Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 27
December 10, 2018
The Female Perspective
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
-- Virginia Woolf
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through her body with his pen.
Behind my house in Burbank there is an alley longer than a football field. One day when my Mom was visiting from back East, I decided to take us through the alley to my back gate to save some time. As we walked, we passed a great collection of junk someone had left propped against the alley wall. These little clusters of junk are a common sight in the alleys of otherwise neat and tidy Burbank: they represent a technically illegal but commonly accepted way of disposing of things too big for the regular trash haul. By unwritten rule, they are taken away by junk prospectors or hauled off by the city. I am so used to them that I seldom cast them a glance, but my Mom, observing one pile at the mouth of the alley, commented sadly, “There's something that didn't work out.”
I looked over, and at first saw only the usual random collection of neatly stacked junk – broken bookshelves, waterlogged paperbacks, an out-of-date television, a lamp with a torn shade, this, that. But at the end of the junkpile was a box overflowing with momentos – a wedding album, loose photographs, the make-female figures that sit atop a wedding cake. The stuff that means so much to married couples when the marriage is working, and so little when the marriage fails.
As we passed the wreckage of someone's failed relationship, it struck me that I might have passed that disjecta membra a hundred times without noticing what it was or deriving any emotional response from it. My Mom, on the other hand, had needed only one glimpse to understand what it represented and feel some sorrow over a thing which had plainly not worked out. This experience triggered a memory, one which further highlighted the difference in the way men and women interpret reality and experience.
The scene was my old apartment in Park La Brea, six or seven years before. My then-girlfriend and I were tucked into the couch in front of our enormous (and enormously heavy) television, doing what might be called “DVD and chill.” Both of us had eclectic tastes in television shows: we watched everything from the Jeremy Brett “Sherlock Holmes” series to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “M*A*S*H,” “Frasier,” “The Simpsons” and God knows what else. On this particular occasion, however, we were watching the original “Star Trek.” In particular, an episode from the show's third season called “Elaan of Troyius.”
The story goes as follows. The two planets Elas and Troyius have been at war for years, and have now reached the point where further conflict will bring mutual destruction. In the hopes of bringing peace, the planets have struck upon an archaic solution: a member of the royal family of Elas will wed a member of the ruling family of Troyius and unite the two planets. As the episode opens, Captain Kirk and the Enterprise have been ordered to ferry Elaan, princess of Elas, to Troyius for the wedding. Kirk is further requested to proceed slowly, so that the Troyaan ambassador, Petri, has time to educate Elaan as to the ways of his people and prepare her for marriage.
Seems simple enough. The problem is that Elaan comes from a savage, arrogant, warlike race that is extremely short on social graces: she treats everyone on the ship like dirt, and to top it off, she doesn't want to be married off to the ruler of Troyius. When Petri attempts to present her with wedding gifts, she throws them at him and then has her bodyguards toss him out. When he returns to have a second go at her, she stabs him. Petri, recuperating in sick bay, refuses to have anything more to do with the princess, so Kirk is stuck with her job. Reluctantly, but with his usual determination, Kirk goes to her quarters to give her the news.
ELAAN: So, Ambassador Petri is going to recover? That is too bad. You have delivered your message. Now you may go.
KIRK: Nothing would please me more, Your Glory. But your impetuous nature--
ELAAN: Your Troyian pig was here in my quarters without any permission, so I stabbed him. Just to be Troyian is enough.
KIRK: You Elasians pride yourselves on being a warrior people. You must understand discipline to be able to give and take orders. My orders are to take you to Troyius to be married and to see that you learn Troyian customs.
ELAAN: I despise Troyians. Any contact with them makes me feel soiled.
KIRK: It's been my experience that the prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other.
ELAAN: It's not in my experience.
KIRK: Well, we're still faced with the same problem.
ELAAN: Problem?
KIRK: Yes, the problem of your indoctrination to Troyian customs and manners.
ELAAN: (snorts) I have eliminated that problem.
KIRK: No, you have eliminated the teacher. The problem still remains.
ELAAN: Oh. And how do we solve the problem?
KIRK: By giving you a new teacher.
ELAAN: Tell me, what can you teach me?
KIRK: Table manners, for one thing. This is a plate. It contains food. This is a knife. It cuts the food. This is a glass--
ELAAN: Leave me!
KIRK: Like it or not, you're going to learn what you've been ordered to learn.
ELAAN: You will return me to Elas immediately!
KIRK: That's impossible.
ELAAN: Everything I order is possible.
KIRK: That's the first problem we're going to work on. Then we'll get you ready to go to Troyius.
ELAAN: (screaming) I will not go to Troyius, I will not be mated to a Troyian, and I will not be humiliated, and I will not be given to a green pig as a bribe to stop a war!
KIRK: You enjoy the privileges and prerogatives of being a Dohlman. Then be worthy of them. If you don't want the obligations that go along with the title, then give it up.
ELAAN: Nobody speaks to me that way!
KIRK: That's another one of your problems. Nobody's told you that you're an uncivilized savage, a vicious child in a woman's body, an arrogant monster!
(Elaan slaps Kirk, so he slaps her back.)
KIRK: That's no way to treat someone who's telling you the truth.
(He turns to leave, she takes a knife from her sleeve and throws it. It just misses him and sticks in the wall.)
KIRK: Tomorrow's lesson will be on courtesy.
This scene has made me laugh out loud since I first viewed it as a child. There's nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a “spoiled brat” laid low. But my girlfriend did not share in my amusement. She remained silent. Later, when Kirk revisits the princesses' quarters, I had cause to laugh again, twice.
When Kirk goes to Elaan's quarters, her bodyguards prevent him from gaining entry: Spock has to stun them with his phaser. He praises Kirk for correctly predicting that Elaan would deny him entry, but expresses confusion at Elaan's reasoning, which to him, isn't logical.
"Mr. Spock," the captain replies. "The women on your planet are logical. That's the only planet in this galaxy that can make that claim."
I laughed hard at this. My girlfriend made a grumpy sound. On screen, Kirk entered the princess' quarters. Elaan immediately took another swing at him, so he forced her back down onto the bed.
ELAAN: You dare touch a member of the royal family?
KIRK: Only in self-defence. Now, are you going to behave or not?
ELAAN: The penalty is death for what you are doing!
KIRK: We're not on Elas. We're on my starship. I command here.
(She bites his hand and runs into the bathroom.)
ELAAN: You are warned, Captain, never to touch me again!
KIRK: If I touch you again, Your Glory, it'll be to administer an ancient Earth custom called a spanking, a form of punishment administered to spoiled brats!
ELAAN: You have my leave to go.
KIRK: You forget, Your Glory, we haven't started your lesson in courtesy!
ELAAN: You can teach me nothing, Captain. If I have to stay here for ten light years, I will not be soiled by any contact with you!
KIRK: Very well. I'll send in Mister Spock or Doctor McCoy. Either way, you're going to be properly prepared for Troyius. As ordered by councils, rulers, and bureaucrats!
Elaan begins to weep, and Kirk, feeling guilty, wipes away her tears, not knowing they contain a biochemical substance which enslaves those who touch them to those who shed them – a super love potion. Elaan, it seems, is so taken by Kirk's strength that she has decided he would make a perfect mate. While all this is going on, the evil Klingons show up. Having sabotaged Kirk's ship so that it is virtually helpless, they then initiate an attack. Kirk sends Elaan to sick bay, which is the safest part of the ship. There she encounters Petri, who offers her the crown jewels of Troyius.
PETRI: Now that we are all about to die, I ask you once again to accept this necklace, and to wear it as a token of respect for the desperate wishes of your people and mine for peace.
ELAAN: That's all you men of other worlds can speak of...duty and responsibility.
In the end, of course, Kirk finds a way to defeat the Klingons and save the day, but the love potion makes giving away the bride to the rulers of Troyius excruciatingly painful on him emotionally. He is only able to overcome his drug-induced love for Elaan by clinging to his sense of duty. Beautiful in her wedding gown, Elaan goes to the transporter room with the captain, looking as if she is going to her own execution.
ELAAN: You will not beam down for the ceremony?
KIRK: No.
ELAAN: I want you to have this as a personal memento. I have learned that on Troyius, they do not wear such things. Remember me.
(She hands over her dagger.)
KIRK: I have no choice.
ELAAN: Nor have I. I have only responsibilities and obligations. Goodbye.
KIRK: Goodbye.
So the episode ends. But what struck me as I discussed it with my girlfriend later was her reaction to Elaan's behavior. She did not find the princess to be “an arrogant monster” or a “spoiled brat in need of a spanking.” She found her instead a victim to be pitied.
“She didn't want to marry that guy,” my girlfriend said angrily. “But they forced her to. She was right when she said she was being given away as a bribe, like an object. Typical patriarchal bullshit. No one cared about what she wanted or how she felt about having to spend the rest of her life on an alien planet, married to someone she didn't love.”
“But she roofied Captain Kirk!” I exclaimed. “She roofied him. How is that better than an arranged marriage?”
“She was trying to escape what amounts to being sold into slavery.” She replied. “She was entitled. I mean, if you're put into prison for a crime you didn't commit, you have every right to drug the guard and try to escape."
Now, I had seen “Elaan of Troyius” God knows how many times in the previous three decades, and it had literally never occurred to me to consider what the character might have been feeling before the episode began, when she was told what her “duties and obligations” were. It never once entered my head that her anger, violence and desperation, which appear only as comic fodder when she's getting put in her place by Kirk, were totally understandable if you put yourself in her slippers. But it took my girlfriend's angry reaction to Elaan being “sold” to the Troyian king to see the situation from Elaan's perspective.
It is interesting to look at the story and see that everyone she meets -- her ruling council, Ambassador Petri, Captain Kirk -- is focused only on what they stand to gain by marrying her off to an alien ruler. No one stops to ask, "Elaan, what do you want?" Of course in the grand scale of things, it's fair to say that what she wants is not very important, since the wedding will save two races from total extermination: but the fact that our individual wants, needs, hopes, desires and dreams may not, in the words of Humphrey Bogart, "add up to a hill of beans" to other people or to the universe, don't make them any less important to us. "Duty and obligation" are very important, even vital, to the survival of society, but acknowledging the suzerainty they have over our lives shouldn't preclude us from feeling compassion for those who are their victims. But oftimes they do. I saw a heap of shattered dreams in an alley and dismissed them as junk. I saw a woman reduced to a bargaining chip and dismissed her as an uppity bitch that needed a spanking. In both cases I saw only the surface, not what lay beneath it.
I have no idea if the difference between male and female perspectives is a function of gender, which is itself supposedly a societal construct, or whether it is something sexually based, and therefore hard-wired into our bodies, like the organs that determine which sex we are. For all I know it could be both. But it is interesting, is it not, the way two human beings can look at the same object and see two completely different things? Perhaps men would benefit themselves, and those around them, if they tried, if only once in a while, to view the world from a woman's perspective.
-- Virginia Woolf
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through her body with his pen.
Behind my house in Burbank there is an alley longer than a football field. One day when my Mom was visiting from back East, I decided to take us through the alley to my back gate to save some time. As we walked, we passed a great collection of junk someone had left propped against the alley wall. These little clusters of junk are a common sight in the alleys of otherwise neat and tidy Burbank: they represent a technically illegal but commonly accepted way of disposing of things too big for the regular trash haul. By unwritten rule, they are taken away by junk prospectors or hauled off by the city. I am so used to them that I seldom cast them a glance, but my Mom, observing one pile at the mouth of the alley, commented sadly, “There's something that didn't work out.”
I looked over, and at first saw only the usual random collection of neatly stacked junk – broken bookshelves, waterlogged paperbacks, an out-of-date television, a lamp with a torn shade, this, that. But at the end of the junkpile was a box overflowing with momentos – a wedding album, loose photographs, the make-female figures that sit atop a wedding cake. The stuff that means so much to married couples when the marriage is working, and so little when the marriage fails.
As we passed the wreckage of someone's failed relationship, it struck me that I might have passed that disjecta membra a hundred times without noticing what it was or deriving any emotional response from it. My Mom, on the other hand, had needed only one glimpse to understand what it represented and feel some sorrow over a thing which had plainly not worked out. This experience triggered a memory, one which further highlighted the difference in the way men and women interpret reality and experience.
The scene was my old apartment in Park La Brea, six or seven years before. My then-girlfriend and I were tucked into the couch in front of our enormous (and enormously heavy) television, doing what might be called “DVD and chill.” Both of us had eclectic tastes in television shows: we watched everything from the Jeremy Brett “Sherlock Holmes” series to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “M*A*S*H,” “Frasier,” “The Simpsons” and God knows what else. On this particular occasion, however, we were watching the original “Star Trek.” In particular, an episode from the show's third season called “Elaan of Troyius.”
The story goes as follows. The two planets Elas and Troyius have been at war for years, and have now reached the point where further conflict will bring mutual destruction. In the hopes of bringing peace, the planets have struck upon an archaic solution: a member of the royal family of Elas will wed a member of the ruling family of Troyius and unite the two planets. As the episode opens, Captain Kirk and the Enterprise have been ordered to ferry Elaan, princess of Elas, to Troyius for the wedding. Kirk is further requested to proceed slowly, so that the Troyaan ambassador, Petri, has time to educate Elaan as to the ways of his people and prepare her for marriage.
Seems simple enough. The problem is that Elaan comes from a savage, arrogant, warlike race that is extremely short on social graces: she treats everyone on the ship like dirt, and to top it off, she doesn't want to be married off to the ruler of Troyius. When Petri attempts to present her with wedding gifts, she throws them at him and then has her bodyguards toss him out. When he returns to have a second go at her, she stabs him. Petri, recuperating in sick bay, refuses to have anything more to do with the princess, so Kirk is stuck with her job. Reluctantly, but with his usual determination, Kirk goes to her quarters to give her the news.
ELAAN: So, Ambassador Petri is going to recover? That is too bad. You have delivered your message. Now you may go.
KIRK: Nothing would please me more, Your Glory. But your impetuous nature--
ELAAN: Your Troyian pig was here in my quarters without any permission, so I stabbed him. Just to be Troyian is enough.
KIRK: You Elasians pride yourselves on being a warrior people. You must understand discipline to be able to give and take orders. My orders are to take you to Troyius to be married and to see that you learn Troyian customs.
ELAAN: I despise Troyians. Any contact with them makes me feel soiled.
KIRK: It's been my experience that the prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other.
ELAAN: It's not in my experience.
KIRK: Well, we're still faced with the same problem.
ELAAN: Problem?
KIRK: Yes, the problem of your indoctrination to Troyian customs and manners.
ELAAN: (snorts) I have eliminated that problem.
KIRK: No, you have eliminated the teacher. The problem still remains.
ELAAN: Oh. And how do we solve the problem?
KIRK: By giving you a new teacher.
ELAAN: Tell me, what can you teach me?
KIRK: Table manners, for one thing. This is a plate. It contains food. This is a knife. It cuts the food. This is a glass--
ELAAN: Leave me!
KIRK: Like it or not, you're going to learn what you've been ordered to learn.
ELAAN: You will return me to Elas immediately!
KIRK: That's impossible.
ELAAN: Everything I order is possible.
KIRK: That's the first problem we're going to work on. Then we'll get you ready to go to Troyius.
ELAAN: (screaming) I will not go to Troyius, I will not be mated to a Troyian, and I will not be humiliated, and I will not be given to a green pig as a bribe to stop a war!
KIRK: You enjoy the privileges and prerogatives of being a Dohlman. Then be worthy of them. If you don't want the obligations that go along with the title, then give it up.
ELAAN: Nobody speaks to me that way!
KIRK: That's another one of your problems. Nobody's told you that you're an uncivilized savage, a vicious child in a woman's body, an arrogant monster!
(Elaan slaps Kirk, so he slaps her back.)
KIRK: That's no way to treat someone who's telling you the truth.
(He turns to leave, she takes a knife from her sleeve and throws it. It just misses him and sticks in the wall.)
KIRK: Tomorrow's lesson will be on courtesy.
This scene has made me laugh out loud since I first viewed it as a child. There's nothing quite so satisfying as seeing a “spoiled brat” laid low. But my girlfriend did not share in my amusement. She remained silent. Later, when Kirk revisits the princesses' quarters, I had cause to laugh again, twice.
When Kirk goes to Elaan's quarters, her bodyguards prevent him from gaining entry: Spock has to stun them with his phaser. He praises Kirk for correctly predicting that Elaan would deny him entry, but expresses confusion at Elaan's reasoning, which to him, isn't logical.
"Mr. Spock," the captain replies. "The women on your planet are logical. That's the only planet in this galaxy that can make that claim."
I laughed hard at this. My girlfriend made a grumpy sound. On screen, Kirk entered the princess' quarters. Elaan immediately took another swing at him, so he forced her back down onto the bed.
ELAAN: You dare touch a member of the royal family?
KIRK: Only in self-defence. Now, are you going to behave or not?
ELAAN: The penalty is death for what you are doing!
KIRK: We're not on Elas. We're on my starship. I command here.
(She bites his hand and runs into the bathroom.)
ELAAN: You are warned, Captain, never to touch me again!
KIRK: If I touch you again, Your Glory, it'll be to administer an ancient Earth custom called a spanking, a form of punishment administered to spoiled brats!
ELAAN: You have my leave to go.
KIRK: You forget, Your Glory, we haven't started your lesson in courtesy!
ELAAN: You can teach me nothing, Captain. If I have to stay here for ten light years, I will not be soiled by any contact with you!
KIRK: Very well. I'll send in Mister Spock or Doctor McCoy. Either way, you're going to be properly prepared for Troyius. As ordered by councils, rulers, and bureaucrats!
Elaan begins to weep, and Kirk, feeling guilty, wipes away her tears, not knowing they contain a biochemical substance which enslaves those who touch them to those who shed them – a super love potion. Elaan, it seems, is so taken by Kirk's strength that she has decided he would make a perfect mate. While all this is going on, the evil Klingons show up. Having sabotaged Kirk's ship so that it is virtually helpless, they then initiate an attack. Kirk sends Elaan to sick bay, which is the safest part of the ship. There she encounters Petri, who offers her the crown jewels of Troyius.
PETRI: Now that we are all about to die, I ask you once again to accept this necklace, and to wear it as a token of respect for the desperate wishes of your people and mine for peace.
ELAAN: That's all you men of other worlds can speak of...duty and responsibility.
In the end, of course, Kirk finds a way to defeat the Klingons and save the day, but the love potion makes giving away the bride to the rulers of Troyius excruciatingly painful on him emotionally. He is only able to overcome his drug-induced love for Elaan by clinging to his sense of duty. Beautiful in her wedding gown, Elaan goes to the transporter room with the captain, looking as if she is going to her own execution.
ELAAN: You will not beam down for the ceremony?
KIRK: No.
ELAAN: I want you to have this as a personal memento. I have learned that on Troyius, they do not wear such things. Remember me.
(She hands over her dagger.)
KIRK: I have no choice.
ELAAN: Nor have I. I have only responsibilities and obligations. Goodbye.
KIRK: Goodbye.
So the episode ends. But what struck me as I discussed it with my girlfriend later was her reaction to Elaan's behavior. She did not find the princess to be “an arrogant monster” or a “spoiled brat in need of a spanking.” She found her instead a victim to be pitied.
“She didn't want to marry that guy,” my girlfriend said angrily. “But they forced her to. She was right when she said she was being given away as a bribe, like an object. Typical patriarchal bullshit. No one cared about what she wanted or how she felt about having to spend the rest of her life on an alien planet, married to someone she didn't love.”
“But she roofied Captain Kirk!” I exclaimed. “She roofied him. How is that better than an arranged marriage?”
“She was trying to escape what amounts to being sold into slavery.” She replied. “She was entitled. I mean, if you're put into prison for a crime you didn't commit, you have every right to drug the guard and try to escape."
Now, I had seen “Elaan of Troyius” God knows how many times in the previous three decades, and it had literally never occurred to me to consider what the character might have been feeling before the episode began, when she was told what her “duties and obligations” were. It never once entered my head that her anger, violence and desperation, which appear only as comic fodder when she's getting put in her place by Kirk, were totally understandable if you put yourself in her slippers. But it took my girlfriend's angry reaction to Elaan being “sold” to the Troyian king to see the situation from Elaan's perspective.
It is interesting to look at the story and see that everyone she meets -- her ruling council, Ambassador Petri, Captain Kirk -- is focused only on what they stand to gain by marrying her off to an alien ruler. No one stops to ask, "Elaan, what do you want?" Of course in the grand scale of things, it's fair to say that what she wants is not very important, since the wedding will save two races from total extermination: but the fact that our individual wants, needs, hopes, desires and dreams may not, in the words of Humphrey Bogart, "add up to a hill of beans" to other people or to the universe, don't make them any less important to us. "Duty and obligation" are very important, even vital, to the survival of society, but acknowledging the suzerainty they have over our lives shouldn't preclude us from feeling compassion for those who are their victims. But oftimes they do. I saw a heap of shattered dreams in an alley and dismissed them as junk. I saw a woman reduced to a bargaining chip and dismissed her as an uppity bitch that needed a spanking. In both cases I saw only the surface, not what lay beneath it.
I have no idea if the difference between male and female perspectives is a function of gender, which is itself supposedly a societal construct, or whether it is something sexually based, and therefore hard-wired into our bodies, like the organs that determine which sex we are. For all I know it could be both. But it is interesting, is it not, the way two human beings can look at the same object and see two completely different things? Perhaps men would benefit themselves, and those around them, if they tried, if only once in a while, to view the world from a woman's perspective.
December 2, 2018
We Wuz Robbed! or, Boxing as Bad Romance
Cage Life
Last night was, for me, rather like running into a crazy old lover from yesteryear. At first you're a bit anxious because you don't know what to expect. Then comes a surge of excitement, when you remember the passion and the pleasure she afforded you. Then, having spent some time with her, you remember why it didn't last in the first place -- namely, because she's nuttier than a shithouse rat in a peanut factory: unstable, unpredictable, untrustworthy. You leave the situation mentally and emotionally exhausted, having relived an entire affair in just a few short hours.
That's what my relationship with the sport of boxing was like. In the 1980s, I was curious and kind of wary. I watched, but I did not necessarily want to be drawn in to such a chaotic, badly run, brutal blood sport, where crooked men flourished and fighters were often treated no better than prostitutes. In the 1990s I was utterly bewitched, ensared, smitten, infatuated. The combination of savagery and technique amazed me, as did the classic appeal to spectacle and bloodlust -- the lure, one might say, of the Roman Arena. In the early 2000s, having bitten into the forbidden apple, I realized it contained more than a few brown spots as well as a worm or two: the corruption was too naked to ignore, as were the unsavory characters that seemed to be everywhere, in an out of the ring. Then, in the mid-late 00s, came the full disillusionment, the exasperation, the disgust, and finally, the divorce. Unable to take another mismatch, bad decision, obvious fix, or intrusion of crude greed and politics into what ought to have been a clean athletic contest between two fighters, I walked away, embittered and saddened, from the only sport I had ever really loved. And, when I caught glimpses of boxing over the years that followed, I saw nothing that caused me to question my leaving her. Only reminders of why I had left.
Then came last night.
For those of you who don't follow the Sweet Science, Saturday, December 1, 2018 was the date of the heavyweight championship match between Deontay Wilder (40 - 0, 38 KOs) and Tyson Fury (27 - 0, 19 KOs). On paper it was an interesting matchup. First, you had the America (Wilder) vs. Britain (Fury) boxing rivalry, which is nearly as old as boxing itself. Then you had the fact both men were undefeated, leading to the classic "somebody's 0 must go" tagline. Then there was the fact that Fury is white while Wilder is black, which doesn't mean what it used to (thank God) but still makes for an interesting visual aesthetic. Finally, the styles of each man were opposed. Wilder is an almost comically sloppy power-puncher with no technique; Fury is an actually comical defensive whiz whose herky-jerky movements are the definition of awkward. It was this that lured me to my friend Nick's house to watch the fight. In essence, it was like being invited to an intimate dinner party in which you knew you'd be paired up with the aforementioned crazy ex-lover: exciting, but also daunting. Did I really want to look into those beautiful but batshit-crazy eyes again? Did I really want to expose myself to the madness and the heartbreak? Because like many of my fellow humans, I have a taste for things that are bad for me. A genuine thirst, one might say. And since 90% of temptation is opportunity, I was well advised to stay home.
I didn't take my own advice. I seldom do. So a few hours later I ended up on the couch, beer in hand, when the opening bell rang in the contest between Mr. Wilder and Mr. Fury. I was looking my ex-lover directly in the eye, and I felt... exactly what I thought I'd feel. Anxiety. My gaze was on the television screen, but my mind was slipping back to the darkest days of my affair with the sport. To the frustration I'd felt at the way people like Don King and Bob Arum, and organizations like HBO and Showtime, had conspired countless to prevent the best fighters from fighting each other. To the dismay I'd felt at the plethora of nakedly corrupt sanctioning bodies -- WBA, WBC, IBF, WBO -- who conspired to make the word "champion" meaningless. To the disgust I'd felt at boxing judges, who seemed to be either hopelessly corrupt or hopelessly incompetent. To the way the sport itself invariably blacked its own eye every time it had a chance to present a positive face to the world -- the "Bite Fight" between Tyson and Holyfield, the horrible decision in Lewis - Holyfield I, the in-the-ring riots following Tszyu - Judah and Golota - Bowe I. These were the reasons I'd walked away. What the hell was I doing in coming back?
Anxiety, however, quickly gave way to excitement. Yes, Wilder is the sloppiest championship-caliber fighter I have ever seen, a man who seems to have learned boxing in a boxcar rather than a gym. Yes, he throws wild haymakers that are so badly telegraphed his opponents have about an hour to decide which way to duck; yes, he holds his hands way too low; and yes, his idea of throwing combinations is to throw two or at most three wild punches instead of just one. But, as as Sir Mix-a-lot would say, it's a big but, he's also so goddamned powerful that any one of those wild bombs can put your lights out at any time. Unlike most heavyweights, Wilder is not less dangerous in round 11 than he was in round 2: he carries his power to the final bell. This makes him enormously exciting. He can flatten you at any moment. He only has to be lucky once.
And Fury? He too has a host of issues. For one, he's flabby and unmuscled. This doesn't make a damn bit of difference in fighting, of course -- beautiful bodies don't win fights, else-wise Mr. Universe would be heavyweight champion -- but it made him look a bit comical next to the anatomical sketch that is Wilder. For another, his style is so frenetic and spasmodic it looks as if he's snorted two pounds of Columbian flake through a garden hose before he steps into the ring. He doesn't bob and weave so much as jitter and twitch. Nor are many of his punches thrown with any kind of force: he doesn't even close his fist when employing his left, rendering it an open-handed slap. And he has a kind of Clown Prince shtick he performs as he fights: grinning, leering, taunting, placing his hands behind his back, sticking out his chin, and -- this is the killer -- performing a kind of air-cunnilingus with his mouth when he wants to enrage his opponent. Yet somehow this shitshow, this dumpster fire of bizarre and bad behavior seem to work in "The Gypsy King's" favor. For a man of superhuman size -- he's 6'9" and 257 lbs -- he has remarkable reflexes. He can make an opponent miss, miss, and miss again, and he counters with punches from weird angles. They may not hurt very much, but the land, and they land pretty often.
The fight progressed the way you'd expect a fight between men with these attributes and failings to progress. Fury frustrated the much more powerful Wilder, taunted him, peppered him with punches. Wilder, for his part, stalked and stalked, throwing bomb after bomb that didn't land, but at every moment conveyed the impression he could end the fight with one punch. He lost rounds -- in my book, every round -- but somehow I just knew he'd find Fury's chin sooner or later. And in Round 9, he finally did.
Actually it wasn't so much the Gypsy's chin as the back of his head, which would be an illegal strike, but Fury, having bent over from the waist in a defensive movement, forfeited his right to call a foul by ducking into the blow. Down went the giant, but he got up, shook it off, and went back to work. In fact, he carried the fight to Wilder so energetically that Deontay looked, going back to his stool at the bell, like he'd been the one who'd been dropped. He was tired, discouraged, and confused, and on a trivial level, I know the feeling. I've spent enough time in and on dojos, boxing gyms and grappling mats to understand what's like to face a guy who presents a seemingly insoluble puzzle, who can take your best shots and keep coming with a smirk, who just seems to have your number firmly in his back pocket.
The fight went on, and my excitement kept rising. This was good! This was fun! This was dramatic and mesmerizing and emotional -- the Roman Arena without the guilt. This was, in fact, everything that had made me fall in love with boxing in the first place. I admired the fearless, awkward, silly-yet-effective style of Fury, and I respected the grim determination of Wilder, who seemed to retain faith that his fists could deliver him the victory in the face of superior energy and superior -- if you want to call it that, because I don't know what the hell else to call it -- technique. I was, I realized, falling in love with my lover all over again.
The twelfth and final round arrived, and now my excitement and love reached Shakespearian proportions. In the last round of a heavyweight fight, if it goes that far, you usually get two exhausted leviathans leaning on each other, gasping for breath, and only occasionally slapping punches at each other's ribs. Not so here. Fury, ignoring the danger in Wilder's hand cannons, kept coming forward, throwing his off-angle punches, twisting and contorting his body like a larger, chubbier, paler version of Darth Maul, and sticking out his tongue. Wilder, for his part, finally employed the semblance of a strategy: he began to back up instead of advancing, holding his dangerous right like a catapult ready to fly, clearly hoping Fury would step into range and skewer himself on it. And that's largely what happened. Fury crouched into a right hand, began to fall, and then ate a tremendous left hook on his way down. When he hit the canvas I shouted, "That's it, it's over, he's done!" And it really seemed that he was. He lay there, knees up, unmoving, while the ref counted. But somehow, against all the laws that ought to govern human affairs, the giant got up -- at the count of nine! -- and the fight resumed.
