a curious form of nostalgia.

They are not, of course, nostalgic for the carnage of Omaha Beach, or for the terrible fighting that followed for the next two months in the hedgerow country beyond before the breakout finally took place -- fighting that killed and wounded roughly as many men as America lost during the entire Korean War. They are nostalgic for the feeling of national unity that D-Day represented, or seemed to represent. The invasion of Normandy was a remarkable, even a staggering, military feat, one of the most logistically complex operations in the history of warfare, and as such it was an expression of the national will. Very few people in America wanted the war, but once engaged the country transformed itself into a gigantic machine whose sole purpose was victory. This is not hyperbole. WW2 was one of the very few moments in American history where focus on a single objective was achieved and, despite massive obstacles and heavy losses, maintained until the objective was taken. And I think we, as a people, miss that feeling. What we forget is that the price of near-complete unity and total focus is often strife and strain, trial and tribulation. Humans are gregarious animals by nature, but they are also quarrelsome and fractious. Our tribal groupings fight with each other, and given the absence of an external enemy, our tribes fight with themselves. And one of the peculiar features of the modern world is the capacity that social media, mobile devices and the Internet generally, to further stimulate division. As more and more identity groups form, as more and more hyphens are fixed to the word "American," so too are the reasons for people to argue. The Internet was supposed to unite us, yet the most common word associated with it is "toxic." And nobody, or very nearly nobody, really enjoys a toxic environment. Even the most loathsome internet troll is at heart not much more than a baby crying for attention. When we give up social media, the psychological boost we experience is simply the feeling that we have removed ourselves from a house divided. In our actual, non-virtual lives, all the anger and self-righteousness and reaction-baiting we experience online barely exists. People may not actively like each other, but they are fairly tolerant and civil to one another, even in traffic. Yet we know, deep-down, that to go all the way, and experience true tribal unity, requires an external threat. Something to remind us that all the hyphens, all the labels, all the ways subtle and gross humans sub-divide themselves, are really figments of our imagination. They are invisible barriers which we place voluntarily around ourselves, because there is little obvious penalty for maintaining them.

So yes, we do look back at that terrible time in history with a strange fondness, just as those of us who can remember it look back with a curious warmth on the months following 9/11, when political, racial, ethnic and economic division were forgotten in a sudden and starting display of national unity. The irony that this unity was caused by tragedy fades in and out of our consciousness. Humans tend to see the past with a rosy and nostalgic glow, but the truth is always harsher and more complicated than we remember.

In recent years, as America has become more divided and angry, or perhaps merely convinced itself that it is divided and angry -- perception is reality on the internet -- we have begun a simultaneous process of deifying those who fought in the Second World War. This is never more apparent than on the anniversaries of major battles from that war. The sobriquet we give the men and women who carried through with that conflict to its successful conclusion reflects our adulation of them: The Greatest Generation. It's not a bad handle, but like all broad brushes, it doesn't quite tell the whole truth.

The Second World War put sixteen million Americans in unform, out of a total population of 145 million. (This was the maximum force our military could actually field without causing economic collapse at home.) Of those 16 million, supposedly less than one million actually saw combat and survived, which makes some sense when you consider that a military as large, well-supplied and thoroughly mechanized as America's required a massive system of supply, maintenance, transport, logistics, etc., etc. simply to stay in the field. Infantrymen used to sneer, "One man in the line, and five to bring up the Coca-Cola." This was an exaggeration, but not by all that much. For every infantry division of 15,000 men, there were around 35,000 support troops in the immediate rear, and this figure does not touch the huge number of men and women serving in uniform who never left the United States, or who were deployed overseas in non-combat capacities. Notwithstanding that military service is arduous and hazardous by its very nature, and that accidents do kill a startling number of servicepeople even today, the vast majority of those who served in the war were not placed directly in harm's way during their term of service. Ronald Reagan, to quote one of millions of examples, spent his time in the Army making training films, because his poor eyesight disqualified him from any other type of duty.

Of those who did see battle, the figures were grim: 405,399 were killed in action between 1941 and 1945, and 671,278 combat-wounded. Another 130,201 were taken prisoner, of whom about 14,000 seem to have died in captivity. The various branches of the military also recorded 50,000 deserters, some of whom had been highly decorated before they "voted with their feet" and left the carnage behind.

