Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 6
July 24, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: "GOETHE: CONVERSATIONS AND ENCOUNTERS"
If I love you, what business is it of yours?
This forgotten little book, edited by David Luke and Robert Pick, is a gem in the almost literal sense -- being both valuable and having many facets. In the former sense, it is a great introduction to one of the greatest writer-artist-philosopher-thinkers of European history; in the latter, it is a treasure-trove of insight and quotation. You may think it a bit scholarly-sounding (or just plain boring) by way of title, but you'd be wrong. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was eminent polymath, one of the great thinker-creators of all history, and a true savant, standing somewhere beyond genius in the power of his thinking and creativity: he was also a very colorful and deeply flawed man who becomes all the more interesting for his vanities and caprices, laid bare here in this editorially-assembled collection of firsthand encounters with the man as recorded by various friends, admirers, relations, rivals, acquaintances, colleagues, and enemies. Presented in chronological format, they trace Goethe from his preciocious childhood in which he embodied the German concept of the Wunderkind, all the way to his deathbed.
To understand the range of Goethe's interests, it's worth noting that one of his least-known efforts is still held in awe 214 years after it was published: THEORY OF COLORS (1810) "disputed the Newtonian view of the subject and formulated a psychological and philosophical account of the way we actually experience color as a phenomenon." [1] Werner Heisenberg later commented, "Goethe’s colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology and aesthetics," while noting that Sir Isaac Newton's work was the more influential, being more scientific in nature. This is undoubtedly true, but rather misses the point that even when acting as a scientist, Goethe's view of life was not really scientific, but consisted of brilliant "intuitive schema" which spoke more to those very arenas of which Heisenberg referred -- art, physiology, aesthetics. Goethe's was not only a brilliant but a profoundly restless and unconventional mind, and a man who seems to have deeply influenced many other great men of his era: "His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler." [3]
The author of FAUST was born in 1749 and lived until 1832, and in that time numbered among friends and acquaintances such people as Mozart and Napoleon, Mendelssohn, Schopenhauer and Schiller, not to mention innumerable politicians, artists, poets, and noblemen from all over Europe, including Talleyrand and Lord Byron. Holding court at his estate in Weimar, he frequently regaled visitors with his thoughts on every aspect of life, and it is these conversations which make up the book -- a selection of Goethe's views on everything from art and politics to music and science; religion, immortality, writing, poetry, science, the creative process, critical acclaim...you name it. And this is what makes the book valuable, for Goethe, while eccentric and often moody, was an immensely wise and quotable man with a lot of insight. I marked down literally dozens of quotations which I found inspiring, arresting, or simply too provocative to forget:
"When a writer can find no more suitable development for his theme, he kills his hero."
"Each man should sacrifice himself to his own conviction."
"Maximum possibilities are realized if the impossible is demanded."
"A monk is a refugee from life; a man buried alive."
"The essential thing is to love truth and to be receptive when one finds it."
"At least there is some character in hatred."
Somme of the anecdotes are just amazing -- the time, for example, when a young Felix Mendelssohn was at his house, and Goethe handed him some sheet music to play for the guests...music which turned out to be hand-written original drafts by Mozart and Beethoven. Goethe pointed out that Beethoven's "looked as if they'd been written with a broom dipped in ink" while Mozart's were picture-perfect, lacking even a single correction, as if dictated directly by God. That would make a great scene in a movie (provided Milos Forman directed it, of course). The point is that in an age very heavy on technology and very light on wisdom, GOETHE: CONVERSATIONS AND ENCOUNTERS is wisdom-heavy...without being a heavy read. I must emphasize this because you couldn't be blamed if you felt your eyeballs hardening just reading the title. I assure you, like most oral histories it moves very swiftly, interweaving somber and in some cases tragic moments with extremely funny, deeply thought-provoking conversations about every aspect of life. Goethe could be a wonderful and considerate man, or an arrogant, cold-hearted jerk, and seems to have been both refreshed and exhausted by the regard in which he was held. Some of this comes off in the different ways he handled, or was handled, by those who met him.
In closing I should admit I knew almost nothing about Goethe when I decided, based on a glimpse of what was inside, that I would read through it, and while this selection of conversations and encounters is by no means a biography, and only touches glancingly on most of his diplomatic career, published works and scientific studies, it is a very excellent portrait of the man himself and his mental processes...a man who was one of the towering artistic and intellectual figures of the 19th century, but almost unknown in America except by a handful of scholars.
This forgotten little book, edited by David Luke and Robert Pick, is a gem in the almost literal sense -- being both valuable and having many facets. In the former sense, it is a great introduction to one of the greatest writer-artist-philosopher-thinkers of European history; in the latter, it is a treasure-trove of insight and quotation. You may think it a bit scholarly-sounding (or just plain boring) by way of title, but you'd be wrong. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was eminent polymath, one of the great thinker-creators of all history, and a true savant, standing somewhere beyond genius in the power of his thinking and creativity: he was also a very colorful and deeply flawed man who becomes all the more interesting for his vanities and caprices, laid bare here in this editorially-assembled collection of firsthand encounters with the man as recorded by various friends, admirers, relations, rivals, acquaintances, colleagues, and enemies. Presented in chronological format, they trace Goethe from his preciocious childhood in which he embodied the German concept of the Wunderkind, all the way to his deathbed.
To understand the range of Goethe's interests, it's worth noting that one of his least-known efforts is still held in awe 214 years after it was published: THEORY OF COLORS (1810) "disputed the Newtonian view of the subject and formulated a psychological and philosophical account of the way we actually experience color as a phenomenon." [1] Werner Heisenberg later commented, "Goethe’s colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology and aesthetics," while noting that Sir Isaac Newton's work was the more influential, being more scientific in nature. This is undoubtedly true, but rather misses the point that even when acting as a scientist, Goethe's view of life was not really scientific, but consisted of brilliant "intuitive schema" which spoke more to those very arenas of which Heisenberg referred -- art, physiology, aesthetics. Goethe's was not only a brilliant but a profoundly restless and unconventional mind, and a man who seems to have deeply influenced many other great men of his era: "His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler." [3]
The author of FAUST was born in 1749 and lived until 1832, and in that time numbered among friends and acquaintances such people as Mozart and Napoleon, Mendelssohn, Schopenhauer and Schiller, not to mention innumerable politicians, artists, poets, and noblemen from all over Europe, including Talleyrand and Lord Byron. Holding court at his estate in Weimar, he frequently regaled visitors with his thoughts on every aspect of life, and it is these conversations which make up the book -- a selection of Goethe's views on everything from art and politics to music and science; religion, immortality, writing, poetry, science, the creative process, critical acclaim...you name it. And this is what makes the book valuable, for Goethe, while eccentric and often moody, was an immensely wise and quotable man with a lot of insight. I marked down literally dozens of quotations which I found inspiring, arresting, or simply too provocative to forget:
"When a writer can find no more suitable development for his theme, he kills his hero."
"Each man should sacrifice himself to his own conviction."
"Maximum possibilities are realized if the impossible is demanded."
"A monk is a refugee from life; a man buried alive."
"The essential thing is to love truth and to be receptive when one finds it."
"At least there is some character in hatred."
Somme of the anecdotes are just amazing -- the time, for example, when a young Felix Mendelssohn was at his house, and Goethe handed him some sheet music to play for the guests...music which turned out to be hand-written original drafts by Mozart and Beethoven. Goethe pointed out that Beethoven's "looked as if they'd been written with a broom dipped in ink" while Mozart's were picture-perfect, lacking even a single correction, as if dictated directly by God. That would make a great scene in a movie (provided Milos Forman directed it, of course). The point is that in an age very heavy on technology and very light on wisdom, GOETHE: CONVERSATIONS AND ENCOUNTERS is wisdom-heavy...without being a heavy read. I must emphasize this because you couldn't be blamed if you felt your eyeballs hardening just reading the title. I assure you, like most oral histories it moves very swiftly, interweaving somber and in some cases tragic moments with extremely funny, deeply thought-provoking conversations about every aspect of life. Goethe could be a wonderful and considerate man, or an arrogant, cold-hearted jerk, and seems to have been both refreshed and exhausted by the regard in which he was held. Some of this comes off in the different ways he handled, or was handled, by those who met him.
In closing I should admit I knew almost nothing about Goethe when I decided, based on a glimpse of what was inside, that I would read through it, and while this selection of conversations and encounters is by no means a biography, and only touches glancingly on most of his diplomatic career, published works and scientific studies, it is a very excellent portrait of the man himself and his mental processes...a man who was one of the towering artistic and intellectual figures of the 19th century, but almost unknown in America except by a handful of scholars.
July 20, 2024
SECOND THOUGHTS ON 70s DISASTER MOVIES
Disaster movies do us the psychological service of forcing a quick march through the worst that could happen. At the end we see that you win a few, you lose a few, some cars are up in trees, and only the most attractive of the young people have survived.
I recently completed a highly enjoyable marathon of 70s-era disaster movies. For those of you who weren't around for Hollywood's "disaster craze," let me tell you, it was something. For years, audiences drank thirstily, almost insatiably, from a well of spectacular, cinematic destruction. In modern times the closest analogs would be the vampire or zombie crazes of the last twenty-five years. Like all crazes, it eventually burned out, but while the mayhem was in swing it was highly entertaining.
Disaster movies were what Charlton Heston, who starred in a number of them, referred to as "stories of an event." What he meant was that the script's did not allow for a great deal of character development, but rather thrust swiftly-developed (or totally undeveloped) characters into extraordinary situations, and drew its entertainment value from watching how they coped with the catastrophe. Suspense was maintained by killing enough of them that there was always doubt as to who would live to the final credits: enertainment was provided by watching things crash, explode, burn or otherwise meet doom in spectacular fashion.
A simple search for films of this type from that era yielded about 30 results, of which I myself would eliminate a small number for being dystopian or post-apocalyptic in character, such as DAMNATION ALLEY and Heston's OMEGA MAN. I would also a trim a few which are plainly horror movies though they certainly present themselves as disasters: DAWN OF THE DEAD, for example. And of course there were a few I did not see or want to because of appallingly bad film quality or reviews (or both). I was left with fourteen films, three of which I managed to catch in the theater (at a triple feature at the Aero in Santa Monica).
The China Syndrome - One of the better actual movies on this list, and only marginally a disaster movie in the sense that it threatens catastrophe without bringing it, TCS is a virulently anti-nuclear story with a good script and fine actors delivering very good performances. Jack Lemmon plays a high-strung worker at a California nuclear plant so obsessed with what he believes are sloppy safety procedures that he ends up holding the reactor hostage.
Gray Lady Down - The aformentioned Chuck Heston stars in this gruesome flick about a nuclear submarine, the Gray Lady, which is accidentally rammed by a freighter and promptly sinks to the bottom of the ocean, necessitating a daring undersea rescue by an experimental craft skippered by David Carradine. As a kid I was traumatized by some of the drowning scenes, which are graphically depicted. While hardly the greatest movie ever made, it's pretty suspenseful and heavy with acting talent.
Kingdom of the Spiders - While KINGDOM is really a monster movie, it's sufficiently massive in scale to qualify as a disaster film. William Shatner is a rugged rural vet brought in to investigate some mysterious animal deaths, only to discover they were caused by a mutated strain of poisonous desert tarantula which is fast spreading toward the nearby town. I got a big kick out of this movie, which develops some very likeable characters and puts them through absolute hell. The ending is a real shocker.
The Towering Inferno - This is probably the acme of diaster movies, a "cast of thousands" epic which sees Paul Newman as the harassed architecht of a mega-skyscraper on the West Coast who discovers, too late, that wicked Richard Chamberlain has cut so many corners the building is nothing but a vast deathtrap. And indeed, when the inevitable fire breaks out, it slaughters so many famous actors you'll quickly remember that these folk really do love a good death scene. This is a tremendously fun movie, which features everyone from from Steve McQueen to O.J. Simpson.
The Swarm - Many consider this movie to be one of the worst of all time. This is nonsense. THE SWARM is indeed utter rubbish, but it is also a great deal of fun. The moronic premise is that a swarm of African killer bees terrorize America, causing far more destruction than you would believe possible, including a nuclear explosion. Michael Caine leads a star-laden cast in this piece of laughable nonsense, which kills most of the characters with an abandon bordering on homicidal mania. You'll never look at bees the same way again.
Two Minute Warning - Charlton Heston is once again at the helm in this surprisingly excellent thriller about a mysterious gunman who sets up shop at a pro football game in Los Angeles, and the cops (Heston and John Cassavettes) who try and stop him before he can initiate a massacre. What distinguishes this film aside from its excellent cast, which includes Jack Klugman playing a desperate bookie with a bad combover, is that the cops know exactly where the gunman is but can't quite get to him, and have to make a series of tough moral decisions while the clueless characters in the crowd go about their soon-to-be-disrupted business.
Juggernaut - This forgotten gem is a first-rate British thriller with an excellent cast, including Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, Freddie Jones, Julian Glover, Jack Watson, Ian Holm, and Simon McCorkindale, most of whom were at the near-beginnings of their careers. It's about a disgruntled bomb expert code named Juggernaut who remote-hijacks a cruise ship plying the stormy North Atlantic, and the bomb disposal expert flown in to try and his plan. Harris plays this disposal expert as a cocky, know-it-all bastard with nerves of steel who comes to the horrible conclusion, midway through the movie, that the hijacker knows more about blowing up bombs he does about defusing them, and begins to fall apart at the seams. The suspense is murderous and the performances superb and often touching, especially Roy Kinnear as the ship's social director, who tries to keep morale up on the possibly doomed ship by any means necessary. And the "which wire do I clip?" scene at the end is a masterpiece.
The Cassandra Crossing - This movie has one hell of an opening, and if it had maintained that breakneck pace it might have been a damn good film. Alas, THE CASSANDRA CROSSING, though full of talent (as all of these movies are), is a weird, rambling, periodically boring tale about a European passenger train which picks up a terrorist infected by a virulent form of man-made plague. The government decides the train ought to be shunted over the nearest cliff rather than risk a pandemic, placing Richard Harris, Sophia Loren, a young Martin Sheen and the ubiquitous O.J. Simpson in very grave peril. I rather enjoyed Bert Lancaster's performance as the weary American general who struggles with the morality of sacrificing the few to save the many, but this film sorely needed a better editor. Way too much of nothing happens for way too long, and by the time something does, it's hard to care.
The Poseidon Adventure - This movie is a nasty piece of work, and all the more pleasurable because of it. All disaster flicks roll the dice by trying to introduce a large number of characters in the shortest possible time, and then hoping we care if any of them survive. THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE gets around this by smartly employing actors like Gene Hackman, who could play a week-old tomato and still be riveting. The Poseidon is a cruise ship traveling the Mediterranean which is capsized by a rogue wave on New Year's Eve: the few survivors, led by Hackman, are trapped on the sinking, upside-down vessel and must try to reverse-engineer an escape through fire, water, and their own fear. A punishing film, but a good one.