Wilder had looked ecstatic when he'd put Fury on his ass; he'd even begun a celebratory moonwalk. The expression on his face when the Gypsy King got up ready to resume the fight was comical -- he resembled Sarah Connor, watching the Terminator decide it wasn't done yet, nope, not by half, and never mind that it was on fire. So the action resumed. First Wilder, then Fury got the better of it, and finally, the bell rang.
Holy hell! What a fight! What a war! What an expression of determination and nearly super-human toughness! What a tribute to the Sweet Science, or at least to the manly art of fighting (neither man's technique was what you'd call "sweet")! Now I remember why I loved this lady called boxing so much! And to think I'd once called her a bitch and a whore!
My rocket had reached maximum altitude. I was high on adrenaline and excitement. I looked forward with vicarious vorfreude to Fury being awarded the WBC heavyweight championship. But what goes up, must come down, and in boxing, what usually comes down comes down hard. The judges solemnly turned in their scores, which were portentously read by the announcer, the venerable Jimmy Lennon, Jr. I'd like to say I couldn't believe what I heard, but of course I could believe it. I had put my fragile heart in the hands of this crazy lover before, and watched as she threw it as hard as she could into the nearest stone wall.
For the judges had scored the fight as follows:
115-111: Wilder
110-114: Fury
113-113: Even
A split draw! Three judges seeing three different fights, only one of which really corresponded to what had actually happened. Ah, boxing judges! You were giving us alternative facts long before Trump made it fashionable!
Realization hit me. In the middle of our wild passion, our romance-novel lovemaking, our adventure in adrenal erotica, the treacherous twat had gotten hold of my heart and shot-putted the thing into the fucking wall.
Again.
If you know anything at all about boxing, you know that the favorite narrative of promoters, sanctioning bodies and cable networks, even more than the Fake Blood Feud, is the Bullshit Rematch. Boxing has a long and sickening history of handing out ludicrous decisions to force needless, or at least questionable, second fights, so that even more money can be sucked out of the audience's pocket, and last night's fight was simply one more example of this sorry tradition -- a tradition, I might add, that was instrumental in getting me to quit boxing the first time.
There's an old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Or, as Clint Eastwood said in Two Mules for Sister Sarah: "Everyone has a right to be a sucker -once." I had gone into my original relationship with boxing in good faith, and over the course of two decades gradually come to understand that I had hitched my emotional wagon to a diseased, mean-spirited, ill-tempered horse that wanted to take me right over the nearest cliff. So I cut loose from the harness and walked away. At that moment I was in the right. I may have been a sucker, but I was a morally pure sucker, the victim of a clever seduction, a sleight-of-hand game that had convinced me the horse had been a magnificent stallion and not a mangy nag with a bad case of the strangles. When I went back last night, however, I forfeited my right to victim status. I'd been fooled twice, suckered twice, and shamed. I'd let lust overcome experience, false hope outweigh common sense. I deserved to be heartbroken. This was my thought as I sat silently on the long Uber ride back to Burbank.
So yeah, I'm done with the bitch. Done with boxing for good. Through carefully putting my Humpty-Dumpty heart back together again piece by piece only to watch Dame Boxing smash it to bits once more with her trusty sledgehammer. I refuse, categorically and absolutely, to return to Nick's house in a few months and watch the inevitable rematch between Mr. Wilder and Mr. Fury. I just won't do it. She won't get my time, she won't get my money, she won't get my hopes. I won't be fooled again. This was the last time.
(Until the next time.)
Last night was, for me, rather like running into a crazy old lover from yesteryear. At first you're a bit anxious because you don't know what to expect. Then comes a surge of excitement, when you remember the passion and the pleasure she afforded you. Then, having spent some time with her, you remember why it didn't last in the first place -- namely, because she's nuttier than a shithouse rat in a peanut factory: unstable, unpredictable, untrustworthy. You leave the situation mentally and emotionally exhausted, having relived an entire affair in just a few short hours.
That's what my relationship with the sport of boxing was like. In the 1980s, I was curious and kind of wary. I watched, but I did not necessarily want to be drawn in to such a chaotic, badly run, brutal blood sport, where crooked men flourished and fighters were often treated no better than prostitutes. In the 1990s I was utterly bewitched, ensared, smitten, infatuated. The combination of savagery and technique amazed me, as did the classic appeal to spectacle and bloodlust -- the lure, one might say, of the Roman Arena. In the early 2000s, having bitten into the forbidden apple, I realized it contained more than a few brown spots as well as a worm or two: the corruption was too naked to ignore, as were the unsavory characters that seemed to be everywhere, in an out of the ring. Then, in the mid-late 00s, came the full disillusionment, the exasperation, the disgust, and finally, the divorce. Unable to take another mismatch, bad decision, obvious fix, or intrusion of crude greed and politics into what ought to have been a clean athletic contest between two fighters, I walked away, embittered and saddened, from the only sport I had ever really loved. And, when I caught glimpses of boxing over the years that followed, I saw nothing that caused me to question my leaving her. Only reminders of why I had left.
Then came last night.
For those of you who don't follow the Sweet Science, Saturday, December 1, 2018 was the date of the heavyweight championship match between Deontay Wilder (40 - 0, 38 KOs) and Tyson Fury (27 - 0, 19 KOs). On paper it was an interesting matchup. First, you had the America (Wilder) vs. Britain (Fury) boxing rivalry, which is nearly as old as boxing itself. Then you had the fact both men were undefeated, leading to the classic "somebody's 0 must go" tagline. Then there was the fact that Fury is white while Wilder is black, which doesn't mean what it used to (thank God) but still makes for an interesting visual aesthetic. Finally, the styles of each man were opposed. Wilder is an almost comically sloppy power-puncher with no technique; Fury is an actually comical defensive whiz whose herky-jerky movements are the definition of awkward. It was this that lured me to my friend Nick's house to watch the fight. In essence, it was like being invited to an intimate dinner party in which you knew you'd be paired up with the aforementioned crazy ex-lover: exciting, but also daunting. Did I really want to look into those beautiful but batshit-crazy eyes again? Did I really want to expose myself to the madness and the heartbreak? Because like many of my fellow humans, I have a taste for things that are bad for me. A genuine thirst, one might say. And since 90% of temptation is opportunity, I was well advised to stay home.
I didn't take my own advice. I seldom do. So a few hours later I ended up on the couch, beer in hand, when the opening bell rang in the contest between Mr. Wilder and Mr. Fury. I was looking my ex-lover directly in the eye, and I felt... exactly what I thought I'd feel. Anxiety. My gaze was on the television screen, but my mind was slipping back to the darkest days of my affair with the sport. To the frustration I'd felt at the way people like Don King and Bob Arum, and organizations like HBO and Showtime, had conspired countless to prevent the best fighters from fighting each other. To the dismay I'd felt at the plethora of nakedly corrupt sanctioning bodies -- WBA, WBC, IBF, WBO -- who conspired to make the word "champion" meaningless. To the disgust I'd felt at boxing judges, who seemed to be either hopelessly corrupt or hopelessly incompetent. To the way the sport itself invariably blacked its own eye every time it had a chance to present a positive face to the world -- the "Bite Fight" between Tyson and Holyfield, the horrible decision in Lewis - Holyfield I, the in-the-ring riots following Tszyu - Judah and Golota - Bowe I. These were the reasons I'd walked away. What the hell was I doing in coming back?
Anxiety, however, quickly gave way to excitement. Yes, Wilder is the sloppiest championship-caliber fighter I have ever seen, a man who seems to have learned boxing in a boxcar rather than a gym. Yes, he throws wild haymakers that are so badly telegraphed his opponents have about an hour to decide which way to duck; yes, he holds his hands way too low; and yes, his idea of throwing combinations is to throw two or at most three wild punches instead of just one. But, as as Sir Mix-a-lot would say, it's a big but, he's also so goddamned powerful that any one of those wild bombs can put your lights out at any time. Unlike most heavyweights, Wilder is not less dangerous in round 11 than he was in round 2: he carries his power to the final bell. This makes him enormously exciting. He can flatten you at any moment. He only has to be lucky once.
And Fury? He too has a host of issues. For one, he's flabby and unmuscled. This doesn't make a damn bit of difference in fighting, of course -- beautiful bodies don't win fights, else-wise Mr. Universe would be heavyweight champion -- but it made him look a bit comical next to the anatomical sketch that is Wilder. For another, his style is so frenetic and spasmodic it looks as if he's snorted two pounds of Columbian flake through a garden hose before he steps into the ring. He doesn't bob and weave so much as jitter and twitch. Nor are many of his punches thrown with any kind of force: he doesn't even close his fist when employing his left, rendering it an open-handed slap. And he has a kind of Clown Prince shtick he performs as he fights: grinning, leering, taunting, placing his hands behind his back, sticking out his chin, and -- this is the killer -- performing a kind of air-cunnilingus with his mouth when he wants to enrage his opponent. Yet somehow this shitshow, this dumpster fire of bizarre and bad behavior seem to work in "The Gypsy King's" favor. For a man of superhuman size -- he's 6'9" and 257 lbs -- he has remarkable reflexes. He can make an opponent miss, miss, and miss again, and he counters with punches from weird angles. They may not hurt very much, but the land, and they land pretty often.
The fight progressed the way you'd expect a fight between men with these attributes and failings to progress. Fury frustrated the much more powerful Wilder, taunted him, peppered him with punches. Wilder, for his part, stalked and stalked, throwing bomb after bomb that didn't land, but at every moment conveyed the impression he could end the fight with one punch. He lost rounds -- in my book, every round -- but somehow I just knew he'd find Fury's chin sooner or later. And in Round 9, he finally did.
Actually it wasn't so much the Gypsy's chin as the back of his head, which would be an illegal strike, but Fury, having bent over from the waist in a defensive movement, forfeited his right to call a foul by ducking into the blow. Down went the giant, but he got up, shook it off, and went back to work. In fact, he carried the fight to Wilder so energetically that Deontay looked, going back to his stool at the bell, like he'd been the one who'd been dropped. He was tired, discouraged, and confused, and on a trivial level, I know the feeling. I've spent enough time in and on dojos, boxing gyms and grappling mats to understand what's like to face a guy who presents a seemingly insoluble puzzle, who can take your best shots and keep coming with a smirk, who just seems to have your number firmly in his back pocket.
The fight went on, and my excitement kept rising. This was good! This was fun! This was dramatic and mesmerizing and emotional -- the Roman Arena without the guilt. This was, in fact, everything that had made me fall in love with boxing in the first place. I admired the fearless, awkward, silly-yet-effective style of Fury, and I respected the grim determination of Wilder, who seemed to retain faith that his fists could deliver him the victory in the face of superior energy and superior -- if you want to call it that, because I don't know what the hell else to call it -- technique. I was, I realized, falling in love with my lover all over again.
The twelfth and final round arrived, and now my excitement and love reached Shakespearian proportions. In the last round of a heavyweight fight, if it goes that far, you usually get two exhausted leviathans leaning on each other, gasping for breath, and only occasionally slapping punches at each other's ribs. Not so here. Fury, ignoring the danger in Wilder's hand cannons, kept coming forward, throwing his off-angle punches, twisting and contorting his body like a larger, chubbier, paler version of Darth Maul, and sticking out his tongue. Wilder, for his part, finally employed the semblance of a strategy: he began to back up instead of advancing, holding his dangerous right like a catapult ready to fly, clearly hoping Fury would step into range and skewer himself on it. And that's largely what happened. Fury crouched into a right hand, began to fall, and then ate a tremendous left hook on his way down. When he hit the canvas I shouted, "That's it, it's over, he's done!" And it really seemed that he was. He lay there, knees up, unmoving, while the ref counted. But somehow, against all the laws that ought to govern human affairs, the giant got up -- at the count of nine! -- and the fight resumed.
Wilder had looked ecstatic when he'd put Fury on his ass; he'd even begun a celebratory moonwalk. The expression on his face when the Gypsy King got up ready to resume the fight was comical -- he resembled Sarah Connor, watching the Terminator decide it wasn't done yet, nope, not by half, and never mind that it was on fire. So the action resumed. First Wilder, then Fury got the better of it, and finally, the bell rang.
Holy hell! What a fight! What a war! What an expression of determination and nearly super-human toughness! What a tribute to the Sweet Science, or at least to the manly art of fighting (neither man's technique was what you'd call "sweet")! Now I remember why I loved this lady called boxing so much! And to think I'd once called her a bitch and a whore!
My rocket had reached maximum altitude. I was high on adrenaline and excitement. I looked forward with vicarious vorfreude to Fury being awarded the WBC heavyweight championship. But what goes up, must come down, and in boxing, what usually comes down comes down hard. The judges solemnly turned in their scores, which were portentously read by the announcer, the venerable Jimmy Lennon, Jr. I'd like to say I couldn't believe what I heard, but of course I could believe it. I had put my fragile heart in the hands of this crazy lover before, and watched as she threw it as hard as she could into the nearest stone wall.
For the judges had scored the fight as follows:
115-111: Wilder
110-114: Fury
113-113: Even
A split draw! Three judges seeing three different fights, only one of which really corresponded to what had actually happened. Ah, boxing judges! You were giving us alternative facts long before Trump made it fashionable!
Realization hit me. In the middle of our wild passion, our romance-novel lovemaking, our adventure in adrenal erotica, the treacherous twat had gotten hold of my heart and shot-putted the thing into the fucking wall.
Again.
If you know anything at all about boxing, you know that the favorite narrative of promoters, sanctioning bodies and cable networks, even more than the Fake Blood Feud, is the Bullshit Rematch. Boxing has a long and sickening history of handing out ludicrous decisions to force needless, or at least questionable, second fights, so that even more money can be sucked out of the audience's pocket, and last night's fight was simply one more example of this sorry tradition -- a tradition, I might add, that was instrumental in getting me to quit boxing the first time.
There's an old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Or, as Clint Eastwood said in Two Mules for Sister Sarah: "Everyone has a right to be a sucker -once." I had gone into my original relationship with boxing in good faith, and over the course of two decades gradually come to understand that I had hitched my emotional wagon to a diseased, mean-spirited, ill-tempered horse that wanted to take me right over the nearest cliff. So I cut loose from the harness and walked away. At that moment I was in the right. I may have been a sucker, but I was a morally pure sucker, the victim of a clever seduction, a sleight-of-hand game that had convinced me the horse had been a magnificent stallion and not a mangy nag with a bad case of the strangles. When I went back last night, however, I forfeited my right to victim status. I'd been fooled twice, suckered twice, and shamed. I'd let lust overcome experience, false hope outweigh common sense. I deserved to be heartbroken. This was my thought as I sat silently on the long Uber ride back to Burbank.
So yeah, I'm done with the bitch. Done with boxing for good. Through carefully putting my Humpty-Dumpty heart back together again piece by piece only to watch Dame Boxing smash it to bits once more with her trusty sledgehammer. I refuse, categorically and absolutely, to return to Nick's house in a few months and watch the inevitable rematch between Mr. Wilder and Mr. Fury. I just won't do it. She won't get my time, she won't get my money, she won't get my hopes. I won't be fooled again. This was the last time.
(Until the next time.)
October 26, 2018
Halloween 2018
Halloween is upon us once again, and so naturally my mind, and my gaze, have returned to such things as carving jack o' lanterns, offering unwanted critical judgments as to my neighbors Halloween decorations, and watching horror movies.
Lots and lots of horror movies.
Now it must be stated here that I need no excuse to watch said movies. For me, the author of (ahem) Devils You Know, every day is Halloween. It stands to reason, therefore, that I have put more thought than the average bloke into just what horror movies are and why we watch them. Of course, in doing this I was preceded by (among others) Stephen King, who wrote a brilliant essay on the "why" of "why do people enjoy being scared?" in his under-rated nonfiction book Danse Macabre. King's conclusion was that horror movies -- and novels -- served as a way of "feeding the gators" which swim beneath man's "civilized forebrain." In other words, they appeal to the beast within us -- not only vicariously satisfying our appetite for blood and violence, but also serving to release pent-up fears. I quite agree with Master King on this, so I'd like to take my own investigation in a different direction entirely.
I was once told there were really only two types of horror films -- the ones based on reality, and ones based on supernatural events. A reality-based horror film proposes a scenario which could happen in everyday life, however improbable it may be. These flicks play into primal fears which evolution has taught us -- fear of the dark, fear of strangers, fear of open water or the deep woods, fear of tight spaces, predatory animals and even disease. They also play on the fears we have of specific fates: being eaten alive, for example, or buried alive, or subjected to torture, or simply hunted by something larger and scarier than ourselves.
A supernaturally-based horror movie, on the other hand, is founded on ideas that are based on magic, demonic possession, communication with the dead, diabolical pacts, or some other thing for which there is no basis in scientific fact. The success of these movies is predicated on the idea that the viewer can fear something which does not exist, but this is actually not as bold a proposition as it sounds. Human beings are to some extent naturally superstitious, and for most of history tended to seek supernatural rather than scientific explanations for almost everything negative which occurred in their daily lives. Humans also seem to have an almost instinctive belief that the supernatural exists as a kind of balance for the arrogance of science, and take a macabre pleasure in envisioning scenarios in which science is helpless and only the priest, or the magic amulet, or the bubbling potion will save them.
As with all either-or choices in life, the idea that movies fall into one or other of these categories requires some qualification. It is possible for a movie with a supernatural theme to be based in reality, and it is possible (though not as common) for a film based in reality to strike a supernatural theme. As an example of the former, I would strongly argue that movies like "Friday the 13th" are reality-based, even though, as the series goes on, Jason is actually a revenant -- a supernaturally-powered being. This seeming contradiction exists because Jason's return from the grave in Part VI is simply a plot device to allow the character to keep appearing following his physical death in Part IV. At any rate, the key element of all "Friday" films is not that Jason is undead, but that he is a psychopathic murderer who tries to slaughter everyone he comes across. And however unlikely it may be, being attacked out of the blue by a person with no discernible motive is a thing that could actually happen to you, and which did in fact happen to your ancient ancestors. If you go into the woods, Jason will get you -- that is "Friday the 13th" at its simplest, and so the supernatural element of Jason himself is actually not important. The fear he engenders is based in hard, cruel reality.
As examples of reality-based horror films, a random sampling might include Friday the 13th , Ten to Midnight, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, Saw, Deliverance, Hostel, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, Wolf Creek, and Scream.
Random examples of supernatural horror movies would include the Exorcist, the Hellraiser, Amityville and Poltergeist series; the Omen trilogy, Phantasm, the Conjuring, the Annabelle movies, the Exorcism of Emily Rose, and Paranormal Activity.
Obviously, even with qualifications, the choice between A and B is a basic metric and not necessarily accurate or the final word. A movie like John Carpenter's The Thing, for example, could be considered supernatural in the sense it deals with malevolent aliens, but the fears the movie plays on -- isolation, paranoia, fear of disease -- are everyday fears. The Blair Witch Project is ostensibly about an evil witch, but it's really about the simple fear of being lost in the woods (ostensibly with a scary creature lying in wait). The Shining could be called a ghost story or a possession story, but it also plays on isolation and fear of nature. Likewise The Howling can be seen as both a fear of the Big Bad Wolf in the Woods, and also a fear of the BBW which lies within all of us. Viewed broadly, however, I think the idea of “natural vs. supernatural” offers an interesting insight into the idea of why some people are terrified of the Exorcist but yawn when they see Jason Voorhees, and why others (like me) ho-hum through The Exorcist and The Changeling and so on but can't sleep and refuse to shower immediately after watching Friday the 13 Part III or the original Black Christmas. Simply put, it boils down to what scares you.
God (or perhaps the devil) knows how many horror movies have been made over the years, but what is inarguable is that only a very, very few have made sufficient impact on our collective psyche as to elevate their antagonists to iconic status. Bela Lugosi played Dracula in 1931, and he also played a lunatic scientist named Paul Carruthers who killed his enemies with scientifically engineered bats in 1940. For which film is he remembered?
This question begs another: why do some horror movie baddies become iconic while others, even when their film-vehicle was successful, fade into oblivion? Well, I keep using the word “icon,” and I have come to believe that some horror villains survive because they are physical representations of specific fears which we all share. . In the old days of horror, Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein's monster, and pretty much anyone wrapped in enough bandages to be called a Mummy, pressed pretty hard on the public psyche. Over time, though, they lost their power to frighten and had to be replaced – and beginning in 1978, with "Halloween," they were. So without further ado, let's have a look at some of the most popular of the modern era, and what I think they actually represent.
CHUCKY ("Childs Play") is every creepy doll you ever saw on the shelf of your spinster aunt's guest bedroom at 3 AM. To some extent he's also every creepy clown you encountered at a birthday party. He's supposed to be cute and innocent and fun...but he's not. He's creepy, his offer of friendship is fake, and he's nursing some horrible agenda that probably includes taking you into a soundproof basement somewhere...the kind with a drain in the floor. The fact that you know this and your parents don't is what makes him so scary. After all, they let him in the house. And now he's in your bedroom. At three in the morning. Staring at you.
LEATHERFACE ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre") is that greasy old man who lives alone in the dilapidated house at the end of the block – on a dead-end street, no less. He drives a rusty, dirty old car and snarls every time you look at him or come near his property. Nobody knows what he does for a living. Nobody knows what goes on in his home. In real life he's probably a harmless recluse, but in your imagination he's got an attic full of mummified children and a basement full of torture tools. He's the monster that lives next door and doesn't bother to hide what he is. If you pass by his house at night or even on a quiet afternoon when there are no witnesses, you'll never be seen again. But you may be heard screaming. Leatherface is the epitome of the hostile outsider, the Other, the one who doesn't want to sit by the fire and tell ghost stories because he'd rather be the ghost. He plays by his own twisted set of rules. God help you if you play with him.
PINHEAD ("Hellraiser") is what happens when, to quote Mean Streets, you fuck around with the infinite. He's Frankenstein's monster, he's the Necronomicon, the Ouija board, the game of Bloody Mary. He's the dare to sleep in the cemetery or visit the haunted house or say the Lord's Prayer backwards. Pinhead is what happens when you knock on the forbidden door and somebody actually answers. He doesn't come to your home and kill you; he waits for you to come to him, and then smirks when you try to change your mind and leave. He's the dare you should not have taken. He's the apple in Eden, and he's also what happens to Lot's wife in the Bible. He's scary not just because of what he does to you but because you asked him to do it.
GHOSTFACE ("Scream") is a variation on a theme. Actually several themes. Like Michael Meyers, he's capricious. Like Leatherface and Freddy, he lives next door or down the street. But unlike them, he's so completely normal you'd never suspect him of even having bad manners, much less being a bloodthirsty killer who is just as happy to butcher a close friend or a lover as a complete stranger. Ghostface is not just your neighbor; he may be your friend, your brother, even your wife. In a sense, Ghostface is the dark corner within every human mind, except that his corner is a lot larger and a lot darker than most, and its full of pointy objects, and instead of avoiding it, he lives there. He's the guy who puts on the sad face over your misfortune when inside he's diabolically laughing. He's the one who lets you cry on your shoulder because your girlfriend got murdered when he was the one who killed her. He's the fear that we don't really know anyone and can't trust anyone. He's the guy who you never suspect until you feel his knife in your back.
FREDDY KRUEGER ("A Nightmare on Elm Street") is the summation of a simple fear, or rather, several simple fears. Every child wants to believe they are safe at home and that their parents will protect them from whatever comes calling which may want to do them harm. Every child wants to believe that their room is the safest place of all, and when they sleep, nothing can get them, not monsters nor madmen. Freddy is living proof that this belief is bullshit. He wants to kill you, to terrorize you and cut you to bloody ribbons, and he wants to do it not at some isolated sleep-away camp or scary abandoned house, but in your own bed, in your own house, with your parents sleeping in the next room. He wants to show you no place is safe and that no one can help you. It's this last theme that Freddy specializes in. He attacks you where you are weakest and most vulnerable, and in such a way that nobody will ever believe you except, maybe, other kids. He's like Norman Bates in Psycho, but instead of the shower, he gets you in your bed, in your dreams. The awfulness of Freddy is that he makes your bed and your dreams the scariest places on earth. That refuge you had? Gone. Welcome to adult life, where the sleepless bed is a demon playground.
MICHAEL MEYERS ("Halloween") is the Boogeyman, pure and simple. He has no personality, no language, no backstory...and no motive. Nobody knows what he looks like, really...he's just a Shape, if you will, filled with bad intentions. He is the walking embodiment of the Book of Job -- a bad thing that happens to good people for absolutely no reason. Unlike Jason, he isn't driven by a need for vengeance and he isn't interested in slaughtering everyone he meets. Oh no. He's interested in slaughtering you. Why? Because he can, that's why. Is he unfair? Oh yes. In fact he specializes in unfairness. He didn't pick you because you're bad, or even because you're good. Nobody knows why he picked you. Even he may not know. Michael is the summation of your fear of the dark, a kind of avatar of all the shapeless dreads you ever had late at night when you couldn't sleep and the branches were squeaking on the window and the closet door was a bit ajar and you wondered what the hell was lurking in it. Michael is a cancer diagnosis, he's a random madman with an axe, a faulty brake line, he's the thing that comes along out of the night and changes everything for the worse, and never once gives you a reason why he did it.
JASON VOORHEES ("Friday the 13th") is...Death. Pure and simple. He may take on the guise of a vengeance-driven madman or a killer zombie, he may tap into the primal fear of being hunted and slaughtered, but these are just clothes he wears, like his hockey mask. Jason -- I'm quoting none other than Robert Englund here -- "is death, death coming for your ass.” The mask is actually a giveaway in that regard. It's awfully reminiscent of a skull, the skull of the Reaper, with the exception that the Reaper grins and Jason has no mouth. It's not only that he is silent, but that he has nothing to say even if he could speak. Jason is all business. He's merciless. He has no pity and no remorse and no fear and he's obsessively single-minded. He wants to kill you. Why? Because you're there. Shoot him, stab him, set him on fire -- he just gets up and keeps coming. His desire for murder is insatiable. He'll kill your mom, your pregnant wife, your wheelchair-bound best friend, your brother, your dog, you, and even if you banish him tonight you can get your bottom dollar he'll be back tomorrow. Because, like Death, he won't stop until he gets you.
By now you're wondering – okay, smart guy, you know so much about fear, tell me who you're afraid of? The answer is that last fella. Jason. The big, rotting, mask-faced zombie with the machete. He scared the nuts off of me when I was nine years old, and again when I was thirteen, and he kept scaring me for decades afterwards. Old as I am now, on the right night, he can still summon up the old terror. Because I'm afraid of death? Well, yeah, sure, but no more than anyone else. It's not death – dying of old age, for example – that scares me. It's the fact that Jason is not just Death, but Death with rabies. He's random, premature, utterly pointless and meaningless death, death without dignity. After all, it's one thing to die on a battlefield for the freedom of your people, or in your own doorway with gun in hand, defending it against invaders: it's quite another to escape to a cabin for a romantic weekend and end up with a railroad spike through your forehead, for no other reason than some damnable lunatic decided to put it there.
The most interesting aspect of examining all this stuff is that as a make-up effects artist (one of the many tattered hats I wear), I have actually met a number of the people who scared the shit out of me as a kid. I've met Pinhead, I've met two of the fellas who played Jason, and I've met Freddy Krueger, too. I've seen John Carpenter, who directed The Thing, The Fog and Halloween, perform his music onstage, and attended a Q & A with Stuart Gordon, who was responsible for Re-Antimator. I've chatted with horror-movie heroines like Ashley Lawrence (Hellraiser) and Heather Langenkamp (Nightmare on Elm Street), and I've met and worked with make-up artists who worked on most of the films that I've mentioned. I've had my own hands dirtied by the foam latex and silicone and fake blood that provides a lot of the scares in these types of films, and I know as well as anyone how industrial a process making them really is. In short, I ought to be as immune as anyone could be from the power of the horror movie. But I'm not. Because while Chucky may just be a prop, and Michael a sweaty stunt man in a William Shatner mask, the things they represent are very real. That's why they scare us. And that's why we pay them to do it.
Happy Halloween.
Lots and lots of horror movies.
Now it must be stated here that I need no excuse to watch said movies. For me, the author of (ahem) Devils You Know, every day is Halloween. It stands to reason, therefore, that I have put more thought than the average bloke into just what horror movies are and why we watch them. Of course, in doing this I was preceded by (among others) Stephen King, who wrote a brilliant essay on the "why" of "why do people enjoy being scared?" in his under-rated nonfiction book Danse Macabre. King's conclusion was that horror movies -- and novels -- served as a way of "feeding the gators" which swim beneath man's "civilized forebrain." In other words, they appeal to the beast within us -- not only vicariously satisfying our appetite for blood and violence, but also serving to release pent-up fears. I quite agree with Master King on this, so I'd like to take my own investigation in a different direction entirely.
I was once told there were really only two types of horror films -- the ones based on reality, and ones based on supernatural events. A reality-based horror film proposes a scenario which could happen in everyday life, however improbable it may be. These flicks play into primal fears which evolution has taught us -- fear of the dark, fear of strangers, fear of open water or the deep woods, fear of tight spaces, predatory animals and even disease. They also play on the fears we have of specific fates: being eaten alive, for example, or buried alive, or subjected to torture, or simply hunted by something larger and scarier than ourselves.
A supernaturally-based horror movie, on the other hand, is founded on ideas that are based on magic, demonic possession, communication with the dead, diabolical pacts, or some other thing for which there is no basis in scientific fact. The success of these movies is predicated on the idea that the viewer can fear something which does not exist, but this is actually not as bold a proposition as it sounds. Human beings are to some extent naturally superstitious, and for most of history tended to seek supernatural rather than scientific explanations for almost everything negative which occurred in their daily lives. Humans also seem to have an almost instinctive belief that the supernatural exists as a kind of balance for the arrogance of science, and take a macabre pleasure in envisioning scenarios in which science is helpless and only the priest, or the magic amulet, or the bubbling potion will save them.