I do not bring these figures up to disparage those who did not experience battle (please repeat that in your head as you read this), or to pass judgment on those who elected to walk away from it, but rather to show that even during this time of unprecedented unity, the heaviest burdens fell on a relatively small group of people...and if the truth is to be told, not everyone reacted as well to those burdens as Hollywood would have us believe. And the fact of the matter is, there is nothing new in this.

When I was growing up, my history teachers used the "thirds" example to explain the American Revolution. That is to say: one third of colonials supported the revolution, one third remained loyal to the British crown, and one third were indifferent: they simply didn't care. If those fractions are accurate, then we owe our national existence to whatever fraction of that patriotic third actually took up arms and fought, or spied on the British, or supplied the Continental armies with food, ammunition, medicine and moral support. I don't know what this figure is, but doubtless it is a hell of a lot smaller than 33%. Again, the burden was borne by a hardy few.

Likewise, in the Civil War, neither the North nor the South ever came close to putting into the field the total number of men who were fit for arms. The reasons for this were complicated, but one of the largest was simply that many men, regardless of where their sympathies lay, did not wish to fight, and chose not to. As with the Revolution, the actual number of those in the arena was equaled or exceeded by those who elected to remain in the bleachers.

The point I am driving at here is that while we, in this unsettled and divisive period, are looking more and more to the past to comfort ourselves and provide a positive example, the truth is that "national unity" is a relative term. Even among the Greatest Generation, there were half a million draft dodgers, a fact conveniently forgotten whenever the subject of draft evasion during the Vietnam war comes up. The stark fact is that while causes and wars come and go, passions ignite and then cool, nations grapple and then shake hands, human nature remains more or less unchanged. We will always wish that disasters do not befall us, and we will always take pride in the unity these disasters bring about in our otherwise fractious race. What's more, we will always overestimate the level of unity we possessed and conveniently ignore, or forget, how few people bore any share of the burden, much less its heaviest weight. The nostalgia we feel for America as a closed fist is understandable and it is partially rooted in reality, but it is perhaps very nearly equally a fantasy of our own deliberate manufacture.

NO MORE ADVENTURES?

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid. -- Q

When I was a boy, there were few television shows I admired more than TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY. The series was set on the fictional South Pacific island of Boragora in the years preceding WW2, and featured the exploits of an ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter. Jake, who traveled with an alcoholic mechanic named Corky and a one-eyed dog named Jack, and ekked out a living flying passengers and cargo around the Pacific islands. His cohorts included Bon Chance Louie, the island's governor and an ex-member of the French Foreign Legion; Sarah Stickney-White, a lounge singer who was really an American spy; the Rev. Willy Tenboom, who was really a German spy; and Koji, a half-European, half-Japanese princess whose lust for jake did not prevent her from threatening to kill him on a regular basis. During the series' run, Jake fought with the modern-day Samurai, the Nazis, giant monkeys, ancient Egyptian cults, slavers, headhunters, some kind of sea monster, and pretty much everything else you can think of. For me, however, these outrageous conflicts, some of which destroyed my suspension of disbelief even as a ten year old child, were not really the appeal of TALES: that rested in the way the world of the late 1930s was presented to the audience.

As with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, the world of the 30s, particularly in areas such as South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, etc. was shown to be primitive, wild, half-unexplored, and largely lawless. Small frontier-style towns were perched on the edge of vast oceans and impenetrable jungles. Booze flowed freely. Brawls were common. Local "authorities," usually military or colonial in nature, were generally corrupt or incompetent or had a laissez-faire attitude which allowed all manner of smuggling and vice-trading to operate in plain sight. The native populations were usually depicted as either helpful and friendly or restive and hostile, but always as half-savages. Those who arrived in the islands were a mixture of greedy, desperate, or fugitive; men and women who had come to the literal end of the earth to seek fortunes or escape troubled pasts. Plantation owners in snap-brim Fedoras and white summer suits drank with dirty, grizzled prospectors with gold dust in their hair and Bowie knives on their hips: out of work mercenaries bent elbows with third-rate lounge singers too poor to buy a ticket back to civilization. Once in a while a clipper arrived, carrying sacks of mail, crates of booze, and a few mysterious new passengers. At other times a gunboat would chug into the harbor, bearing the flag of one of the colonial powers, and provoking the local spies to slink away to their hidden radio-telegraph machines to send furtive messages to their controllers. Those visits, a piano, and a working radio were the only sources of vertical entertainment: the rest was found in bedrooms or out in the jungles or upon the wild wild sea.