Earthquake - Chuck Heston once again takes the lead in this highly fractured, silly, but rather enjoyable exercise in massive destruction, which was largely shot in my old backyard of Burbank-Toloca Lake, and depicts Los Angeles getting positively assholed by The Big One, a superquake that first levels, and then floods, much of the city. Victoria Principal, pre-DALLAS fame, struts around in superhuman gorgeousness, while Marjoe Gortner chills as a psycho whose National Guard duties give him ample means to get even with some neighborhood bullies. Heston must ultimately decide between saving his alcoholic shrew wife played by Ava Gardner, or the young babe Geneviève Bujold, who wants to run away with him. One thing I'll give this messy movie is the relentless way it pummels the characters with fresh disasters.
Airport - Mocked mercilessly by satirical takes like AIRPLANE, AIRPORT was also reviled by its star, Burt Lancaster, who hated it so much he trashed it at every opportunity for the rest of his life...though I'm pretty sure he cashed his paycheck. But this is a quite enjoyable and effective thriller with more than a cup of soap opera thrown in for good measure. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a mad bomber who hijacks an airliner which is already headed for trouble due to a massive snowstorm sweeping over the Midwest. One reviewer described it as "a blizzard, a bomb, and a stowaway" and that's accurate enough, but it's still great fun.
Airport '75 - A surprisingly enjoyable sequel to the original 1970 flick, "'75" features -- you guessed it -- Chuck Heston, as a hotshot pilot who has a hell of a problem on his hands. See, an airliner chock full of innocent people has been rammed by private plane in midair, killing the airliner's pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer, but not downing the plane. From his office down below, Heston must find a way to get the airliner out of the clouds and safely on the tarmac without a crew, and without much of an instrument panel, and with a liner full of panicked passengers. It's a helluva problem, and some very ingenuous means are used to solve it.
Airport '77 - You'd think the second sequel to a movie hated by its own star would be absolutely terrible, but marshaling a lot of talent, including Jack Lemmon and Jimmy Stewart, actually gets this sucker off the ground...and into the ocean! Yep, the latest disaster to strike a flying machine is that it crashes at sea and sinks to the bottom, while somehow retaining (mostly) watertight integrity, oxygen, and electricity. A rescue operation is naturally initiated, but this being a disaster movie a lot of people are going to die anyway, except George Kennedy, of course, who is in all the AIRPORT films and always comes out unharmed.
Concorde: Airport '79 -- This lengthy final installment was a crass attempt to kick a few last coins out of the exhausted pinata that was the disaster genre, and the AIRPORT franchise generally, which by this time was a pastiche of itself. I remember watching it on TV with my older brother when it aired, and we had great fun mocking the dumb plot, trash effects and campy writing, so I guess we enjoyed ourselves after all. The main appeal was crusty old George Kennedy, who seems to have showed up mainly because he wanted 100% attendance in the franchise. Or possibly to pay a gambling debt. According to Wikipedia: "It is also listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made." It's about a crooked arms dealer's attempts to blast the Concorde jet from the sky to rid himself of one of its passengers, a bit of overkill if ever there was. This oaf expends so much money and effort trying to annihilate the feckless news reporter that he begins to resemble Wylie E. Coyote, but fuck it, nobody watches the fourth movie in a disaster franchise for the plot.
Meteor - "It's five miles wide and it's coming this way!" If ever a tag line invited ridicule, this was it. The worst film on this list by some distance, far worse than THE SWARM or CONCORDE could ever hope to be, is METEOR, a cinematic atrocity that should be erased from human memory. The movie's unfortunate star, Sean Connery, later apologized for its existence by noting that, "The film's success depended very heavily on its special effects. When I saw the final cut I was appalled. Shit flying around instead of meteors." Shit is right. METEOR is about a gigantic space rock which threatens to destroy the Earth, but unfortunately does not, at least not before it stupefies its audience via two hours of pointless dialog (in several languages, no less), time-consuming sub-plots that go nowhere, fake-looking disaster scenes randomly distributed throughout the movie, and some of the worst acting by the best actors you'll ever see: Martin Landau's performance is so bad I burst out laughing. But there is nothing funny about this miserable chunk of space shit. The last half an hour actually features the entire cast slogging through mud, and that is exactly what watching this movie is like. Fuck this film. Seriously, fuck it.
So much for the movies themselves, most of which I found quite engaging, if often somewhat mindless and certainly very repetitious in construction and theme. Now comes the important question, one which should concern any reader or teller of tales: what is the appeal of the disaster story? They lack well-drawn characters, employ a fractured narrative, and the antagonist is often a literal force of nature rather than a person: even when the adversary is human, he tends to be a mere catalyst for events. So again I ask: what's the appeal?
In his rambling but brilliant book DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King analyzed not only what he felt made horror work as a genre of fiction and film, but also why people enjoyed being scared. In his now-famous essay which has retroactively been dubbed "Keep the Gators Fed," he explained the need many feed to toss red meat to the beasts within themselves, a thesis I fully support; in a different part of the book, however, he tackled THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, a film he described as an economic horror movie, in which the supernatural elements pale, in King's mind, to the financial disaster the accursed house presents its crumbling hero and his family. The audience is presented with a slow-motion act of destruction, and cannot look away, in large part because the movie articulates, in a stylized way, their own fears about economic ruin. Well, in a disaster film we get plenty of destruction and ruin, and very little slow motion. Indeed, there is a sacrificial quality to these stories: the setting is always presented as either beautiful, idyllic, luxurious or high-tech; something safe, something which stands for human aesthetics or genius; and then it is thoroughly and cruelly sacrificed, like a gorgeous virgin to dark, bloodthirsty gods. We satisfy the beasts within by feeding them freezers full of red meat: toppling buildings, crashing aeroplanes, derailing trains, out of control fires, raging whirlwinds, towering waves, massive asteroid impacts, swarms of killer insects. At the same time we offer them the classic car-wreck-as-entertainment, the spectacle provided by someone else's misfortune. The homey small town, the famous big city, the cozy mountain resort or plush luxury liner, all familiar to the audience and all regarded as more or less safe, are suddenly visited by Biblical plague. We know many of the people involved are going to die, but not all of them, and that at the end, while the physical destruction may be complete, the message will be the same in every film: humanity survives.
The disaster craze more-or-less ended with the seventies themselves. Oh, disaster movies were still made here and there, but the public's appetite for them had finally been satiated: a new obsession was required and, I suppose, found. It was not until computer generated animation became a workable prospect in the early-mid 90s that we began to see a modest renewal of interest in the genre with movies like TWISTER (one could certainly argue that JURASSIC PARK and its sequels fall into this category). And this is the way of Hollywood, and literary, crazes. The public is insatiable until it isn't. That however in unimportant. What interests me is the Why of things, and what our passion for tales like this says about the human race is intensely interesting, if at times quite depressing, but I have come to understand it. We live in a civilized society. Climate changes and proximity to geological fault lines notwithstanding, the ordinary Westerner, whether he is a German or a Spaniard, a Canadian or a New Zealander, lives a life of ease and comfort. Even the dirt-poor, and even the homeless, live comparably better in some ways than most of our ancient ancestors -- or even many of our grandparents five generations back. Nor do most of us interact with nature or wildness in any fashion which is not at least partially controlled and therefore safe. In short, the very things we were designed to do by virtue of evolution and genetics -- to live in the raw, at the mercy of the elements, constantly on the move, constantly fleeing danger or facing it head-on -- are the things we seldom or never actually experience in our lives. Our ancestors were weaned on cataclysms: floods, fires, famines, droughts, plagues, wars. We were weaned on sugar, saturated fats and air conditioning. And let's face it, sometimes even the most optimistic of us, even the happiest-go-lucky sumbitch out there, the human champagne type who sees the glass as entirely full even when the glass is laying shattered upon the ground, will be stuck in shit-impacted gridlock on the 405 freeway on a hot, hazy, ozone-stinking morning, look at the shimmer of downtown through the haze, listen to the doom report on the radio, think about all the bills they have to pay and how little they enjoy their job, and say, "What a fucking mess we've made of this world." And because this is so, because so many of us are merely viewed as consumers, as drones, as soulless digits whose purpose is to pay taxes for 50 years and then die quietly out of sight when our time comes, it's natural for us to long for our civilization, so-called, to be blown to bits. Just smashed all to fiery fragments. A clean sweep to free us from the rat race, the 9 - 5, the boss, the taxman, the doomscroll. In fact, if one looks at the literature of the last century and beyond, it is easy enough to see how this feeling has obtained as long as people have been bound by the accident of birth to spend their lives in coal mines, factories, hardscrabble farms, and lonely dead-end jobs without prospect of excitement or release. How many men have willingly marched off to war, have risked crippling injury, mutilation, and death, simply to get the hell away from the endless, soul-starving drudgery of "civilization?" Some maintain that war itself is a sort of fever-reaction to civilization itself, that war releases the frantic energies trapped by a safe if grinding, dull, and adventure-free existence which is at odds with our wild and violent nature. I certainly believe this at least to an extent, and I believe that things like horror and disaster stories not only trigger our seldom-invoked but hardwired fight-or-flight responses, they also appeal to our sense of morbid curiosity. One slows down passing the car wreck to see the spectacle, but also to experience a feeling of relief that "at least it wasn't me." Not a very noble thing, but mankind was not meant to be inherently noble. He was meant to survive, and disaster movies are ultimately about survival. They allow us a cathartic but vicarious release of that self-same energy that finds very little other release in our neatly-kept, 21st century lives. Because, after all, we really don't want our civilization to die. We're far too addicted to its comforts. But we dislike it enough to want to see it burned in effigy, and disaster movies provide this precise service...without depriving us of our air conditioning.
I recently completed a highly enjoyable marathon of 70s-era disaster movies. For those of you who weren't around for Hollywood's "disaster craze," let me tell you, it was something. For years, audiences drank thirstily, almost insatiably, from a well of spectacular, cinematic destruction. In modern times the closest analogs would be the vampire or zombie crazes of the last twenty-five years. Like all crazes, it eventually burned out, but while the mayhem was in swing it was highly entertaining.
Disaster movies were what Charlton Heston, who starred in a number of them, referred to as "stories of an event." What he meant was that the script's did not allow for a great deal of character development, but rather thrust swiftly-developed (or totally undeveloped) characters into extraordinary situations, and drew its entertainment value from watching how they coped with the catastrophe. Suspense was maintained by killing enough of them that there was always doubt as to who would live to the final credits: enertainment was provided by watching things crash, explode, burn or otherwise meet doom in spectacular fashion.
A simple search for films of this type from that era yielded about 30 results, of which I myself would eliminate a small number for being dystopian or post-apocalyptic in character, such as DAMNATION ALLEY and Heston's OMEGA MAN. I would also a trim a few which are plainly horror movies though they certainly present themselves as disasters: DAWN OF THE DEAD, for example. And of course there were a few I did not see or want to because of appallingly bad film quality or reviews (or both). I was left with fourteen films, three of which I managed to catch in the theater (at a triple feature at the Aero in Santa Monica).
The China Syndrome - One of the better actual movies on this list, and only marginally a disaster movie in the sense that it threatens catastrophe without bringing it, TCS is a virulently anti-nuclear story with a good script and fine actors delivering very good performances. Jack Lemmon plays a high-strung worker at a California nuclear plant so obsessed with what he believes are sloppy safety procedures that he ends up holding the reactor hostage.
Gray Lady Down - The aformentioned Chuck Heston stars in this gruesome flick about a nuclear submarine, the Gray Lady, which is accidentally rammed by a freighter and promptly sinks to the bottom of the ocean, necessitating a daring undersea rescue by an experimental craft skippered by David Carradine. As a kid I was traumatized by some of the drowning scenes, which are graphically depicted. While hardly the greatest movie ever made, it's pretty suspenseful and heavy with acting talent.
Kingdom of the Spiders - While KINGDOM is really a monster movie, it's sufficiently massive in scale to qualify as a disaster film. William Shatner is a rugged rural vet brought in to investigate some mysterious animal deaths, only to discover they were caused by a mutated strain of poisonous desert tarantula which is fast spreading toward the nearby town. I got a big kick out of this movie, which develops some very likeable characters and puts them through absolute hell. The ending is a real shocker.
The Towering Inferno - This is probably the acme of diaster movies, a "cast of thousands" epic which sees Paul Newman as the harassed architecht of a mega-skyscraper on the West Coast who discovers, too late, that wicked Richard Chamberlain has cut so many corners the building is nothing but a vast deathtrap. And indeed, when the inevitable fire breaks out, it slaughters so many famous actors you'll quickly remember that these folk really do love a good death scene. This is a tremendously fun movie, which features everyone from from Steve McQueen to O.J. Simpson.
The Swarm - Many consider this movie to be one of the worst of all time. This is nonsense. THE SWARM is indeed utter rubbish, but it is also a great deal of fun. The moronic premise is that a swarm of African killer bees terrorize America, causing far more destruction than you would believe possible, including a nuclear explosion. Michael Caine leads a star-laden cast in this piece of laughable nonsense, which kills most of the characters with an abandon bordering on homicidal mania. You'll never look at bees the same way again.
Two Minute Warning - Charlton Heston is once again at the helm in this surprisingly excellent thriller about a mysterious gunman who sets up shop at a pro football game in Los Angeles, and the cops (Heston and John Cassavettes) who try and stop him before he can initiate a massacre. What distinguishes this film aside from its excellent cast, which includes Jack Klugman playing a desperate bookie with a bad combover, is that the cops know exactly where the gunman is but can't quite get to him, and have to make a series of tough moral decisions while the clueless characters in the crowd go about their soon-to-be-disrupted business.
Juggernaut - This forgotten gem is a first-rate British thriller with an excellent cast, including Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, Freddie Jones, Julian Glover, Jack Watson, Ian Holm, and Simon McCorkindale, most of whom were at the near-beginnings of their careers. It's about a disgruntled bomb expert code named Juggernaut who remote-hijacks a cruise ship plying the stormy North Atlantic, and the bomb disposal expert flown in to try and his plan. Harris plays this disposal expert as a cocky, know-it-all bastard with nerves of steel who comes to the horrible conclusion, midway through the movie, that the hijacker knows more about blowing up bombs he does about defusing them, and begins to fall apart at the seams. The suspense is murderous and the performances superb and often touching, especially Roy Kinnear as the ship's social director, who tries to keep morale up on the possibly doomed ship by any means necessary. And the "which wire do I clip?" scene at the end is a masterpiece.