As with all either-or choices in life, the idea that movies fall into one or other of these categories requires some qualification. It is possible for a movie with a supernatural theme to be based in reality, and it is possible (though not as common) for a film based in reality to strike a supernatural theme. As an example of the former, I would strongly argue that movies like "Friday the 13th" are reality-based, even though, as the series goes on, Jason is actually a revenant -- a supernaturally-powered being. This seeming contradiction exists because Jason's return from the grave in Part VI is simply a plot device to allow the character to keep appearing following his physical death in Part IV. At any rate, the key element of all "Friday" films is not that Jason is undead, but that he is a psychopathic murderer who tries to slaughter everyone he comes across. And however unlikely it may be, being attacked out of the blue by a person with no discernible motive is a thing that could actually happen to you, and which did in fact happen to your ancient ancestors. If you go into the woods, Jason will get you -- that is "Friday the 13th" at its simplest, and so the supernatural element of Jason himself is actually not important. The fear he engenders is based in hard, cruel reality.
As examples of reality-based horror films, a random sampling might include Friday the 13th , Ten to Midnight, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, Saw, Deliverance, Hostel, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, Wolf Creek, and Scream.
Random examples of supernatural horror movies would include the Exorcist, the Hellraiser, Amityville and Poltergeist series; the Omen trilogy, Phantasm, the Conjuring, the Annabelle movies, the Exorcism of Emily Rose, and Paranormal Activity.
Obviously, even with qualifications, the choice between A and B is a basic metric and not necessarily accurate or the final word. A movie like John Carpenter's The Thing, for example, could be considered supernatural in the sense it deals with malevolent aliens, but the fears the movie plays on -- isolation, paranoia, fear of disease -- are everyday fears. The Blair Witch Project is ostensibly about an evil witch, but it's really about the simple fear of being lost in the woods (ostensibly with a scary creature lying in wait). The Shining could be called a ghost story or a possession story, but it also plays on isolation and fear of nature. Likewise The Howling can be seen as both a fear of the Big Bad Wolf in the Woods, and also a fear of the BBW which lies within all of us. Viewed broadly, however, I think the idea of “natural vs. supernatural” offers an interesting insight into the idea of why some people are terrified of the Exorcist but yawn when they see Jason Voorhees, and why others (like me) ho-hum through The Exorcist and The Changeling and so on but can't sleep and refuse to shower immediately after watching Friday the 13 Part III or the original Black Christmas. Simply put, it boils down to what scares you.
God (or perhaps the devil) knows how many horror movies have been made over the years, but what is inarguable is that only a very, very few have made sufficient impact on our collective psyche as to elevate their antagonists to iconic status. Bela Lugosi played Dracula in 1931, and he also played a lunatic scientist named Paul Carruthers who killed his enemies with scientifically engineered bats in 1940. For which film is he remembered?
This question begs another: why do some horror movie baddies become iconic while others, even when their film-vehicle was successful, fade into oblivion? Well, I keep using the word “icon,” and I have come to believe that some horror villains survive because they are physical representations of specific fears which we all share. . In the old days of horror, Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein's monster, and pretty much anyone wrapped in enough bandages to be called a Mummy, pressed pretty hard on the public psyche. Over time, though, they lost their power to frighten and had to be replaced – and beginning in 1978, with "Halloween," they were. So without further ado, let's have a look at some of the most popular of the modern era, and what I think they actually represent.
CHUCKY ("Childs Play") is every creepy doll you ever saw on the shelf of your spinster aunt's guest bedroom at 3 AM. To some extent he's also every creepy clown you encountered at a birthday party. He's supposed to be cute and innocent and fun...but he's not. He's creepy, his offer of friendship is fake, and he's nursing some horrible agenda that probably includes taking you into a soundproof basement somewhere...the kind with a drain in the floor. The fact that you know this and your parents don't is what makes him so scary. After all, they let him in the house. And now he's in your bedroom. At three in the morning. Staring at you.
LEATHERFACE ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre") is that greasy old man who lives alone in the dilapidated house at the end of the block – on a dead-end street, no less. He drives a rusty, dirty old car and snarls every time you look at him or come near his property. Nobody knows what he does for a living. Nobody knows what goes on in his home. In real life he's probably a harmless recluse, but in your imagination he's got an attic full of mummified children and a basement full of torture tools. He's the monster that lives next door and doesn't bother to hide what he is. If you pass by his house at night or even on a quiet afternoon when there are no witnesses, you'll never be seen again. But you may be heard screaming. Leatherface is the epitome of the hostile outsider, the Other, the one who doesn't want to sit by the fire and tell ghost stories because he'd rather be the ghost. He plays by his own twisted set of rules. God help you if you play with him.
PINHEAD ("Hellraiser") is what happens when, to quote Mean Streets, you fuck around with the infinite. He's Frankenstein's monster, he's the Necronomicon, the Ouija board, the game of Bloody Mary. He's the dare to sleep in the cemetery or visit the haunted house or say the Lord's Prayer backwards. Pinhead is what happens when you knock on the forbidden door and somebody actually answers. He doesn't come to your home and kill you; he waits for you to come to him, and then smirks when you try to change your mind and leave. He's the dare you should not have taken. He's the apple in Eden, and he's also what happens to Lot's wife in the Bible. He's scary not just because of what he does to you but because you asked him to do it.
GHOSTFACE ("Scream") is a variation on a theme. Actually several themes. Like Michael Meyers, he's capricious. Like Leatherface and Freddy, he lives next door or down the street. But unlike them, he's so completely normal you'd never suspect him of even having bad manners, much less being a bloodthirsty killer who is just as happy to butcher a close friend or a lover as a complete stranger. Ghostface is not just your neighbor; he may be your friend, your brother, even your wife. In a sense, Ghostface is the dark corner within every human mind, except that his corner is a lot larger and a lot darker than most, and its full of pointy objects, and instead of avoiding it, he lives there. He's the guy who puts on the sad face over your misfortune when inside he's diabolically laughing. He's the one who lets you cry on your shoulder because your girlfriend got murdered when he was the one who killed her. He's the fear that we don't really know anyone and can't trust anyone. He's the guy who you never suspect until you feel his knife in your back.
FREDDY KRUEGER ("A Nightmare on Elm Street") is the summation of a simple fear, or rather, several simple fears. Every child wants to believe they are safe at home and that their parents will protect them from whatever comes calling which may want to do them harm. Every child wants to believe that their room is the safest place of all, and when they sleep, nothing can get them, not monsters nor madmen. Freddy is living proof that this belief is bullshit. He wants to kill you, to terrorize you and cut you to bloody ribbons, and he wants to do it not at some isolated sleep-away camp or scary abandoned house, but in your own bed, in your own house, with your parents sleeping in the next room. He wants to show you no place is safe and that no one can help you. It's this last theme that Freddy specializes in. He attacks you where you are weakest and most vulnerable, and in such a way that nobody will ever believe you except, maybe, other kids. He's like Norman Bates in Psycho, but instead of the shower, he gets you in your bed, in your dreams. The awfulness of Freddy is that he makes your bed and your dreams the scariest places on earth. That refuge you had? Gone. Welcome to adult life, where the sleepless bed is a demon playground.
MICHAEL MEYERS ("Halloween") is the Boogeyman, pure and simple. He has no personality, no language, no backstory...and no motive. Nobody knows what he looks like, really...he's just a Shape, if you will, filled with bad intentions. He is the walking embodiment of the Book of Job -- a bad thing that happens to good people for absolutely no reason. Unlike Jason, he isn't driven by a need for vengeance and he isn't interested in slaughtering everyone he meets. Oh no. He's interested in slaughtering you. Why? Because he can, that's why. Is he unfair? Oh yes. In fact he specializes in unfairness. He didn't pick you because you're bad, or even because you're good. Nobody knows why he picked you. Even he may not know. Michael is the summation of your fear of the dark, a kind of avatar of all the shapeless dreads you ever had late at night when you couldn't sleep and the branches were squeaking on the window and the closet door was a bit ajar and you wondered what the hell was lurking in it. Michael is a cancer diagnosis, he's a random madman with an axe, a faulty brake line, he's the thing that comes along out of the night and changes everything for the worse, and never once gives you a reason why he did it.
JASON VOORHEES ("Friday the 13th") is...Death. Pure and simple. He may take on the guise of a vengeance-driven madman or a killer zombie, he may tap into the primal fear of being hunted and slaughtered, but these are just clothes he wears, like his hockey mask. Jason -- I'm quoting none other than Robert Englund here -- "is death, death coming for your ass.” The mask is actually a giveaway in that regard. It's awfully reminiscent of a skull, the skull of the Reaper, with the exception that the Reaper grins and Jason has no mouth. It's not only that he is silent, but that he has nothing to say even if he could speak. Jason is all business. He's merciless. He has no pity and no remorse and no fear and he's obsessively single-minded. He wants to kill you. Why? Because you're there. Shoot him, stab him, set him on fire -- he just gets up and keeps coming. His desire for murder is insatiable. He'll kill your mom, your pregnant wife, your wheelchair-bound best friend, your brother, your dog, you, and even if you banish him tonight you can get your bottom dollar he'll be back tomorrow. Because, like Death, he won't stop until he gets you.
By now you're wondering – okay, smart guy, you know so much about fear, tell me who you're afraid of? The answer is that last fella. Jason. The big, rotting, mask-faced zombie with the machete. He scared the nuts off of me when I was nine years old, and again when I was thirteen, and he kept scaring me for decades afterwards. Old as I am now, on the right night, he can still summon up the old terror. Because I'm afraid of death? Well, yeah, sure, but no more than anyone else. It's not death – dying of old age, for example – that scares me. It's the fact that Jason is not just Death, but Death with rabies. He's random, premature, utterly pointless and meaningless death, death without dignity. After all, it's one thing to die on a battlefield for the freedom of your people, or in your own doorway with gun in hand, defending it against invaders: it's quite another to escape to a cabin for a romantic weekend and end up with a railroad spike through your forehead, for no other reason than some damnable lunatic decided to put it there.
The most interesting aspect of examining all this stuff is that as a make-up effects artist (one of the many tattered hats I wear), I have actually met a number of the people who scared the shit out of me as a kid. I've met Pinhead, I've met two of the fellas who played Jason, and I've met Freddy Krueger, too. I've seen John Carpenter, who directed The Thing, The Fog and Halloween, perform his music onstage, and attended a Q & A with Stuart Gordon, who was responsible for Re-Antimator. I've chatted with horror-movie heroines like Ashley Lawrence (Hellraiser) and Heather Langenkamp (Nightmare on Elm Street), and I've met and worked with make-up artists who worked on most of the films that I've mentioned. I've had my own hands dirtied by the foam latex and silicone and fake blood that provides a lot of the scares in these types of films, and I know as well as anyone how industrial a process making them really is. In short, I ought to be as immune as anyone could be from the power of the horror movie. But I'm not. Because while Chucky may just be a prop, and Michael a sweaty stunt man in a William Shatner mask, the things they represent are very real. That's why they scare us. And that's why we pay them to do it.
Happy Halloween.
October 9, 2018
Space X: or, memories of the Cold War
Last night I went outside to watch the launch of the latest Space X rocket. My expectations were extremely low. In my experience, skywatching almost invariably leads to disappointment. Blood moons, blue moons, lunar eclipses, solar eclipses, such-and-such comet, the perihelion of Mars -- somehow whatever it is, it never meets my expectations, and I figured that if nature couldn't raise my jaded eyebrows, what chance did a man-made rocket have?
As it turned out, I was wrong, wrong by a very wide margin. What unfolded before my I eyes last night was spectacularly beautiful. First we saw the rocket blasting upward into the heavens, a huge orange-red fireball rising on a column of smoke. Then it seemed to disappear, only to emerge Phoenix-like a few moments later amid a huge, slowly expanding corona of blue-gray gas. I am not exaggerating when I say that it was like watching the universe being created -- a nebula of light that slowly filled the lower quadrant of the sky like a newly-born cosmos. And through this, the fiery ascent continued, doubled when the rocket separated into its two sections, effectively doubling the spectacle.
As I've said, the whole process was breathtaking to witness. But beneath the feeling of awe and silly happiness which overcomes me every time I see anything awe-inspiring, came a completely unexpected sensation of animal terror. At first I couldn't understand why I was experiencing it, and indeed, it took a few minutes to puzzle out why such a rewarding and rare sight would trigger the fear-centers of my brain. Then, as the rocket's decidedly red glare dwindled to a pinpoint, it hit me: I had stumbled into one of those abandoned, forgotten, deeply entombed memory-vaults which all of us carry somewhere in the center of our brains. And this particular vault, which more resembled a mausoleum than anything else, read COLD WAR CHILDHOOD - DO NOT OPEN.
When I first saw daylight in 1972, the Cold War was already a quarter century old and showed every sign of either lasting forever or ending with a tremendous bang. Neither outcome was particularly attractive. Endless continuation meant endless tension, endless fear, and, perhaps worst of all, an endless sensation of futility. When you think the world may blow itself to bits at any moment, the idea of long-term planning vis-à-vis your own life seems pointless. Indeed, though I was by no means part of the punk movement, the attitude I had during my later childhood and early teenage years was essentially a punk attitude -- apathetic, nihilistic, angry. It was best summed up by the lyrics of Mayhem's 1982 song "Choke":
I don't know why you're trying – give up
You know you're gonna die – give up
It's all a stupid joke – give up
I want to see you choke, choke, choke
Mushroom cloud in the sky
Pass the bottles, see the city fry
Load the gun, aim it at your head
Pull a trigger, you're better off dead!
As you can see, there's an inherent contradiction in being placed between these two millstones -- on the one side, waiting for something you don't want to happen but which feels so inevitable you just wish they'd push the button and get it over with, and on the other, hoping like hell you never woke up to see "the mushroom cloud in the sky" since it would not only mean your own destruction, but that of everyone you knew, and indeed, of the entire world itself.
In his minor masterpiece Coming Up For Air, George Orwell's protagonist George Bowling tells the reader that the unique feature of growing up during the late-Victorian/early-Edwardian era was the belief people had back then that their society would last forever. They themselves would die, but British society would not. It took the "bloody balls-up" of the First World War to shake that belief, but even then, the idea that Britain might be physically destroyed, wiped out annihilated, was beyond them, for no weapons existed or even could be imagined that would achieve this. Having been born decades after the fictitious Bowling, I did not have that luxury. I knew even as a child that there were something like 13,000 nuclear missiles sitting in silos all over the planet, primed, ready and waiting to do its part into turning the green and verdant planet upon which I resided into a radioactive cinder hanging in space. There was literally no escape from the knowledge. It was everywhere -- in magazines, in newspapers, on television, in film, in the table-talk of my parents, even in comic books. It was for the most part background music to our daily lives, but the music never switched off, and every now and again some incident would ratchet up the tension still further and make me wonder if the day hadn't arrived at last that I'd go outside and see rocket contrails streaking across the Maryland sky.
Every life has contains a pattern of awareness. In what we call "normal, well-adjusted" people, the harsh realities of life are at first vaguely suspected, then slowly understood, and then finally accepted. This process is gradual and, in a prosperous country like America, often takes several decades, with the very toughest lessons reserved for middle age. In my particular case, this awareness was accelerated, partially by unhappy school experiences beginning around the age of ten, but perhaps just as much by the overall atmosphere that came with living next to Washington, D.C. at the height of the Cold War. While still a young boy who did not grasp much, I understood most intimately the meaning of Yeats' infamous poem, "Second Coming:"
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
For those who think I may be indulging in some pretentious melodrama, it's important to remember just how intense the rivalry between the West and the East was during the Reagan era -- especially the period 1981 - 1987, and how many times we seemed on the brink of world war and self-annihilation. By the time I was in fifth grade I took it as an article of faith, as did every one of my friends, that we would almost certainly never live to adulthood, and I have a vivid memory of expressing gratitude that we resided so close to the White House and the Pentagon: I knew none of us would suffer when the war began. How could we, when literally hundreds of Soviet warheads were trained on our very households? A loud rumble, a flash of light -- and then nothingness. That was how the War -- and my own existence -- would end. It seemed immensely preferable to the sort of tormented half-life the survivors would have to endure, wandering amongst the rubble -- possibly for years -- before radiation sickness or starvation or a follow-up barrage of nuclear missiles finally finished them off.
I can't swear to this, but I believe it to be a normal state of affairs in most societies that children begin their lives with an unwavering faith in the wisdom and probity of their parents and leaders and then only gradually -- and in some cases never -- lose this faith. In my case, that naivete never really existed. I knew while still in the single digits the world was a terrifying place, bristling with doomsday armaments, awash in corruption and pollution, planned and organized by lunatics and run by fools. I knew as well that it might cease to exist at any moment. It was, as the saying went, only the push of a button away. This knowledge did not discount the existence of such things as love, friendship, pleasure or happiness, but it did make them harder to come by, and, once acquired, difficult to keep. And it heightened my awareness of my own mortality. When your life depends on the whims and caprices of world leaders who are only dubiously sane, one does not view time as an inexhaustible commodity. Life, too, falls apart, and the more effort expended to make it permanent and safe, the higher and narrower the pedestal upon which it sits seems to become...and the more violent its inevitable crash. So I believed, anyway, when I was a child. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that this period is when I first picked up a pen and began to explore the world around me through fiction. For me, then as now, writing was not merely a way to vent creativity or exercise control, but to come to terms with a universe governed by the one-way flow of time. What is time, after all, but entropy -- and what is entropy but things falling apart?
For my part, I watched the rocket fall apart, and then went back inside. I was still bewitched by the beauty of what I'd seen, and still trembly from having unwittingly opened a vault of old childhood fears. Sitting down in front of my laptop, I thought about the apocalyptic nature of the stories I've been writing lately. In a sense they are an acknowledgement that the world is a place where chaos and ruin are easier to come by than order and stability; but in another sense they are a middle finger extended at time and its hatchetman, entropy. Because, you see, just because things fall apart, doesn't mean I want them to. Like everyone else I'd rather the goddamned center stayed where it was. I don't want the button pushed, I don't want the ice caps to melt, I don't want the rain forests shaved flat or the oceans poisoned, but I feel helpless to do anything about any of it. I'm one man, not a terribly significant one and certainly not one with any financial power. Much of the punk attitude which I formed as a twelve year-old has returned to me against my will and, until I saw the rocket, without my knowledge. I realize I'm angry and seized by a sense of futility, yet at the same time helpless, fatalistic. But I'm not nihilistic anymore, and neither am I totally apathetic. If you read my work, you'll find occasionally -- just occasionally mind you, but often enough that you can't take it for granted otherwise - that the center does hold. Things fall apart. But sometimes they stick together. If only in a story.
Carl Sagan once questioned, not rhetorically, if self-destruction was the inevitable end of every sentient species in the universe. Human beings certainly do have a propensity for cutting things down and blowing them up. The Cold War was a symptom an illness, and the present war we're fighting against our own planet -- a slow-motion war, measured in hurricanes, floods, droughts, extinctions and rising tides -- is also a symptom. The disease is us. But -- and here is where I think I have actually progressed as a person in thirty-odd years -- I believe the disease has a cure. Watching a rocket whose purpose was not annihilation and mass murder, but the betterment of mankind (at least in theory) reminded me that we are not only capable of greatness as well as villainy, we're also capable of change.
Not a bad night's work.
As it turned out, I was wrong, wrong by a very wide margin. What unfolded before my I eyes last night was spectacularly beautiful. First we saw the rocket blasting upward into the heavens, a huge orange-red fireball rising on a column of smoke. Then it seemed to disappear, only to emerge Phoenix-like a few moments later amid a huge, slowly expanding corona of blue-gray gas. I am not exaggerating when I say that it was like watching the universe being created -- a nebula of light that slowly filled the lower quadrant of the sky like a newly-born cosmos. And through this, the fiery ascent continued, doubled when the rocket separated into its two sections, effectively doubling the spectacle.
As I've said, the whole process was breathtaking to witness. But beneath the feeling of awe and silly happiness which overcomes me every time I see anything awe-inspiring, came a completely unexpected sensation of animal terror. At first I couldn't understand why I was experiencing it, and indeed, it took a few minutes to puzzle out why such a rewarding and rare sight would trigger the fear-centers of my brain. Then, as the rocket's decidedly red glare dwindled to a pinpoint, it hit me: I had stumbled into one of those abandoned, forgotten, deeply entombed memory-vaults which all of us carry somewhere in the center of our brains. And this particular vault, which more resembled a mausoleum than anything else, read COLD WAR CHILDHOOD - DO NOT OPEN.
When I first saw daylight in 1972, the Cold War was already a quarter century old and showed every sign of either lasting forever or ending with a tremendous bang. Neither outcome was particularly attractive. Endless continuation meant endless tension, endless fear, and, perhaps worst of all, an endless sensation of futility. When you think the world may blow itself to bits at any moment, the idea of long-term planning vis-à-vis your own life seems pointless. Indeed, though I was by no means part of the punk movement, the attitude I had during my later childhood and early teenage years was essentially a punk attitude -- apathetic, nihilistic, angry. It was best summed up by the lyrics of Mayhem's 1982 song "Choke":
I don't know why you're trying – give up
You know you're gonna die – give up
It's all a stupid joke – give up
I want to see you choke, choke, choke
Mushroom cloud in the sky
Pass the bottles, see the city fry
Load the gun, aim it at your head
Pull a trigger, you're better off dead!
As you can see, there's an inherent contradiction in being placed between these two millstones -- on the one side, waiting for something you don't want to happen but which feels so inevitable you just wish they'd push the button and get it over with, and on the other, hoping like hell you never woke up to see "the mushroom cloud in the sky" since it would not only mean your own destruction, but that of everyone you knew, and indeed, of the entire world itself.
In his minor masterpiece Coming Up For Air, George Orwell's protagonist George Bowling tells the reader that the unique feature of growing up during the late-Victorian/early-Edwardian era was the belief people had back then that their society would last forever. They themselves would die, but British society would not. It took the "bloody balls-up" of the First World War to shake that belief, but even then, the idea that Britain might be physically destroyed, wiped out annihilated, was beyond them, for no weapons existed or even could be imagined that would achieve this. Having been born decades after the fictitious Bowling, I did not have that luxury. I knew even as a child that there were something like 13,000 nuclear missiles sitting in silos all over the planet, primed, ready and waiting to do its part into turning the green and verdant planet upon which I resided into a radioactive cinder hanging in space. There was literally no escape from the knowledge. It was everywhere -- in magazines, in newspapers, on television, in film, in the table-talk of my parents, even in comic books. It was for the most part background music to our daily lives, but the music never switched off, and every now and again some incident would ratchet up the tension still further and make me wonder if the day hadn't arrived at last that I'd go outside and see rocket contrails streaking across the Maryland sky.
Every life has contains a pattern of awareness. In what we call "normal, well-adjusted" people, the harsh realities of life are at first vaguely suspected, then slowly understood, and then finally accepted. This process is gradual and, in a prosperous country like America, often takes several decades, with the very toughest lessons reserved for middle age. In my particular case, this awareness was accelerated, partially by unhappy school experiences beginning around the age of ten, but perhaps just as much by the overall atmosphere that came with living next to Washington, D.C. at the height of the Cold War. While still a young boy who did not grasp much, I understood most intimately the meaning of Yeats' infamous poem, "Second Coming:"
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
For those who think I may be indulging in some pretentious melodrama, it's important to remember just how intense the rivalry between the West and the East was during the Reagan era -- especially the period 1981 - 1987, and how many times we seemed on the brink of world war and self-annihilation. By the time I was in fifth grade I took it as an article of faith, as did every one of my friends, that we would almost certainly never live to adulthood, and I have a vivid memory of expressing gratitude that we resided so close to the White House and the Pentagon: I knew none of us would suffer when the war began. How could we, when literally hundreds of Soviet warheads were trained on our very households? A loud rumble, a flash of light -- and then nothingness. That was how the War -- and my own existence -- would end. It seemed immensely preferable to the sort of tormented half-life the survivors would have to endure, wandering amongst the rubble -- possibly for years -- before radiation sickness or starvation or a follow-up barrage of nuclear missiles finally finished them off.
I can't swear to this, but I believe it to be a normal state of affairs in most societies that children begin their lives with an unwavering faith in the wisdom and probity of their parents and leaders and then only gradually -- and in some cases never -- lose this faith. In my case, that naivete never really existed. I knew while still in the single digits the world was a terrifying place, bristling with doomsday armaments, awash in corruption and pollution, planned and organized by lunatics and run by fools. I knew as well that it might cease to exist at any moment. It was, as the saying went, only the push of a button away. This knowledge did not discount the existence of such things as love, friendship, pleasure or happiness, but it did make them harder to come by, and, once acquired, difficult to keep. And it heightened my awareness of my own mortality. When your life depends on the whims and caprices of world leaders who are only dubiously sane, one does not view time as an inexhaustible commodity. Life, too, falls apart, and the more effort expended to make it permanent and safe, the higher and narrower the pedestal upon which it sits seems to become...and the more violent its inevitable crash. So I believed, anyway, when I was a child. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that this period is when I first picked up a pen and began to explore the world around me through fiction. For me, then as now, writing was not merely a way to vent creativity or exercise control, but to come to terms with a universe governed by the one-way flow of time. What is time, after all, but entropy -- and what is entropy but things falling apart?
For my part, I watched the rocket fall apart, and then went back inside. I was still bewitched by the beauty of what I'd seen, and still trembly from having unwittingly opened a vault of old childhood fears. Sitting down in front of my laptop, I thought about the apocalyptic nature of the stories I've been writing lately. In a sense they are an acknowledgement that the world is a place where chaos and ruin are easier to come by than order and stability; but in another sense they are a middle finger extended at time and its hatchetman, entropy. Because, you see, just because things fall apart, doesn't mean I want them to. Like everyone else I'd rather the goddamned center stayed where it was. I don't want the button pushed, I don't want the ice caps to melt, I don't want the rain forests shaved flat or the oceans poisoned, but I feel helpless to do anything about any of it. I'm one man, not a terribly significant one and certainly not one with any financial power. Much of the punk attitude which I formed as a twelve year-old has returned to me against my will and, until I saw the rocket, without my knowledge. I realize I'm angry and seized by a sense of futility, yet at the same time helpless, fatalistic. But I'm not nihilistic anymore, and neither am I totally apathetic. If you read my work, you'll find occasionally -- just occasionally mind you, but often enough that you can't take it for granted otherwise - that the center does hold. Things fall apart. But sometimes they stick together. If only in a story.
Carl Sagan once questioned, not rhetorically, if self-destruction was the inevitable end of every sentient species in the universe. Human beings certainly do have a propensity for cutting things down and blowing them up. The Cold War was a symptom an illness, and the present war we're fighting against our own planet -- a slow-motion war, measured in hurricanes, floods, droughts, extinctions and rising tides -- is also a symptom. The disease is us. But -- and here is where I think I have actually progressed as a person in thirty-odd years -- I believe the disease has a cure. Watching a rocket whose purpose was not annihilation and mass murder, but the betterment of mankind (at least in theory) reminded me that we are not only capable of greatness as well as villainy, we're also capable of change.
Not a bad night's work.
September 3, 2018
Even Now: Anthony Bourdain and the Suicide Solution
Oh, forgive me father, for I have sinned
I've been through hell and back again
I shook hands with the devil
Looked 'em in the eye
Looked like a long lost friend
Oh, anything you want, any dirty deeds
He's got everything -- except what I really need
Keeping me temporarily satisfied
But not one thing I've tried
Filled me up inside or felt like mine
Mine, all mine.
-- Van Halen
The living's in the way we die.
-- Ah-Ha
When celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain took his own life in a Paris hotel room a few months ago, the reaction of the press taught me a lot about the way suicide is approached in what is sometimes called “the national conversation.” Journalists circled around the story in tornado-like fashion, whirling details into our collective face for weeks afterward. We were briefed on every detail of Bourdain's upbringing and career, the various high-profile feuds in which he'd engaged, the details of his relationship with actress Asia Argento, the aggressive role he'd taken in what is known as the #metoo movement. We got reams of tributes from fellow chefs, television personalities and internet celebrities, and were constantly reminded about his hit television show, “Destination Unknown,” and his bestselling books, including “Kitchen Confidential,” which briefly became a scripted TV series. The actual details of his death, however, remained curiously elusive, even after sufficient time had passed for them to become public, either by virtue of official pronouncements or leaks to the press. Many of the reports I read repeated the same line almost verbatim: Bourdain had been “found unresponsive” in his hotel room by fellow chef Eric Ripert, and had later been pronounced dead. It took me some time to confirm an early rumor that had fleetingly appeared on the Net immediately following the news of his demise: Bourdain had hanged himself.
To concentrate on such a morbid detail may strike the reader as pointless or macabre, but the reluctance of the press, which under ordinary circumstances pants like a horny high school student at the thought of tragic or salacious details, especially as they regard celebrities, to come clean about the manner in which Bourdain shed this vale of tears is illustrative of a much greater problem in our society, to wit: the way we deal with suicide, and the conditions which drive people to commit it.
In every country and culture, there are social taboos, subjects that cannot be broached without considerable backlash. British society, for many centuries, was governed by the principle summed up in a single sentence: “It simply isn't done.” And that which was “not done” was not only not to be done, it was not to be discussed. Such a system was surprisingly effective for ensuring that topics like venereal disease, homosexuality, alcoholism and drug abuse, bankruptcy, social inequality, deformity or retardation in children, spousal abuse were swept under the societal rug. On the other hand, it created an environment in which the undiscussed also festered, for the simple reason that no problem can be solved unless and until it is first acknowledged. In American society, there are relatively few social taboos that remain universal throughout this remarkably vast and diverse nation, but mental illness and depression are high among them, and suicide, the unholy spawn of these bastards, probably chief. The press reported honestly that Anthony Bourdain killed himself. In showing a squeamish reluctance to discuss the manner by which he took his life, however, they made it clear that when it comes to suicide, it is simply “not done” to go into too many details. Even now, in an age when the Internet has made accessing atrocity as easy as clicking on a hyperlink, suicide remains shrouded in mystery.