Notwithstanding the obvious evils of colonialism, which were not entirely lost on me even as a small boy, I cannot express how much I loved the smoky, sultry atmosphere of TALES and its disreputable cast of characters. The mere fact that an ex-Flying Tiger and an ex-Foreign Legion soldier rubbed shoulders together in the Monkey Bar every night gave me shivers. As for the idea that Jake could simply jump into his seaplane, Cutter's Goose, and fly off to an island filled with ancient gold mines, or cannibal warriors, or Japanese troops, or pirates who traded in human flesh, as easily as my Mom could take me for ice cream in our Oldsmobile, struck me as being better than any superpower.

I stress that what I am talking about here is not simply a child's love for action. If I wanted to witness action as a thing in itself, it was available to me in a dozen other different shows full of blasting guns and screeching tires. TALES offered me not merely action but adventure, which is something quite different indeed. Action works the adrenal glands, but adventure stimulates the soul. It stirs passions which are quite independent of mere thrills or simple danger. It offers us wild new experiences which we will retain long after our adrenaline high has faded and our loot spent. Action is easy to come by, but adventure, real adventure, is not, and in fact seems to be getting more elusive all the time.

Adventure, it seems, has many enemies. One of them, the foremost of them, is technology. You never saw Jake Cutter with a cell phone or a GPS system. He was often lost, and even when his aeroplane radio worked, it didn't mean anyone was listening or that help was available. Adventure requires a certain reliance on instinct and wit as well as courage -- in other words it requires self-reliance -- and one of the curious affects of technology is that it reduces our need for these things. In America, it is now very difficult to get truly lost, and one has to make an almost deliberate effort to find a spot in which some kind of help is not readily available if you really need it.

Adventure also requires ignorance. To go on an adventure is to plunge into the unknown, but we live in a world where images of every square milimeter of it is available on Google Maps,and it is now possible to get cell phone service in most of Mongolia. How do you plunge into the unknown when information and imagery on everything imaginable are available with a simple internet search? As the rain forest shrinks and roads cut their way into the most formiddable mountain chains, inaccessible places where few have tread become rarer and rarer commodities. I can't think of Indiana Jones without wondering if his modern-day counterpart might not be dismayed to find McDonald's wrappers and beer can ring tabs in what he thought was the deepest region of the Amazon or the Congo. Wherever you go, someone will have preceded you, and probably posted the pictures on Instagram.

A third enemy of adventure is government. When a new territory is "discovered" by a people, there is always a period of exploration, followed by colonization, followed by raw material exploitation, and finally, by absorption into the larger whole of the nation which discovered ("stole" or "robbed") it. Think of it as a grid. The conquering power begins with a very widely spaced net of settlements which are far-flung and have to exist largely on their own resources, without benefit (or hinderance) of real governmental power. This atmosphere invites all manner of exploiters, adventurers, criminals, speculators, prospectors, farmers, ranchers, gamblers, mercenaries, entertainers, smugglers, prostitutes, tradesmen and anything else you care to name. These folks bring much wickedness with them, but they live in an atmosphere of freedom which also allows for great adventures to take place. Over time, however, successive waves of people bring with them successive waves of governmental officers and agents; means of communication with the host nation improve; more and more control and authority are exerted and more and more laws come into effect. The successful absorption of a frontier area means that civilization has now arrived, meaning in turn that the host of adventurers who once haunted the saloons and whorehouses and docks must now either leave or "become respectable," i.e. surrender claim to further adventure. Either way, the possibility for real adventure fades as the government grid grows tighter and tighter; until at last the grid becomes a net, and one needs a permit to do anything. As the world's population grows along with knowledge, technology and the reach of government, we now face a situation where it is possible to foresee a time when the net exists everywhere, and there is a sheriff, courts, tax collector, surveillance cameras, and possibly even a goddamned HOA in Antarctica.