The Cassandra Crossing - This movie has one hell of an opening, and if it had maintained that breakneck pace it might have been a damn good film. Alas, THE CASSANDRA CROSSING, though full of talent (as all of these movies are), is a weird, rambling, periodically boring tale about a European passenger train which picks up a terrorist infected by a virulent form of man-made plague. The government decides the train ought to be shunted over the nearest cliff rather than risk a pandemic, placing Richard Harris, Sophia Loren, a young Martin Sheen and the ubiquitous O.J. Simpson in very grave peril. I rather enjoyed Bert Lancaster's performance as the weary American general who struggles with the morality of sacrificing the few to save the many, but this film sorely needed a better editor. Way too much of nothing happens for way too long, and by the time something does, it's hard to care.
The Poseidon Adventure - This movie is a nasty piece of work, and all the more pleasurable because of it. All disaster flicks roll the dice by trying to introduce a large number of characters in the shortest possible time, and then hoping we care if any of them survive. THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE gets around this by smartly employing actors like Gene Hackman, who could play a week-old tomato and still be riveting. The Poseidon is a cruise ship traveling the Mediterranean which is capsized by a rogue wave on New Year's Eve: the few survivors, led by Hackman, are trapped on the sinking, upside-down vessel and must try to reverse-engineer an escape through fire, water, and their own fear. A punishing film, but a good one.
Earthquake - Chuck Heston once again takes the lead in this highly fractured, silly, but rather enjoyable exercise in massive destruction, which was largely shot in my old backyard of Burbank-Toloca Lake, and depicts Los Angeles getting positively assholed by The Big One, a superquake that first levels, and then floods, much of the city. Victoria Principal, pre-DALLAS fame, struts around in superhuman gorgeousness, while Marjoe Gortner chills as a psycho whose National Guard duties give him ample means to get even with some neighborhood bullies. Heston must ultimately decide between saving his alcoholic shrew wife played by Ava Gardner, or the young babe Geneviève Bujold, who wants to run away with him. One thing I'll give this messy movie is the relentless way it pummels the characters with fresh disasters.
Airport - Mocked mercilessly by satirical takes like AIRPLANE, AIRPORT was also reviled by its star, Burt Lancaster, who hated it so much he trashed it at every opportunity for the rest of his life...though I'm pretty sure he cashed his paycheck. But this is a quite enjoyable and effective thriller with more than a cup of soap opera thrown in for good measure. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a mad bomber who hijacks an airliner which is already headed for trouble due to a massive snowstorm sweeping over the Midwest. One reviewer described it as "a blizzard, a bomb, and a stowaway" and that's accurate enough, but it's still great fun.
Airport '75 - A surprisingly enjoyable sequel to the original 1970 flick, "'75" features -- you guessed it -- Chuck Heston, as a hotshot pilot who has a hell of a problem on his hands. See, an airliner chock full of innocent people has been rammed by private plane in midair, killing the airliner's pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer, but not downing the plane. From his office down below, Heston must find a way to get the airliner out of the clouds and safely on the tarmac without a crew, and without much of an instrument panel, and with a liner full of panicked passengers. It's a helluva problem, and some very ingenuous means are used to solve it.
Airport '77 - You'd think the second sequel to a movie hated by its own star would be absolutely terrible, but marshaling a lot of talent, including Jack Lemmon and Jimmy Stewart, actually gets this sucker off the ground...and into the ocean! Yep, the latest disaster to strike a flying machine is that it crashes at sea and sinks to the bottom, while somehow retaining (mostly) watertight integrity, oxygen, and electricity. A rescue operation is naturally initiated, but this being a disaster movie a lot of people are going to die anyway, except George Kennedy, of course, who is in all the AIRPORT films and always comes out unharmed.
Concorde: Airport '79 -- This lengthy final installment was a crass attempt to kick a few last coins out of the exhausted pinata that was the disaster genre, and the AIRPORT franchise generally, which by this time was a pastiche of itself. I remember watching it on TV with my older brother when it aired, and we had great fun mocking the dumb plot, trash effects and campy writing, so I guess we enjoyed ourselves after all. The main appeal was crusty old George Kennedy, who seems to have showed up mainly because he wanted 100% attendance in the franchise. Or possibly to pay a gambling debt. According to Wikipedia: "It is also listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made." It's about a crooked arms dealer's attempts to blast the Concorde jet from the sky to rid himself of one of its passengers, a bit of overkill if ever there was. This oaf expends so much money and effort trying to annihilate the feckless news reporter that he begins to resemble Wylie E. Coyote, but fuck it, nobody watches the fourth movie in a disaster franchise for the plot.
Meteor - "It's five miles wide and it's coming this way!" If ever a tag line invited ridicule, this was it. The worst film on this list by some distance, far worse than THE SWARM or CONCORDE could ever hope to be, is METEOR, a cinematic atrocity that should be erased from human memory. The movie's unfortunate star, Sean Connery, later apologized for its existence by noting that, "The film's success depended very heavily on its special effects. When I saw the final cut I was appalled. Shit flying around instead of meteors." Shit is right. METEOR is about a gigantic space rock which threatens to destroy the Earth, but unfortunately does not, at least not before it stupefies its audience via two hours of pointless dialog (in several languages, no less), time-consuming sub-plots that go nowhere, fake-looking disaster scenes randomly distributed throughout the movie, and some of the worst acting by the best actors you'll ever see: Martin Landau's performance is so bad I burst out laughing. But there is nothing funny about this miserable chunk of space shit. The last half an hour actually features the entire cast slogging through mud, and that is exactly what watching this movie is like. Fuck this film. Seriously, fuck it.
So much for the movies themselves, most of which I found quite engaging, if often somewhat mindless and certainly very repetitious in construction and theme. Now comes the important question, one which should concern any reader or teller of tales: what is the appeal of the disaster story? They lack well-drawn characters, employ a fractured narrative, and the antagonist is often a literal force of nature rather than a person: even when the adversary is human, he tends to be a mere catalyst for events. So again I ask: what's the appeal?
In his rambling but brilliant book DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King analyzed not only what he felt made horror work as a genre of fiction and film, but also why people enjoyed being scared. In his now-famous essay which has retroactively been dubbed "Keep the Gators Fed," he explained the need many feed to toss red meat to the beasts within themselves, a thesis I fully support; in a different part of the book, however, he tackled THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, a film he described as an economic horror movie, in which the supernatural elements pale, in King's mind, to the financial disaster the accursed house presents its crumbling hero and his family. The audience is presented with a slow-motion act of destruction, and cannot look away, in large part because the movie articulates, in a stylized way, their own fears about economic ruin. Well, in a disaster film we get plenty of destruction and ruin, and very little slow motion. Indeed, there is a sacrificial quality to these stories: the setting is always presented as either beautiful, idyllic, luxurious or high-tech; something safe, something which stands for human aesthetics or genius; and then it is thoroughly and cruelly sacrificed, like a gorgeous virgin to dark, bloodthirsty gods. We satisfy the beasts within by feeding them freezers full of red meat: toppling buildings, crashing aeroplanes, derailing trains, out of control fires, raging whirlwinds, towering waves, massive asteroid impacts, swarms of killer insects. At the same time we offer them the classic car-wreck-as-entertainment, the spectacle provided by someone else's misfortune. The homey small town, the famous big city, the cozy mountain resort or plush luxury liner, all familiar to the audience and all regarded as more or less safe, are suddenly visited by Biblical plague. We know many of the people involved are going to die, but not all of them, and that at the end, while the physical destruction may be complete, the message will be the same in every film: humanity survives.
The disaster craze more-or-less ended with the seventies themselves. Oh, disaster movies were still made here and there, but the public's appetite for them had finally been satiated: a new obsession was required and, I suppose, found. It was not until computer generated animation became a workable prospect in the early-mid 90s that we began to see a modest renewal of interest in the genre with movies like TWISTER (one could certainly argue that JURASSIC PARK and its sequels fall into this category). And this is the way of Hollywood, and literary, crazes. The public is insatiable until it isn't. That however in unimportant. What interests me is the Why of things, and what our passion for tales like this says about the human race is intensely interesting, if at times quite depressing, but I have come to understand it. We live in a civilized society. Climate changes and proximity to geological fault lines notwithstanding, the ordinary Westerner, whether he is a German or a Spaniard, a Canadian or a New Zealander, lives a life of ease and comfort. Even the dirt-poor, and even the homeless, live comparably better in some ways than most of our ancient ancestors -- or even many of our grandparents five generations back. Nor do most of us interact with nature or wildness in any fashion which is not at least partially controlled and therefore safe. In short, the very things we were designed to do by virtue of evolution and genetics -- to live in the raw, at the mercy of the elements, constantly on the move, constantly fleeing danger or facing it head-on -- are the things we seldom or never actually experience in our lives. Our ancestors were weaned on cataclysms: floods, fires, famines, droughts, plagues, wars. We were weaned on sugar, saturated fats and air conditioning. And let's face it, sometimes even the most optimistic of us, even the happiest-go-lucky sumbitch out there, the human champagne type who sees the glass as entirely full even when the glass is laying shattered upon the ground, will be stuck in shit-impacted gridlock on the 405 freeway on a hot, hazy, ozone-stinking morning, look at the shimmer of downtown through the haze, listen to the doom report on the radio, think about all the bills they have to pay and how little they enjoy their job, and say, "What a fucking mess we've made of this world." And because this is so, because so many of us are merely viewed as consumers, as drones, as soulless digits whose purpose is to pay taxes for 50 years and then die quietly out of sight when our time comes, it's natural for us to long for our civilization, so-called, to be blown to bits. Just smashed all to fiery fragments. A clean sweep to free us from the rat race, the 9 - 5, the boss, the taxman, the doomscroll. In fact, if one looks at the literature of the last century and beyond, it is easy enough to see how this feeling has obtained as long as people have been bound by the accident of birth to spend their lives in coal mines, factories, hardscrabble farms, and lonely dead-end jobs without prospect of excitement or release. How many men have willingly marched off to war, have risked crippling injury, mutilation, and death, simply to get the hell away from the endless, soul-starving drudgery of "civilization?" Some maintain that war itself is a sort of fever-reaction to civilization itself, that war releases the frantic energies trapped by a safe if grinding, dull, and adventure-free existence which is at odds with our wild and violent nature. I certainly believe this at least to an extent, and I believe that things like horror and disaster stories not only trigger our seldom-invoked but hardwired fight-or-flight responses, they also appeal to our sense of morbid curiosity. One slows down passing the car wreck to see the spectacle, but also to experience a feeling of relief that "at least it wasn't me." Not a very noble thing, but mankind was not meant to be inherently noble. He was meant to survive, and disaster movies are ultimately about survival. They allow us a cathartic but vicarious release of that self-same energy that finds very little other release in our neatly-kept, 21st century lives. Because, after all, we really don't want our civilization to die. We're far too addicted to its comforts. But we dislike it enough to want to see it burned in effigy, and disaster movies provide this precise service...without depriving us of our air conditioning.
July 16, 2024
THE CHARMED ONE: THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF SHANNEN DOHERTY
Have you ever felt like a phone call that's been disconnected?
I never met Shannen Doherty. I never worked, to my knowledge or remembrance, on any project in which she was even tangentially involved. A great deal of what I remember about her is from gossip magazines and entertinment news shows of the 90s, who frequently crafted hit pieces based on secondhand information and spiteful rumor. In recent years -- the last ten, it seems -- she was on my personal radar because of her fight with cancer, and her ongoing and seemingly never-dying feud with Alyssa Milano. And now she is gone, a victim of the cancer she battled relentlessly up until the day it killed her. That is not a great deal to go on by itself, but there is, of course, more. There is always more.
I arrived at college in 1990, which coincidentally was the same year BEVERLY HILLS, 90210 debuted on Fox. I had "encountered" Shannen before, as a child actress on various programs I'd seen, but I doubt I had even a faint remembrance of her. Playing Brenda Walsh, the tempestuous other half of the Walsh twins, Doherty made immediate waves with the show's fast-growing audience, but she was a polarizing figure on the show. Was she hot or just weird-looking? Was she a likeable fish out of water or a mere social climber? Was she sympathetic or something of an antagonist? This was the sort of thing fans, and people like myself, who pretended not to be a fan but watched it anyway, would argue about, sometimes almost seriously. In regards to Shannen the human being, however, Shannen the actress, there was little debate: she was the quintessential Hollywood Bad Girl, the spoiled child actress semi-grown up to be a full-blown set siva, bitch, and monster. When she finally left 90210 after four seasons, it seemed to be one of those situations which walked the line between "I quit!" and "you're fired!" Shannen was the girl everyone loved to hate -- in part, I think, because of the complicated, paraodoxical relationship Americans in particular have with celebrity. We seem to both want and need celebrities, and were are often as entertained by their off-screen doings as whatever they bring to the television or theater or stage, but at the same time we love to hate them, and to pass judgment on their lifestyles. There is a good deal of envy at the core of this, but that is not important, anymore than it is important whether everything that was said about Shannen was true or none of it. What I myself know after almost thirteen years grinding in Tinseltown is that nobody, and I mean nobody, who isn't actually there on set will ever truly the know the story. TV shows, like films, are hermetically sealed communities in which very little escapes which is not intended to escape: the code of silence practiced by the ordinary crew member is far more rigidly observed than the Mafia's omerta: he will talk shop with fellow crew, or with relations with no connections whatever to the industry, but never to celebrity gossip rags whatever they choose to call themselves. Hell, when I was working there (2007 - 2020), it was taken as an article of faith that if you'd worked for TMZ, even as a 23 year-old production assistant, you were unhirable in any other field: nobody wanted a rat on set.
But at the time I believed all of it, every bad word. I believed it because I wanted to believe it, because I'm no different than anyone else -- rather, I wasn't then, before my own time in the industry -- and had fun mocking the bad behavior of the young starlet.
The next time Doherty came on my personal radar was when she was cast as Prue Halliwell on CHARMED, another Aaron Spelling show, and one which turned out to be one of the unexpected hits of 1998. Doherty had "reconciled" with Spelling sufficiently to head up this new series about three sisters who discover they have inherited magical powers, but this time her run was even shorter than on 90210 -- a mere three of CHARMED's eight seasons. Having directed the cliffhanger season finale herself, Doherty and her beau were on vacation -- in Canada I believe -- when they got the news she'd been unceremoniously fired for "bad behavior." Although I didn't watch CHARMED at the time it was on the air, I had to laugh at history repeating itself. I believed every word of the gossip rolling out of the online magazines, and simply accepted that it was her jealousy of the popularity of her co-star, Alyssa Milano, which had short-circuited this precious second career chance. Divas gonna diva, after all.
It was quite a few years later that friends of mine from the industry let me in on the fact that Doherty's departure from CHARMED was in many ways a raw deal, a sort of cold-blooded assassination carried out by the producers to appease Milano, "who wanted to move up one place on the call sheet" and thus disposed of the series' titular star rather than face a lawsuit. As I said above, nobody who wasn't there will ever know the whole story, but I've heard enough from "knowledgeable sources" to believe that as guilty as Doherty had been on 90210, which was largely but not entirely, was how innocent she'd been here. The fact the entirety of the cast ultimately and publicly sided with her over Milano is sufficient proof for me to believe this is substantially true, and that she was a wronged woman.