The conscious motive behind this is probably decent enough, i.e. to spare the family, loved ones and fans the gruesome details, but the decency is misplaced, because the unconscious driving force behind the motive is undoubtedly embarrassment. To kill oneself is seen as a shameful and disgusting act, and so it is easier to write that Bordain was “found unresponsive” than “found hanging from a luggage strap.” The idea is that softening the details grants the dead person dignity. That it may. What it does not do, and I understand that I am repeating myself here, is drive home the horror of suicide and the conditions which precipitate it. These need to be discussed fearlessly, ruthlessly and honestly. To describe the circumstances of a particular death is simple enough if one is willing to skirt the taboo, but to discuss the series of events which trigger self-destruction is more difficult, because it is here that the the fears and loathings which created the taboo in the first place confront us.
Let us take celebrity suicide. This has become so common that it is difficult for the press to keep up with it. Robin Williams died by hanging. Fashion maven Kate Spade killed herself the same week as Bourdain. Chris Cornell of Soundgarden hanged himself, and not long afterward so did his close friend Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. Stephanie Adams, a former Playboy playmate, threw herself off a building. Tony Scott, director of mega-hits like TOP GUN and BEVERLY HILLS COP II, jumped off a bridge. Michael Ruppert, author of PRESIDENTIAL ENERGY POLICY, which became the basis of the popular documentary THE COLLAPSE, shot himself. In each case there is a tendency, perhaps understandable, to ask why one should be feel sorry for wealthy, often famous people who can't find a reason to live but evidently can find at least one compelling reason to die. Yet the rash of celebrity and quasi-celebrity suicides is simply a bellwether of a much larger trend in American society, one which tends to cut across economic lines. According to the CDC, the suicide rate in the United States has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, rising by 25% overall, with twenty-five states reporting increases of up to 30% in that time period. Suicide is now the tenth leading cause of death in this country, claiming 42,773 lives each year – and this, at a time when prescription of psychiatric drugs is at an all-time high: approximately 33 million adults are on medication, i.e. 10% of the entire country; but the figures for children are especially appalling. Information supplied by the mental health watchdog CCHR indicates that 2.1 million kids are on antidepressants; 1.2 million on antipsychotics, and 1.4 million on anti-anxiety meds.
These figures obviously demands a series of questions, but the most obvious, and the most pressing, is why. The United States, for all of its problems, is one of the crown-jewel nations of the earth. Education is free until the eighteenth year. Credit allows people of low economic standing to live a full class above their means. Compared to much of the rest of the planet, we possess an abundance of food, natural resources and living space. We have no fear of foreign invasion and the threat of nuclear war is a faint fraction of what it was during the Cold War. Political violence of the sort that plagues much of the rest of the planet is almost non-existent, and the cost of living in many areas is ridiculously cheap. Even some of our more rampant issues, things like the obesity epidemic, the increase in diabetes, psychological problems with body image – “first world problems” as they are now called – cannot be taken all that seriously since they are symptomatic of our own tendency toward excess. Yet Americans are killing themselves at a greater rate than ever, and this increase began several years before such landmark events as 9/11, the Iraq War and subsequent “Global War on Terror,” the Great Recession, and the election of Donald Trump, all of which have been blamed for increasing national anxiety.
It's even worse than you think. In 1999, the year our suicide rate began its upward spike, America was enjoying a seldom-precedented period of all-around prosperity. During the previous decade, the Gross Domestic Product continued to increase by roughly 4.5% a year, while unemployment steadily declined from a high, in 1991, of 7.3%, to a scant 3.9% in 1999. The domestic political situation was stable, democracy was on the march all over the world, and there was less to fear, in concrete terms, than there had ever been since any period since the Jazz Age. It is logical to conclude, then, that the motivation behind these deaths came from circumstances which were not economic in nature, nor driven by anxieties about nuclear war, pandemic or any other possible catastrophe. It is also logical to conclude that contrary to all American propaganda going back to the time of the Declaration of Independence, physical comfort, economic prosperity and material wealth do not provide much of a shield against internal despair. Americans have been taught from birth to believe that wealth and especially fame provide happiness, but the rash of celebrity deaths and the suicide rates among the middle, upper middle and rich classes argue decisively otherwise.
According to Medbroadcast, the chief cause of suicide is “major psychiatric illness - in particular, mood disorders (e.g., depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia).” The next is “substance abuse (primarily alcohol abuse).” Others include a family history of suicide, which is probably linked to genetic predisposition to depression, and “unbearable emotional pain,” which is hardly distinguishable from depression. The common theme here is obvious: suicide is driven by things we Americans prefer not to talk about.
And because we do not talk about them, we further isolate those who suffer from them. Not surprisingly, feelings of isolation are one of the chief precursors of suicide. Because of our taboo, people beginning the process of “suicidal ideation” (the process of normalizing suicide in one's thoughts) often feel, or have been made to feel, that they are weak, dysfunctional, damaged, or helpless; when they speak out they are shamed for making others uncomfortable ("First world problem over here!") and when they remain silent their suffering grows. It is a vicious cycle and one which frequently ends with a gunshot.
In America, we have a peculiar habit of looking at effects without discussing their causes. This applies to every aspect of American life, most notably mass shootings, but in the case of suicide it is particularly egregious. Despite the skyrocket in suicide throughout our land, the social taboo remains firmly in place. We are allowed to express dismay, to vent anger, even to grieve, but not to ask the larger questions, or the largest one of all, why. Instead, the ugly truths are avoided or sanded-down so as not to alarm or offend. Unimportant or secondary factors are endlessly discusses while, without exception, the crucial ones are smothered in silence. We hear the sirens of the coroner's wagon, smile a sickly smile and say, "There's nothing to see here, folks!" We whistle past our own graveyards.
In regards to Bourdain's suicide, the causes were obviously complex and may never be fully understood. At the heart of every suicide, even those provoked by severe mental illness, there remains at least a small element of mystery. But as part of the broader trend of the increase in American suicides, I can venture a few educated guesses as to the critical question of "why?"
The original draft of the Declaration of Independence drafted the mission statement of the new nation as "life, liberty and the pursuit of property." This last word was viewed as a bit too vulgar and was altered to "happiness." No one, however, has ever been fooled by the change. In America, "property" and "happiness" are believed to be synonymous, interchangeable. Having one means having the other, and anyone who has achieved material prosperity who does not exhibit happiness is viewed as spoiled, weak, ungrateful, and altogether disgusting. You have more; therefore you ought be happier than those who have less. By the very act of their unhappiness they are challenging the American mantra, in a sense committing a sort of societal treason.
The social psychologist Erich Fromm famously wrote that humanity in the industrial age had two choices -- to have, or to be. Those who "had" believed happiness lay in the acquisition of material goods and the satisfaction of material desires. Those who wanted to "be" believed that happiness -- the meaning of life -- lay in experience, self-discovery, and finding harmony with the larger world. The former camp tended toward narcissism and egotism, which in turn isolated them from the rest of humanity and from the world as a whole. They were materially prosperous but internally destitute -- "alienated," in Fromm's words, and often unhappy. They sought to alleviate their unhappiness by the further acquisition of wealth, and when this failed, their unhappiness increased, and with it their isolation.
In contrast, the latter, those who wanted to "be" were interested in inner activity, which Fromm described thusly:
"To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which - though in varying degrees – every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be interested...to give."
This is a tremendous rejection of the creed that money buys happiness, and in my personal experience it is true. As Lawrence Sanders once wrote, greed does not lead to satiety; greed leads to greed. The pit is bottomless. But understanding this is not the American way. In the face of mounting unhappiness, of an ever-climbing suicide rate, of an entire generation of children who have to be medicated, or think they have to be medicated, simply to function in our society, we have doubled-down on the idea that wealth, power and fame are the definition of happiness and even raised them to the status of moral virtues. The Jenners, the Kardashians, the Hiltons and those of their ilk have become a species of demigod, all the more admirable for the fact that they have done little or nothing of practical value to earn their success. In this we now resemble the British Empire at the height of its decadence, having made a Golden Calf of the flesh while neglecting the needs of the soul. And what happened to the British Empire?
It will no doubt come as a surprise to some that the rates of mental illness, even severe mental illness like schizophrenia, drops in any nation during time of war, as does chronic depression. It may also come as a surprise that in tribal societies, mental illness and depression are almost unheard-of. This phenomenon was examined by Sebastian Junger in his illuminating book Tribe and his conclusion was simple: what we call civilization, with its tendency toward egotism, isolation, selfishness, and materialism, not only neglects the deeper needs of the human soul, it creates a disharmonious relationship with the environment, the effects of which we are only now just beginning to understand.
I am not advocating throwing all your possessions into the sea and living in a cave somewhere on roots and rainwater. As the Police once sang, we are spirits in a material world, and we are ruled to some extent by material considerations. We need clothes, food, running water, a roof over our heads. These things provide us with comfort and security. But they do not provide us with happiness and if we spend our lives pursuing them to the exclusion of all else...well, he who dies with the most toys, still dies. It's what he does in the years and decades beforehand that matters. What did he learn about life? What did he learn about himself? What did he learn about the world and his place within it? None of these answers can be found in an interest statement. Nor can they be found by swallowing pills and placing a bag over your head. Suicide is not a solution to anything, it is simply an escape from the problem. That such an obvious sentiment even needs to be uttered is a devastating commentary on the mentality with which we have been raised.
Anthony Bourdain was rich. He was also incredibly famous. By any American metric he ought to have been happy. Yet he killed himself. Again, I don't claim to know precisely why. News continues to break which indicates possible motives, and the hollowness of materialism may have had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with his decision. But the fact remains that by the logic upon which this country was founded, he should never have wanted to take his own life. Only the working class, the poor and the homeless ought to do so. Yet among those segments of our society the rate of suicide is so low as to be practically non-existent. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that the struggle simply to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads leaves little time for the sort of extended anguish that leads to suicide; but the more unpleasant truth is that those on the lower margins of our society know instinctively what all living things know, but which materialists have forgotten, to wit: the meaning of life is in living.
I've been through hell and back again
I shook hands with the devil
Looked 'em in the eye
Looked like a long lost friend
Oh, anything you want, any dirty deeds
He's got everything -- except what I really need
Keeping me temporarily satisfied
But not one thing I've tried
Filled me up inside or felt like mine
Mine, all mine.
-- Van Halen
The living's in the way we die.
-- Ah-Ha
When celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain took his own life in a Paris hotel room a few months ago, the reaction of the press taught me a lot about the way suicide is approached in what is sometimes called “the national conversation.” Journalists circled around the story in tornado-like fashion, whirling details into our collective face for weeks afterward. We were briefed on every detail of Bourdain's upbringing and career, the various high-profile feuds in which he'd engaged, the details of his relationship with actress Asia Argento, the aggressive role he'd taken in what is known as the #metoo movement. We got reams of tributes from fellow chefs, television personalities and internet celebrities, and were constantly reminded about his hit television show, “Destination Unknown,” and his bestselling books, including “Kitchen Confidential,” which briefly became a scripted TV series. The actual details of his death, however, remained curiously elusive, even after sufficient time had passed for them to become public, either by virtue of official pronouncements or leaks to the press. Many of the reports I read repeated the same line almost verbatim: Bourdain had been “found unresponsive” in his hotel room by fellow chef Eric Ripert, and had later been pronounced dead. It took me some time to confirm an early rumor that had fleetingly appeared on the Net immediately following the news of his demise: Bourdain had hanged himself.
To concentrate on such a morbid detail may strike the reader as pointless or macabre, but the reluctance of the press, which under ordinary circumstances pants like a horny high school student at the thought of tragic or salacious details, especially as they regard celebrities, to come clean about the manner in which Bourdain shed this vale of tears is illustrative of a much greater problem in our society, to wit: the way we deal with suicide, and the conditions which drive people to commit it.
In every country and culture, there are social taboos, subjects that cannot be broached without considerable backlash. British society, for many centuries, was governed by the principle summed up in a single sentence: “It simply isn't done.” And that which was “not done” was not only not to be done, it was not to be discussed. Such a system was surprisingly effective for ensuring that topics like venereal disease, homosexuality, alcoholism and drug abuse, bankruptcy, social inequality, deformity or retardation in children, spousal abuse were swept under the societal rug. On the other hand, it created an environment in which the undiscussed also festered, for the simple reason that no problem can be solved unless and until it is first acknowledged. In American society, there are relatively few social taboos that remain universal throughout this remarkably vast and diverse nation, but mental illness and depression are high among them, and suicide, the unholy spawn of these bastards, probably chief. The press reported honestly that Anthony Bourdain killed himself. In showing a squeamish reluctance to discuss the manner by which he took his life, however, they made it clear that when it comes to suicide, it is simply “not done” to go into too many details. Even now, in an age when the Internet has made accessing atrocity as easy as clicking on a hyperlink, suicide remains shrouded in mystery.
The conscious motive behind this is probably decent enough, i.e. to spare the family, loved ones and fans the gruesome details, but the decency is misplaced, because the unconscious driving force behind the motive is undoubtedly embarrassment. To kill oneself is seen as a shameful and disgusting act, and so it is easier to write that Bordain was “found unresponsive” than “found hanging from a luggage strap.” The idea is that softening the details grants the dead person dignity. That it may. What it does not do, and I understand that I am repeating myself here, is drive home the horror of suicide and the conditions which precipitate it. These need to be discussed fearlessly, ruthlessly and honestly. To describe the circumstances of a particular death is simple enough if one is willing to skirt the taboo, but to discuss the series of events which trigger self-destruction is more difficult, because it is here that the the fears and loathings which created the taboo in the first place confront us.
Let us take celebrity suicide. This has become so common that it is difficult for the press to keep up with it. Robin Williams died by hanging. Fashion maven Kate Spade killed herself the same week as Bourdain. Chris Cornell of Soundgarden hanged himself, and not long afterward so did his close friend Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. Stephanie Adams, a former Playboy playmate, threw herself off a building. Tony Scott, director of mega-hits like TOP GUN and BEVERLY HILLS COP II, jumped off a bridge. Michael Ruppert, author of PRESIDENTIAL ENERGY POLICY, which became the basis of the popular documentary THE COLLAPSE, shot himself. In each case there is a tendency, perhaps understandable, to ask why one should be feel sorry for wealthy, often famous people who can't find a reason to live but evidently can find at least one compelling reason to die. Yet the rash of celebrity and quasi-celebrity suicides is simply a bellwether of a much larger trend in American society, one which tends to cut across economic lines. According to the CDC, the suicide rate in the United States has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, rising by 25% overall, with twenty-five states reporting increases of up to 30% in that time period. Suicide is now the tenth leading cause of death in this country, claiming 42,773 lives each year – and this, at a time when prescription of psychiatric drugs is at an all-time high: approximately 33 million adults are on medication, i.e. 10% of the entire country; but the figures for children are especially appalling. Information supplied by the mental health watchdog CCHR indicates that 2.1 million kids are on antidepressants; 1.2 million on antipsychotics, and 1.4 million on anti-anxiety meds.
These figures obviously demands a series of questions, but the most obvious, and the most pressing, is why. The United States, for all of its problems, is one of the crown-jewel nations of the earth. Education is free until the eighteenth year. Credit allows people of low economic standing to live a full class above their means. Compared to much of the rest of the planet, we possess an abundance of food, natural resources and living space. We have no fear of foreign invasion and the threat of nuclear war is a faint fraction of what it was during the Cold War. Political violence of the sort that plagues much of the rest of the planet is almost non-existent, and the cost of living in many areas is ridiculously cheap. Even some of our more rampant issues, things like the obesity epidemic, the increase in diabetes, psychological problems with body image – “first world problems” as they are now called – cannot be taken all that seriously since they are symptomatic of our own tendency toward excess. Yet Americans are killing themselves at a greater rate than ever, and this increase began several years before such landmark events as 9/11, the Iraq War and subsequent “Global War on Terror,” the Great Recession, and the election of Donald Trump, all of which have been blamed for increasing national anxiety.
It's even worse than you think. In 1999, the year our suicide rate began its upward spike, America was enjoying a seldom-precedented period of all-around prosperity. During the previous decade, the Gross Domestic Product continued to increase by roughly 4.5% a year, while unemployment steadily declined from a high, in 1991, of 7.3%, to a scant 3.9% in 1999. The domestic political situation was stable, democracy was on the march all over the world, and there was less to fear, in concrete terms, than there had ever been since any period since the Jazz Age. It is logical to conclude, then, that the motivation behind these deaths came from circumstances which were not economic in nature, nor driven by anxieties about nuclear war, pandemic or any other possible catastrophe. It is also logical to conclude that contrary to all American propaganda going back to the time of the Declaration of Independence, physical comfort, economic prosperity and material wealth do not provide much of a shield against internal despair. Americans have been taught from birth to believe that wealth and especially fame provide happiness, but the rash of celebrity deaths and the suicide rates among the middle, upper middle and rich classes argue decisively otherwise.
According to Medbroadcast, the chief cause of suicide is “major psychiatric illness - in particular, mood disorders (e.g., depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia).” The next is “substance abuse (primarily alcohol abuse).” Others include a family history of suicide, which is probably linked to genetic predisposition to depression, and “unbearable emotional pain,” which is hardly distinguishable from depression. The common theme here is obvious: suicide is driven by things we Americans prefer not to talk about.
And because we do not talk about them, we further isolate those who suffer from them. Not surprisingly, feelings of isolation are one of the chief precursors of suicide. Because of our taboo, people beginning the process of “suicidal ideation” (the process of normalizing suicide in one's thoughts) often feel, or have been made to feel, that they are weak, dysfunctional, damaged, or helpless; when they speak out they are shamed for making others uncomfortable ("First world problem over here!") and when they remain silent their suffering grows. It is a vicious cycle and one which frequently ends with a gunshot.
In America, we have a peculiar habit of looking at effects without discussing their causes. This applies to every aspect of American life, most notably mass shootings, but in the case of suicide it is particularly egregious. Despite the skyrocket in suicide throughout our land, the social taboo remains firmly in place. We are allowed to express dismay, to vent anger, even to grieve, but not to ask the larger questions, or the largest one of all, why. Instead, the ugly truths are avoided or sanded-down so as not to alarm or offend. Unimportant or secondary factors are endlessly discusses while, without exception, the crucial ones are smothered in silence. We hear the sirens of the coroner's wagon, smile a sickly smile and say, "There's nothing to see here, folks!" We whistle past our own graveyards.
In regards to Bourdain's suicide, the causes were obviously complex and may never be fully understood. At the heart of every suicide, even those provoked by severe mental illness, there remains at least a small element of mystery. But as part of the broader trend of the increase in American suicides, I can venture a few educated guesses as to the critical question of "why?"
The original draft of the Declaration of Independence drafted the mission statement of the new nation as "life, liberty and the pursuit of property." This last word was viewed as a bit too vulgar and was altered to "happiness." No one, however, has ever been fooled by the change. In America, "property" and "happiness" are believed to be synonymous, interchangeable. Having one means having the other, and anyone who has achieved material prosperity who does not exhibit happiness is viewed as spoiled, weak, ungrateful, and altogether disgusting. You have more; therefore you ought be happier than those who have less. By the very act of their unhappiness they are challenging the American mantra, in a sense committing a sort of societal treason.
The social psychologist Erich Fromm famously wrote that humanity in the industrial age had two choices -- to have, or to be. Those who "had" believed happiness lay in the acquisition of material goods and the satisfaction of material desires. Those who wanted to "be" believed that happiness -- the meaning of life -- lay in experience, self-discovery, and finding harmony with the larger world. The former camp tended toward narcissism and egotism, which in turn isolated them from the rest of humanity and from the world as a whole. They were materially prosperous but internally destitute -- "alienated," in Fromm's words, and often unhappy. They sought to alleviate their unhappiness by the further acquisition of wealth, and when this failed, their unhappiness increased, and with it their isolation.
In contrast, the latter, those who wanted to "be" were interested in inner activity, which Fromm described thusly:
"To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which - though in varying degrees – every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be interested...to give."
This is a tremendous rejection of the creed that money buys happiness, and in my personal experience it is true. As Lawrence Sanders once wrote, greed does not lead to satiety; greed leads to greed. The pit is bottomless. But understanding this is not the American way. In the face of mounting unhappiness, of an ever-climbing suicide rate, of an entire generation of children who have to be medicated, or think they have to be medicated, simply to function in our society, we have doubled-down on the idea that wealth, power and fame are the definition of happiness and even raised them to the status of moral virtues. The Jenners, the Kardashians, the Hiltons and those of their ilk have become a species of demigod, all the more admirable for the fact that they have done little or nothing of practical value to earn their success. In this we now resemble the British Empire at the height of its decadence, having made a Golden Calf of the flesh while neglecting the needs of the soul. And what happened to the British Empire?
It will no doubt come as a surprise to some that the rates of mental illness, even severe mental illness like schizophrenia, drops in any nation during time of war, as does chronic depression. It may also come as a surprise that in tribal societies, mental illness and depression are almost unheard-of. This phenomenon was examined by Sebastian Junger in his illuminating book Tribe and his conclusion was simple: what we call civilization, with its tendency toward egotism, isolation, selfishness, and materialism, not only neglects the deeper needs of the human soul, it creates a disharmonious relationship with the environment, the effects of which we are only now just beginning to understand.
I am not advocating throwing all your possessions into the sea and living in a cave somewhere on roots and rainwater. As the Police once sang, we are spirits in a material world, and we are ruled to some extent by material considerations. We need clothes, food, running water, a roof over our heads. These things provide us with comfort and security. But they do not provide us with happiness and if we spend our lives pursuing them to the exclusion of all else...well, he who dies with the most toys, still dies. It's what he does in the years and decades beforehand that matters. What did he learn about life? What did he learn about himself? What did he learn about the world and his place within it? None of these answers can be found in an interest statement. Nor can they be found by swallowing pills and placing a bag over your head. Suicide is not a solution to anything, it is simply an escape from the problem. That such an obvious sentiment even needs to be uttered is a devastating commentary on the mentality with which we have been raised.
Anthony Bourdain was rich. He was also incredibly famous. By any American metric he ought to have been happy. Yet he killed himself. Again, I don't claim to know precisely why. News continues to break which indicates possible motives, and the hollowness of materialism may have had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with his decision. But the fact remains that by the logic upon which this country was founded, he should never have wanted to take his own life. Only the working class, the poor and the homeless ought to do so. Yet among those segments of our society the rate of suicide is so low as to be practically non-existent. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that the struggle simply to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads leaves little time for the sort of extended anguish that leads to suicide; but the more unpleasant truth is that those on the lower margins of our society know instinctively what all living things know, but which materialists have forgotten, to wit: the meaning of life is in living.
July 29, 2018
The Way It Was When
I found myself in Hollywood again. I can't remember the date or the circumstances, but it was a beautiful evening – balmy, with a breeze that ruffled the palm trees nodding over the boulevard like sleepy sentinels. My destination? Burbank, and home. But though traffic was mysteriously light – almost non-existent – I found myself in no hurry to get there. Between the weather, the open road, the superb tunes rolling out of the radio, and my general state of relaxation, I was enjoying myself thoroughly. As I shot past the Hollywood Bowl to the 101 Freeway, equally and suspiciously free of cars, I was struck by a realization which made me laugh out loud: quite by accident, I had re-discovered the joy of cruising.
Cruising, or in the parlance of my parents, “going for a drive,” is something which used to be an important part of my life. It is one of the few distinct pleasures which I remember from high school, which otherwise was not all that pleasurable of an experience. The ages between, say, twelve and sixteen are a continuous struggle to define oneself as a adult, at a time when one is still actually a child both physically and mentally, and the acquisition of a driver's license bestows upon the teenager a precious commodity: temporary freedom. You may live, as I did, in a too-small house with too many people and animals, and spend the rest of your time jammed in school with a couple of thousand other equally frustrated young humans; you may exist in a state of simmering sexual frustration, the victim of hormonal mood swings and the quasi-tantrums that result from them. You may be oppressed by parents, homework, chores, bullies, elder siblings, and the sense that one's life is not your own and there is no such thing as privacy; but when they hand you that license and a set of car keys, everything changes, if only for an hour or two, here and there.
When I was about seventeen I had a specific ritual I followed, beginning the spring and ending somewhere in the fall. When the weather was just right, in that period of day known as the gloaming – when the sun is down but light still fills the sky – I would swing into the '77 Olds Cutlass Supreme that was my temporary chariot, fire up every one of the 350 cubic inches in its engine, set the four-barrel carburator to rumble, and have myself a drive.
I grew up near the Potomac River, among trees and ivy and rolling hills. It was suburbia, but not the sort that desecrates the landscape; the houses all seemed like hobbitons, growing up out of the earth in the shade of the trees. Natural phenomena, as it were. Just a few minutes from my house were single-lane railway bridges, fast-moving streams, brooding woods, and sprawling fields unbesmirched by a single man-made structure. In the summers, after a thunderstorm, mist would hang thickly over the woods and the open pastures; in the fall, the sharp October air was full of the spice of decaying leaves and woodsmoke. All of this was perfect backdrop for cruising. I would steer the great Cutlass through the landscape, passing the homes of schoolmates, inhaling the perfume of growing things, and listening to the mix tape I'd jammed into the dashboard player. In those days, every kid was armed with a tremendous collection of mix tapes, mostly recorded off the radio, and there was one for every mood. Nowadays you say, “There's an app for that.” In those days you said, “There's a mix tape for that” – “that” being your state of mind. If you were angry, if you were lonely, if you were feeling confident, happy or just plain horny, you had a collection of songs you could fall back on to enhance those feelings. The construction of a mix tape was a science that had to be carefully apprenticed before it could be mastered; I could probably write a book about the techniques necessary to produce the perfect one, if I thought anyone would read it. At any rate, I had more tapes than I could count, but there was one in particular which always accompanied my when I went cruising. After all these years I can only recall two songs on it – Guns 'n Roses “Patience” and “You Don't Move Me Anymore” by Keith Richards – but the effect it produced in me on those lazy, moon-lighted evenings in the summer I can remember perfectly. It was a sensation of freedom, coupled with the knowledge that in that moment you were completely unreachable by telephone, parent or teacher. Nobody knew where you were; nobody could tell you what to do or how to do it. Cell phones did not exist. GPS tracking did not exist. When you got in that car, you were like a deep-sea diver with a thousand feet of water over his head: immersed in, yet disconnected from, the world around you. Returning from a good cruise produced in my teenage body and mind the exact feelings which a cigar and two fingers of Irish whiskey produce in my middle-aged ones: peace and contentment.
At the moment of my Hollywood epiphany, I realized that it had been nearly a dozen years since I had simply “gone for a drive.” When I moved to Los Angeles in '07, I quickly discovered that the traffic here, along with the inadequate road system and the brutality of the summer and early fall weather, were not conducive to cruising. Indeed, nobody around here drives just for the sake of it. Though L.A. is famous for its car culture, the automobile here is either a status symbol or a means to an end. The idea that it can be used as a balm for one's soul is not even considered. Conditions simply make it impossible. The circumstances which allowed me to cruise by accident were simply a set of perfectly aligned flukes which I'd never experienced before and have not experienced since. Nevertheless, having “gone for a drive” by accident, it got me thinking about how much life has changed since my cruising days, since the times I used to spend hours in the basement or in my room, patiently waiting for the right song to come over the radio so I could add it to my latest mix tape. I realized that I am now old enough to mourn The Way Things Were When.
Being born in the early 70s, I have layers and layers of intricate memories of a now-extinct society, a world before cellular phones or mobile devices or the Internet, before microchips in cars, before recycling, before CDs and MP3s and podcasts, before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, before streaming services and cloud drives, before almost everything which makes our modern society work. A world in which “going for a drive” was a significant act, and creating a mix tape was a rite of passage, like a Native American boy's learning to track a deer. A world of newspapers, cassette tapes, watches, Walkmans, Atari computers, VCRs, 200 lb television sets with rabbit ears, and mail-order catalogs with six-to-eight week delivery times. A world of Encyclopedias and TV Guides. A world in which it was not possible or even desirable to be called or contacted at any time. A world in which the simple act of climbing into a car unplugged you from the world.
Lest you think I am simply indulging in nostalgia, let me say that I am quite well aware at the world of the 70s, 80s and early-mid 90s was hardly perfect and we who lived through those times are were old enough to make conscious judgments of them knew it even then. There is no word in the English language for the frustration which a person feels when he desires a technology or a device which does not yet exist, but I felt that frustration quite keenly as a child, a teenager, and a young man. Simply put, we knew a much more sophisticated world was around the corner, a world of instantaneous gratification and all-hours convenience, but we weren't there yet. We were stuck with cassette tapes and clunky VCRs and a choice between ABC, NBC or CBS; stuck with telephone cords that inevitably twisted into knots, and the very real possibility of breaking down a lonely stretch of highway in bad weather with absolutely no way to call for help. So no, this is not nostalgia; not all nostalgia, anyway. It is simply an awareness that time is marching on, and that as it so marches, certain pleasures which were unique to my generation have been left behind in its dust, probably forever. Cruising – at least in Los Angeles – is one. Assembling mix tapes on clunky tape-recorders is another. But the list, if I were to sit down and really think about it, is immense.
In Anne Rice's novel Interview With A Vampire, the character of Armand explains to the neophyte vampire Louis that the reason the undead do not really live forever is because very few of them have the stomach for immortality. The vampire, Armand explains, is born into a particular era and belongs to that era alone; as time passes, language changes, clothing changes, custom changes, architecture changes, and at some point, the vampire finds itself unable to relate to the present. It is still looking for the accents, the styles, the sounds of its own era, now long extinct and never to return. In the end the loneliness, the imposed isolation, the sense of being “in but not of” the world becomes unbearable, and the vampire steps deliberately into the light and destroys itself. I do not, of course, feel that way just now – like destroying myself, I mean. I'm way too young for that. But I have come to understand the grumbling, the carping, the endless complaining my grandparents were guilty of as far back as I can remember – a constant, ne'er-ceasing lament about the Way The World Was When. They talked about things like coal-fired stoves, milkmen, nickel beers, listening to soap operas on the radio, and the pain-in-the-ass necessity of having your collar turned or your hat reblocked. They talked about how you had to wear a suit or a dress to a movie theater and how a dollar could buy you a steak dinner with all the trimmings and a cold beer and still leave you enough money for the tip and the trolley home. At the time, I didn't want to hear any of that sort of talk and it is only recently that I have come to understand what a wonderful insight it gave me into the world in which they experienced their own youth. But it also lends me an understanding of just what it feels like to be the Vampire Armand, struggling endlessly to keep up with a life that never stops moving, that allows each of us a certain time to be both “in and of” the world, and then slowly begins to pull away from us, to make us living anachronisms, who bore the younger folk with our tales of The Way The World Was When.