In a sense this time has already arrived in what we call the First World. To live a reckless, dangerous, adventurous life in a country like the United States is extremely difficult if one is not wealthy, and even then, takes on an air of poseurism, dilettanteism and fraud. What is more laughable than the millionaire who travels around the world in a hot-air balloon? We all know he simply trying to find something his money cannot buy, which is not a quest likely to engender much sympathy or inspire the broad masses. Hell, even the middle-class kid who chases adrenaline highs via sky-diving, surfing and motocross racing carries with him a whiff of desperate absurdity. He is simply manufacturing excitement for its own sake, and while there is certainly action in these activities, there is no real adventure.

Of course, it may be seen that I am no different. Everything I have done as an adult which I did not have to do, but put me at some level of physical risk, would be regarded as laughable from the standpoint of, say, a child-soldier in Africa. Dreams of adventure and even action are undoubtedly always viewed with contempt by those whose daily lives are filled with risks they have no choice but to take. And one would be well within his rights to question how much I truly want adventure or even action at this time in my life. After all, I benefit enormously from the net in which I often feel trapped. To cite one example: in my one-bedroom apartment here in large-town Pennsylvania, I have central air conditioning and heat, a dishwasher, a washer-dryer, sinks, running water, electricity, a toilet, bath and shower. And if any of this breaks down, I have only to put in a work order and maintenance men soon appear. Hell, just a few weeks ago a burner on my electric stove went out, and instead of fixing the burner, the landlord replaced the entire oven. These are some of the benefits of the net, the grid we call civilization. Yet at the same time, this cocoon of what would have been called extravagant luxury just a few generations ago is also part of the great gray force which strangles our spirit of adventure and replaces it with -- at best -- a desire for action; but even the action available to us is more and more experienced as a secondhand event, via that species of voyeurism we call television and the internet.

In writing this I do not set myself up as some kind of martyr or luddite. By and large my "conveniences" are benefits I do not wish to live without; but I am keenly aware that the effect they have on me is a softening and a diminishing one. They and GPS and Google and all the rest of it are like a comfortable straight-jacket which keeps me safe and my life orderly and comfortable, but also restricts my movements and makes my muscles atrophy. It's much harder for me to die or be wretched than it was for my ancestors circa 1560 or even 1900, but it is also spiritually rather dull.

Today I read yet another article lamenting the population decline which is occurring almost everywhere in the world. Considering that many of the newspapers that publish these articles now were at the forefront of the "overpopulation = extinction" movement which prevailed in this country for decades, I find this greatly amusing, but it speaks to my general point. Modern life, for about 1.5 billion people currently living on this planet, is a materially comfortable place, and it is precisely in the areas where life is most comfortable and safe from privations and shortages where birth rates are at their lowest point. This follows a well-known trend throughout history, which shows that birth rates automatically and steadily decrease as material prosperity rises. Human beings will not reproduce in any great numbers given the financial and technical means to avoid it.

I don't want to overreach here, but I see this as following my main point, which is that a sense of adventure is only really possible if one regards the world as a wide-open place full of exotic mysteries and exciting unknowns. Since the world is largely no longer that place, it follows that our sense of adventure has dulled. In becoming civilized and achieving the conveniences and luxuries which make life easier and less drudgerous, in reducing hunger even among the very poor, we have also freed our minds to consider the higher problems of existence. For as it has often been said, only a man with a full belly gives a damn about the higher problems of existence: the poor, hungry fellow has neither the time nor the interest. And one of the primary considerations of existence is, Why are we here? Of course there is no specific answer to that question which is not facetious, overly generalized or simplistic, but one credible answer is, "To live!" Which means in this case simply to enjoy life and not merely endure. But how is life best enjoyed? Does the washer-dryer and the 4K and the 5G equate to happiness? Not for most of us. We need something more. Like the millionaire in his hot-air balloon, we seek that which money cannot buy. We want a sense of adventure, of excitement and wonder, which is the very thing the constricting net of civilization denies us.

I don't know how this spirit can be revived in the age we live in, or whether the question is of any great importance relative to others which plague and bedevil us; but I do know I want a positive answer for my own selfish reasons, and that it is certainly important to me. To simply draw breath, take up space, and mark time until death is not enough. To simply exist in some state of comfortable material mediocrity, drawing excitement through a television screen or a monitor, is not enough. I may not be Jake Cutter, but I'm driven by the same basic forces. And they tell me that somewhere, somehow, there's a world of adventure still waiting for me. All I have to do is find it.