Why does any of this matter? As the cliche goes, it's complicated. Doherty was a staple of the 90s. Between 90210, MALLRATS, HEATHERS and CHARMED it seemed you couldn't escape her for good or ill, and then -- bang. It was over. A lot of actors get fired off shows and return after a period of career purgatory, or what my friend Mark calls "film jail," but almost nobody gets a third bite at the apple. Doherty's career never recovered. She became more famous for her feuds than she was for her work. And this is why it matters.
90210 is something of a sentimental favorite for my generation, a teen soap opera which was somewhat ridiculous even when it was on the air, but possessed an undeniable charisma and the kind of strutting self-confidence you sometimes see if free spirits who don't give a damn, or a fuck for that matter, what you think of them because they know they're cool. (Hell, I freely admit I had Brandon Walsh hair and sideburns for several years.) But CHARMED, whatever you think of the series (and maybe you've only seen half of one episode because it was on the television in front of the only available treadmill at the gym), was something a hell of a lot more important to millions of girls and young women. Like BUFFY, it was not only an inspiration, providing not one but three role models, each of which appealed to a different sort of viewer, it also tackled a lot of the real-world issues that young women encountered in everyday life. CHARMED was about sometimes painful family dynamics; it was about work-life balance; it was about loneliness, lust, love and sex; it was about fashion; it was about music; it was about job hunts and aggravating co-workers and workplace dating and hangovers and rivalry and stealing your sister's clothing and makeup and how the hell do we pay the gas bill and are we going to die alone? It was, in short, about everything the twentysomething female was dealing with in the late 90s, the difference between that time and now being that the women of CHARMED were depicted as being liberated but also suffering the price of liberation, and trying to decide whether the strong-and-independent-girlboss or the traditional marriage w/kids life was the way to go, which is something you would never see on television now. In short, despite its fantastical premise, tongue-in-cheek delivery and often quite deliberate silliness, CHARMED actually had something to say about real life: it was relatable -- moreso on this in a moment. And if I had a penny for every woman I'd met who gushed over the memory of the series, I'd have as much money as Musk. But never mind Gen X and Millennials: there are young women I know who were barely alive if even born when the show debuted who binge-watch it regularly. And Shannen Doherty was at the center of that. She played the big sister Prue with a combination of bossiness, bitchiness, tenderness, and humor: she, the matriarch by default, had to be as much a mom as a sis and sometimes resented it, just as her sisters, played by Holly Marie Combs and Milano, sometimes resented her. The frictive nature of the relationship lent it a lot of credence.
But I mentioned relatability, and this is another thing CHARMED had in common with BUFFY and so many other superhero stories going back to Spider Man and before: the superpowers of the ladies in question did not make their personal and professional lives easier. It made them harder. It stress-tested and often destroyed their romantic relationships and cost them jobs and time and money and worry -- plenty of worry. It burdened them with the weight of a double life, and sometimes it threatened to end that life. And to circle back to Doherty directly, this paradox, this powerlessness by virtue of power, applied to Shannen herself. She was a child actor: you can find her on LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRARIE and T.J. HOOKER. She did not have what we call "a normal life." When she became a star she did not know how to cope with the superpower of celebrity and it played out in fights in makeup trailers, in nightclub brawls, in impulse marriages, in accusations and arguments and rumors and gossip, much of which was founded. She didn't even want to do CHARMED when the opportunity arose -- a TV show about witches? Come on. But it worked. Improbably perhaps, but that is the nature of magic.
Doherty struggled mightily in her post-CHARMED career. Her rhetorical remark, "Do you ever feel like a phone call that's been disconnected?" is probably the saddest and yet at the same time the most illuminating comment anyone has ever made about what it's like to be cut off in mid-career as if by an executioner's axe. Nor would she accept Milano's alleged attempts to gaslight what had occurred, replying to the charge that was merely set drama with the cry "what you call drama I call trauma." And I use the word "cry" specifically and not for dramatic effect: Doherty was obviously devastated by what had happened, by the consequences to her career and life, and being Doherty, wasn't inclined to be terribly quiet or polite about it. The extent to which she ultimately accepted her share of responsibility for her troubles, whatever that share might have been, is to some extent documented on her podcast, LET'S BE CLEAR, but the rest of it was known only to herself and her intimates. As I said above, at the core of all Hollywood feuds is a secret, and that secret is both open and remarkably well kept.
When I heard the news of Doherty's death, I was as they say "shocked but not surprised." I subscribed to her podcast, and she had released new material as recently as a week before her demise. Of course I knew she had supposedly incurable cancer, but nothing is incurable until it actually kills you, and she had lived with the disease so long that I regarded almost in the way I regard Magic Johnson's HIV+ status: a mere factor in a complicated life, and not one that required much commentary, or even thought. But now she's gone, and I find myself grieving almost as if I had worked with her or known her socially. Of course I know why, and so do you: pure selfishness. She was one of the pop-culture stars of the 1990s: in a way she encapsulated the decade. From her debut as Brenda in 1990 to her exit as Prue in 2001, her hair, her clothing, the way she carried herself on screen, the slang she dropped, all of it was the description of an arc: the twentysomethings. And like Doherty herself, the twentysomethings are now fiftysomethings, if only barely, and feeling dismay that they -- like the surviving cast of CHARMED -- no longer resemble their twentysomething selves. Hairlines have receded. Skin has wrinkled. Muscles have softened. The scars of living show plainly on faces and bodies. The styles, the fashions, the technology and the music of that time, as much as we all might still love it and cherish its collective memory, now feels definitely and unmistakably dated, part of another time, another era, the pre-9/11 world which everyone who was privileged to experience misses like all hell whether they admit it or no. To lose Shannen is to lose an icon, a piece of ourselves, our past, our collective history. It is to stare mortality in the face. It's a body blow, a gut shot, a kick to the balls. It hurts in a raw sort of way. A cruel way.
And yet the magic around her remains and perhaps strengthens in death. It casts a glow every time she shoots that look over a bare shoulder, or flashes that impossibly perfect smile, or deliberately evokes that smoky, flirty tone she was capable of summoning and dismissing at will. I honestly don't know how I'd rate Shannen as an actress, but as a presence, a charismatic force, a self-conscious icon of a time and a place and mood and a theme, she gets supernatural marks indeed. And is that not the nature of charm?
I never met Shannen Doherty. I never worked, to my knowledge or remembrance, on any project in which she was even tangentially involved. A great deal of what I remember about her is from gossip magazines and entertinment news shows of the 90s, who frequently crafted hit pieces based on secondhand information and spiteful rumor. In recent years -- the last ten, it seems -- she was on my personal radar because of her fight with cancer, and her ongoing and seemingly never-dying feud with Alyssa Milano. And now she is gone, a victim of the cancer she battled relentlessly up until the day it killed her. That is not a great deal to go on by itself, but there is, of course, more. There is always more.
I arrived at college in 1990, which coincidentally was the same year BEVERLY HILLS, 90210 debuted on Fox. I had "encountered" Shannen before, as a child actress on various programs I'd seen, but I doubt I had even a faint remembrance of her. Playing Brenda Walsh, the tempestuous other half of the Walsh twins, Doherty made immediate waves with the show's fast-growing audience, but she was a polarizing figure on the show. Was she hot or just weird-looking? Was she a likeable fish out of water or a mere social climber? Was she sympathetic or something of an antagonist? This was the sort of thing fans, and people like myself, who pretended not to be a fan but watched it anyway, would argue about, sometimes almost seriously. In regards to Shannen the human being, however, Shannen the actress, there was little debate: she was the quintessential Hollywood Bad Girl, the spoiled child actress semi-grown up to be a full-blown set siva, bitch, and monster. When she finally left 90210 after four seasons, it seemed to be one of those situations which walked the line between "I quit!" and "you're fired!" Shannen was the girl everyone loved to hate -- in part, I think, because of the complicated, paraodoxical relationship Americans in particular have with celebrity. We seem to both want and need celebrities, and were are often as entertained by their off-screen doings as whatever they bring to the television or theater or stage, but at the same time we love to hate them, and to pass judgment on their lifestyles. There is a good deal of envy at the core of this, but that is not important, anymore than it is important whether everything that was said about Shannen was true or none of it. What I myself know after almost thirteen years grinding in Tinseltown is that nobody, and I mean nobody, who isn't actually there on set will ever truly the know the story. TV shows, like films, are hermetically sealed communities in which very little escapes which is not intended to escape: the code of silence practiced by the ordinary crew member is far more rigidly observed than the Mafia's omerta: he will talk shop with fellow crew, or with relations with no connections whatever to the industry, but never to celebrity gossip rags whatever they choose to call themselves. Hell, when I was working there (2007 - 2020), it was taken as an article of faith that if you'd worked for TMZ, even as a 23 year-old production assistant, you were unhirable in any other field: nobody wanted a rat on set.
But at the time I believed all of it, every bad word. I believed it because I wanted to believe it, because I'm no different than anyone else -- rather, I wasn't then, before my own time in the industry -- and had fun mocking the bad behavior of the young starlet.
The next time Doherty came on my personal radar was when she was cast as Prue Halliwell on CHARMED, another Aaron Spelling show, and one which turned out to be one of the unexpected hits of 1998. Doherty had "reconciled" with Spelling sufficiently to head up this new series about three sisters who discover they have inherited magical powers, but this time her run was even shorter than on 90210 -- a mere three of CHARMED's eight seasons. Having directed the cliffhanger season finale herself, Doherty and her beau were on vacation -- in Canada I believe -- when they got the news she'd been unceremoniously fired for "bad behavior." Although I didn't watch CHARMED at the time it was on the air, I had to laugh at history repeating itself. I believed every word of the gossip rolling out of the online magazines, and simply accepted that it was her jealousy of the popularity of her co-star, Alyssa Milano, which had short-circuited this precious second career chance. Divas gonna diva, after all.
It was quite a few years later that friends of mine from the industry let me in on the fact that Doherty's departure from CHARMED was in many ways a raw deal, a sort of cold-blooded assassination carried out by the producers to appease Milano, "who wanted to move up one place on the call sheet" and thus disposed of the series' titular star rather than face a lawsuit. As I said above, nobody who wasn't there will ever know the whole story, but I've heard enough from "knowledgeable sources" to believe that as guilty as Doherty had been on 90210, which was largely but not entirely, was how innocent she'd been here. The fact the entirety of the cast ultimately and publicly sided with her over Milano is sufficient proof for me to believe this is substantially true, and that she was a wronged woman.
Why does any of this matter? As the cliche goes, it's complicated. Doherty was a staple of the 90s. Between 90210, MALLRATS, HEATHERS and CHARMED it seemed you couldn't escape her for good or ill, and then -- bang. It was over. A lot of actors get fired off shows and return after a period of career purgatory, or what my friend Mark calls "film jail," but almost nobody gets a third bite at the apple. Doherty's career never recovered. She became more famous for her feuds than she was for her work. And this is why it matters.
90210 is something of a sentimental favorite for my generation, a teen soap opera which was somewhat ridiculous even when it was on the air, but possessed an undeniable charisma and the kind of strutting self-confidence you sometimes see if free spirits who don't give a damn, or a fuck for that matter, what you think of them because they know they're cool. (Hell, I freely admit I had Brandon Walsh hair and sideburns for several years.) But CHARMED, whatever you think of the series (and maybe you've only seen half of one episode because it was on the television in front of the only available treadmill at the gym), was something a hell of a lot more important to millions of girls and young women. Like BUFFY, it was not only an inspiration, providing not one but three role models, each of which appealed to a different sort of viewer, it also tackled a lot of the real-world issues that young women encountered in everyday life. CHARMED was about sometimes painful family dynamics; it was about work-life balance; it was about loneliness, lust, love and sex; it was about fashion; it was about music; it was about job hunts and aggravating co-workers and workplace dating and hangovers and rivalry and stealing your sister's clothing and makeup and how the hell do we pay the gas bill and are we going to die alone? It was, in short, about everything the twentysomething female was dealing with in the late 90s, the difference between that time and now being that the women of CHARMED were depicted as being liberated but also suffering the price of liberation, and trying to decide whether the strong-and-independent-girlboss or the traditional marriage w/kids life was the way to go, which is something you would never see on television now. In short, despite its fantastical premise, tongue-in-cheek delivery and often quite deliberate silliness, CHARMED actually had something to say about real life: it was relatable -- moreso on this in a moment. And if I had a penny for every woman I'd met who gushed over the memory of the series, I'd have as much money as Musk. But never mind Gen X and Millennials: there are young women I know who were barely alive if even born when the show debuted who binge-watch it regularly. And Shannen Doherty was at the center of that. She played the big sister Prue with a combination of bossiness, bitchiness, tenderness, and humor: she, the matriarch by default, had to be as much a mom as a sis and sometimes resented it, just as her sisters, played by Holly Marie Combs and Milano, sometimes resented her. The frictive nature of the relationship lent it a lot of credence.
But I mentioned relatability, and this is another thing CHARMED had in common with BUFFY and so many other superhero stories going back to Spider Man and before: the superpowers of the ladies in question did not make their personal and professional lives easier. It made them harder. It stress-tested and often destroyed their romantic relationships and cost them jobs and time and money and worry -- plenty of worry. It burdened them with the weight of a double life, and sometimes it threatened to end that life. And to circle back to Doherty directly, this paradox, this powerlessness by virtue of power, applied to Shannen herself. She was a child actor: you can find her on LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRARIE and T.J. HOOKER. She did not have what we call "a normal life." When she became a star she did not know how to cope with the superpower of celebrity and it played out in fights in makeup trailers, in nightclub brawls, in impulse marriages, in accusations and arguments and rumors and gossip, much of which was founded. She didn't even want to do CHARMED when the opportunity arose -- a TV show about witches? Come on. But it worked. Improbably perhaps, but that is the nature of magic.
Doherty struggled mightily in her post-CHARMED career. Her rhetorical remark, "Do you ever feel like a phone call that's been disconnected?" is probably the saddest and yet at the same time the most illuminating comment anyone has ever made about what it's like to be cut off in mid-career as if by an executioner's axe. Nor would she accept Milano's alleged attempts to gaslight what had occurred, replying to the charge that was merely set drama with the cry "what you call drama I call trauma." And I use the word "cry" specifically and not for dramatic effect: Doherty was obviously devastated by what had happened, by the consequences to her career and life, and being Doherty, wasn't inclined to be terribly quiet or polite about it. The extent to which she ultimately accepted her share of responsibility for her troubles, whatever that share might have been, is to some extent documented on her podcast, LET'S BE CLEAR, but the rest of it was known only to herself and her intimates. As I said above, at the core of all Hollywood feuds is a secret, and that secret is both open and remarkably well kept.