I do not, at present, have children, but I do have a niece and a nephew and sometimes, when I am regaling them with tales of my own childhood, I can see the boredom glassing over their eyes. They cannot relate, and there is really no reason why they should: they belong to a different world, one which is growing more different, more alien – to me, anyway – with every passing year. Yet at the same time I cannot look at them without feeling a twinge of pity. Just as I will never know what it is like to go to school in the horse-drawn sleigh that pulled my grandmother through Indiana snow, they will never – so long as they live in Los Angeles – know the joy of cruising through somnolent streets on lovely summer evenings, alone with their thoughts, knowing they are unreachable, untouchable, totally, wonderfully alone. Nor will they ever grasp the complex mixture of method and patience which was required to construct the perfect mix tape. But I'll tell you this much, friends and neighbors: they don't know what the hell they're missing.
Cruising, or in the parlance of my parents, “going for a drive,” is something which used to be an important part of my life. It is one of the few distinct pleasures which I remember from high school, which otherwise was not all that pleasurable of an experience. The ages between, say, twelve and sixteen are a continuous struggle to define oneself as a adult, at a time when one is still actually a child both physically and mentally, and the acquisition of a driver's license bestows upon the teenager a precious commodity: temporary freedom. You may live, as I did, in a too-small house with too many people and animals, and spend the rest of your time jammed in school with a couple of thousand other equally frustrated young humans; you may exist in a state of simmering sexual frustration, the victim of hormonal mood swings and the quasi-tantrums that result from them. You may be oppressed by parents, homework, chores, bullies, elder siblings, and the sense that one's life is not your own and there is no such thing as privacy; but when they hand you that license and a set of car keys, everything changes, if only for an hour or two, here and there.
When I was about seventeen I had a specific ritual I followed, beginning the spring and ending somewhere in the fall. When the weather was just right, in that period of day known as the gloaming – when the sun is down but light still fills the sky – I would swing into the '77 Olds Cutlass Supreme that was my temporary chariot, fire up every one of the 350 cubic inches in its engine, set the four-barrel carburator to rumble, and have myself a drive.
I grew up near the Potomac River, among trees and ivy and rolling hills. It was suburbia, but not the sort that desecrates the landscape; the houses all seemed like hobbitons, growing up out of the earth in the shade of the trees. Natural phenomena, as it were. Just a few minutes from my house were single-lane railway bridges, fast-moving streams, brooding woods, and sprawling fields unbesmirched by a single man-made structure. In the summers, after a thunderstorm, mist would hang thickly over the woods and the open pastures; in the fall, the sharp October air was full of the spice of decaying leaves and woodsmoke. All of this was perfect backdrop for cruising. I would steer the great Cutlass through the landscape, passing the homes of schoolmates, inhaling the perfume of growing things, and listening to the mix tape I'd jammed into the dashboard player. In those days, every kid was armed with a tremendous collection of mix tapes, mostly recorded off the radio, and there was one for every mood. Nowadays you say, “There's an app for that.” In those days you said, “There's a mix tape for that” – “that” being your state of mind. If you were angry, if you were lonely, if you were feeling confident, happy or just plain horny, you had a collection of songs you could fall back on to enhance those feelings. The construction of a mix tape was a science that had to be carefully apprenticed before it could be mastered; I could probably write a book about the techniques necessary to produce the perfect one, if I thought anyone would read it. At any rate, I had more tapes than I could count, but there was one in particular which always accompanied my when I went cruising. After all these years I can only recall two songs on it – Guns 'n Roses “Patience” and “You Don't Move Me Anymore” by Keith Richards – but the effect it produced in me on those lazy, moon-lighted evenings in the summer I can remember perfectly. It was a sensation of freedom, coupled with the knowledge that in that moment you were completely unreachable by telephone, parent or teacher. Nobody knew where you were; nobody could tell you what to do or how to do it. Cell phones did not exist. GPS tracking did not exist. When you got in that car, you were like a deep-sea diver with a thousand feet of water over his head: immersed in, yet disconnected from, the world around you. Returning from a good cruise produced in my teenage body and mind the exact feelings which a cigar and two fingers of Irish whiskey produce in my middle-aged ones: peace and contentment.
At the moment of my Hollywood epiphany, I realized that it had been nearly a dozen years since I had simply “gone for a drive.” When I moved to Los Angeles in '07, I quickly discovered that the traffic here, along with the inadequate road system and the brutality of the summer and early fall weather, were not conducive to cruising. Indeed, nobody around here drives just for the sake of it. Though L.A. is famous for its car culture, the automobile here is either a status symbol or a means to an end. The idea that it can be used as a balm for one's soul is not even considered. Conditions simply make it impossible. The circumstances which allowed me to cruise by accident were simply a set of perfectly aligned flukes which I'd never experienced before and have not experienced since. Nevertheless, having “gone for a drive” by accident, it got me thinking about how much life has changed since my cruising days, since the times I used to spend hours in the basement or in my room, patiently waiting for the right song to come over the radio so I could add it to my latest mix tape. I realized that I am now old enough to mourn The Way Things Were When.
Being born in the early 70s, I have layers and layers of intricate memories of a now-extinct society, a world before cellular phones or mobile devices or the Internet, before microchips in cars, before recycling, before CDs and MP3s and podcasts, before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, before streaming services and cloud drives, before almost everything which makes our modern society work. A world in which “going for a drive” was a significant act, and creating a mix tape was a rite of passage, like a Native American boy's learning to track a deer. A world of newspapers, cassette tapes, watches, Walkmans, Atari computers, VCRs, 200 lb television sets with rabbit ears, and mail-order catalogs with six-to-eight week delivery times. A world of Encyclopedias and TV Guides. A world in which it was not possible or even desirable to be called or contacted at any time. A world in which the simple act of climbing into a car unplugged you from the world.
Lest you think I am simply indulging in nostalgia, let me say that I am quite well aware at the world of the 70s, 80s and early-mid 90s was hardly perfect and we who lived through those times are were old enough to make conscious judgments of them knew it even then. There is no word in the English language for the frustration which a person feels when he desires a technology or a device which does not yet exist, but I felt that frustration quite keenly as a child, a teenager, and a young man. Simply put, we knew a much more sophisticated world was around the corner, a world of instantaneous gratification and all-hours convenience, but we weren't there yet. We were stuck with cassette tapes and clunky VCRs and a choice between ABC, NBC or CBS; stuck with telephone cords that inevitably twisted into knots, and the very real possibility of breaking down a lonely stretch of highway in bad weather with absolutely no way to call for help. So no, this is not nostalgia; not all nostalgia, anyway. It is simply an awareness that time is marching on, and that as it so marches, certain pleasures which were unique to my generation have been left behind in its dust, probably forever. Cruising – at least in Los Angeles – is one. Assembling mix tapes on clunky tape-recorders is another. But the list, if I were to sit down and really think about it, is immense.
In Anne Rice's novel Interview With A Vampire, the character of Armand explains to the neophyte vampire Louis that the reason the undead do not really live forever is because very few of them have the stomach for immortality. The vampire, Armand explains, is born into a particular era and belongs to that era alone; as time passes, language changes, clothing changes, custom changes, architecture changes, and at some point, the vampire finds itself unable to relate to the present. It is still looking for the accents, the styles, the sounds of its own era, now long extinct and never to return. In the end the loneliness, the imposed isolation, the sense of being “in but not of” the world becomes unbearable, and the vampire steps deliberately into the light and destroys itself. I do not, of course, feel that way just now – like destroying myself, I mean. I'm way too young for that. But I have come to understand the grumbling, the carping, the endless complaining my grandparents were guilty of as far back as I can remember – a constant, ne'er-ceasing lament about the Way The World Was When. They talked about things like coal-fired stoves, milkmen, nickel beers, listening to soap operas on the radio, and the pain-in-the-ass necessity of having your collar turned or your hat reblocked. They talked about how you had to wear a suit or a dress to a movie theater and how a dollar could buy you a steak dinner with all the trimmings and a cold beer and still leave you enough money for the tip and the trolley home. At the time, I didn't want to hear any of that sort of talk and it is only recently that I have come to understand what a wonderful insight it gave me into the world in which they experienced their own youth. But it also lends me an understanding of just what it feels like to be the Vampire Armand, struggling endlessly to keep up with a life that never stops moving, that allows each of us a certain time to be both “in and of” the world, and then slowly begins to pull away from us, to make us living anachronisms, who bore the younger folk with our tales of The Way The World Was When.
I do not, at present, have children, but I do have a niece and a nephew and sometimes, when I am regaling them with tales of my own childhood, I can see the boredom glassing over their eyes. They cannot relate, and there is really no reason why they should: they belong to a different world, one which is growing more different, more alien – to me, anyway – with every passing year. Yet at the same time I cannot look at them without feeling a twinge of pity. Just as I will never know what it is like to go to school in the horse-drawn sleigh that pulled my grandmother through Indiana snow, they will never – so long as they live in Los Angeles – know the joy of cruising through somnolent streets on lovely summer evenings, alone with their thoughts, knowing they are unreachable, untouchable, totally, wonderfully alone. Nor will they ever grasp the complex mixture of method and patience which was required to construct the perfect mix tape. But I'll tell you this much, friends and neighbors: they don't know what the hell they're missing.
July 15, 2018
Where the Beechwoods Used to Be; or, why I love Secondhand Bookstores
Say what you like -- call it silly, childish, anything -- but doesn't it make you puke sometimes to see what they're doing to England, with their bird-baths and their plaster gnomes and their pixies and tin cans, where the beechwoods used to be?
-- George Orwell, "Coming Up For Air"
Only a fool stands in the way of progress...if this is progress.
-- Captain James T. Kirk
I grew up in a house filled with books. I mean this literally. Both my parents and my older brother were voracious readers, albeit readers with different tastes, and there were bookshelves almost everywhere -- the living room, the den (which we called "the sunporch"), the upstairs hallway, the various bedrooms, even the basement. Excess books were to be found in the attic, the garage and, in the case of rare volumes from past centuries, in the breakfronts in the dining room. My father read scholarly history, biography and works on politics, along with some historical fiction: big, hard-backed, intimidating-looking works of almost Biblical proportions. My mother devoured mysteries by the freightload -- probably forty or fifty a year, mostly paperbacks, which to me seemed more approachable and less frighteningly adult. My brother's tastes were eclectic indeed: comic books, science-fiction, pictorial volumes on cinema, collections of essays and short stories by writers as varied as Harlan Ellison and George Orwell, this, that. It was damn near impossible to go anywhere in our house without encountering books, and being a child of a curious nature, I started first by looking at the pictures (if any), then reading the descriptions on the flyleaves of the dust jackets, then making tentative efforts to read the books themselves. Most were way over my head in terms of subject matter, but that didn't stop me, and I delighted in the literary smorgasbord I could sample at will: a novel about ancient Rome, a biography of Al Capone, stacks of Fantastic Four comics, mysteries written by Lawrence Sanders and Agatha Christie, the collected adventures of Sherlock Holmes, sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuin. Believe it or not -- and you may not, if you're thirty or younger -- one of my favorite pastimes was yanking a random volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica off its shelf and just turning the gilt-edged pages for hours, marveling at the pictures, diagrams (some of them transparencies or fold-outs), sketches and maps. Today this sort of thing is done via the soulless instruments known as Google and Wikipedia; but Google-Wikipedia have nothing on the pleasure of sitting in an easy chair with a big, leather-bound volume tooled in gold, reading about crocodiles or the Battle of Hastings or the Sahara Desert or the Xyphoid process or any other of ten thousand random people, places or things that make up this world.
Growing up, my family had an obsession with moviegoing which was pretty impressive, but the one thing which rivaled it was our tendency to make Viking-like raids on bookstores. No such establishment in the Maryland - D.C. - Virginia area was safe. There was nothing my father liked better to do on a Saturday during the early 1980s than pack us into the car, hunt down a book merchant, and loot him empty. Everyone got a book, and some of us got two or even three. My mother spent a lot of years in a state of frustration over the staggering sums of money we -- meaning her husband -- spent on this passion. In those days, of course, bookstores were not what they are today or were just ten years ago; the mega-chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders did not exist. Crown Books was probably as big of a chain as existed and the individual stores were not very large, and no, you couldn't get a cup of coffee or a Danish and no, you couldn't get wi-fi because it didn't exist and neither did the Internet. A bookstore was just that -- a store with books in it. Nothing else. But that was fine with us, and especially with me.
You see, the family obsession with the written word carried with it its own aesthetic. When you grow up surrounded by books, you constantly encounter certain tactile and olfactory sensations which get bound up in your mind with various concepts and emotions, all of them positive. Thousands of books create a smell of paper, leather, linen and dust which permeates not only your nose but your childhood; touching those pebbled leather or scratchy linen covers brings forth memories of sitting by the fireplace, reading in perfect comfort and security into the late hours of the night. The associations are pleasant, and they linger into adulthood. So it's little wonder that entering a bookstore now, especially a secondhand bookstore, plunges me immediately and totally into some of the happiest days of my own early life.
The secondhand bookstore has distinct advantages in my mind over the firsthand bookstore for several reasons. Firstly, the moment you walk through the door your nostrils are confronted with the smell of thousands of decaying, dust-coated tomes full of foxed paper -- to me and other bibliophiles, a terrific sensation. Secondly, the lighting is almost invariably dim, giving the whole place a hushed, intimate atmosphere. Third, the fact that the books are all used means that the place is full of nearly extinct, out of print editions, old volumes from past centuries, and other impossible-to-find works, often by long-dead or obscure authors. Perusing stacks of these old mummies often yields great treasure, for the fact that a book has become utterly forgotten by no means excludes it from greatness, and should you find some long-forgotten great work, you experience the special pleasure of being let in on a dusty old secret known only to a select few.
There is of course another reason I prefer secondhand bookstores to the big conglomerates, of which Barnes & Noble is, now, I believe the last representative; they are privately owned and, for this and the fore-mentioned reasons, are in possession of a soul. And as our nation continues down the path of gentrification, cultural homogenization and corporatization generally, soul is an increasingly rare commodity anywhere. The secondhand bookstore, like the mom-and-pop grocery, the independently-owned hardware, toy, dime or record store, the hobby shop and the family-owned diner or coffeehouse, is increasingly in the process of being exterminated. This extermination is cold-blooded, deliberate and seemingly irreversible, which is odd because nearly everyone -- every human being with taste or aesthetic feeling, that is -- prefers to do business with the small businessman rather than the large if given any kind of choice at all. And is not merely sentiment that drives this preference. So long as small businesses of any kind proliferate, the customer is sure to be treated honestly and fairly in the vast majority of his dealings; what's more, if he is a repeat customer, he will also be treated personally. All of these qualities are absent from corporations and chains. They are run not by owners but by managers, and staffed by underpaid employees who like as not get no benefits and are treated poorly or indifferently by their employer, and have neither the incentive nor the native interest to please the customer. Going to a Barnes & Noble may be a positive experience to the Bibliophile insomuch as it is full of books and coffee, but in comparison with a good secondhand bookstore it is rather like tinned peaches versus ripe peaches taken directly off the tree. The former gives you the simulacrum of the thing you want, and the latter gives you the reality.
Whenever I move to a new city or state, the first thing I do is run down a mental checklist of the things I will need to locate after, or even before, I unpack: A friendly pub. A good restaurant. An honest mechanic. And a bookstore, preferably secondhand. Until a few weeks ago I was a habituate of a place in Burbank called Movie World, located downtown on San Fernando Boulevard. The title of the store was deceptive; while Movie World did sell movie posters, old VCR tapes, cinematic publicity stills, television scripts and various other ephemera related to Hollywood, it was by and large simply a used bookstore. And what a used bookstore. From floor to ceiling were stacked tens of thousands of hardbacks, paperbacks, magazines, leatherbound collections -- you name it, it was there, coated in dust and jammed in so tight against its fellows you practically needed a crowbar to pry it free. Indeed, Movie World was a firetrap of the first order, overstocked to an unsafe degree (there were literally avalanches of magazines and books that blocked entire isles), and not terribly well organized, though the gentlemanly owner tried his best to do so. He had, he told me, once run three secondhand bookshops, but the other two had folded and he'd been forced to cram the stock of both the others into his sole remaining store. Truth be told, I didn't mind; in fact I rather liked the ramshackle appearance. After the brightly lighted, sanitized, everything-in-its-place appearance of a Barnes & Noble, the existence of this kind of store, where every square foot was heaped with such a freight of books and old magazines and rolled-up posters and dog-eared 8 x 10 headshots that you wondered why the floor didn't collapse, was a positive joy for me. What's more, it was directly around the corner from my gym. I could roll up in my car, work out for an hour, then wander into Movie World and inhale its intoxicating scent as I hunted the isles for something new to read. Like as not I'd then eat lunch across the street, enjoying the first pages of my spontaneous purchase -- a pleasure all the more pleasurable for not being shared.
I patronized Movie World for years. Occasionally I'd go inside with a friend, but in a sense, Movie World was my friend and there was no need for further company. I don't know how many purchases I made there, but the number must be very great indeed, and included some terrific finds: old army manuals from WW2, out-of-print classics like Beau Geste, trashy adventure novels covered with mustard stains (I hope they were mustard stains), smashing autobiographies of obscure actors. Shopping there -- or just wandering there, without buying anything -- became a settled part of my routine. I really didn't need any of the stuff I bought, especially the scripts for episodes of forgotten 80s television shows like Matt Houston, but that was part of the fun. Nobody ever died because they didn't buy that old steel ammunition box from WW2 they saw in the junk shop window; on the other hand, nobody who hasn't paid hard-earned cash for a useless item simply for the joy of possessing it has lived a day in their life. Anyway, one day late last year -- I'm sure you knew this was coming, though I'm not sure I did -- the owner informed me that after decades in business he was finally retiring -- he'd sell off his entire stock, give away what didn't sell on his last day, and vacate the premises he'd occupied sometime around the year of my birth. If I may extend the metaphor, it was rather like having a good buddy tell you he's decided to leave town forever and head for the opposite side of he earth, where you can never visit. It reminded me of a similar experience I'd had in Bethesda, Maryland, in the early 2000s, when Second Story Books was forced by developers to shut its doors to make way for some fucking abomination of an art gallery that nobody wanted. In that case, it was less like losing a buddy than witnessing a murder you are powerless to prevent and equally powerless to avenge (unless you burn the fucking art gallery to the ground, which I may or may not have seriously considered). In both cases, though, these individual tiny incidents belong to a much larger trend -- a cultural massacre, a sort of slow-rolling genocide of everything which possesses soul in favor of everything which does not.
When Movie World shut down, I struck out in search of a replacement, but I've yet to find one which truly fills that particular niche within my soul. A very well-maintained secondhand bookstore does in fact reside very close to me in Toluca Lake, but in my first visit to the place I found it a little too well-maintained: too bright, too neat, too organized. Even the presence of several cats, sleeping peaceably atop stacks of books, couldn't quite give it the atmosphere of run-down, homey charm that I associate with a "real" used bookshop. It occurred to me as I left (having bought two books; hell, I'm not wasting a visit) that the mom-and-pop operations, even where they survive, have had to change their character somewhat in order to compete, or feel as if they are competing, with the big chains. Thus the cleanliness, the harsh lighting, the absence of dust. But it is precisely these things, in my mind, which lend the secondhand store its final coat of charm. Shops like that don't really give a shit whether you have allergies or expect to be served coffee or fume because there's no wi-fi for your android phone; not because they are indifferent to your wants, but because they concentrate on your needs. Customer service is sometimes more than satisfying petty desires in the consumer; it is sometimes slipping past them and reminding you, via a book avalanche or a handful of dust-bunnies, why you actually came into the store in the first place.
In his minor masterpiece Coming Up For Air, George Orwell brilliantly and evocatively told the story of a harassed, disappointed, much put-upon London everyman named George Bowling who rebels against the cold, mechanistic, heartless trend of the modern world by trying to revisit the idyllic country town of his boyhood, only to find that it has been utterly destroyed by the wheels of "progress." In confess that sometimes, as I comb through Los Angeles for a proper secondhand bookstore and a re-connection to the best days of my own childhood, I feel much like poor old George Bowling, who discovers there is no refuge from the bright lights and dead souls that surround him. Yet all is not lost. The hulking chain stores like Borders, which helped obliterate the secondhand store nationwide, are themselves being driven out of existence by Internet-based booksellers like Amazon: Borders ceased to exist almost a decade ago, and Barnes & Noble is sluggishly dying. Some will of course decry this as the final doom of the brick-and-mortar bookstore, but I see the strong possibility of a different future, because I know I am not alone in my passion for the tactile experience which is part and parcel of entering a bookshop. Human beings are gregarious animals and while they may enjoy the convenience of online shopping, it doesn't exactly fill up a Saturday afternoon for the family. The market abhors a vacuum, and if the last of the big chains goes into extinction, I foresee the rise of a new generation of bookseller -- one who bridges the gap between the cold, "full service" store which serves coffee and biscotti and carries mostly new releases from big publishers, and the dusty, dimly-lighted, no-frills secondhand store about which I have just waxed rhapsodic-nostalgic for the last few thousand words. This new sort of bookstore will carry heaps of old used books, but also sell coffee and have the latest bestsellers. It will have a lounge where people can read and get wi-fi, but the furniture will be secondhand and mismatched, and anyone talking on a cell phone will be told roughly to get the hell out. And best of all, it will be privately owned and privately run, designed and organized to the owner's whims and personal tastes. Said owner will not be a mere manager selling a commodity which to him might as well be pork bellies or wheat futures, but rather a bibliophile who passionately loves books, and reading, and the whole atmosphere which can surround both. Beechwoods can be cut down, you see, but they can also be replanted and regrown. All it takes is love, courage...and a little bit of soul.
-- George Orwell, "Coming Up For Air"
Only a fool stands in the way of progress...if this is progress.
-- Captain James T. Kirk
I grew up in a house filled with books. I mean this literally. Both my parents and my older brother were voracious readers, albeit readers with different tastes, and there were bookshelves almost everywhere -- the living room, the den (which we called "the sunporch"), the upstairs hallway, the various bedrooms, even the basement. Excess books were to be found in the attic, the garage and, in the case of rare volumes from past centuries, in the breakfronts in the dining room. My father read scholarly history, biography and works on politics, along with some historical fiction: big, hard-backed, intimidating-looking works of almost Biblical proportions. My mother devoured mysteries by the freightload -- probably forty or fifty a year, mostly paperbacks, which to me seemed more approachable and less frighteningly adult. My brother's tastes were eclectic indeed: comic books, science-fiction, pictorial volumes on cinema, collections of essays and short stories by writers as varied as Harlan Ellison and George Orwell, this, that. It was damn near impossible to go anywhere in our house without encountering books, and being a child of a curious nature, I started first by looking at the pictures (if any), then reading the descriptions on the flyleaves of the dust jackets, then making tentative efforts to read the books themselves. Most were way over my head in terms of subject matter, but that didn't stop me, and I delighted in the literary smorgasbord I could sample at will: a novel about ancient Rome, a biography of Al Capone, stacks of Fantastic Four comics, mysteries written by Lawrence Sanders and Agatha Christie, the collected adventures of Sherlock Holmes, sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuin. Believe it or not -- and you may not, if you're thirty or younger -- one of my favorite pastimes was yanking a random volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica off its shelf and just turning the gilt-edged pages for hours, marveling at the pictures, diagrams (some of them transparencies or fold-outs), sketches and maps. Today this sort of thing is done via the soulless instruments known as Google and Wikipedia; but Google-Wikipedia have nothing on the pleasure of sitting in an easy chair with a big, leather-bound volume tooled in gold, reading about crocodiles or the Battle of Hastings or the Sahara Desert or the Xyphoid process or any other of ten thousand random people, places or things that make up this world.
Growing up, my family had an obsession with moviegoing which was pretty impressive, but the one thing which rivaled it was our tendency to make Viking-like raids on bookstores. No such establishment in the Maryland - D.C. - Virginia area was safe. There was nothing my father liked better to do on a Saturday during the early 1980s than pack us into the car, hunt down a book merchant, and loot him empty. Everyone got a book, and some of us got two or even three. My mother spent a lot of years in a state of frustration over the staggering sums of money we -- meaning her husband -- spent on this passion. In those days, of course, bookstores were not what they are today or were just ten years ago; the mega-chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders did not exist. Crown Books was probably as big of a chain as existed and the individual stores were not very large, and no, you couldn't get a cup of coffee or a Danish and no, you couldn't get wi-fi because it didn't exist and neither did the Internet. A bookstore was just that -- a store with books in it. Nothing else. But that was fine with us, and especially with me.
You see, the family obsession with the written word carried with it its own aesthetic. When you grow up surrounded by books, you constantly encounter certain tactile and olfactory sensations which get bound up in your mind with various concepts and emotions, all of them positive. Thousands of books create a smell of paper, leather, linen and dust which permeates not only your nose but your childhood; touching those pebbled leather or scratchy linen covers brings forth memories of sitting by the fireplace, reading in perfect comfort and security into the late hours of the night. The associations are pleasant, and they linger into adulthood. So it's little wonder that entering a bookstore now, especially a secondhand bookstore, plunges me immediately and totally into some of the happiest days of my own early life.
The secondhand bookstore has distinct advantages in my mind over the firsthand bookstore for several reasons. Firstly, the moment you walk through the door your nostrils are confronted with the smell of thousands of decaying, dust-coated tomes full of foxed paper -- to me and other bibliophiles, a terrific sensation. Secondly, the lighting is almost invariably dim, giving the whole place a hushed, intimate atmosphere. Third, the fact that the books are all used means that the place is full of nearly extinct, out of print editions, old volumes from past centuries, and other impossible-to-find works, often by long-dead or obscure authors. Perusing stacks of these old mummies often yields great treasure, for the fact that a book has become utterly forgotten by no means excludes it from greatness, and should you find some long-forgotten great work, you experience the special pleasure of being let in on a dusty old secret known only to a select few.
There is of course another reason I prefer secondhand bookstores to the big conglomerates, of which Barnes & Noble is, now, I believe the last representative; they are privately owned and, for this and the fore-mentioned reasons, are in possession of a soul. And as our nation continues down the path of gentrification, cultural homogenization and corporatization generally, soul is an increasingly rare commodity anywhere. The secondhand bookstore, like the mom-and-pop grocery, the independently-owned hardware, toy, dime or record store, the hobby shop and the family-owned diner or coffeehouse, is increasingly in the process of being exterminated. This extermination is cold-blooded, deliberate and seemingly irreversible, which is odd because nearly everyone -- every human being with taste or aesthetic feeling, that is -- prefers to do business with the small businessman rather than the large if given any kind of choice at all. And is not merely sentiment that drives this preference. So long as small businesses of any kind proliferate, the customer is sure to be treated honestly and fairly in the vast majority of his dealings; what's more, if he is a repeat customer, he will also be treated personally. All of these qualities are absent from corporations and chains. They are run not by owners but by managers, and staffed by underpaid employees who like as not get no benefits and are treated poorly or indifferently by their employer, and have neither the incentive nor the native interest to please the customer. Going to a Barnes & Noble may be a positive experience to the Bibliophile insomuch as it is full of books and coffee, but in comparison with a good secondhand bookstore it is rather like tinned peaches versus ripe peaches taken directly off the tree. The former gives you the simulacrum of the thing you want, and the latter gives you the reality.
Whenever I move to a new city or state, the first thing I do is run down a mental checklist of the things I will need to locate after, or even before, I unpack: A friendly pub. A good restaurant. An honest mechanic. And a bookstore, preferably secondhand. Until a few weeks ago I was a habituate of a place in Burbank called Movie World, located downtown on San Fernando Boulevard. The title of the store was deceptive; while Movie World did sell movie posters, old VCR tapes, cinematic publicity stills, television scripts and various other ephemera related to Hollywood, it was by and large simply a used bookstore. And what a used bookstore. From floor to ceiling were stacked tens of thousands of hardbacks, paperbacks, magazines, leatherbound collections -- you name it, it was there, coated in dust and jammed in so tight against its fellows you practically needed a crowbar to pry it free. Indeed, Movie World was a firetrap of the first order, overstocked to an unsafe degree (there were literally avalanches of magazines and books that blocked entire isles), and not terribly well organized, though the gentlemanly owner tried his best to do so. He had, he told me, once run three secondhand bookshops, but the other two had folded and he'd been forced to cram the stock of both the others into his sole remaining store. Truth be told, I didn't mind; in fact I rather liked the ramshackle appearance. After the brightly lighted, sanitized, everything-in-its-place appearance of a Barnes & Noble, the existence of this kind of store, where every square foot was heaped with such a freight of books and old magazines and rolled-up posters and dog-eared 8 x 10 headshots that you wondered why the floor didn't collapse, was a positive joy for me. What's more, it was directly around the corner from my gym. I could roll up in my car, work out for an hour, then wander into Movie World and inhale its intoxicating scent as I hunted the isles for something new to read. Like as not I'd then eat lunch across the street, enjoying the first pages of my spontaneous purchase -- a pleasure all the more pleasurable for not being shared.
I patronized Movie World for years. Occasionally I'd go inside with a friend, but in a sense, Movie World was my friend and there was no need for further company. I don't know how many purchases I made there, but the number must be very great indeed, and included some terrific finds: old army manuals from WW2, out-of-print classics like Beau Geste, trashy adventure novels covered with mustard stains (I hope they were mustard stains), smashing autobiographies of obscure actors. Shopping there -- or just wandering there, without buying anything -- became a settled part of my routine. I really didn't need any of the stuff I bought, especially the scripts for episodes of forgotten 80s television shows like Matt Houston, but that was part of the fun. Nobody ever died because they didn't buy that old steel ammunition box from WW2 they saw in the junk shop window; on the other hand, nobody who hasn't paid hard-earned cash for a useless item simply for the joy of possessing it has lived a day in their life. Anyway, one day late last year -- I'm sure you knew this was coming, though I'm not sure I did -- the owner informed me that after decades in business he was finally retiring -- he'd sell off his entire stock, give away what didn't sell on his last day, and vacate the premises he'd occupied sometime around the year of my birth. If I may extend the metaphor, it was rather like having a good buddy tell you he's decided to leave town forever and head for the opposite side of he earth, where you can never visit. It reminded me of a similar experience I'd had in Bethesda, Maryland, in the early 2000s, when Second Story Books was forced by developers to shut its doors to make way for some fucking abomination of an art gallery that nobody wanted. In that case, it was less like losing a buddy than witnessing a murder you are powerless to prevent and equally powerless to avenge (unless you burn the fucking art gallery to the ground, which I may or may not have seriously considered). In both cases, though, these individual tiny incidents belong to a much larger trend -- a cultural massacre, a sort of slow-rolling genocide of everything which possesses soul in favor of everything which does not.
When Movie World shut down, I struck out in search of a replacement, but I've yet to find one which truly fills that particular niche within my soul. A very well-maintained secondhand bookstore does in fact reside very close to me in Toluca Lake, but in my first visit to the place I found it a little too well-maintained: too bright, too neat, too organized. Even the presence of several cats, sleeping peaceably atop stacks of books, couldn't quite give it the atmosphere of run-down, homey charm that I associate with a "real" used bookshop. It occurred to me as I left (having bought two books; hell, I'm not wasting a visit) that the mom-and-pop operations, even where they survive, have had to change their character somewhat in order to compete, or feel as if they are competing, with the big chains. Thus the cleanliness, the harsh lighting, the absence of dust. But it is precisely these things, in my mind, which lend the secondhand store its final coat of charm. Shops like that don't really give a shit whether you have allergies or expect to be served coffee or fume because there's no wi-fi for your android phone; not because they are indifferent to your wants, but because they concentrate on your needs. Customer service is sometimes more than satisfying petty desires in the consumer; it is sometimes slipping past them and reminding you, via a book avalanche or a handful of dust-bunnies, why you actually came into the store in the first place.
In his minor masterpiece Coming Up For Air, George Orwell brilliantly and evocatively told the story of a harassed, disappointed, much put-upon London everyman named George Bowling who rebels against the cold, mechanistic, heartless trend of the modern world by trying to revisit the idyllic country town of his boyhood, only to find that it has been utterly destroyed by the wheels of "progress." In confess that sometimes, as I comb through Los Angeles for a proper secondhand bookstore and a re-connection to the best days of my own childhood, I feel much like poor old George Bowling, who discovers there is no refuge from the bright lights and dead souls that surround him. Yet all is not lost. The hulking chain stores like Borders, which helped obliterate the secondhand store nationwide, are themselves being driven out of existence by Internet-based booksellers like Amazon: Borders ceased to exist almost a decade ago, and Barnes & Noble is sluggishly dying. Some will of course decry this as the final doom of the brick-and-mortar bookstore, but I see the strong possibility of a different future, because I know I am not alone in my passion for the tactile experience which is part and parcel of entering a bookshop. Human beings are gregarious animals and while they may enjoy the convenience of online shopping, it doesn't exactly fill up a Saturday afternoon for the family. The market abhors a vacuum, and if the last of the big chains goes into extinction, I foresee the rise of a new generation of bookseller -- one who bridges the gap between the cold, "full service" store which serves coffee and biscotti and carries mostly new releases from big publishers, and the dusty, dimly-lighted, no-frills secondhand store about which I have just waxed rhapsodic-nostalgic for the last few thousand words. This new sort of bookstore will carry heaps of old used books, but also sell coffee and have the latest bestsellers. It will have a lounge where people can read and get wi-fi, but the furniture will be secondhand and mismatched, and anyone talking on a cell phone will be told roughly to get the hell out. And best of all, it will be privately owned and privately run, designed and organized to the owner's whims and personal tastes. Said owner will not be a mere manager selling a commodity which to him might as well be pork bellies or wheat futures, but rather a bibliophile who passionately loves books, and reading, and the whole atmosphere which can surround both. Beechwoods can be cut down, you see, but they can also be replanted and regrown. All it takes is love, courage...and a little bit of soul.
June 19, 2018
Breaking Brad: or, why Grammar Nazis is good for ya
Like most people, I often want to beat the shit out of that subspecies of human we refer to as “the grammar Nazi.” You know, that sumbitch that's always telling you it's “whom” and not “who” or “me” and not “I.” Who tells you the comma should be a semicolon, or that you ended the sentence in a preposition and shouldn't have, because it "just isn't done." You know, that guy.
Unlike most people – I say this uncomfortably, with some upper-lip sweat, but I've gotta say it – I must confess I am occasionally that grammar Nazi. I've pulled on the black boots and carried the whip and Luger of the full-fledged, heel-clicking, monocle-wearing, grammar-syntax-spelling-punctuation fascist. Hail grammar!
Schizophrenic? Never been diagnosed. Hypocrite? Possibly. Morally correct? Here is my argument that I am. And it starts with a little discussion about brads. Yup, you heard me, brads.
A brad, for those of you who don't know, is a little brass paper fastener, about 2 ¾ inches long, which is used to hold together bodies of paper too thick to be stapled. It can be truly said that Hollywood runs on brads. They are the ammunition for its machine gun, the cream for its coffee, the peanut butter for its jelly. You can't have Hollywood without brads, because without brads, every script in this town would fall apart, literally, just like that. Given that every script has at least 90-odd pages, and there are hundreds of thousands of scripts in this city, it would be a total disaster. An explosion in a confetti factory. Doom.
Now, it so happens that hole-punchers make three holes: top, middle and bottom. So in theory, each script requires three brads. But in reality, only two are used: one at the top and one at the bottom. The middle is left empty. Always. In fact, if you submit a script to a studio, and they see it has three brads in it, or they see that it has brads in the top and middle, or middle and bottom, holes, they will throw it in the recycling bin faster than you can say “broken dreams.” They will not look at the title. They will not read the first page. They will not hand it a blindfold and a cigarette. They will just pull the trigger.
If this seems capricious or cruel, well, it is – cruel anyway. But it is not capricious. It has a very definite rationale, a cold and ruthless purpose. The purpose is to save time.
Hollywood is a town of wannabees. I say that with no malice. Nearly everyone here, myself included, is aspiring to be something other than what they actually are at the moment you meet them: actors, comedians, musicians, producers, directors...and scriptwriters. And a million wannabe scriptwriters means a million scripts. Those scripts pour into studio offices all day, every day, all year long. A friend of mine here told me his own office gets six hundred a week. Theoretically, every one of these has to be read and then summarized so it can be rejected or moved on for further study. It is verboten to simply throw away stacks of scripts because you, the studio reader, don't feel like reading them or are utterly overwhelmed by the influx. After all, you might be chucking away the next Godfather or Citizen Kane or Star Wars. But there is one exception to this rule. It is unwritten, but it is universally practiced. If a script comes in with three brads, or improperly placed brads, into the garbage chute it goes, and no one will bat an eye. But why, you ask – why? The answer is that because the rule about brads is so well known, it is assumed – with some degree of justification – that anyone who doesn't know it is a slovenly amateur whose writing won't be any better than their script etiquette. Their scripts can be destroyed unread with a clear conscience. So the tradition goes, anyway.
Okay, you say, now I know about brads and this arcane folkway of Hollywood script-readers. What the heil does that have to do with grammar Nazism?
When I am on the internet, be it Facebook or Twitter or the comments section of any website whatsoever, the first thing that strikes me is the aggressiveness of the posts. The issue people are posting about doesn't matter: gardening, politics, martial arts, kittens, the starship Enterprise – all irrelevant. The human being, safe behind anonymity and a keyboard, is evidently quite the little Ghengis Khan, and will launch a full-fledged, often vicious verbal attack on anyone or anything who disagrees with them in the slightest way on any subject. But when I look at attacks on the internet of any kind, especially those directed at me, one of the first things I take note of is the way they are executed. Is the attacker coherent? Do they write in complete sentences? Is there a structure to their argument? Are the spelling, grammar, punctuation and so forth they use correct or reasonably so? Do they commit any logical fallacies? It's a quick mental checklist, a sort of red-pen rundown I perform automatically, just the way the bleary-eyed script-reader checks each new arrival on his desk for the proper number and arrangement of brads.
You see, it all comes down to credibility. If someone is calling me ignorant who cannot spell the word, if someone is calling me stupid who writes two pages without using a comma and capitalizes more or less when they feel like it, I can assume with reasonable certainty that they are idiots or badly educated and that I can safely ignore what they have to say. If, on the other hand, they can write a proper sentence and construct a proper argument, I will probably listen (meaning read) and if it is not too insulting, give it a fair hearing before I respond. The person may be a jerk, but they know how to use the bloody brads. So to speak.
Snobbish, you say: many intelligent people lack schooling or are just plain bad writers. By red-penning their thoughts instead of arguing with them, I'm being cruel and unhelpful and even sidestepping the debate, whatever the debate may be. This is undeniably true, and it is undeniably unfair. But then some very good scriptwriters have failed the brad test and had their stuff shitcanned because of a misplaced paper fastener, and that, too, is unfair. The hard truth is the script-reader must have ways of thinning the herd. He must establish minimum prerequisites, a run of basic criteria, which if not met disqualify the script-writer, or else he will never get anything done at all. He must, in short, learn to discriminate. And isn't that a loaded word? Applied one way it is a horrible act. Applied another way it is a compliment – the ability to discriminate between, say, between shit and apple pie is important if you are hungry. And that is what the internet is: shit and apple pie. And it's a lot of the former and very little of the latter. We must have a way to discriminate between the two, and it seems to me that gauging the "English IQ" of someone who writes you a snarky or argumentative message is not a bad place to start.
Notice I said start, not end. Someone may be writing you who speaks English as a second or third language, or who is using voice-to-text, or is in a great rush or under pressure or had to drop out of school in eighth grade to get a job to support themselves. These people ought to get passes. I am speaking here mainly of people who are being aggressive, obnoxious, rude, insulting, and just plain nasty. If they are also sloppy in the bargain, why let them off? Why bother sifting through the chaos of their poorly-formed thoughts? Better to simply to lay hands on the grammar Nazi whip and let fly. It will infuriate them, it will make them look foolish, and when you get tired of it you can always destroy their arguments using a less persnickety weapon, like logic. The fact is that Grammar Nazism is often used by people who have no actual answer to an argument and want to distract their opponent and any onlookers from this fact; in that regard it is a logical fallacy itself. I do maintain that is not a legitimate substitute for an argument, but when your attacker is not making an argument but merely slinging mud or spewing nonsense, it is a viable option. The English "brad test" is designed to separate those who don't know the rules from those who do: it does not finish the selection process, but starts it.
I think we can all agree that Grammar Nazism is a terrible thing to be subjected to. I've been on the receiving end of that whip several times and it stings my ego terribly and makes me want to beat the shit out of the person using it – especially if, as I just said, they don't have an argument to make and want to harp on my misuse of a comma or some other trivial nonsense. But that is the nature of weaponry. It can be used by you, or it can be used against you, so it's best to establish a kind of Geneva Convention of Grammar Nazism. Perhaps we could establish a cultural rule that forbids hissy-fits over things like missing semicolons and dangling participles under certain definite conditions, while excusing G.N.'s of their G.N.-ism when a written statement is so egregiously sloppy and stupid that it practically begins to be deconstructed with a rusty scalpel. Perhaps that is a good idea. But in the mean time, goddamn it, I will retain my Grammar Nazi uniform and eight-headed whip and use them, or not, as I see fit. It so happens that I enjoy the screams.
Unlike most people – I say this uncomfortably, with some upper-lip sweat, but I've gotta say it – I must confess I am occasionally that grammar Nazi. I've pulled on the black boots and carried the whip and Luger of the full-fledged, heel-clicking, monocle-wearing, grammar-syntax-spelling-punctuation fascist. Hail grammar!
Schizophrenic? Never been diagnosed. Hypocrite? Possibly. Morally correct? Here is my argument that I am. And it starts with a little discussion about brads. Yup, you heard me, brads.
A brad, for those of you who don't know, is a little brass paper fastener, about 2 ¾ inches long, which is used to hold together bodies of paper too thick to be stapled. It can be truly said that Hollywood runs on brads. They are the ammunition for its machine gun, the cream for its coffee, the peanut butter for its jelly. You can't have Hollywood without brads, because without brads, every script in this town would fall apart, literally, just like that. Given that every script has at least 90-odd pages, and there are hundreds of thousands of scripts in this city, it would be a total disaster. An explosion in a confetti factory. Doom.
Now, it so happens that hole-punchers make three holes: top, middle and bottom. So in theory, each script requires three brads. But in reality, only two are used: one at the top and one at the bottom. The middle is left empty. Always. In fact, if you submit a script to a studio, and they see it has three brads in it, or they see that it has brads in the top and middle, or middle and bottom, holes, they will throw it in the recycling bin faster than you can say “broken dreams.” They will not look at the title. They will not read the first page. They will not hand it a blindfold and a cigarette. They will just pull the trigger.
If this seems capricious or cruel, well, it is – cruel anyway. But it is not capricious. It has a very definite rationale, a cold and ruthless purpose. The purpose is to save time.
Hollywood is a town of wannabees. I say that with no malice. Nearly everyone here, myself included, is aspiring to be something other than what they actually are at the moment you meet them: actors, comedians, musicians, producers, directors...and scriptwriters. And a million wannabe scriptwriters means a million scripts. Those scripts pour into studio offices all day, every day, all year long. A friend of mine here told me his own office gets six hundred a week. Theoretically, every one of these has to be read and then summarized so it can be rejected or moved on for further study. It is verboten to simply throw away stacks of scripts because you, the studio reader, don't feel like reading them or are utterly overwhelmed by the influx. After all, you might be chucking away the next Godfather or Citizen Kane or Star Wars. But there is one exception to this rule. It is unwritten, but it is universally practiced. If a script comes in with three brads, or improperly placed brads, into the garbage chute it goes, and no one will bat an eye. But why, you ask – why? The answer is that because the rule about brads is so well known, it is assumed – with some degree of justification – that anyone who doesn't know it is a slovenly amateur whose writing won't be any better than their script etiquette. Their scripts can be destroyed unread with a clear conscience. So the tradition goes, anyway.
Okay, you say, now I know about brads and this arcane folkway of Hollywood script-readers. What the heil does that have to do with grammar Nazism?
When I am on the internet, be it Facebook or Twitter or the comments section of any website whatsoever, the first thing that strikes me is the aggressiveness of the posts. The issue people are posting about doesn't matter: gardening, politics, martial arts, kittens, the starship Enterprise – all irrelevant. The human being, safe behind anonymity and a keyboard, is evidently quite the little Ghengis Khan, and will launch a full-fledged, often vicious verbal attack on anyone or anything who disagrees with them in the slightest way on any subject. But when I look at attacks on the internet of any kind, especially those directed at me, one of the first things I take note of is the way they are executed. Is the attacker coherent? Do they write in complete sentences? Is there a structure to their argument? Are the spelling, grammar, punctuation and so forth they use correct or reasonably so? Do they commit any logical fallacies? It's a quick mental checklist, a sort of red-pen rundown I perform automatically, just the way the bleary-eyed script-reader checks each new arrival on his desk for the proper number and arrangement of brads.
You see, it all comes down to credibility. If someone is calling me ignorant who cannot spell the word, if someone is calling me stupid who writes two pages without using a comma and capitalizes more or less when they feel like it, I can assume with reasonable certainty that they are idiots or badly educated and that I can safely ignore what they have to say. If, on the other hand, they can write a proper sentence and construct a proper argument, I will probably listen (meaning read) and if it is not too insulting, give it a fair hearing before I respond. The person may be a jerk, but they know how to use the bloody brads. So to speak.
Snobbish, you say: many intelligent people lack schooling or are just plain bad writers. By red-penning their thoughts instead of arguing with them, I'm being cruel and unhelpful and even sidestepping the debate, whatever the debate may be. This is undeniably true, and it is undeniably unfair. But then some very good scriptwriters have failed the brad test and had their stuff shitcanned because of a misplaced paper fastener, and that, too, is unfair. The hard truth is the script-reader must have ways of thinning the herd. He must establish minimum prerequisites, a run of basic criteria, which if not met disqualify the script-writer, or else he will never get anything done at all. He must, in short, learn to discriminate. And isn't that a loaded word? Applied one way it is a horrible act. Applied another way it is a compliment – the ability to discriminate between, say, between shit and apple pie is important if you are hungry. And that is what the internet is: shit and apple pie. And it's a lot of the former and very little of the latter. We must have a way to discriminate between the two, and it seems to me that gauging the "English IQ" of someone who writes you a snarky or argumentative message is not a bad place to start.
Notice I said start, not end. Someone may be writing you who speaks English as a second or third language, or who is using voice-to-text, or is in a great rush or under pressure or had to drop out of school in eighth grade to get a job to support themselves. These people ought to get passes. I am speaking here mainly of people who are being aggressive, obnoxious, rude, insulting, and just plain nasty. If they are also sloppy in the bargain, why let them off? Why bother sifting through the chaos of their poorly-formed thoughts? Better to simply to lay hands on the grammar Nazi whip and let fly. It will infuriate them, it will make them look foolish, and when you get tired of it you can always destroy their arguments using a less persnickety weapon, like logic. The fact is that Grammar Nazism is often used by people who have no actual answer to an argument and want to distract their opponent and any onlookers from this fact; in that regard it is a logical fallacy itself. I do maintain that is not a legitimate substitute for an argument, but when your attacker is not making an argument but merely slinging mud or spewing nonsense, it is a viable option. The English "brad test" is designed to separate those who don't know the rules from those who do: it does not finish the selection process, but starts it.
I think we can all agree that Grammar Nazism is a terrible thing to be subjected to. I've been on the receiving end of that whip several times and it stings my ego terribly and makes me want to beat the shit out of the person using it – especially if, as I just said, they don't have an argument to make and want to harp on my misuse of a comma or some other trivial nonsense. But that is the nature of weaponry. It can be used by you, or it can be used against you, so it's best to establish a kind of Geneva Convention of Grammar Nazism. Perhaps we could establish a cultural rule that forbids hissy-fits over things like missing semicolons and dangling participles under certain definite conditions, while excusing G.N.'s of their G.N.-ism when a written statement is so egregiously sloppy and stupid that it practically begins to be deconstructed with a rusty scalpel. Perhaps that is a good idea. But in the mean time, goddamn it, I will retain my Grammar Nazi uniform and eight-headed whip and use them, or not, as I see fit. It so happens that I enjoy the screams.
June 12, 2018
The Best of the Bad: My Favorite Movie Villains
Face it. Half of what's fun about going to the movies can be summed up in three words: the bad guys. In addition to generally getting the best dialogue (and the best tailors: who dresses better than the Nazis?) the villains or super-villains of cinema allow us to focus our free-floating hatreds and dislikes on one atavistic image, one sneering, gloating face. Everything that sucks about our own lives can be crammed into a single pinata of evil. And if and when the villain is defeated, well, we achieve a vicarious, cathartic release which we are often denied in real life. You can't kill your boss, the office bully or the asshole who just wrote you a $350 ticket for being three inches too far from the curb, but you can watch as appropriately magnified versions of these people are shot, blown to pieces, socked on the jaw, or just told to go fuck themselves.
Now, by definition, every movie must have its antagonists -- those characters whose purpose is to thwart the desires and goals of the heroes or heroines. In some movies these antagonists are not evil or even bad, they are simply obstacles which must be got around -- or through -- for the good guy to get what he or she wants. A good example of this would be "drill instructor" or "tough coach" films where the D.I. is the antagonist but not a villain. These folks are disqualified from my list, so you won't be seeing Louis Gossett, Jr. here even though he did kick Richard Gere's balls into next week win a fight in "An Officer and a Gentleman."
In other films, of course, the baddies are pureblood evil itself, with absolutely no redeeming qualities at all. They have no psychological depth and seem to revel in killing, torture and other nastiness. But simply being evil is not enough to qualify for my own personal Murderer's Row of cinematic goons and goonettes, any more than being able to hit a ball with a stick makes you a Major League ballplayer. To truly wear the Black Hat, you've gotta be bad, and being bad is more than acting that way. You've gotta have that extra something: bad charisma, rabid animal magnetism, kommandant presence, call it what you like.
So, for the record, here are my top 20 Cinematic Villains of All-Time. Actually I chose 21, so call this "The Blackjack of Evil." Here goes....
Evelyn Draper (Play Misty For Me). Long before "Fatal Attraction" gave us rabbit-boiling as a stalker hobby, aficionados of cheating on their wives, fiances and girlfriends had their illicit erections shrunk by the sight of knife-wielding psycho Evelyn (Jessica Walter). In this strangely forgotten horror/thriller, Clint Eastwood is a disc jockey who picks up a sultry stranger at a bar for a one-night stand. Unfortunately for him, one night of pleasure turns into a whole lotta nights of terror. Seems Evelyn is not quite ready to let him go, and she expresses her unwillingness in this direction by stalking the ever-loving shit out of Eastwood's character and his (legitimate) girlfriend. Seeing the cinematic tough guy of all tough guys driven to the point of hysteria by the hit-and-run tactics of the demented Evelyn is enough to scare anybody, but the relentless and increasingly terrifying methods she uses to express her displeasure make this movie, and this bad girl, very hard to forget. There is a scene where she cuts the eyes out of one of his paintings which is horrifying to watch. Trust me, you will never be able to have casual sex with an obsessive psychopath again.
Sergeant Waters (A Soldier's Story). Sgt. Waters is one of the most psychologically complex bad guys I have ever encountered in cinema. A career black soldier in a still-segregated U.S. Army, Waters is tough as nails, a First World War hero who pushes his men hard and punishes mistakes without mercy. Sounds like the typical movie NCO, right? Wrong. See, Waters has a serious hate on against a particular type of stereotypical Southern black man he refers to as a "Geechee." Geechees, in his mind, drag the black race down by making it impossible for white people to respect them.
So, as a half-hobby, half-crusade, Waters (Adolph Caesar) selects the Geechiest black men in his units and pushes them toward destruction -- prison, suicide, he doesn't care, so long as the Geechie is destroyed. Waters is a nasty piece of work, scientifically vicious, yet his grievance is so totally sincere, and the racism he himself is subjected to is so intense, that you pity him even as you despise him. Waters is never so terrifying as when he recounts how a soldier in his segregated outfit allowed himself to be publicly humiliated in France in WW1 for money by wearing a tail and eating bananas to amuse a white audience. "And would you believe," Waters mutters over his drink. "That when we slit his throat, the fool actually had the nerve to ask us what he had done wrong?"
Frank Nitti (The Untouchables). Billy Drago is one of those actors whose face tells the whole story before he utters a single word. Blessed by genetics with the mug of a total villain, Drago plays Al Capone's vicious right-hand man to a T of evil. Within moments of the movie's opening, he has already murdered a little girl by blowing her to bits with a bomb, along with everyone else in a homey little candy store, and it's all downhill from there. Later he brutally murders not one but two of the audience's favorite good-guy characters, and then has the audacity to taunt the do-gooding Eliot Ness about it with these words: "You're friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Think about that when I beat the rap!" Shit, any man who machine-guns Sean Connery has to be truly awful.
Rick Masters (To Live and Die in L.A.). You can always judge a bad guy in this manner: on a scale of 1 – 10, how badly do you want to see him die? With one or two exceptions I can't think of a villain I hated more than the sadistic counterfeiter played by Willem Dafoe in the L.A.-noir film “To Live and Die in L.A.” Masters is not only bloodthirsty and extremely cruel, clearly relishing the terror and agony of his many victims, he's also insufferably smug. There were times I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle the ugly fucker myself. Dafoe would go on to achieve fame as the almost saintly Sergeant Elias in “Platoon,” but I've never forgotten the way the mere sight of him on the screen made me want to simultaneously kill the sonofabitch and cover up my testicles less he shoot them off me. And yes, he really does shoot someone in the balls in this movie.
The Kurgan (Highlander). With his hulking stature, huge cold eyes, and marbled facial features, not to mention his savage voice, Clancy Brown makes one scary-ass bad guy in any movie. In “Highlander” he plays the immortal warrior Kurgan, who was raised, we were told, by a nomadic people who threw their children into pits full of starving dogs to fight over meat. It shows. This is one mean motherfucker. Enormously tall, dressed in a punk outfit cut to look like a gladiator's armor, and sporting a row of safety pins in his neck and a sword the size of the Empire State Building, Kurgan positively delights in killing and mayhem, and not just with his sword: in one scene he drives around Manhattan running people down for the sheer fun of it, all the while mocking his victims and the terrified woman he's taken hostage. Referring to Sean Connery's character, who he beheads midway through the film, Kurgan boasts: “I took his head and raped his woman before his blood was cold!” And he says this in a church. Nasty, nasty piece of work. (Connery is now 0 - 2 against my villains.)
Warden Norton (Shawshank Redemption). Villains are like ice cream; they come in every flavor. One of the worst kinds of baddie is the towering hypocrite, who preaches one thing and does quite the other, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more hypocritical prick than Norton (Bob Gunton). The warden of Shawshank prison, he not only uses his inmates as slaves, allows his sadistic henchmen to torture them, and prevents an innocent man from being released, he does this for money...all while quoting the Bible. This would be bad enough, but Norton actually seems to be as pious as he pretends; you get the feeling his fussy manners, severe crew-cut and avoidance of profanity aren't an act...which makes him all the more appalling when he calmly watches atrocities go on all around him with a faint, sanctimonious smile. Picture a totally demonic Ned Flanders and you've got the Warden. Hell, any villain who refers to a scantily-clad woman as “Miss Fussy-britches” has to be pure evil.
Thulsa Doom (Conan the Barbarian). Many cinematic villains like to twirl their mustaches and revel in their own evil. The ancient sorcerer Thulsa Doom is of a very different class. He's the cult leader type, unflappable even in the face of imminent danger, always in control of his emotions and quite the debater. He's also absolutely pitiless. In the opening of “Conan,” he kills Conan's father by unleashing war dogs on him; chops the head off Conan's mother; slaughters every adult inhabitant of Conan's village; and sells Conan into slavery. All before the opening credits are even dry. Not a bad intro. Yet Doom is far from a wild, bloodthirsty maniac; on the contrary, he's so even-tempered, so calm, so reasonable in his arguments that it's hard not to like him a little, even when he's ordering people fed to giant snakes. His best bad-guy moment comes when, instead of screaming at Conan for seeking revenge, he gives him a fatherly lecture rife with disappointment. And then has him crucified. That's a bad-guy microphone drop if ever a Wiz there was.
Antonio Salieri (Amadeus). If I ever needed anyone to play the Devil, not as towering Leviathan of pure evil but a subtle, sympathetic Satan whose terrifying depths of villainy only slowly come to light over the course of a movie, I would pick F. Murray Abraham, who justly won an Oscar for his mesmerizing performance as a man so consumed by jealousy that he carries out a diabolical plan to murder the target of his obsession, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But it is not mere jealousy that drives Salieri, a composer who at first actually admired the brash young genius; it is the belief that God has betrayed him by investing that genius in such a crude, vulgar, boorish figure as “Amadeus” turns out to be. Much of Salieri's grievance against Mozart, and even God, perhaps, is justified; what is not are the terrible lengths he goes to obtain revenge against both. This is a man who is fully conscious of the fact that what he is doing is totally evil, even by his own sense of right and wrong, and does it anyway. It's difficult to watch, and impossible not to.
Segeant Barnes (Platoon). Americans tend to think of their military men with haloes over their helmets, but Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a soldier whose close-cropped curls might just conceal horns. A scar-faced veteran of many tours in Vietnam, Barnes is tough as nails and a first-class leader; he's also a merciless killer who isn't too partial about what gets in front of his gun. Over the course of “Platoon,” Barnes doesn't just grease Viet Cong; he blasts an old woman between the eyes, threatens to massacre an entire village, and then kills one of his own men who has proffered criminal charges against him. In one memorable scene, he laments, “them politicians back in Washington, tryin' to fight this war with one hand tied to their balls." And then declares, "Ain't no time or need for a courtroom out here.” One of the most interesting comments about Barnes is actually rendered by his mortal enemy Elias: “Barnes believes in what he's doing.” And indeed he does. Which is what makes him so goddamned scary.
Darth Vader (Star Wars). A man who truly needs no introduction, everyone's favorite Sith Lord is no ordinary villain: enclosed black armor, black leather, and a black cape, speaking through a vocabulator that makes him sound every bit as wicked as he is, the artist formerly known as Anakin Skywalker set the bar for bad behavior in “Episode IV: A New Hope” and “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.” I've seen a positive crap-ton of movies, but I have never, before or since watched an audience hiss when the antagonist enters a room. Honest to God, the audience hissed. I thought that was the sort of thing people did in 19th century opera houses in Sicily when they didn't like the tenor, but I'm here to tell you it actually happened. Vader, the archetype of the “fallen angel” character, is a volcano of villainy. In his first on-screen appearance in 1977, he crushes the trachea of a rebel leader and then hurls his corpse into a wall so hard it rebounds like a ping-pong ball. This sets the tone for all sorts of future mayhem, but he's never more evil than in the sequel, when his violence is directed as much at his own troops as the enemy. Whether killing incompetent admirals, torturing his daughter or shortening his son by a hand, Vader is, as Ice Cube might observe, the wrong nigga to fuck wit.