When I heard the news of Doherty's death, I was as they say "shocked but not surprised." I subscribed to her podcast, and she had released new material as recently as a week before her demise. Of course I knew she had supposedly incurable cancer, but nothing is incurable until it actually kills you, and she had lived with the disease so long that I regarded almost in the way I regard Magic Johnson's HIV+ status: a mere factor in a complicated life, and not one that required much commentary, or even thought. But now she's gone, and I find myself grieving almost as if I had worked with her or known her socially. Of course I know why, and so do you: pure selfishness. She was one of the pop-culture stars of the 1990s: in a way she encapsulated the decade. From her debut as Brenda in 1990 to her exit as Prue in 2001, her hair, her clothing, the way she carried herself on screen, the slang she dropped, all of it was the description of an arc: the twentysomethings. And like Doherty herself, the twentysomethings are now fiftysomethings, if only barely, and feeling dismay that they -- like the surviving cast of CHARMED -- no longer resemble their twentysomething selves. Hairlines have receded. Skin has wrinkled. Muscles have softened. The scars of living show plainly on faces and bodies. The styles, the fashions, the technology and the music of that time, as much as we all might still love it and cherish its collective memory, now feels definitely and unmistakably dated, part of another time, another era, the pre-9/11 world which everyone who was privileged to experience misses like all hell whether they admit it or no. To lose Shannen is to lose an icon, a piece of ourselves, our past, our collective history. It is to stare mortality in the face. It's a body blow, a gut shot, a kick to the balls. It hurts in a raw sort of way. A cruel way.
And yet the magic around her remains and perhaps strengthens in death. It casts a glow every time she shoots that look over a bare shoulder, or flashes that impossibly perfect smile, or deliberately evokes that smoky, flirty tone she was capable of summoning and dismissing at will. I honestly don't know how I'd rate Shannen as an actress, but as a presence, a charismatic force, a self-conscious icon of a time and a place and mood and a theme, she gets supernatural marks indeed. And is that not the nature of charm?
July 12, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: MARTIN CAIDEN'S "BLACK THURSDAY"
And there is the sound, the one that grates deepest against the nerves, that is hellish and hated, that knifes into the brain and makes a man wince through and through. A scream, metallic, thin, and high, a slender file blade cutting through the nerves. Above all else there is this cry of the fighter racing in close, sounding a scream that can be none other.
BLACK THURSDAY achieves something rare in any field: it is at once an amazing piece of research and also an eminently readable book. Martin Caiden takes us through the disastrous raid on Schweinfurt by the U.S. 8th Air Force in late 1943, the so-called "Black Thursday" battle which saw 60 American bombers shot down over Germany -- around 20% of the attacking force. No dry history this, but an almost novel-esque work which layers history, tactics, strategy and a blow-by-blow account of the raid, while simultaneously taking the deepest possible dive into what it meant to fly a B-17 in combat -- the mechanical wonders, the physical effort, the psychological strain. I really cannot emphasize how swiftly this book moves or how frightfully well it conveys the horror and confusion of a bombing raid carried out under continous attack by flak guns, rockets, aerial mines, and hundreds upon hundreds of enemy fighters. There are many touching and some tragic, and even a few funny, stories about how pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners coped, or failed to cope, with the horror.
I should note here that I have read a number of memoirs about fighter and bomber pilots in the Second World War, but little or nothing about the air war as a whole. I know the basic history, the objectives, some of the top personalities, and some of the more glorious or notorious incidents: but I do not claim even an enthusiastic amateur's knowledge of the war as a whole. So I was grateful for the layout of the book. Caiden takes a brief broad overview of the history of the air war over Europe, and America's participation in same. The British had tried to carry out daylight bombing raids over Germany, but the losses they sustained were so prohibitive they eventually gave up resorted to heavy night attacks. America, establishing bases in Britain, took over the burden of daylight operations, flying gigantic formations of what were initially largely unescorted heavy bombers over Germany and Occupied Europe, in the face of tremendous opposition. The purpose of the raids was primarily the destruction of German's sprawling war industry, and the now-infamous Schweinfurt raids were meant to strike a fatal blow to the Third Reich's crucial ball-bearing industry and thus cripple the Nazi war machine. To achieve this goal, a force of about 300+ B-17s was mustered for the strike. This is their story.
The structure of the book is interesting. Caiden was a veteran pilot and understood fliers and flying and machinery, and he wants the reader to understand what it means to move through the air in 30 tons of aircraft -- the work involved, the physics, the technical expertise and the cold courage. So he breaks down the chapters into the overall strategy, the tactics, the logistics, the everything involved in carrying out a 300-bomber raid over a hostile nation. This is an immense task but he handles it as deftly as a bullfighter, making his mark on each subject but never lingering.
Then we get the real action. Caiden makes extensive use of firsthand accounts and official records to record the event from the POV of those involved. He makes us feel it, the successes and failures both, and tries to cover all aspects of the battle -- for example, one entire chapter is devoted to the improbable escape to Spain, through Germany and France, of one airman shot down during the attack; another takes the experiences of a single minute of heavy combat as experienced by a series of bomber crews. At the same time, he explains the tactics and strategy of the Luftwaffe, praising their courage, ingenuity and determination at every point. While Caiden is obviously partisan, using "we" and "our" when describing Americans and the Air Forces, he does not make the error of presenting the Germans as mere foils for American greatness. The Germans won this battle, and while they paid a steep price to do so, Caiden does not let us forget that Schweinfurt was a bloody mess that failed to achieve its objective despite shockingly accurate bombing. The scenes where American ground crews wait in vain for bombers that will never return, the times when accidents kill as many Americans as a lost battle, the pathetic image of the lone survivor of an entire squadron staring through tear-blurred eyes at row after row after row of empty bunks never again to be filled by their former occupants, will stick with you forever. Like many people, I always assumed the Air Forces had it easier than the infantry, that they fought a "clean war," but this assumption does not survive contact with BLACK THURSDAY. Aside from being in the first wave of an amphibious invasion against a hardened beach, I can't imagine anything as terrifying, and nothing more terrifying, than being stuck in the ball turret of a B-17 when 200 German fighters are attacking you from every direction, flak is pounding away all around you, one engine is on fire, and you know you've still got 3, 4, 5 more hours of this hell to go through before you can get home.
If you get home.
If the book has a weakness, it is that Caiden uses German records only for the purposes of recording losses and measuring bomb damage. There are no interviews with Luftwaffe fighter pilots who flew against the raid, or the Luftwaffe commanders who directed the battle. He does not tap into official histories from "the other side of the hill" except to give us some statistics. By doing so he would have greatly improved an already amazing piece of history and research, and given us a broader and deeper, and also a more balanced, account of the battle. However, I realize this was probably not his objective to begin with. As I said, Caiden is a partisan writer: he wrote this book to impress upon us the courage of the American airman and the tremendous struggles and sacrifices he had to make to win the daylight air war over Europe, not to tell both sides of the story. Still, I consider this a pity. I have read enough German accounts of what it was like to fly against the dreaded "boxes" of B-17s, each bristling with hundreds of .50 machine guns, to want to read more. And I confess I wondered if Caiden was uncomfortable with the idea of opening up, in the reader's mind, what happens when hundreds of tons of high explosives rain down on factory workers and civilians of all ages alike. When the air war is disussed by historians, I have found it often omits describing this fundamental horror as a way of keeping the "Greatest Generation" clean in their own minds. The national myths of any nation require a certain amount of this sweeping-dust-beneath-the-rug approach: however, a moment's worth of inquiry satisified me that he was doing absolutely nothing of the kind: he tackled that subject in excruciatingly horrifying detail in A TORCH TO THE ENEMY, about the firebombing of Tokyo. So I believe his motive here was to tell a complex tale in the most efficient and arresting manner possible, and keep it lean and mean.
In short, I loved this book. It reads almost like a novel and it has none of the overly technical, burdensome discussions of metallurgy, aerdodynamics, and what-not that made what many consider his seminal work, THE FORK-TAILED DEVIL, impossible for me to read cover to cover. That book has terrific anecdotes and exhaustive research, but -- in my opinion -- it gets in its own way with all the nuts and bolts: BLACK THURSDAY does not make that mistake. It's one of the best WW2 histories I've ever read, and I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested in history or aviation to read it.
BLACK THURSDAY achieves something rare in any field: it is at once an amazing piece of research and also an eminently readable book. Martin Caiden takes us through the disastrous raid on Schweinfurt by the U.S. 8th Air Force in late 1943, the so-called "Black Thursday" battle which saw 60 American bombers shot down over Germany -- around 20% of the attacking force. No dry history this, but an almost novel-esque work which layers history, tactics, strategy and a blow-by-blow account of the raid, while simultaneously taking the deepest possible dive into what it meant to fly a B-17 in combat -- the mechanical wonders, the physical effort, the psychological strain. I really cannot emphasize how swiftly this book moves or how frightfully well it conveys the horror and confusion of a bombing raid carried out under continous attack by flak guns, rockets, aerial mines, and hundreds upon hundreds of enemy fighters. There are many touching and some tragic, and even a few funny, stories about how pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners coped, or failed to cope, with the horror.
I should note here that I have read a number of memoirs about fighter and bomber pilots in the Second World War, but little or nothing about the air war as a whole. I know the basic history, the objectives, some of the top personalities, and some of the more glorious or notorious incidents: but I do not claim even an enthusiastic amateur's knowledge of the war as a whole. So I was grateful for the layout of the book. Caiden takes a brief broad overview of the history of the air war over Europe, and America's participation in same. The British had tried to carry out daylight bombing raids over Germany, but the losses they sustained were so prohibitive they eventually gave up resorted to heavy night attacks. America, establishing bases in Britain, took over the burden of daylight operations, flying gigantic formations of what were initially largely unescorted heavy bombers over Germany and Occupied Europe, in the face of tremendous opposition. The purpose of the raids was primarily the destruction of German's sprawling war industry, and the now-infamous Schweinfurt raids were meant to strike a fatal blow to the Third Reich's crucial ball-bearing industry and thus cripple the Nazi war machine. To achieve this goal, a force of about 300+ B-17s was mustered for the strike. This is their story.
The structure of the book is interesting. Caiden was a veteran pilot and understood fliers and flying and machinery, and he wants the reader to understand what it means to move through the air in 30 tons of aircraft -- the work involved, the physics, the technical expertise and the cold courage. So he breaks down the chapters into the overall strategy, the tactics, the logistics, the everything involved in carrying out a 300-bomber raid over a hostile nation. This is an immense task but he handles it as deftly as a bullfighter, making his mark on each subject but never lingering.
Then we get the real action. Caiden makes extensive use of firsthand accounts and official records to record the event from the POV of those involved. He makes us feel it, the successes and failures both, and tries to cover all aspects of the battle -- for example, one entire chapter is devoted to the improbable escape to Spain, through Germany and France, of one airman shot down during the attack; another takes the experiences of a single minute of heavy combat as experienced by a series of bomber crews. At the same time, he explains the tactics and strategy of the Luftwaffe, praising their courage, ingenuity and determination at every point. While Caiden is obviously partisan, using "we" and "our" when describing Americans and the Air Forces, he does not make the error of presenting the Germans as mere foils for American greatness. The Germans won this battle, and while they paid a steep price to do so, Caiden does not let us forget that Schweinfurt was a bloody mess that failed to achieve its objective despite shockingly accurate bombing. The scenes where American ground crews wait in vain for bombers that will never return, the times when accidents kill as many Americans as a lost battle, the pathetic image of the lone survivor of an entire squadron staring through tear-blurred eyes at row after row after row of empty bunks never again to be filled by their former occupants, will stick with you forever. Like many people, I always assumed the Air Forces had it easier than the infantry, that they fought a "clean war," but this assumption does not survive contact with BLACK THURSDAY. Aside from being in the first wave of an amphibious invasion against a hardened beach, I can't imagine anything as terrifying, and nothing more terrifying, than being stuck in the ball turret of a B-17 when 200 German fighters are attacking you from every direction, flak is pounding away all around you, one engine is on fire, and you know you've still got 3, 4, 5 more hours of this hell to go through before you can get home.
If you get home.
If the book has a weakness, it is that Caiden uses German records only for the purposes of recording losses and measuring bomb damage. There are no interviews with Luftwaffe fighter pilots who flew against the raid, or the Luftwaffe commanders who directed the battle. He does not tap into official histories from "the other side of the hill" except to give us some statistics. By doing so he would have greatly improved an already amazing piece of history and research, and given us a broader and deeper, and also a more balanced, account of the battle. However, I realize this was probably not his objective to begin with. As I said, Caiden is a partisan writer: he wrote this book to impress upon us the courage of the American airman and the tremendous struggles and sacrifices he had to make to win the daylight air war over Europe, not to tell both sides of the story. Still, I consider this a pity. I have read enough German accounts of what it was like to fly against the dreaded "boxes" of B-17s, each bristling with hundreds of .50 machine guns, to want to read more. And I confess I wondered if Caiden was uncomfortable with the idea of opening up, in the reader's mind, what happens when hundreds of tons of high explosives rain down on factory workers and civilians of all ages alike. When the air war is disussed by historians, I have found it often omits describing this fundamental horror as a way of keeping the "Greatest Generation" clean in their own minds. The national myths of any nation require a certain amount of this sweeping-dust-beneath-the-rug approach: however, a moment's worth of inquiry satisified me that he was doing absolutely nothing of the kind: he tackled that subject in excruciatingly horrifying detail in A TORCH TO THE ENEMY, about the firebombing of Tokyo. So I believe his motive here was to tell a complex tale in the most efficient and arresting manner possible, and keep it lean and mean.
In short, I loved this book. It reads almost like a novel and it has none of the overly technical, burdensome discussions of metallurgy, aerdodynamics, and what-not that made what many consider his seminal work, THE FORK-TAILED DEVIL, impossible for me to read cover to cover. That book has terrific anecdotes and exhaustive research, but -- in my opinion -- it gets in its own way with all the nuts and bolts: BLACK THURSDAY does not make that mistake. It's one of the best WW2 histories I've ever read, and I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested in history or aviation to read it.
July 8, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: ERROL FLYNN'S "MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS"
I have been in rebellion against God and government ever since I can remember.
In his own autobiography, IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER, Basil Rathbone wrote of Errol Flynn:
"He was one of the most beautiful male animals I've ever seen...but I think his greatest handicap was that he was incapable of taking anything or anyone else seriously. I don't think he had any ambition beyond 'living up' every moment of his life to the maximum of his physical capacity, and making money. He had talent, but how much we shall never know; there were flashes of talent in the three pictures we made together. He was monstrously lazy and self-indulgent, relying on a magnificent body to keep him going, and he had an insidious flair for making trouble, mostly for himself. I believe him to have been quite fearless, and subconsciously possessed of his own self-destruction. I would say that he was fond of me, for what reasons I will never know. It was always 'Dear old Bazzz,' and he would flash that smile that was both defiant and cruel, but for me always had a tinge of affection in it. We only crossed swords, never words."