Gordon Gekko (Wall Street). If Antonio Salieri represents the hidden side of Satan, earnest and sincere, then Gekko is his public face: handsome, charismatic, charming...and always looking to make a deal. Michael Douglas plays this utterly unscrupulous corporate raider with a relish bordering on glee, and it's impossible not to be seduced, even though you know the seduction won't end well. Indeed, while Gekko exults in making money, it's not really the money he's after, it's the sheer thrill of making it, and he's so addicted to that rush he doesn't give a fuck who he hurts or what the consequences are. When his protege asks him “How much is enough?” his answer, with all the bullshit scraped away, comes down to: greed doesn't lead to satiety. Greed leads to greed. The pleasure is therefore in wanting, not having. But of all his pleasures, none is sweeter to him than corrupting others into his way of thinking, and isn't that what the devil does best?
Hans Gruber (Die Hard). With his droll manners and tailor-made suits, the former East German radical turned “extraordinary thief” has a special place in the Great Hall of Villains. This gentleman poses as a terrorist to execute a bold and bloody robbery that he knows will lead to the deaths of dozens of innocent people, including a pregnant woman. Does he give a fuck? Not even a little one. Though we get little of Gruber's backstory in the movie, it's pretty clear he's the sort of disillusioned ex-radical who makes the very worst kind of criminal: the type with zero beliefs at all. Gruber (Alan Rickman) not only doesn't give a shit about “collateral damage,” he doesn't give two about his own men. Just the money he came to steal. Yet somehow, despite all of this, he manages to convey a moralistic disdain for both his nemesis John McClane, and for American culture generally. He'll show us about greed and materialism!...by being greedier and more materialistic than any of us! I can't see this guy on screen without thinking: “You've been struck by a smooth criminal.” *
* The gangster in Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" was Billy Drago!
Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street). Before he was debased into a sort of cartoon character by a string of increasingly moronic sequels, this extra-crispy revenant from hell was one of the most terrifying baddies ever to keep you awake at night. Played by the normally cuddly Robert Englund, Fred Krueger was a vicious child-murderer sprung on a technicality but brought to savage justice by the parents of his victims, who burned him alive. Years later, however, Freddy returns as a malevolent spirit who invades the dreams of his killers' children, terrorizing them to the point of insanity before slashing them to bloody ribbons with his trademark razor-tipped glove. Vicious, cunning and sadistic, Freddy hit audiences where they felt safest – in their beds and in their dreams, turning them into terrifying nightmares where failure to wake up meant horrible death. I can honestly say this bastard robbed me of many a good night's rest when I was in my tweens, and I still find the slice-and-dice he performs on some of his victims, including Johnny Depp, unsettling today. Though he has limited screen time, Englund manages to fairly crackle with a mixture of dirty, snuff-film sadism and capering, evil glee. This is one villain who loves what he does and wants you to know it.
John Kreese (The Karate Kid). Few movies take less time to establish just what their bad guys are made of than “TKK.” When we first meet John Kreese, he is instructing a class full of impressionable young karate students. The following exchange occurs:
Kreese: Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Defeat does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Prepare! What do we study here?
Cobra Kai: The way of the fist, sir!
Kreese: And what is that way?
Cobra Kai: Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, sir!
Kreese: We do not train to be merciful here. Mercy is for the weak. Here, in the streets, in competition. A man confronts you, he is the enemy, and an enemy deserves no mercy!
Kreese, the founder of Cobra Kai Karate, is the perfect Black Hat. He's a bully, he's a bigot, he's an egotist, and his attitude rests entirely in his fists. But his bigotry is really his best quality, because it's so marvelously hypocritical. He refers to Mr. Miyagi as a “slant” and a “slope,” which is really breathtaking when you consider that he's mocking mock of the same race of people that invented the martial art he's devoted his life to and from which he makes his entire living. Bad as he is, he's never badder than when he infamously instructs his star pupil, Johnny, to “sweep the leg” when fighting the heroic Daniel. The look of betrayal on actor Billy Zabka's face when he realizes just what sort of man he's chosen to be his idol, mentor, and father-figure is as evocative as it is haunting. This is child abuse at its psychological worst.
Tommy D. (Goodfellas). Aside from Rick Masters, I can't think of anyone I wanted to see die more than Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) in Martin Scorsese's unbeatable gangster epic. Tommy, a Mafia associate angling hard to get his button, is one of the worst human beings ever to cross the silver screen. He's pathologically violent, casually sadistic, and so unstable that you have no idea what the hell is going to set him off from one moment to the next. Whether he's attacking a waiter for daring to ask him to pay his bill, casually murdering a bartender for talking back to him, or slaughtering a made man for failing to show him respect he isn't due and hasn't earned, Tommy is a parole board's worst nightmare. He has no conscience, no remorse, no pity, and neither the ability nor willingness to restrain his impulses toward violence. Imagine a wagon full of old dynamite, sweating big beads of Nitro as it jounces along a badly rutted country road; that's Tommy. Every time he makes an appearance you know someone is going to die horribly. Maybe even Tommy himself. But hey, he isn't all bad. After killing the hapless Billy Batts, he apologizes to Henry with the immortal words: “I didn't mean to get blood on your floor.”
Amon Goethe (Schindler's List). Like Tommy D., Goethe (Ralph Finnes) was, unfortunately, a real-life human being. A low-ranking officer in the Death's Head branch of the SS, he ran a small forced-labor camp in Poland during WW2, but Goethe's introduction to the audience is chillingly deceptive. He comes off as self-involved, cynical, and a bit profane; the sort of corrupt sensualist that the film's hero, Oskar Schindler, can easily relate to and work with. But Goethe is no love-able scoundrel, no rouge with a heart of gold. Actually he has no heart at all. What he does possess is a decided taste for murder – the more casual and capricious, the better. Throughout the movie Goethe kills for cause, for whim, and for no goddamned reason at all; his morning “exercise” is to shoot lollygagging camp prisoners from his balcony with a hunting rifle. He's such a crook and thief that even the SS doesn't really like or trust him. But it's with his psychological torture of his Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch, on whom he has a sort of perverse crush, that achieves his apotheosis. “I realize,” he tells her one night. “That you're not a person in the strictest sense of the word.” No line he utters could sum up the character of this gentleman better. It's said that Ralph Finnes was so convincing in the role of this homicidal psychopath that one of the Holocaust survivors visiting the film set actually wet herself when she laid eyes on him. It's easy to understand why. He's the Angel of Death with a drinking problem.
King Edward I a.k.a. Edward the Longshanks (Braveheart). The Scots are a notoriously difficult people to subdue. This has been known from the time of the Roman emperors, who subjugated what is now England and Wales but decided it was in their best interests to simply build a wall up north to keep the goddamn Scottish savages out of the rest of the country. As late as WW2, it was observed that, when taken captive by the Germans, “the Scots resorted to the sort of behavior that made Hadrian build his wall.” Well, in “Braveheart,” Edward I (Patrick McGoohan) is determined to ensure his dominance over the troublesome country to the north, and he will stop at absolutely nothing to do it. Before we even see his character on screen, he's already shown his mettle by inviting Scottish leaders to a parlay under flag of truce – and then having the lot of them hanged. In the course of the movie, he murders his son's lover by throwing him out a window, initiates a program to breed the Scots out of their own by letting his nobles rape Scottish women, and once again violates a flag of truce by inviting William Wallace to a meeting and there trying to assassinate him. As if all that is not enough, he's cheap, too. When asked in battle if his archers should lay down a barrage before he sends in his Irish conscript soldiers, the King replies, “Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing.”
Khan Noonian Singh (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). In 1968, Ricardo Montalban was cast on the low-rated cult TV series “Star Trek” to play a genetically enhanced war criminal who had escaped Earth in a cryogenic spaceship and drifted in suspended animation, with the survivors of his army, among the stars for centuries before being rescued by the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Montalban later remarked that he enjoyed the role but, as a busy character actor, quickly forgot it. He was probably surprised when he was asked to reprise that role fifteen years later for the second feature-length “Trek” film, “The Wrath of Khan.” If so, the surprise didn't hurt his performance. In the television episode, Khan repays James T. Kirk's hospitality by hijacking his ship, but is defeated and exiled on a remote planet with his followers. In the movie, Khan escapes and embarks on a brutal revenge mission against Kirk, who he blames for the death of his wife. Bristling with charisma, masculinity and an ego as big as the universe he wants to conquer, Khan thrives on his own hatred; it's nitrous oxide for the engine of his vengeance, and heaven help anyone who stands in his way. Khan enslaves Federation officers using parasitic slugs, slaughters hapless Starfleet cadets, and tortures and then kills scientists who try to hamper his plans. At one point, taunting Kirk, he says, “I've done worse than kill you, Admiral. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me – as you left my wife. Marooned for all eternity at the center of a dead planet. Buried alive.” Kirk's epic response: “KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!” is one of the most memorable one-line comebacks in cinematic history, and the sort of thing that can only occur when a great hero has a great villain to fight with. I'm convinced that if TWOK had been a drama and not sci-fi, Montalban would have won an Oscar like Douglas, Caesar and Abraham did.*
* Berenger and Finnes were nominated for Oscars for the afformentioned roles but stupidly did not win.
Lord Humungus & Wes (The Road Warrior). Okay, this is cheating, but sometimes a “bad” is actually a tag-team affair. In “The Road Warrior” our redoubtable lone-wolf antihero, “Mad” Max Rockatansky, is vexed by an army of nomadic bandits led by Lord Humungus (Kjell Nillssen). Humungus is a hulking wall of muscle who wears a steel hockey mask, a loincloth, and issues decidedly not-hollow threats and demands in a savage yet highly educated growl from the loudspeaker on his souped-up dune buggy. His men kill pretty much everything they can, including dogs, and like a spot of rape first if they can manage it. Like many evildoers, the Lord of the Wastelands blames his victims for their suffering: “Once again,” he lectures the defenders of a desert fort who he has been besieging for months. “You've made me unleash my dogs of war.” The biggest of these “dogs” is Wez (Vernon Wells), a goggle-eyed psychopath whose stare could make a face bleed, and who has almost no dialogue except things like “Kill! Kill! Killlllllll!” Wez, unlike most baddies, doesn't need a signature weapon to do his killllllllling; he can put you in your grave with a head-butt. Nor does shooting him work; he'll just pluck the arrow from his body and give it a masochistic lick. In an interesting departure from convention, Wez is gay, and the death of his lover drives him, if this is possible, even more crazy than he is at the beginning of the movie. It also affords a rather amusing scene where a gust of wind shows us that Wez does not care for loincloths.
Pamela Voorhees (Friday the 13th). Most people think of “Friday” films as the bloody playground of one Jason Voorhees, he of the hockey mask, machete and bad attitude generally. But in the iconic first film the villain is not Jason, but her batshit-crazy mother Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer, an accomplished stage actress who took her role in the movie so she could buy a new car. Palmer's motives may have been mercenary, but her performance as the knife-wielding mommy of Crystal Lake's least popular citizen is unforgettable. Like many crazy cinematic killers, Mrs. Voorhees has a legitimate grudge; her only son, the deformed Jason, drowned when camp counselors decided to leave him alone so they could make love. That mistake causes a lot of people to pay a grisly price, not leastwhich is Pamela herself. The slow reveal of her insanity at the movie's climax, cultimating in a scene where she begins speaking in Jason's voice (“Get her, Mommy! Kill her! Don't let her get away!”) is so disturbing that it frightens me even now as I write this, at 3:11 pm on a sunny California day.
In compiling this list I'm sure I've forgotten a few who would qualify, and excluded others who, for one reason or another, I don't consider real villains but merely antagonists. These are simply Black Hats who made a deep impression on your humble correspondent. If there are any I missed who made an impression on you, please let me know.
Now, by definition, every movie must have its antagonists -- those characters whose purpose is to thwart the desires and goals of the heroes or heroines. In some movies these antagonists are not evil or even bad, they are simply obstacles which must be got around -- or through -- for the good guy to get what he or she wants. A good example of this would be "drill instructor" or "tough coach" films where the D.I. is the antagonist but not a villain. These folks are disqualified from my list, so you won't be seeing Louis Gossett, Jr. here even though he did kick Richard Gere's balls into next week win a fight in "An Officer and a Gentleman."
In other films, of course, the baddies are pureblood evil itself, with absolutely no redeeming qualities at all. They have no psychological depth and seem to revel in killing, torture and other nastiness. But simply being evil is not enough to qualify for my own personal Murderer's Row of cinematic goons and goonettes, any more than being able to hit a ball with a stick makes you a Major League ballplayer. To truly wear the Black Hat, you've gotta be bad, and being bad is more than acting that way. You've gotta have that extra something: bad charisma, rabid animal magnetism, kommandant presence, call it what you like.
So, for the record, here are my top 20 Cinematic Villains of All-Time. Actually I chose 21, so call this "The Blackjack of Evil." Here goes....
Evelyn Draper (Play Misty For Me). Long before "Fatal Attraction" gave us rabbit-boiling as a stalker hobby, aficionados of cheating on their wives, fiances and girlfriends had their illicit erections shrunk by the sight of knife-wielding psycho Evelyn (Jessica Walter). In this strangely forgotten horror/thriller, Clint Eastwood is a disc jockey who picks up a sultry stranger at a bar for a one-night stand. Unfortunately for him, one night of pleasure turns into a whole lotta nights of terror. Seems Evelyn is not quite ready to let him go, and she expresses her unwillingness in this direction by stalking the ever-loving shit out of Eastwood's character and his (legitimate) girlfriend. Seeing the cinematic tough guy of all tough guys driven to the point of hysteria by the hit-and-run tactics of the demented Evelyn is enough to scare anybody, but the relentless and increasingly terrifying methods she uses to express her displeasure make this movie, and this bad girl, very hard to forget. There is a scene where she cuts the eyes out of one of his paintings which is horrifying to watch. Trust me, you will never be able to have casual sex with an obsessive psychopath again.
Sergeant Waters (A Soldier's Story). Sgt. Waters is one of the most psychologically complex bad guys I have ever encountered in cinema. A career black soldier in a still-segregated U.S. Army, Waters is tough as nails, a First World War hero who pushes his men hard and punishes mistakes without mercy. Sounds like the typical movie NCO, right? Wrong. See, Waters has a serious hate on against a particular type of stereotypical Southern black man he refers to as a "Geechee." Geechees, in his mind, drag the black race down by making it impossible for white people to respect them.
So, as a half-hobby, half-crusade, Waters (Adolph Caesar) selects the Geechiest black men in his units and pushes them toward destruction -- prison, suicide, he doesn't care, so long as the Geechie is destroyed. Waters is a nasty piece of work, scientifically vicious, yet his grievance is so totally sincere, and the racism he himself is subjected to is so intense, that you pity him even as you despise him. Waters is never so terrifying as when he recounts how a soldier in his segregated outfit allowed himself to be publicly humiliated in France in WW1 for money by wearing a tail and eating bananas to amuse a white audience. "And would you believe," Waters mutters over his drink. "That when we slit his throat, the fool actually had the nerve to ask us what he had done wrong?"
Frank Nitti (The Untouchables). Billy Drago is one of those actors whose face tells the whole story before he utters a single word. Blessed by genetics with the mug of a total villain, Drago plays Al Capone's vicious right-hand man to a T of evil. Within moments of the movie's opening, he has already murdered a little girl by blowing her to bits with a bomb, along with everyone else in a homey little candy store, and it's all downhill from there. Later he brutally murders not one but two of the audience's favorite good-guy characters, and then has the audacity to taunt the do-gooding Eliot Ness about it with these words: "You're friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig. Think about that when I beat the rap!" Shit, any man who machine-guns Sean Connery has to be truly awful.
Rick Masters (To Live and Die in L.A.). You can always judge a bad guy in this manner: on a scale of 1 – 10, how badly do you want to see him die? With one or two exceptions I can't think of a villain I hated more than the sadistic counterfeiter played by Willem Dafoe in the L.A.-noir film “To Live and Die in L.A.” Masters is not only bloodthirsty and extremely cruel, clearly relishing the terror and agony of his many victims, he's also insufferably smug. There were times I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle the ugly fucker myself. Dafoe would go on to achieve fame as the almost saintly Sergeant Elias in “Platoon,” but I've never forgotten the way the mere sight of him on the screen made me want to simultaneously kill the sonofabitch and cover up my testicles less he shoot them off me. And yes, he really does shoot someone in the balls in this movie.
The Kurgan (Highlander). With his hulking stature, huge cold eyes, and marbled facial features, not to mention his savage voice, Clancy Brown makes one scary-ass bad guy in any movie. In “Highlander” he plays the immortal warrior Kurgan, who was raised, we were told, by a nomadic people who threw their children into pits full of starving dogs to fight over meat. It shows. This is one mean motherfucker. Enormously tall, dressed in a punk outfit cut to look like a gladiator's armor, and sporting a row of safety pins in his neck and a sword the size of the Empire State Building, Kurgan positively delights in killing and mayhem, and not just with his sword: in one scene he drives around Manhattan running people down for the sheer fun of it, all the while mocking his victims and the terrified woman he's taken hostage. Referring to Sean Connery's character, who he beheads midway through the film, Kurgan boasts: “I took his head and raped his woman before his blood was cold!” And he says this in a church. Nasty, nasty piece of work. (Connery is now 0 - 2 against my villains.)
Warden Norton (Shawshank Redemption). Villains are like ice cream; they come in every flavor. One of the worst kinds of baddie is the towering hypocrite, who preaches one thing and does quite the other, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more hypocritical prick than Norton (Bob Gunton). The warden of Shawshank prison, he not only uses his inmates as slaves, allows his sadistic henchmen to torture them, and prevents an innocent man from being released, he does this for money...all while quoting the Bible. This would be bad enough, but Norton actually seems to be as pious as he pretends; you get the feeling his fussy manners, severe crew-cut and avoidance of profanity aren't an act...which makes him all the more appalling when he calmly watches atrocities go on all around him with a faint, sanctimonious smile. Picture a totally demonic Ned Flanders and you've got the Warden. Hell, any villain who refers to a scantily-clad woman as “Miss Fussy-britches” has to be pure evil.
Thulsa Doom (Conan the Barbarian). Many cinematic villains like to twirl their mustaches and revel in their own evil. The ancient sorcerer Thulsa Doom is of a very different class. He's the cult leader type, unflappable even in the face of imminent danger, always in control of his emotions and quite the debater. He's also absolutely pitiless. In the opening of “Conan,” he kills Conan's father by unleashing war dogs on him; chops the head off Conan's mother; slaughters every adult inhabitant of Conan's village; and sells Conan into slavery. All before the opening credits are even dry. Not a bad intro. Yet Doom is far from a wild, bloodthirsty maniac; on the contrary, he's so even-tempered, so calm, so reasonable in his arguments that it's hard not to like him a little, even when he's ordering people fed to giant snakes. His best bad-guy moment comes when, instead of screaming at Conan for seeking revenge, he gives him a fatherly lecture rife with disappointment. And then has him crucified. That's a bad-guy microphone drop if ever a Wiz there was.
Antonio Salieri (Amadeus). If I ever needed anyone to play the Devil, not as towering Leviathan of pure evil but a subtle, sympathetic Satan whose terrifying depths of villainy only slowly come to light over the course of a movie, I would pick F. Murray Abraham, who justly won an Oscar for his mesmerizing performance as a man so consumed by jealousy that he carries out a diabolical plan to murder the target of his obsession, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But it is not mere jealousy that drives Salieri, a composer who at first actually admired the brash young genius; it is the belief that God has betrayed him by investing that genius in such a crude, vulgar, boorish figure as “Amadeus” turns out to be. Much of Salieri's grievance against Mozart, and even God, perhaps, is justified; what is not are the terrible lengths he goes to obtain revenge against both. This is a man who is fully conscious of the fact that what he is doing is totally evil, even by his own sense of right and wrong, and does it anyway. It's difficult to watch, and impossible not to.
Segeant Barnes (Platoon). Americans tend to think of their military men with haloes over their helmets, but Staff Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a soldier whose close-cropped curls might just conceal horns. A scar-faced veteran of many tours in Vietnam, Barnes is tough as nails and a first-class leader; he's also a merciless killer who isn't too partial about what gets in front of his gun. Over the course of “Platoon,” Barnes doesn't just grease Viet Cong; he blasts an old woman between the eyes, threatens to massacre an entire village, and then kills one of his own men who has proffered criminal charges against him. In one memorable scene, he laments, “them politicians back in Washington, tryin' to fight this war with one hand tied to their balls." And then declares, "Ain't no time or need for a courtroom out here.” One of the most interesting comments about Barnes is actually rendered by his mortal enemy Elias: “Barnes believes in what he's doing.” And indeed he does. Which is what makes him so goddamned scary.
Darth Vader (Star Wars). A man who truly needs no introduction, everyone's favorite Sith Lord is no ordinary villain: enclosed black armor, black leather, and a black cape, speaking through a vocabulator that makes him sound every bit as wicked as he is, the artist formerly known as Anakin Skywalker set the bar for bad behavior in “Episode IV: A New Hope” and “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.” I've seen a positive crap-ton of movies, but I have never, before or since watched an audience hiss when the antagonist enters a room. Honest to God, the audience hissed. I thought that was the sort of thing people did in 19th century opera houses in Sicily when they didn't like the tenor, but I'm here to tell you it actually happened. Vader, the archetype of the “fallen angel” character, is a volcano of villainy. In his first on-screen appearance in 1977, he crushes the trachea of a rebel leader and then hurls his corpse into a wall so hard it rebounds like a ping-pong ball. This sets the tone for all sorts of future mayhem, but he's never more evil than in the sequel, when his violence is directed as much at his own troops as the enemy. Whether killing incompetent admirals, torturing his daughter or shortening his son by a hand, Vader is, as Ice Cube might observe, the wrong nigga to fuck wit.
Gordon Gekko (Wall Street). If Antonio Salieri represents the hidden side of Satan, earnest and sincere, then Gekko is his public face: handsome, charismatic, charming...and always looking to make a deal. Michael Douglas plays this utterly unscrupulous corporate raider with a relish bordering on glee, and it's impossible not to be seduced, even though you know the seduction won't end well. Indeed, while Gekko exults in making money, it's not really the money he's after, it's the sheer thrill of making it, and he's so addicted to that rush he doesn't give a fuck who he hurts or what the consequences are. When his protege asks him “How much is enough?” his answer, with all the bullshit scraped away, comes down to: greed doesn't lead to satiety. Greed leads to greed. The pleasure is therefore in wanting, not having. But of all his pleasures, none is sweeter to him than corrupting others into his way of thinking, and isn't that what the devil does best?
Hans Gruber (Die Hard). With his droll manners and tailor-made suits, the former East German radical turned “extraordinary thief” has a special place in the Great Hall of Villains. This gentleman poses as a terrorist to execute a bold and bloody robbery that he knows will lead to the deaths of dozens of innocent people, including a pregnant woman. Does he give a fuck? Not even a little one. Though we get little of Gruber's backstory in the movie, it's pretty clear he's the sort of disillusioned ex-radical who makes the very worst kind of criminal: the type with zero beliefs at all. Gruber (Alan Rickman) not only doesn't give a shit about “collateral damage,” he doesn't give two about his own men. Just the money he came to steal. Yet somehow, despite all of this, he manages to convey a moralistic disdain for both his nemesis John McClane, and for American culture generally. He'll show us about greed and materialism!...by being greedier and more materialistic than any of us! I can't see this guy on screen without thinking: “You've been struck by a smooth criminal.” *
* The gangster in Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" was Billy Drago!
Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street). Before he was debased into a sort of cartoon character by a string of increasingly moronic sequels, this extra-crispy revenant from hell was one of the most terrifying baddies ever to keep you awake at night. Played by the normally cuddly Robert Englund, Fred Krueger was a vicious child-murderer sprung on a technicality but brought to savage justice by the parents of his victims, who burned him alive. Years later, however, Freddy returns as a malevolent spirit who invades the dreams of his killers' children, terrorizing them to the point of insanity before slashing them to bloody ribbons with his trademark razor-tipped glove. Vicious, cunning and sadistic, Freddy hit audiences where they felt safest – in their beds and in their dreams, turning them into terrifying nightmares where failure to wake up meant horrible death. I can honestly say this bastard robbed me of many a good night's rest when I was in my tweens, and I still find the slice-and-dice he performs on some of his victims, including Johnny Depp, unsettling today. Though he has limited screen time, Englund manages to fairly crackle with a mixture of dirty, snuff-film sadism and capering, evil glee. This is one villain who loves what he does and wants you to know it.
John Kreese (The Karate Kid). Few movies take less time to establish just what their bad guys are made of than “TKK.” When we first meet John Kreese, he is instructing a class full of impressionable young karate students. The following exchange occurs:
Kreese: Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Defeat does not exist in this dojo, does it?
Cobra Kai: No, Sensei!
Kreese: Prepare! What do we study here?
Cobra Kai: The way of the fist, sir!
Kreese: And what is that way?
Cobra Kai: Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, sir!
Kreese: We do not train to be merciful here. Mercy is for the weak. Here, in the streets, in competition. A man confronts you, he is the enemy, and an enemy deserves no mercy!
Kreese, the founder of Cobra Kai Karate, is the perfect Black Hat. He's a bully, he's a bigot, he's an egotist, and his attitude rests entirely in his fists. But his bigotry is really his best quality, because it's so marvelously hypocritical. He refers to Mr. Miyagi as a “slant” and a “slope,” which is really breathtaking when you consider that he's mocking mock of the same race of people that invented the martial art he's devoted his life to and from which he makes his entire living. Bad as he is, he's never badder than when he infamously instructs his star pupil, Johnny, to “sweep the leg” when fighting the heroic Daniel. The look of betrayal on actor Billy Zabka's face when he realizes just what sort of man he's chosen to be his idol, mentor, and father-figure is as evocative as it is haunting. This is child abuse at its psychological worst.
Tommy D. (Goodfellas). Aside from Rick Masters, I can't think of anyone I wanted to see die more than Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) in Martin Scorsese's unbeatable gangster epic. Tommy, a Mafia associate angling hard to get his button, is one of the worst human beings ever to cross the silver screen. He's pathologically violent, casually sadistic, and so unstable that you have no idea what the hell is going to set him off from one moment to the next. Whether he's attacking a waiter for daring to ask him to pay his bill, casually murdering a bartender for talking back to him, or slaughtering a made man for failing to show him respect he isn't due and hasn't earned, Tommy is a parole board's worst nightmare. He has no conscience, no remorse, no pity, and neither the ability nor willingness to restrain his impulses toward violence. Imagine a wagon full of old dynamite, sweating big beads of Nitro as it jounces along a badly rutted country road; that's Tommy. Every time he makes an appearance you know someone is going to die horribly. Maybe even Tommy himself. But hey, he isn't all bad. After killing the hapless Billy Batts, he apologizes to Henry with the immortal words: “I didn't mean to get blood on your floor.”
Amon Goethe (Schindler's List). Like Tommy D., Goethe (Ralph Finnes) was, unfortunately, a real-life human being. A low-ranking officer in the Death's Head branch of the SS, he ran a small forced-labor camp in Poland during WW2, but Goethe's introduction to the audience is chillingly deceptive. He comes off as self-involved, cynical, and a bit profane; the sort of corrupt sensualist that the film's hero, Oskar Schindler, can easily relate to and work with. But Goethe is no love-able scoundrel, no rouge with a heart of gold. Actually he has no heart at all. What he does possess is a decided taste for murder – the more casual and capricious, the better. Throughout the movie Goethe kills for cause, for whim, and for no goddamned reason at all; his morning “exercise” is to shoot lollygagging camp prisoners from his balcony with a hunting rifle. He's such a crook and thief that even the SS doesn't really like or trust him. But it's with his psychological torture of his Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch, on whom he has a sort of perverse crush, that achieves his apotheosis. “I realize,” he tells her one night. “That you're not a person in the strictest sense of the word.” No line he utters could sum up the character of this gentleman better. It's said that Ralph Finnes was so convincing in the role of this homicidal psychopath that one of the Holocaust survivors visiting the film set actually wet herself when she laid eyes on him. It's easy to understand why. He's the Angel of Death with a drinking problem.
King Edward I a.k.a. Edward the Longshanks (Braveheart). The Scots are a notoriously difficult people to subdue. This has been known from the time of the Roman emperors, who subjugated what is now England and Wales but decided it was in their best interests to simply build a wall up north to keep the goddamn Scottish savages out of the rest of the country. As late as WW2, it was observed that, when taken captive by the Germans, “the Scots resorted to the sort of behavior that made Hadrian build his wall.” Well, in “Braveheart,” Edward I (Patrick McGoohan) is determined to ensure his dominance over the troublesome country to the north, and he will stop at absolutely nothing to do it. Before we even see his character on screen, he's already shown his mettle by inviting Scottish leaders to a parlay under flag of truce – and then having the lot of them hanged. In the course of the movie, he murders his son's lover by throwing him out a window, initiates a program to breed the Scots out of their own by letting his nobles rape Scottish women, and once again violates a flag of truce by inviting William Wallace to a meeting and there trying to assassinate him. As if all that is not enough, he's cheap, too. When asked in battle if his archers should lay down a barrage before he sends in his Irish conscript soldiers, the King replies, “Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing.”
Khan Noonian Singh (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). In 1968, Ricardo Montalban was cast on the low-rated cult TV series “Star Trek” to play a genetically enhanced war criminal who had escaped Earth in a cryogenic spaceship and drifted in suspended animation, with the survivors of his army, among the stars for centuries before being rescued by the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Montalban later remarked that he enjoyed the role but, as a busy character actor, quickly forgot it. He was probably surprised when he was asked to reprise that role fifteen years later for the second feature-length “Trek” film, “The Wrath of Khan.” If so, the surprise didn't hurt his performance. In the television episode, Khan repays James T. Kirk's hospitality by hijacking his ship, but is defeated and exiled on a remote planet with his followers. In the movie, Khan escapes and embarks on a brutal revenge mission against Kirk, who he blames for the death of his wife. Bristling with charisma, masculinity and an ego as big as the universe he wants to conquer, Khan thrives on his own hatred; it's nitrous oxide for the engine of his vengeance, and heaven help anyone who stands in his way. Khan enslaves Federation officers using parasitic slugs, slaughters hapless Starfleet cadets, and tortures and then kills scientists who try to hamper his plans. At one point, taunting Kirk, he says, “I've done worse than kill you, Admiral. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me – as you left my wife. Marooned for all eternity at the center of a dead planet. Buried alive.” Kirk's epic response: “KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!” is one of the most memorable one-line comebacks in cinematic history, and the sort of thing that can only occur when a great hero has a great villain to fight with. I'm convinced that if TWOK had been a drama and not sci-fi, Montalban would have won an Oscar like Douglas, Caesar and Abraham did.*
* Berenger and Finnes were nominated for Oscars for the afformentioned roles but stupidly did not win.