The extent to which Rathbone, who worked closely with Flynn on CAPTAIN BLOOD, ROBIN HOOD and DAWN PATROL, understood and did not understand the paradoxical, enigmatic, what-you-saw-is-not-necessarily-what-you-got Errol Flynn will be revealed to anyone who spends the money and takes the time to read his surprisingly thick, surprisingly deep, often amusing and occasionally appalling autobiography, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS.
Now I freely confess I am one of those fiends who folds back the edges of book pages I consider to contain important quotations. I also confess I bought this book expecting that Flynn would have little to say aside from endless recounts of alcoholic and sexual debacheries and perhaps some amusing gossip from the Golden Age of Hollywood; in other words, I expected to be entertained, but I did not anticipate folding many pages. As to the former, my expectations were met. As to the latter, I confess I was dead wrong. Errol Flynn was indeed a degenerate, libertine, almost completely amoral man, one who lived his entire life either teetering on the edge of, or completely beyond, both the rules of civilized behavior and occasionally, of civilization itself. The smile that Rathbone described as "defiant and cruel" was just that, for Flynn was defiant by nature -- defiant of everything -- and his pleasures often took an exploitative form that bore no regard for the feelings or dignity of others. He lived for those pleasures, and adventure, and laughed (literally) at the idea of consequences. He seems to have scarcely understood the idea of guilt, conscience or remorse, and he did not take himself any more seriously than he took the women (sometimes girls) he seduced, the husbands he humiliated, or the many people of all races he ruthlessly conned out of their money and their dignity. On the other hand, he was far more than the sum of his sins: Flynn was highly intelligent, extremely resourceful, deeply curious about life and human existence, and in his later years, a surprisingly self-critical and philosophical man who came to regret many of his choices. If he was ruthless, he was also without self-pity.
Flynn takes us from his improbable childhood -- he was the son of a famous Australian scientist who rather doted on him, and an unloving mother with whom he remained at war his entire life -- to an even more improbable adolescence. Born in Tasmania, which is quite literally the end of the earth, he took on the characteristics of that island's most famous animal: the devil. He was a curious, wild, nearly fearless child, always up to mischief, and even at a very young age obsessed with the female of the species. Gifted with extreme good looks, he collected sexual experiences (and veneral diseases) early, and his teens and twenties were spent on a series of adventures. At different points before he was accidentally discovered by Hollywood, Flynn sailed the South Seas, tried his hand at running various kinds of plantations, dabbled in the slave trade, panned for gold in New Guinea -- the most dangerous place on earth at that time -- and eventually learned to live as a vagabond con man. While guiding a documentary crew up the deadly Sepik River in New Guinea, he was noted for his looks and charisma and cast in a movie called THE WAKE OF THE BOUNTY, which opened him up to the film world but did not deliver him from poverty or give him purpose. Indeed, Flynn is 179 pages into his memoirs before he ceases his life of wandering, hanging out with street thugs in Australia, running cons from Hong Kong to the Phillippines, and sailing around the Pacific with a fellow con artist named Koets, and joins the Northampton Repertory Company in England. This act set the course for the rest of his life, for it was here he learned how to act, and more than that, became interested in acting as a craft. Indeed, in his later years he remarked that the happiest times of his life were the two years he spent "trodding the boards" with this theater company. And therein lies one of the book's many moments of tragedy. Flynn's talents as an actor, which were considerable, eventually became overlooked because of his physical appearance; his handsomeness and devil-may-care smile are what got him to New York and eventually, Los Angeles, and the genuine passion and deep-soul satisfaction that a life of theater acting might have engendered in him were traded, before he even really understood what happened, for a life as a movie star: a life that fed into all of his surface passions and animal lusts, but did not ultimately leave him fulfilled, satisified, or even in possession of his self-respect.
Flynn's Hollywood career started with a bang with CAPTAIN BLOOD in 1935. He rapidly became one of "the" leading men in the motion picture industry and pictures like THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, ROBIN HOOD, THE SEA HAWK, and SANTA FE TRAIL cemented his status as a "swashbuckler" -- the 30s-40s equivalent of an action star. His fame and money allowed him to indulge in all of his favorite pastimes, and gave him a reputation as a womanzer nonpariel, but his marital choices cost him dearly in divorce court and plagued him for the rest of his life. Indeed, it could be said that Flynn spent much of that life working in films he cared nothing about simply to feed the insatiable alimony demands of his first wife. He could not enter military service during WW2 because of malaria, tuberculosis and veneral disease picked up in his "adventures," and he unfairly suffered reputation damage by being associated with a taste for Fascism (an absurdity when you consider Flynn's centralmost desire in life was for personal freedom). His taste for hijinks and low farce hamstrung his efforts to land meatier acting parts, as did his penchant for making enemies, which fed a growing disillusion with acting generally. However, it was his trial for rape in 1943 which he regarded as the most significant moment of his life. Indeed, he qualifies the incident by stating his life can be divided into "before" and "after" the trial. What happened, in extreme brief and according to Flynn, was this: Flynn's reputation as a ladykiller with a taste for young flesh made him the subject of a number of extortion attempts, one of which led to a highly dubious rape prosecution in Los Angeles which deeply humiliated him and seems to have left him permanently traumatized. Indeed, he devotes an entire act of the book to the trial (which he believed was a frame-up) and its aftermath, which badly damaged his career and both public and self-image. Acting no longer meant anything to him, and neither did money or even sex. He speaks freely about contemplating suicide on many occasions, and writes with palpable anguish about the decline in his fortunes: "All my life the one thing I feared was mediocrity -- and my whole living effort was pitched to oppose ever becoming a mediocrity. I did not wish to live in a mediocre way, nor to be regarded artistically as a mediocrity. This to me was the cardinal sin: to be middling was to be nothing."
I must pause here to say that MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS, despite its salacious fascinations, dry wit, and often appalling amoralism, comes dangerously close to becoming tedious at a certain point about 3/4 of the way through. This is not due to any deficiency in Flynn's writing style: he is actually quite a cracking good writer, and it's easy to see why Hemingway disliked him so much, and for other reasons than that Flynn shared more than one woman with him: Flynn led a life that in many ways eclipsed Hemingway's, and had he doggedly pursued mastering the craft-and-art of writing in the same way he did young women, he might have produced some fiction to put the literary world on notice. No, it is simply that Flynn's penchant for sleeping with other men's wives, his taste for sophomoric pranks and crude humor, his love of the con, the tinge of cruelty and complete lack of remorse he had for all the damage he caused...it all becomes tiresome after a time. Tiresome, and a little disgusting. Yet just at the moment I was beginning to get sick of all these tales of seductions, pranks, parties, debaucheries, fights, disastrous vacations, sailing expeditions, financial problems and irresponsible shennanigans, Flynn abruptly changes course. No longer content with listing his victories and defeats, he spends the last 100-odd pages in a deeply philosophical quest to discover where his life went wrong, what he has learned from his mistakes, why he made the choices he did and how he came to be so disgusted with surface attractions that he refused to look in the mirror. He contemplates life and makes powerful observations about himself, some of which may have startled his friend "Dear Old Bazzz":
"I know I am a contradiction inside a contradiction...you can love every instant of living and still want to be dead."
"I have a zest for living yet twice an urge to die."
"If I have a genius it is a genius for living. And yet I turn many things into shit."
"I hate the legend of myself as a phallic representation, yet I work to keep it alive. I portray myself as wicked, yet I hope not to be truly regarded as wicked."
"Praise Mama. Damn her too."
At the time he wrote the book, he was acutely aware that his looks were going, his health was slipping, his bank account was void and his career was in chaos; he had become somewhat acclaimed as an actor again, but only for smoothly recherche portrayals of characters who were very much like him in that moment of his life: aged-out Romeos engaged in losing struggles with the bottle, such as he portrayed in THE SUN ALSO RISES, a performance so good even Hemingway respected it. Yet his incapacity for self-pity makes his self-explorations truly interesting and slightly tragic and even sympathetic. In the end, Flynn, who seemed to be missing the capacity to grasp the collateral and sometimes deliberate damage he had inflicted on others, is unsparing in looking at the wreck he made of his own life. To his credit, he does not blame a rapacious ex-wife, controlling studio mogul Jack Warner, his mean-minded mother, or any other person or set of circumstances for his dark night of the soul. He knows he has led an extraordinary life, and he knows it was not the life he should have led, that he might have been much more than an actor known for standing with a sword in one hand and a garter in the other. As he put it: "I had no greatness, only a deadly fear of mediocrity."
In the end, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS is a much subtler and deeper book than I was expecting, about one of the most notorious movie stars of all time, for whose sexual rapacity birthed the vulgar phrase "in like Flynn," which is still in use 75 years after his death. Many readers will be put off by his amoralism, sexual rapacity and taste for all things facetious, sophomoric and irresponsible. Some will be outraged by his cruel con artistry and his dabbles in the modern-day slave trade still rampant in the South Seas. Others will regard his life as Rathbone did, as a rather self-indulgent waste of talent. Neither would be wrong. But I think even his bitterest critics would agree that in the end, there was much more to Flynn than his wicked, wicked ways.
In his own autobiography, IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER, Basil Rathbone wrote of Errol Flynn:
"He was one of the most beautiful male animals I've ever seen...but I think his greatest handicap was that he was incapable of taking anything or anyone else seriously. I don't think he had any ambition beyond 'living up' every moment of his life to the maximum of his physical capacity, and making money. He had talent, but how much we shall never know; there were flashes of talent in the three pictures we made together. He was monstrously lazy and self-indulgent, relying on a magnificent body to keep him going, and he had an insidious flair for making trouble, mostly for himself. I believe him to have been quite fearless, and subconsciously possessed of his own self-destruction. I would say that he was fond of me, for what reasons I will never know. It was always 'Dear old Bazzz,' and he would flash that smile that was both defiant and cruel, but for me always had a tinge of affection in it. We only crossed swords, never words."
The extent to which Rathbone, who worked closely with Flynn on CAPTAIN BLOOD, ROBIN HOOD and DAWN PATROL, understood and did not understand the paradoxical, enigmatic, what-you-saw-is-not-necessarily-what-you-got Errol Flynn will be revealed to anyone who spends the money and takes the time to read his surprisingly thick, surprisingly deep, often amusing and occasionally appalling autobiography, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS.
Now I freely confess I am one of those fiends who folds back the edges of book pages I consider to contain important quotations. I also confess I bought this book expecting that Flynn would have little to say aside from endless recounts of alcoholic and sexual debacheries and perhaps some amusing gossip from the Golden Age of Hollywood; in other words, I expected to be entertained, but I did not anticipate folding many pages. As to the former, my expectations were met. As to the latter, I confess I was dead wrong. Errol Flynn was indeed a degenerate, libertine, almost completely amoral man, one who lived his entire life either teetering on the edge of, or completely beyond, both the rules of civilized behavior and occasionally, of civilization itself. The smile that Rathbone described as "defiant and cruel" was just that, for Flynn was defiant by nature -- defiant of everything -- and his pleasures often took an exploitative form that bore no regard for the feelings or dignity of others. He lived for those pleasures, and adventure, and laughed (literally) at the idea of consequences. He seems to have scarcely understood the idea of guilt, conscience or remorse, and he did not take himself any more seriously than he took the women (sometimes girls) he seduced, the husbands he humiliated, or the many people of all races he ruthlessly conned out of their money and their dignity. On the other hand, he was far more than the sum of his sins: Flynn was highly intelligent, extremely resourceful, deeply curious about life and human existence, and in his later years, a surprisingly self-critical and philosophical man who came to regret many of his choices. If he was ruthless, he was also without self-pity.
Flynn takes us from his improbable childhood -- he was the son of a famous Australian scientist who rather doted on him, and an unloving mother with whom he remained at war his entire life -- to an even more improbable adolescence. Born in Tasmania, which is quite literally the end of the earth, he took on the characteristics of that island's most famous animal: the devil. He was a curious, wild, nearly fearless child, always up to mischief, and even at a very young age obsessed with the female of the species. Gifted with extreme good looks, he collected sexual experiences (and veneral diseases) early, and his teens and twenties were spent on a series of adventures. At different points before he was accidentally discovered by Hollywood, Flynn sailed the South Seas, tried his hand at running various kinds of plantations, dabbled in the slave trade, panned for gold in New Guinea -- the most dangerous place on earth at that time -- and eventually learned to live as a vagabond con man. While guiding a documentary crew up the deadly Sepik River in New Guinea, he was noted for his looks and charisma and cast in a movie called THE WAKE OF THE BOUNTY, which opened him up to the film world but did not deliver him from poverty or give him purpose. Indeed, Flynn is 179 pages into his memoirs before he ceases his life of wandering, hanging out with street thugs in Australia, running cons from Hong Kong to the Phillippines, and sailing around the Pacific with a fellow con artist named Koets, and joins the Northampton Repertory Company in England. This act set the course for the rest of his life, for it was here he learned how to act, and more than that, became interested in acting as a craft. Indeed, in his later years he remarked that the happiest times of his life were the two years he spent "trodding the boards" with this theater company. And therein lies one of the book's many moments of tragedy. Flynn's talents as an actor, which were considerable, eventually became overlooked because of his physical appearance; his handsomeness and devil-may-care smile are what got him to New York and eventually, Los Angeles, and the genuine passion and deep-soul satisfaction that a life of theater acting might have engendered in him were traded, before he even really understood what happened, for a life as a movie star: a life that fed into all of his surface passions and animal lusts, but did not ultimately leave him fulfilled, satisified, or even in possession of his self-respect.
Flynn's Hollywood career started with a bang with CAPTAIN BLOOD in 1935. He rapidly became one of "the" leading men in the motion picture industry and pictures like THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, ROBIN HOOD, THE SEA HAWK, and SANTA FE TRAIL cemented his status as a "swashbuckler" -- the 30s-40s equivalent of an action star. His fame and money allowed him to indulge in all of his favorite pastimes, and gave him a reputation as a womanzer nonpariel, but his marital choices cost him dearly in divorce court and plagued him for the rest of his life. Indeed, it could be said that Flynn spent much of that life working in films he cared nothing about simply to feed the insatiable alimony demands of his first wife. He could not enter military service during WW2 because of malaria, tuberculosis and veneral disease picked up in his "adventures," and he unfairly suffered reputation damage by being associated with a taste for Fascism (an absurdity when you consider Flynn's centralmost desire in life was for personal freedom). His taste for hijinks and low farce hamstrung his efforts to land meatier acting parts, as did his penchant for making enemies, which fed a growing disillusion with acting generally. However, it was his trial for rape in 1943 which he regarded as the most significant moment of his life. Indeed, he qualifies the incident by stating his life can be divided into "before" and "after" the trial. What happened, in extreme brief and according to Flynn, was this: Flynn's reputation as a ladykiller with a taste for young flesh made him the subject of a number of extortion attempts, one of which led to a highly dubious rape prosecution in Los Angeles which deeply humiliated him and seems to have left him permanently traumatized. Indeed, he devotes an entire act of the book to the trial (which he believed was a frame-up) and its aftermath, which badly damaged his career and both public and self-image. Acting no longer meant anything to him, and neither did money or even sex. He speaks freely about contemplating suicide on many occasions, and writes with palpable anguish about the decline in his fortunes: "All my life the one thing I feared was mediocrity -- and my whole living effort was pitched to oppose ever becoming a mediocrity. I did not wish to live in a mediocre way, nor to be regarded artistically as a mediocrity. This to me was the cardinal sin: to be middling was to be nothing."
I must pause here to say that MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS, despite its salacious fascinations, dry wit, and often appalling amoralism, comes dangerously close to becoming tedious at a certain point about 3/4 of the way through. This is not due to any deficiency in Flynn's writing style: he is actually quite a cracking good writer, and it's easy to see why Hemingway disliked him so much, and for other reasons than that Flynn shared more than one woman with him: Flynn led a life that in many ways eclipsed Hemingway's, and had he doggedly pursued mastering the craft-and-art of writing in the same way he did young women, he might have produced some fiction to put the literary world on notice. No, it is simply that Flynn's penchant for sleeping with other men's wives, his taste for sophomoric pranks and crude humor, his love of the con, the tinge of cruelty and complete lack of remorse he had for all the damage he caused...it all becomes tiresome after a time. Tiresome, and a little disgusting. Yet just at the moment I was beginning to get sick of all these tales of seductions, pranks, parties, debaucheries, fights, disastrous vacations, sailing expeditions, financial problems and irresponsible shennanigans, Flynn abruptly changes course. No longer content with listing his victories and defeats, he spends the last 100-odd pages in a deeply philosophical quest to discover where his life went wrong, what he has learned from his mistakes, why he made the choices he did and how he came to be so disgusted with surface attractions that he refused to look in the mirror. He contemplates life and makes powerful observations about himself, some of which may have startled his friend "Dear Old Bazzz":
"I know I am a contradiction inside a contradiction...you can love every instant of living and still want to be dead."
"I have a zest for living yet twice an urge to die."
"If I have a genius it is a genius for living. And yet I turn many things into shit."
"I hate the legend of myself as a phallic representation, yet I work to keep it alive. I portray myself as wicked, yet I hope not to be truly regarded as wicked."
"Praise Mama. Damn her too."
At the time he wrote the book, he was acutely aware that his looks were going, his health was slipping, his bank account was void and his career was in chaos; he had become somewhat acclaimed as an actor again, but only for smoothly recherche portrayals of characters who were very much like him in that moment of his life: aged-out Romeos engaged in losing struggles with the bottle, such as he portrayed in THE SUN ALSO RISES, a performance so good even Hemingway respected it. Yet his incapacity for self-pity makes his self-explorations truly interesting and slightly tragic and even sympathetic. In the end, Flynn, who seemed to be missing the capacity to grasp the collateral and sometimes deliberate damage he had inflicted on others, is unsparing in looking at the wreck he made of his own life. To his credit, he does not blame a rapacious ex-wife, controlling studio mogul Jack Warner, his mean-minded mother, or any other person or set of circumstances for his dark night of the soul. He knows he has led an extraordinary life, and he knows it was not the life he should have led, that he might have been much more than an actor known for standing with a sword in one hand and a garter in the other. As he put it: "I had no greatness, only a deadly fear of mediocrity."
In the end, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS is a much subtler and deeper book than I was expecting, about one of the most notorious movie stars of all time, for whose sexual rapacity birthed the vulgar phrase "in like Flynn," which is still in use 75 years after his death. Many readers will be put off by his amoralism, sexual rapacity and taste for all things facetious, sophomoric and irresponsible. Some will be outraged by his cruel con artistry and his dabbles in the modern-day slave trade still rampant in the South Seas. Others will regard his life as Rathbone did, as a rather self-indulgent waste of talent. Neither would be wrong. But I think even his bitterest critics would agree that in the end, there was much more to Flynn than his wicked, wicked ways.
July 5, 2024
YOU LOOK LONELY
It was a few weeks ago, late at night, and I was at the keys, working hard on my latest book, lost in the imaginary world I was in the process of creating. My apartment was dark save for the red lamps and a single, flickering candle. I had put on music as accompaniment, nothing with lyrics that would distract, just beautiful, solemn music that was playing under the collective heading of "You Look Lonely."
I had been at the bottle. It's an old writer's curse and not one I am going to complain about here, but yeah, I was probably in the bag. Sometimes it helps me access my thoughts. Sometimes it liberates me from my inhibitions. Sometimes it ignites feelings that, for me, are all too damned difficult to get at or perhaps gone altogether. But at some point I sat back, and, needing a break scrolled down in the comments section beneath the video. I don't normally do this. Comments on YouTube, while no where near as horrible as they were 10 - 15 years ago, are still usually vulgar and stupid enough to make me regret even glancing at them. But this night was different. Very different. Perhaps it was the sort of music the video played; perhaps it was merely the title, but the comments here were cut from different stone, true stone. And for what seemed like hours I read the private, pain-filled confessionals of complete strangers, people whose faces I couldn't see, whose voices I couldn't hear, who I will never meet in real life. And it shook me deeply. As I recently noted somewhere else, I see a lot of tragedy in my line of work. Robbery, rape, overdose, suicide, murder, all of it. It's gotten to the point where it's hard for me to experience a genuine emotional reaction to anything, hence the whiskey. But not that night.
Loneliness is a constant in my life. In bars, in cars, on the streets, in stores, everywhere. There is no way out. I am a single man.
I been alone for 35 years, nothing can fix that.
Is it weird to feel lonely even if you have a good social life? I just sometimes feel so lost, lonely, not aiming or seeking for new challenges in life. One day having a good laugh with friends and the day after or even the same evening it just hits you... "That" feeling. Thinking about doing great stuff in the future... but then never really starting to work towards it. I sometimes really question myself in every single way. Am I going to be succesfull one day? Am I going to make my parents proud of me one day? Am I going to stop stressing about everything one day? Am I going to be loved unconditionally one day...?
6'1" 185lbs Exercise regularly, stable job. Living on my own. No diseases. No kids. No criminal record. Still not good enough I guess and still single forever. Loneliness is the only thing that ever embraced me...
In the old days of the internet, I can remember "logging on" and having the most meaningful conversations with strangers about almost any topic imaginable. Now I feel like you can't post a picture of a sunset without somone hijacking or vandalizing the conversation to service their own anger or loathing or smugness or narcissism. All the roads lead to ugliness. But not this time. There was this weird democracy that comes with anonymity. Everyone became equal in their loneliness, and the confessions unfolded, page after page of bare-laid souls:
Yeah, I want to have someone to love. But every time I do I ask myself: "Am I good enough?" I give up. Sure I can love someone but for someone to love me is just a fake reality. For me, everything in life is just a straight line. When I get good and bad grades, when someone in my family dies, when someone insults me, I don't feel anything, just emptiness. I think I'm like this because I've been through a lot of bullying, I ignored them, closed myself from others and always put up a straight face. Every smile is fake, only lasts for a few seconds. So anyway that was my story. Thank you for reading.
i don't fear being alone I fear being lonely
I wish there were nice people. But hey, the world is not nice
I died years ago I am simply existing until im not, days and days go by, repeating over and over and i feel nothing im empty i can laugh and i can smile and joke and play but in the end im left with this emptiness that never goes away, sometimes i wish the night i died was really my death i wont take myself but this thing im living isnt a life its miserable and im secretly waiting for the end
Without you, there's nothing here for me.
And here i am in my bed crying because no one can fix me.
I can smile. I can laugh. I can be happy. But no one knows that truly it's an act. It's a manipulation or an easy way to deceive everyone. Let's be honest. You can buy anyone with a fake smile. And yes, im lonely...
I sat back in my chair in the red-lit darkness with the music brooding and the sound of the summer rain on the windows. I was drunk. Keenly aware that I was living a cliche as old as the typewriter -- probably as old as the quill. There was something so Film Noir about the crimson light, the sad soul-tugging music, the endless outpouring of anonymous pain. About the way the ice clinked and rattled in my glass when I sipped the cold liquid fire that makes me more human. About the way my own thoughts turned inward.
Thought i was getting better but today all the memories just hit me like a ton of bricks, i miss her voice and laugh and cute smile so much....she was my whole world and ill never forget you
I don't feel anything anymore and Idc...
i hate myself, i hate the decisions i made. i hate my life, im so depressed.
I've been in self isolation for five years. Hardly living , clinging on to every day, every ounce of hope just so I won't commit the Act . Worst is, I'm living with my fam who don't understand me at all. No matter how much I've cried Infront of them. I have no control in life, I can't even finish myself. When will this end!
I simply give up. I've been alone all my life, loneliness is now part of me. Three years of psychotherapy got me nowhere and now I'm back on antidepressants. I will accept the fact that I am not made for this world
The only thing missing was a cigarette so its smoke could curl in the neon light. It was all so perfectly atmospheric, so poetically sad. I was even in a cotton undershirt.
Probably ending it all soon, thank you for the final few fleeting moments of clarity this music gave me.
I pass by her house…it’s like we never met before. It feels like I’m the only one who carries the memories. Sometimes I see her car pass by and wonder if she feels the same.
Every night, before I close my eyes I wish, I beg even don't wake up again, I want quit this, I'm not enough
I feel nothing anymore. There's absolutely nothing I want to do, only things I have to do. Nothing brings me joy....
dark hours, cacophony of multicolor lights, alcohol and tobacco smell, wrong feelings, contradictory, glimmer of hope, suffocated in filth...but it s kind of...ok this way....the cold...the only constant in your life....get used to it
I was moved. Profoundly moved. One could argue all pity is self-pity, a projection of one's fears, or a recognition of one's own hurts, but I don't buy it. Not all the way. Statements like that are never more than half-truths, and those who utter them always have their own hidden motives for leaving out the other half. In any event what I felt was a need to engage, to join the confession. Writing is a solitary pursuit, after all, and the dividing line between solitude and loneliness is often indistinguishable.
"Show me your relationship to pain," I wrote, quoting one of my favorite authors. "And I will show you who you are." And then I added my own spin, which when you are already spinning is not difficult to do: "Show me your relationship to loneliness and I will show you who you do not wish to be."
Eventually a reply came. Someone quite rightly asking for a clarification. "I feel like this is a quote that I kind of understand on the surface, but there’s a deeper meaning I don’t get. Could you go into more detail?"
I was embarrassed at having been so deliberately vague and mystical, so after a lot of thinking I answered, with apologies:
"Our ability to withstand pain is accepted as a measure of our strength. But the degree to which we can endure loneliness is in some ways a measure of our weakness...we habituate ourselves to a state we despise and would do almost anything to escape from. We begin to pride ourselves outwardly, in a perverse way, that we are 'strong enough' to walk alone, meanwhile secretly longing to walk hand in hand with someone else. In other words, the more we can stand up to loneliness the more we hate it, and the greater our desire to escape it becomes."
Re-reading this now, on another night where the lamps are casting their glow, I see that I had spoken truly, which is hardly always the case when talking with strangers under the influence of the True. Anyone who reads my blogs - or my fiction, for that matter -- knows I have an abiding romance with pain, and this too, is a cliche. The half-starving writer, whose melting glass of ice cubes and whiskey sits atop a heap of unpaid bills and parking tickets and rejection slips, whose trophy cup for Best Novel of 20XX is full of cigarette butts, who gets more respect from strangers who have read his work than friends who never will, is almost a caricature, and when you throw in the fact that all writers are liars who speak more truly with their lies, as Hemingway sort-of said, than other people speak with their truths, I could perhaps be accused of telling a creative fib here: but I am not. These strangers bared their souls and in my own way, more pompously perhaps, but nevertheless truly, I bared mine. I was caught up in a peculiar sort of moment, when a person who has difficulty feeling things, or at any rate often has difficulty feeling what others would deem the right things, forgot the double ring of calluses over his emotions.
The next day I did a lot of thinking about loneliness, and whether the age we live in has led to an epidemic or merely exposed its existence. A lot gets blamed on the internet, in many cases justly, but if we are honest with ourselves, we often heap upon it the same guilt which fell on television in the 70s - 80s and video games since the late 90s, only a smallish part of which was rooted in verifiable fact. Technology has become a kind of whipping boy for our societal ills, and loneliness, unlike, say, mass shootings, is not a newish phenomenon. But I confess that I do believe that this condition, initially soothed for so many by the creation of chatrooms, instant messaging and the like 25-plus years ago, has now become horribly exacerbated. Instead of facilitating human contact, it has allowed humans to live without for years at a time. An entire generation has grown up considering text messaging to be a more normal form of communication than talking over the phone, and "ghosting" as the preferred means of dismissing someone from your life rather than a painful but cathartic confrontation in person. People sitting opposite one another at restaurants, even people outside in the sunshine, like as not have their faces buried in their mobile devices, isolating themselves even when surrounded by others. Humans are gregarious animals and suffer according psychological damage when isolated from other humans. Alerts on a phone are a poor substitute for intimacy, and it is starting to show.
I know I have a reactionary, even a hypocritical attitude toward a lot of technology. I use it and I don't really want to live without it and yet I despise it all the same. Even now, sitting here alone in the dark listening to a sad playlist ("They Moved On Too Fast"), I am rejecting human society in favor of connecting with a scattering of people I'll never meet. And perhaps that why it hit me so hard, that outpouring of loneliness, of grief: because I see so much of it in myself. There is something curiously and horribly seductive about it, something romantic, and that brings me back to the beginning of this note, to the atmosphere that loneliness brings with it. Loneliness is a feeling, and under certain circumstances we've all experienced can even become a condition; but it is not meant to be a lifestyle. It should never be normalized or accepted, as so many people in the comments section accepted it, as something all-encompassing and inescapable. My own, pre-internet generation saw it as a shameful condition never to be admitted, but this in retrospect was hardly the high ground, moral or otherwise, and my words to the stranger on the subject are the ones I truly hold with: to measure ourselves by our ability to endure loneliness, or to find some virtue in it where none exists, is a fool's errand. And with that in mind, I am pushing away from the keyboard and leaving my apartment to mingle with my fellow humans. I sincerely hope you do the same. For the solitude there is always time.