Lord Humungus & Wes (The Road Warrior). Okay, this is cheating, but sometimes a “bad” is actually a tag-team affair. In “The Road Warrior” our redoubtable lone-wolf antihero, “Mad” Max Rockatansky, is vexed by an army of nomadic bandits led by Lord Humungus (Kjell Nillssen). Humungus is a hulking wall of muscle who wears a steel hockey mask, a loincloth, and issues decidedly not-hollow threats and demands in a savage yet highly educated growl from the loudspeaker on his souped-up dune buggy. His men kill pretty much everything they can, including dogs, and like a spot of rape first if they can manage it. Like many evildoers, the Lord of the Wastelands blames his victims for their suffering: “Once again,” he lectures the defenders of a desert fort who he has been besieging for months. “You've made me unleash my dogs of war.” The biggest of these “dogs” is Wez (Vernon Wells), a goggle-eyed psychopath whose stare could make a face bleed, and who has almost no dialogue except things like “Kill! Kill! Killlllllll!” Wez, unlike most baddies, doesn't need a signature weapon to do his killllllllling; he can put you in your grave with a head-butt. Nor does shooting him work; he'll just pluck the arrow from his body and give it a masochistic lick. In an interesting departure from convention, Wez is gay, and the death of his lover drives him, if this is possible, even more crazy than he is at the beginning of the movie. It also affords a rather amusing scene where a gust of wind shows us that Wez does not care for loincloths.
Pamela Voorhees (Friday the 13th). Most people think of “Friday” films as the bloody playground of one Jason Voorhees, he of the hockey mask, machete and bad attitude generally. But in the iconic first film the villain is not Jason, but her batshit-crazy mother Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer, an accomplished stage actress who took her role in the movie so she could buy a new car. Palmer's motives may have been mercenary, but her performance as the knife-wielding mommy of Crystal Lake's least popular citizen is unforgettable. Like many crazy cinematic killers, Mrs. Voorhees has a legitimate grudge; her only son, the deformed Jason, drowned when camp counselors decided to leave him alone so they could make love. That mistake causes a lot of people to pay a grisly price, not leastwhich is Pamela herself. The slow reveal of her insanity at the movie's climax, cultimating in a scene where she begins speaking in Jason's voice (“Get her, Mommy! Kill her! Don't let her get away!”) is so disturbing that it frightens me even now as I write this, at 3:11 pm on a sunny California day.
In compiling this list I'm sure I've forgotten a few who would qualify, and excluded others who, for one reason or another, I don't consider real villains but merely antagonists. These are simply Black Hats who made a deep impression on your humble correspondent. If there are any I missed who made an impression on you, please let me know.
May 24, 2018
Why Trump? Why now?
At breakfast a few weeks ago, while reading the Los Angeles Times, I encountered these words about Donald Trump, written by an op-ed writer named Stephen Almond:
I have spent many anguished hours pondering how it is that a man of such low character and dubious qualifications occupies the Oval Office. I've spent even longer trying to understand his presidency. I've pored over polls and research papers, absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None has solved the mystery.
The opening three sentences go a fair country distance toward explaining why Trump was in fact elected in the first place, and why there is a substantial chance he will be elected in again in 2020, should he somehow escape the various legal entanglements which now hamper him. “I've poured over polls and research papers,” Mr. Almond tells us, and “absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None of them has solved the mystery.”
Polls? Research papers? Think pieces? Are you kidding me? Why would analyses written by ivory-tower intellectuals, themselves invariably liberals to a man (or woman), yield any useful information about Donald Trump or the people who voted for him? Asking a university professor, a member of a political think tank, or a professional journalist to “solve the mystery” is about as effective as inviting a professional soldier to perform brain surgery, merely because he knows how to handle a knife. As I have stated before – in this very blog, no less – there is no group of people less qualified to explain the Trump phenomenon than the professional journalistic class and its various hangers-on: pundits, pollsters, academics. They do not “get it.” They will never “get it.” There are a number of reasons for this, foremost of which is their own political outlook, which prevents them from seeing this country as it actually is; but the reasons go beyond the blinders all political partisans wear. The fact is, this class of people are endeavoring to use a scientific process to examine human motivation, which resides deep within the human heart and is about as likely to yield its secrets to a microscope as a bank vault is to open because you mutter the words, “Open sesame.”
When Trump was elected, the dismay, horror and anguish of the left and a large chunk of the political center produced a collective wail so deafening that for weeks and even months after he took office, it was impossible to “hear” anything else in the press. The seven stages of grief began their grisly march through newscasts, op-ed pieces, blogs, newspaper articles, news magazines, even comedic monologues. Shock was followed by denial; pain by guilt (“Why did we sabotage Bernie's candidacy?”); anger by a species of bargaining (“Wait until 2018, when we get the Senate back!”); and most recently, depression. There is not a lot of evidence, however, that the last and most important of these stages are being approached, much less embraced. A year into Trump's presidency I still see few signs that the “upward turn” – reconstruction, “working through,” acceptance and hope – are on the horizon. The left is anger-locked, unable to get past its fury that a thrice-married, many-times bankrupt reality television star twice convicted of civil fraud by the United States government defeated “the most qualified candidate in history” and assumed the office once held by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In a sense, this is understandable. Being defeated by a moral and mental mediocrity is difficult to accept, as any intelligent, sensitive person who was ever bullied in junior high school by a sub-literate moron can tell you. Nevertheless, it happened, and unless the left and center-left grasp why it happened, it may very well happen again.
As I have noted before, and despite the almost hysterical insistence of the mainstream press and the left generally, America remains a “white” country when viewed in strictly demographic terms. By the last census, the total population is 318 million; if we exclude the fifteen million of those who are here illegally and cannot vote (despite what The Donald claims) we come to a figure of 303 million, of which 200 million identify, or are identified by the rules of the census, as “white.” Of course, “white” is largely a meaningless term (indeed, the absurdity of the concept of race is never more evident than when one tries to quantify it), since many classified that way are, in fact, nothing of the kind. Still, the census gives us a good, if very broad and crude, notion of the basic racial makeup of the country. Two hundred million “whites” out of a population of 300 million means two out of every three American citizens is “white.” This is a fact which sticks hard in the craw of many liberals and center-leftists, especially those who live in big, racially and ethnically diverse cities like New York, Los Angeles or San Fransisco. The reality they see is the reality they more or less assume obtains for the rest of the nation; but as anyone who has ever driven through, say, Kansas, or southern Illinois, or rural Pennsylvania will tell you, it is not actual reality. Perspective is everything when forming a worldview, or for that matter, trying to solve the “mystery” which so puzzles Mr. Almond.
According to public records, about 128 million people voted in the 2016 election -- 63 million for Trump, 65 million for Clinton. But of the white people who voted, 58% cast their ballots for Trump, and no less than 63% of all white men. While Trump's deepest support lay in whites in the age demographic 45 – 65, he also received the majority of white female vote as well: 53%. This fact seems rather astonishing when one considers that Trump was running against a well-known female candidate with extensive educational and public service credentials, but it remains a fact: more than half of white people who voted, voted for Trump. More than half of white women who voted, voted for Trump. It is these figures which baffle, dismay and outrage so many pundits, journalists and “political experts.” In their minds, America is a steadily liberalizing country, fast doing away with religious belief and embracing the concepts of democratic socialism, cultural diversity, and internationalism. When they are smacked upside the head by evidence to the contrary, they are gobsmacked, flabbergasted – choose your archaic term for bone-deep and unwelcome surprise. As I said, they don't get it. The question “why?” is at least as important as the question of why so many white people voted for Donald Trump – and would probably do so again, given the chance. Almond's “mystery” is in fact two mysteries. I aim to solve both.
I have noted previously that 2016 may be the year most remembered as that in which journalists discovered there is actually a white working class. On the face of it, the fact that the media did not grasp the existence of a population which may number as many as 76 million men and women – just under one in four Americans – seems absurd, but the evidence is too plain to ignore. These polished, well-educated, seemingly intelligent people, whose entire job is to keep a finger on the pulse of this nation and to understand the working of its innermost mind and heart, were as ignorant of this horde of blue-collared white folks as Columbus was of the New World when he blundered into it. It took Trump's election to open their eyes, but even when awakened, their political leanings forced them into an Orwellian state where they were unwilling to draw any conclusions from their discovery. Thus, the tiresome, almost nauseating insistence that Trump's election was solely the product of white racism.
Of course, some Trump supporters are racists, and others on the borderline of racism. The evidence of this, too, is impossible to ignore. (Trump himself make frank and open appeals to xenophobia during his campaign, and continues to do so.) But the fact remains that of all the people I know personally who voted for Trump, I would characterize none as genuine bigots. At worst, some have slight prejudices, but if pressed, if put in a situation where they had to abandon those prejudices or double down on them, I truly believe every one would choose the former rather than the latter course. To a man (and woman), they voted for Trump because they quite simply reject the vision of America which the left has been peddling for decades. Yes, they resent the “cultural diversity seminars” forced upon them at work, the unpaid “racial sensitivity trainings,” the mandatory “gender identity education courses” for their children; yes, they are frustrated that it is easier to obtain, at many major universities, a copy of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto than it is one of the United States Constitution; yes, they weary of watching liberals gnash their teeth over the issues of transgender bathrooms and the fact that illegal immigrants might not be able to obtain driver's licenses and health care when millions of actual American citizens have neither; yes, they worry that liberals turn a blind eye toward outrages perpetrated by radical Islam while seemingly condemning Christianity and promoting atheism at every opportunity; but the most common motive for a Trump vote is not purely political or religious-racial-ethnic but economic in nature. When I listen to interviews with the more articulate and intelligent of his supporters throughout the country, what strikes me again and again is the narrowness of their concerns. We live in an age of one-issue voters, and the one-issue which seemed to drive so many working-class whites to pull the lever for Donald Trump is simply the fear of being left behind.
If you are old enough to really recall the 1990s, you will probably remember them as an era of unrivaled economic prosperity and generalized optimism. The economy was booming, jobs were plentiful, the Cold War had ended in bloodless triumph, democracy was on the march all across the world, and so determined was Bill Clinton to smash racism in America that he was only half-jokingly referred to as "the first black president." It was scarcely noticed by many of the big media outlets, or even by the middle class itself, that the decline of skilled and highly-paid unskilled labor jobs in the U.S. continued to decline, that coal miners, factory workers, farmers and other salt-of-the-earth Americans were not being swept along by the rush of free-trade "prosperity" embodied by the NAFTA agreements, but rather watching in kind of baffled fury as their own incomes and prospects shrank and kept shrinking. This erosion predated the presidencies of Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43, but it certainly continued and perhaps even accelerated during their administrations. The white working class certainly felt abandoned by Obama, who neither understood nor seemed to sympathize with them – the condescending remark he made about “guns and Bibles” was as offensive to many in this country as a flippant joke about “fried chicken and watermelons” would have been to black people had it been uttered by a white president. Indeed, the very nature of Obama's presidency was bound up with the idea that those who had traditionally been excluded from the American Dream – minorities in general – were finally seeing their moment arrive. This moment was undeniably overdue, but it offered little comfort to the West Virginia coal miner now two years unemployed, the small businessman in Kansas choked out of business by red tape, the Pennsylvanian master welder who saw his job at the Caterpillar plant exported to Korea and was told to go get a job at Wal-Mart instead. More importantly, when he vented his grievance, he was generally told by the media and intelligentsia to shut up. The complaints of white men were of zero interest to the left and center-left; their very existence was only tolerated if they toed the left-wing line. The miner was told he was environmentally destructive; the farmer that he lived on “stolen” Indian land (as if his critic did not!); the factory worker was dismissed with the sentiment that “we don't want to hear white men complain about anything." The evident motive of these dismissals was rooted in a feeling that the time had come to right old wrongs; the problem was that it ignored the fact that two wrongs do not constitute a right. If it was wrong to subject black people to Jim Crow and systematized, institutionalized racism, if it was wrong to harass and punish gays merely for being gay, if it was wrong to oppress and devalue women – and it was – then it was equally wrong to negate the apprehensions of the supposedly privileged white male, to dismiss them with contempt, to tell him, in effect, that his time had passed and he ought to go quietly into that good night. And it was not merely morally wrong, but stupid. It would have been far more sensible for the left to try to win over the working class white man than to call him a ignorant, uneducated bigot whose feelings did not matter. In choosing the latter course the American left not only alienated millions of potential voters, it ignored its own history, to wit: in the 19th century, the left found its strongest support among the working class, which was being ruthlessly exploited by its capitalist masters, regardless of race or ethnicity. As late as the mid-20th century, the white union worker walked, to some extent, hand-in-hand with the left-wing intelligentsia; with socialists and borderline socialists; with Jews, blacks Latinos and other minorities; and with the broad masses of the Democratic Party. But times had changed, and the leaders of liberalism and progressivism had moved up in economic status, concentrating on the coasts and the big cities and universities, and gradually severing their ties with the workers whom they once idealized, recruited and to some extent, led. A different political landscape emerged, one in which the blue collars which had once been die-hard Democrats began to vote increasingly Republican, and to become more vulnerable to the kind of demagogic, blame-them tactics employed by Trump and people of his ilk. Politics abhors a vacuum; if the needs of a group of people are not fulfilled, or at least addressed, by one party, then they will be adopted by the other. When the left disowned the white working class, they set in motion a chain of events that handed the keys to the White House to Donald Trump.
Trump's election campaign contained very little of substance. Unlike, for example, Bernie Sanders, who was more than willing to get into the nuts and bolts of many of his proposals – perhaps even to his detriment – Trump mainly spoke in generalities and was deliberately vague about how he would execute such ideas as he had. However, on certain points he was quite specific, and the most important of these, more important than his infamous border wall or proposed Muslim ban, was the idea that he cared for, and would protect and serve, the American worker. Trump was a businessman and presumably understood business better than any professional politician. He would “get tough” with our trade partners, throw out harmful or useless trade agreements, punish U.S. corporations who shipped jobs overseas, and slash business and banking regulation to the bone. Anything that inhibited the economy would be thrown out; anything that added jobs, be it drilling in national parks or allowing every manner of filth to be poured into the atmosphere, soil and water, would be permitted. In a very real sense his agenda was Reaganomics on steroids, an idea that government governs best not when it governs least, but when it governs not at all.
Liberals were aghast at this, and many centrists as well, but again, they failed to understand the appeal this sort of talk has to a proud third-generation coal miner who has been out of work for two years and cannot reconcile himself to pumping gas, flipping burgers or stocking shelves for $6.75 an hour. It is often, and rightly, said that when a man's belly is empty, his only concern is with filling it; it is only when he is full that moral, philosophical and spiritual issues begin to concern him. Concern for the environment, for a justice system that serves everyone, for an America where it is not necessary to remind people that Black Lives Matter – all of this is virtuous. But none of it is likely to be of great concern to the man in question when he cannot pay his mortgage, cannot afford health care, and cannot see any prospect of doing so in the future. Hell is not necessarily a place; it is simply the absence of hope. And if nothing else, The Donald offered hope to people who had none.
It so happens that I listen to a lot of progressive radio, and in recent months I've been amazed by the insistence that “we (meaning the left) don't need the white working class at election time.” This has been repeated so often that I suspect many progressives actually believe it. They think they can get back in office by putting up candidates whose appeal is rooted almost exclusively among blacks, Latinos, gays, and white liberals. To me this represents a simple doubling-down of mistakes already made. But again, the question is one of ideology versus reality. All ideologues, of any party, dismiss reality at the exact moment it comes into conflict with their political beliefs. The left doesn't “get” the election of Trump because they have chosen not to respect, or even to admit the existence, of a huge, seething mass of people who do not approve of their agenda, and have the power to vote against it; and rather than trying to win these people over – and many could be won over – they have continued to insult and negate them. Flipping the coin, Trump was elected because he grasped, if only by accident, that this mass did in fact exist, and that, if properly galvanized, it might vote for him. Whether it will vote for him again in 2020 (assuming he is able and willing to run) I don't know. But I do know that unless the left can find a way to approach the blue-collar white worker more sensibly and respectfully, it may, at that time, once again find itself on the outside, looking in.
I have spent many anguished hours pondering how it is that a man of such low character and dubious qualifications occupies the Oval Office. I've spent even longer trying to understand his presidency. I've pored over polls and research papers, absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None has solved the mystery.
The opening three sentences go a fair country distance toward explaining why Trump was in fact elected in the first place, and why there is a substantial chance he will be elected in again in 2020, should he somehow escape the various legal entanglements which now hamper him. “I've poured over polls and research papers,” Mr. Almond tells us, and “absorbed an ocean of think pieces. None of them has solved the mystery.”
Polls? Research papers? Think pieces? Are you kidding me? Why would analyses written by ivory-tower intellectuals, themselves invariably liberals to a man (or woman), yield any useful information about Donald Trump or the people who voted for him? Asking a university professor, a member of a political think tank, or a professional journalist to “solve the mystery” is about as effective as inviting a professional soldier to perform brain surgery, merely because he knows how to handle a knife. As I have stated before – in this very blog, no less – there is no group of people less qualified to explain the Trump phenomenon than the professional journalistic class and its various hangers-on: pundits, pollsters, academics. They do not “get it.” They will never “get it.” There are a number of reasons for this, foremost of which is their own political outlook, which prevents them from seeing this country as it actually is; but the reasons go beyond the blinders all political partisans wear. The fact is, this class of people are endeavoring to use a scientific process to examine human motivation, which resides deep within the human heart and is about as likely to yield its secrets to a microscope as a bank vault is to open because you mutter the words, “Open sesame.”
When Trump was elected, the dismay, horror and anguish of the left and a large chunk of the political center produced a collective wail so deafening that for weeks and even months after he took office, it was impossible to “hear” anything else in the press. The seven stages of grief began their grisly march through newscasts, op-ed pieces, blogs, newspaper articles, news magazines, even comedic monologues. Shock was followed by denial; pain by guilt (“Why did we sabotage Bernie's candidacy?”); anger by a species of bargaining (“Wait until 2018, when we get the Senate back!”); and most recently, depression. There is not a lot of evidence, however, that the last and most important of these stages are being approached, much less embraced. A year into Trump's presidency I still see few signs that the “upward turn” – reconstruction, “working through,” acceptance and hope – are on the horizon. The left is anger-locked, unable to get past its fury that a thrice-married, many-times bankrupt reality television star twice convicted of civil fraud by the United States government defeated “the most qualified candidate in history” and assumed the office once held by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In a sense, this is understandable. Being defeated by a moral and mental mediocrity is difficult to accept, as any intelligent, sensitive person who was ever bullied in junior high school by a sub-literate moron can tell you. Nevertheless, it happened, and unless the left and center-left grasp why it happened, it may very well happen again.
As I have noted before, and despite the almost hysterical insistence of the mainstream press and the left generally, America remains a “white” country when viewed in strictly demographic terms. By the last census, the total population is 318 million; if we exclude the fifteen million of those who are here illegally and cannot vote (despite what The Donald claims) we come to a figure of 303 million, of which 200 million identify, or are identified by the rules of the census, as “white.” Of course, “white” is largely a meaningless term (indeed, the absurdity of the concept of race is never more evident than when one tries to quantify it), since many classified that way are, in fact, nothing of the kind. Still, the census gives us a good, if very broad and crude, notion of the basic racial makeup of the country. Two hundred million “whites” out of a population of 300 million means two out of every three American citizens is “white.” This is a fact which sticks hard in the craw of many liberals and center-leftists, especially those who live in big, racially and ethnically diverse cities like New York, Los Angeles or San Fransisco. The reality they see is the reality they more or less assume obtains for the rest of the nation; but as anyone who has ever driven through, say, Kansas, or southern Illinois, or rural Pennsylvania will tell you, it is not actual reality. Perspective is everything when forming a worldview, or for that matter, trying to solve the “mystery” which so puzzles Mr. Almond.
According to public records, about 128 million people voted in the 2016 election -- 63 million for Trump, 65 million for Clinton. But of the white people who voted, 58% cast their ballots for Trump, and no less than 63% of all white men. While Trump's deepest support lay in whites in the age demographic 45 – 65, he also received the majority of white female vote as well: 53%. This fact seems rather astonishing when one considers that Trump was running against a well-known female candidate with extensive educational and public service credentials, but it remains a fact: more than half of white people who voted, voted for Trump. More than half of white women who voted, voted for Trump. It is these figures which baffle, dismay and outrage so many pundits, journalists and “political experts.” In their minds, America is a steadily liberalizing country, fast doing away with religious belief and embracing the concepts of democratic socialism, cultural diversity, and internationalism. When they are smacked upside the head by evidence to the contrary, they are gobsmacked, flabbergasted – choose your archaic term for bone-deep and unwelcome surprise. As I said, they don't get it. The question “why?” is at least as important as the question of why so many white people voted for Donald Trump – and would probably do so again, given the chance. Almond's “mystery” is in fact two mysteries. I aim to solve both.
I have noted previously that 2016 may be the year most remembered as that in which journalists discovered there is actually a white working class. On the face of it, the fact that the media did not grasp the existence of a population which may number as many as 76 million men and women – just under one in four Americans – seems absurd, but the evidence is too plain to ignore. These polished, well-educated, seemingly intelligent people, whose entire job is to keep a finger on the pulse of this nation and to understand the working of its innermost mind and heart, were as ignorant of this horde of blue-collared white folks as Columbus was of the New World when he blundered into it. It took Trump's election to open their eyes, but even when awakened, their political leanings forced them into an Orwellian state where they were unwilling to draw any conclusions from their discovery. Thus, the tiresome, almost nauseating insistence that Trump's election was solely the product of white racism.
Of course, some Trump supporters are racists, and others on the borderline of racism. The evidence of this, too, is impossible to ignore. (Trump himself make frank and open appeals to xenophobia during his campaign, and continues to do so.) But the fact remains that of all the people I know personally who voted for Trump, I would characterize none as genuine bigots. At worst, some have slight prejudices, but if pressed, if put in a situation where they had to abandon those prejudices or double down on them, I truly believe every one would choose the former rather than the latter course. To a man (and woman), they voted for Trump because they quite simply reject the vision of America which the left has been peddling for decades. Yes, they resent the “cultural diversity seminars” forced upon them at work, the unpaid “racial sensitivity trainings,” the mandatory “gender identity education courses” for their children; yes, they are frustrated that it is easier to obtain, at many major universities, a copy of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto than it is one of the United States Constitution; yes, they weary of watching liberals gnash their teeth over the issues of transgender bathrooms and the fact that illegal immigrants might not be able to obtain driver's licenses and health care when millions of actual American citizens have neither; yes, they worry that liberals turn a blind eye toward outrages perpetrated by radical Islam while seemingly condemning Christianity and promoting atheism at every opportunity; but the most common motive for a Trump vote is not purely political or religious-racial-ethnic but economic in nature. When I listen to interviews with the more articulate and intelligent of his supporters throughout the country, what strikes me again and again is the narrowness of their concerns. We live in an age of one-issue voters, and the one-issue which seemed to drive so many working-class whites to pull the lever for Donald Trump is simply the fear of being left behind.
If you are old enough to really recall the 1990s, you will probably remember them as an era of unrivaled economic prosperity and generalized optimism. The economy was booming, jobs were plentiful, the Cold War had ended in bloodless triumph, democracy was on the march all across the world, and so determined was Bill Clinton to smash racism in America that he was only half-jokingly referred to as "the first black president." It was scarcely noticed by many of the big media outlets, or even by the middle class itself, that the decline of skilled and highly-paid unskilled labor jobs in the U.S. continued to decline, that coal miners, factory workers, farmers and other salt-of-the-earth Americans were not being swept along by the rush of free-trade "prosperity" embodied by the NAFTA agreements, but rather watching in kind of baffled fury as their own incomes and prospects shrank and kept shrinking. This erosion predated the presidencies of Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43, but it certainly continued and perhaps even accelerated during their administrations. The white working class certainly felt abandoned by Obama, who neither understood nor seemed to sympathize with them – the condescending remark he made about “guns and Bibles” was as offensive to many in this country as a flippant joke about “fried chicken and watermelons” would have been to black people had it been uttered by a white president. Indeed, the very nature of Obama's presidency was bound up with the idea that those who had traditionally been excluded from the American Dream – minorities in general – were finally seeing their moment arrive. This moment was undeniably overdue, but it offered little comfort to the West Virginia coal miner now two years unemployed, the small businessman in Kansas choked out of business by red tape, the Pennsylvanian master welder who saw his job at the Caterpillar plant exported to Korea and was told to go get a job at Wal-Mart instead. More importantly, when he vented his grievance, he was generally told by the media and intelligentsia to shut up. The complaints of white men were of zero interest to the left and center-left; their very existence was only tolerated if they toed the left-wing line. The miner was told he was environmentally destructive; the farmer that he lived on “stolen” Indian land (as if his critic did not!); the factory worker was dismissed with the sentiment that “we don't want to hear white men complain about anything." The evident motive of these dismissals was rooted in a feeling that the time had come to right old wrongs; the problem was that it ignored the fact that two wrongs do not constitute a right. If it was wrong to subject black people to Jim Crow and systematized, institutionalized racism, if it was wrong to harass and punish gays merely for being gay, if it was wrong to oppress and devalue women – and it was – then it was equally wrong to negate the apprehensions of the supposedly privileged white male, to dismiss them with contempt, to tell him, in effect, that his time had passed and he ought to go quietly into that good night. And it was not merely morally wrong, but stupid. It would have been far more sensible for the left to try to win over the working class white man than to call him a ignorant, uneducated bigot whose feelings did not matter. In choosing the latter course the American left not only alienated millions of potential voters, it ignored its own history, to wit: in the 19th century, the left found its strongest support among the working class, which was being ruthlessly exploited by its capitalist masters, regardless of race or ethnicity. As late as the mid-20th century, the white union worker walked, to some extent, hand-in-hand with the left-wing intelligentsia; with socialists and borderline socialists; with Jews, blacks Latinos and other minorities; and with the broad masses of the Democratic Party. But times had changed, and the leaders of liberalism and progressivism had moved up in economic status, concentrating on the coasts and the big cities and universities, and gradually severing their ties with the workers whom they once idealized, recruited and to some extent, led. A different political landscape emerged, one in which the blue collars which had once been die-hard Democrats began to vote increasingly Republican, and to become more vulnerable to the kind of demagogic, blame-them tactics employed by Trump and people of his ilk. Politics abhors a vacuum; if the needs of a group of people are not fulfilled, or at least addressed, by one party, then they will be adopted by the other. When the left disowned the white working class, they set in motion a chain of events that handed the keys to the White House to Donald Trump.
Trump's election campaign contained very little of substance. Unlike, for example, Bernie Sanders, who was more than willing to get into the nuts and bolts of many of his proposals – perhaps even to his detriment – Trump mainly spoke in generalities and was deliberately vague about how he would execute such ideas as he had. However, on certain points he was quite specific, and the most important of these, more important than his infamous border wall or proposed Muslim ban, was the idea that he cared for, and would protect and serve, the American worker. Trump was a businessman and presumably understood business better than any professional politician. He would “get tough” with our trade partners, throw out harmful or useless trade agreements, punish U.S. corporations who shipped jobs overseas, and slash business and banking regulation to the bone. Anything that inhibited the economy would be thrown out; anything that added jobs, be it drilling in national parks or allowing every manner of filth to be poured into the atmosphere, soil and water, would be permitted. In a very real sense his agenda was Reaganomics on steroids, an idea that government governs best not when it governs least, but when it governs not at all.
Liberals were aghast at this, and many centrists as well, but again, they failed to understand the appeal this sort of talk has to a proud third-generation coal miner who has been out of work for two years and cannot reconcile himself to pumping gas, flipping burgers or stocking shelves for $6.75 an hour. It is often, and rightly, said that when a man's belly is empty, his only concern is with filling it; it is only when he is full that moral, philosophical and spiritual issues begin to concern him. Concern for the environment, for a justice system that serves everyone, for an America where it is not necessary to remind people that Black Lives Matter – all of this is virtuous. But none of it is likely to be of great concern to the man in question when he cannot pay his mortgage, cannot afford health care, and cannot see any prospect of doing so in the future. Hell is not necessarily a place; it is simply the absence of hope. And if nothing else, The Donald offered hope to people who had none.
It so happens that I listen to a lot of progressive radio, and in recent months I've been amazed by the insistence that “we (meaning the left) don't need the white working class at election time.” This has been repeated so often that I suspect many progressives actually believe it. They think they can get back in office by putting up candidates whose appeal is rooted almost exclusively among blacks, Latinos, gays, and white liberals. To me this represents a simple doubling-down of mistakes already made. But again, the question is one of ideology versus reality. All ideologues, of any party, dismiss reality at the exact moment it comes into conflict with their political beliefs. The left doesn't “get” the election of Trump because they have chosen not to respect, or even to admit the existence, of a huge, seething mass of people who do not approve of their agenda, and have the power to vote against it; and rather than trying to win these people over – and many could be won over – they have continued to insult and negate them. Flipping the coin, Trump was elected because he grasped, if only by accident, that this mass did in fact exist, and that, if properly galvanized, it might vote for him. Whether it will vote for him again in 2020 (assuming he is able and willing to run) I don't know. But I do know that unless the left can find a way to approach the blue-collar white worker more sensibly and respectfully, it may, at that time, once again find itself on the outside, looking in.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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