I had been at the bottle. It's an old writer's curse and not one I am going to complain about here, but yeah, I was probably in the bag. Sometimes it helps me access my thoughts. Sometimes it liberates me from my inhibitions. Sometimes it ignites feelings that, for me, are all too damned difficult to get at or perhaps gone altogether. But at some point I sat back, and, needing a break scrolled down in the comments section beneath the video. I don't normally do this. Comments on YouTube, while no where near as horrible as they were 10 - 15 years ago, are still usually vulgar and stupid enough to make me regret even glancing at them. But this night was different. Very different. Perhaps it was the sort of music the video played; perhaps it was merely the title, but the comments here were cut from different stone, true stone. And for what seemed like hours I read the private, pain-filled confessionals of complete strangers, people whose faces I couldn't see, whose voices I couldn't hear, who I will never meet in real life. And it shook me deeply. As I recently noted somewhere else, I see a lot of tragedy in my line of work. Robbery, rape, overdose, suicide, murder, all of it. It's gotten to the point where it's hard for me to experience a genuine emotional reaction to anything, hence the whiskey. But not that night.
Loneliness is a constant in my life. In bars, in cars, on the streets, in stores, everywhere. There is no way out. I am a single man.
I been alone for 35 years, nothing can fix that.
Is it weird to feel lonely even if you have a good social life? I just sometimes feel so lost, lonely, not aiming or seeking for new challenges in life. One day having a good laugh with friends and the day after or even the same evening it just hits you... "That" feeling. Thinking about doing great stuff in the future... but then never really starting to work towards it. I sometimes really question myself in every single way. Am I going to be succesfull one day? Am I going to make my parents proud of me one day? Am I going to stop stressing about everything one day? Am I going to be loved unconditionally one day...?
6'1" 185lbs Exercise regularly, stable job. Living on my own. No diseases. No kids. No criminal record. Still not good enough I guess and still single forever. Loneliness is the only thing that ever embraced me...
In the old days of the internet, I can remember "logging on" and having the most meaningful conversations with strangers about almost any topic imaginable. Now I feel like you can't post a picture of a sunset without somone hijacking or vandalizing the conversation to service their own anger or loathing or smugness or narcissism. All the roads lead to ugliness. But not this time. There was this weird democracy that comes with anonymity. Everyone became equal in their loneliness, and the confessions unfolded, page after page of bare-laid souls:
Yeah, I want to have someone to love. But every time I do I ask myself: "Am I good enough?" I give up. Sure I can love someone but for someone to love me is just a fake reality. For me, everything in life is just a straight line. When I get good and bad grades, when someone in my family dies, when someone insults me, I don't feel anything, just emptiness. I think I'm like this because I've been through a lot of bullying, I ignored them, closed myself from others and always put up a straight face. Every smile is fake, only lasts for a few seconds. So anyway that was my story. Thank you for reading.
i don't fear being alone I fear being lonely
I wish there were nice people. But hey, the world is not nice
I died years ago I am simply existing until im not, days and days go by, repeating over and over and i feel nothing im empty i can laugh and i can smile and joke and play but in the end im left with this emptiness that never goes away, sometimes i wish the night i died was really my death i wont take myself but this thing im living isnt a life its miserable and im secretly waiting for the end
Without you, there's nothing here for me.
And here i am in my bed crying because no one can fix me.
I can smile. I can laugh. I can be happy. But no one knows that truly it's an act. It's a manipulation or an easy way to deceive everyone. Let's be honest. You can buy anyone with a fake smile. And yes, im lonely...
I sat back in my chair in the red-lit darkness with the music brooding and the sound of the summer rain on the windows. I was drunk. Keenly aware that I was living a cliche as old as the typewriter -- probably as old as the quill. There was something so Film Noir about the crimson light, the sad soul-tugging music, the endless outpouring of anonymous pain. About the way the ice clinked and rattled in my glass when I sipped the cold liquid fire that makes me more human. About the way my own thoughts turned inward.
Thought i was getting better but today all the memories just hit me like a ton of bricks, i miss her voice and laugh and cute smile so much....she was my whole world and ill never forget you
I don't feel anything anymore and Idc...
i hate myself, i hate the decisions i made. i hate my life, im so depressed.
I've been in self isolation for five years. Hardly living , clinging on to every day, every ounce of hope just so I won't commit the Act . Worst is, I'm living with my fam who don't understand me at all. No matter how much I've cried Infront of them. I have no control in life, I can't even finish myself. When will this end!
I simply give up. I've been alone all my life, loneliness is now part of me. Three years of psychotherapy got me nowhere and now I'm back on antidepressants. I will accept the fact that I am not made for this world
The only thing missing was a cigarette so its smoke could curl in the neon light. It was all so perfectly atmospheric, so poetically sad. I was even in a cotton undershirt.
Probably ending it all soon, thank you for the final few fleeting moments of clarity this music gave me.
I pass by her house…it’s like we never met before. It feels like I’m the only one who carries the memories. Sometimes I see her car pass by and wonder if she feels the same.
Every night, before I close my eyes I wish, I beg even don't wake up again, I want quit this, I'm not enough
I feel nothing anymore. There's absolutely nothing I want to do, only things I have to do. Nothing brings me joy....
dark hours, cacophony of multicolor lights, alcohol and tobacco smell, wrong feelings, contradictory, glimmer of hope, suffocated in filth...but it s kind of...ok this way....the cold...the only constant in your life....get used to it
I was moved. Profoundly moved. One could argue all pity is self-pity, a projection of one's fears, or a recognition of one's own hurts, but I don't buy it. Not all the way. Statements like that are never more than half-truths, and those who utter them always have their own hidden motives for leaving out the other half. In any event what I felt was a need to engage, to join the confession. Writing is a solitary pursuit, after all, and the dividing line between solitude and loneliness is often indistinguishable.
"Show me your relationship to pain," I wrote, quoting one of my favorite authors. "And I will show you who you are." And then I added my own spin, which when you are already spinning is not difficult to do: "Show me your relationship to loneliness and I will show you who you do not wish to be."
Eventually a reply came. Someone quite rightly asking for a clarification. "I feel like this is a quote that I kind of understand on the surface, but there’s a deeper meaning I don’t get. Could you go into more detail?"
I was embarrassed at having been so deliberately vague and mystical, so after a lot of thinking I answered, with apologies:
"Our ability to withstand pain is accepted as a measure of our strength. But the degree to which we can endure loneliness is in some ways a measure of our weakness...we habituate ourselves to a state we despise and would do almost anything to escape from. We begin to pride ourselves outwardly, in a perverse way, that we are 'strong enough' to walk alone, meanwhile secretly longing to walk hand in hand with someone else. In other words, the more we can stand up to loneliness the more we hate it, and the greater our desire to escape it becomes."
Re-reading this now, on another night where the lamps are casting their glow, I see that I had spoken truly, which is hardly always the case when talking with strangers under the influence of the True. Anyone who reads my blogs - or my fiction, for that matter -- knows I have an abiding romance with pain, and this too, is a cliche. The half-starving writer, whose melting glass of ice cubes and whiskey sits atop a heap of unpaid bills and parking tickets and rejection slips, whose trophy cup for Best Novel of 20XX is full of cigarette butts, who gets more respect from strangers who have read his work than friends who never will, is almost a caricature, and when you throw in the fact that all writers are liars who speak more truly with their lies, as Hemingway sort-of said, than other people speak with their truths, I could perhaps be accused of telling a creative fib here: but I am not. These strangers bared their souls and in my own way, more pompously perhaps, but nevertheless truly, I bared mine. I was caught up in a peculiar sort of moment, when a person who has difficulty feeling things, or at any rate often has difficulty feeling what others would deem the right things, forgot the double ring of calluses over his emotions.
The next day I did a lot of thinking about loneliness, and whether the age we live in has led to an epidemic or merely exposed its existence. A lot gets blamed on the internet, in many cases justly, but if we are honest with ourselves, we often heap upon it the same guilt which fell on television in the 70s - 80s and video games since the late 90s, only a smallish part of which was rooted in verifiable fact. Technology has become a kind of whipping boy for our societal ills, and loneliness, unlike, say, mass shootings, is not a newish phenomenon. But I confess that I do believe that this condition, initially soothed for so many by the creation of chatrooms, instant messaging and the like 25-plus years ago, has now become horribly exacerbated. Instead of facilitating human contact, it has allowed humans to live without for years at a time. An entire generation has grown up considering text messaging to be a more normal form of communication than talking over the phone, and "ghosting" as the preferred means of dismissing someone from your life rather than a painful but cathartic confrontation in person. People sitting opposite one another at restaurants, even people outside in the sunshine, like as not have their faces buried in their mobile devices, isolating themselves even when surrounded by others. Humans are gregarious animals and suffer according psychological damage when isolated from other humans. Alerts on a phone are a poor substitute for intimacy, and it is starting to show.
I know I have a reactionary, even a hypocritical attitude toward a lot of technology. I use it and I don't really want to live without it and yet I despise it all the same. Even now, sitting here alone in the dark listening to a sad playlist ("They Moved On Too Fast"), I am rejecting human society in favor of connecting with a scattering of people I'll never meet. And perhaps that why it hit me so hard, that outpouring of loneliness, of grief: because I see so much of it in myself. There is something curiously and horribly seductive about it, something romantic, and that brings me back to the beginning of this note, to the atmosphere that loneliness brings with it. Loneliness is a feeling, and under certain circumstances we've all experienced can even become a condition; but it is not meant to be a lifestyle. It should never be normalized or accepted, as so many people in the comments section accepted it, as something all-encompassing and inescapable. My own, pre-internet generation saw it as a shameful condition never to be admitted, but this in retrospect was hardly the high ground, moral or otherwise, and my words to the stranger on the subject are the ones I truly hold with: to measure ourselves by our ability to endure loneliness, or to find some virtue in it where none exists, is a fool's errand. And with that in mind, I am pushing away from the keyboard and leaving my apartment to mingle with my fellow humans. I sincerely hope you do the same. For the solitude there is always time.
July 3, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: JAKE LA MOTTA'S "RAGING BULL"
Just give me a stage where this bull can rage.
When most people hear the words "raging bull," their minds immediately move to the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. That infamous movie had a point of origin, however, and this is it: the life story of the Raging Bull himself, middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta.
Years after his death and three quartes of a century after his last war in the ring, La Motta's name is still synonymous with a toughness that crosses the border into masochism, as well as misogyny, paranoia and selfishness. It is recorded that when the real-life La Motta left the premiere of Scorsese's film, he asked his ex-wife Vicki in a whining tone, "I really wasn't that bad, was I?" Her reply? "No, you were worse."
It was partially in an attempt to find out what La Motta thought of himself that I located and bought this surprisingly difficult-to-find book. Which was also surprisingly expensive. So be it, and here we go.
The autobiography reads like a well-written pulp fiction crime novel, and no wonder: La Motta, was as much a crook as a boxer. Indeed, this terse little memoir has more robbery, larceny, rape, bribery, depravity and assault in it than any three hardboiled detective flicks set in the era in which the La Motta fought (1941 - 1954). Not since Errol Flynn's tell-all MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS have I read such an warts-and-all, honest-in-spirit confessional from a public figure. He lays his dark and tortured soul absolutely bare. Most people, writing autobiographies, make at least some attempt to rationalize or justify the evil they have done in life, and to apportion some share of the blame to others, or to "the system" or something even more generalized, like poverty or racism: the Bronx Bull does not. This profoundly irresponsible man takes the lion's share of responsibility for his mistakes, caprices and cruelties, attacking himself with the same vigor he once swarmed his middleweight opponents.
La Motta depicts himself as a brutalized boy growing up in a filthy Bronx slum in the 1920s and 30s (he vividly describes the stench of his tenement housing, abetted by the foul practice of boiling dirty diapers on the stove, as well as the dog-sized rats) in which the brutality of the local Mob was balanced by the near-equal savagery of the NYPD. His early years were spent fighting bullies (he used an ice pick), committing a series of petty crimes, and auditioning for the Mafia via a series of robberies. Learning how to box in reform school, he found he had a real talent for structured violence as well, and blazed a bloody trail on the boxing circuit, where he rapidly became known as the Bronx Bull or the Raging Bull for his furious aggression and near-indestructability. He even handed the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson his first-ever defeat, but was denied a title shot until he agreed to throw a fight so Mafia fatcats could get rich on crooked bets. This led to a lengthy suspension and serious damage to his reputation, but La Motta was not to be denied, defeating Marcel Cerdan to claim the middleweight title.
Of course, when he finally won the belt and its attendant glory, he quickly cratered his marriage, career, finances and everything else so thoroughly that he ended up on a chain gang in Florida on a morals charge just a few years after his retirement. This fall, not from grace, which is a state he never visited, but from financial success and public adoration, seems earned and then some, but it also carries the tragedy implicit in the rags-to-riches story, which so often ends "and back to rags again." We, as a society, are literally born into the idea of of the "happily ever after." We very seldom wonder what happens after ever-after. Much of this book is devoted to it.
In fact, La Motta was so tormented by a youthful robbery gone horribly wrong, in which he savagely beat a bookie with a lead pipe, that he sought contrition and repentance in the suffering implicit in the ring, and basically shit on everyone in his life -- his wives, his brother, his best friend -- every chance he got, because he didn't believe he deserved to be the focus of anyone's love. As Vicki said, the loathsome creature portrayed by De Niro in RAGING BULL is perhaps even uglier in his own words than he seems through Scorsese's lens: a jealous, self-hating, pathologically violent beast who didn't quite understand the difference between rape and sex and whose main virtue was a mule-like refusal to bend his knee to the Mafia, even though at times he was quite the armed robber and thief himself. La Motta, as a psychological study, is at least as fascinating as he is disgusting, though sometimes it's a bit of a horserace. There is no doubt that he was a victim of poverty, but he was also a creature of free will like all men, and much of that freedom he used poorly to say the very, very least.
RAGING BULL is extremely well-written; as I said above, it actually turns pages just like a novel, and has the benefit of real emotional honesty: but it is not always easy to read. La Motta is at times so vile that you almost wish someone had shot him dead just to put him out of society's misery. In two chapter he details needlessly violent robberies he committed, and in another the rape of a friend's girlfriend, who later disintegrates mentally as a result of her trauma. What redeems RAGING BULL, at least to a degree, is that some men -- Salvador Dali for example, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sammy Hagar, Arnold Schwarzenegger, even Athony Keidis -- write confessionals that often sound more like boasting than contrition. RAGING BULL is not in that category. In fact, the salvation of this book lies in the fact that you cannot possibly despise La Motta more than he does; you cannot hold him up to greater scrutiny, ridicule and attack than he has done in these pages. Errol Flynn came to believe that he had wasted his life and talents in a mindless pursuit of pleasure, but exhibited very little if any remorse for the damage he'd done to others; La Motta makes it clear that he at least had the decency to truly hate himself for the wreckage he left behind in his wake. If you want a beautifully ugly depiction of poverty, the mob, and the tormented life of a pro fighter who could lick any opponent save himself, you cannot beat this book, whose only real weakness is an unrealistically happy ending. And as a final note I want to touch upon that.
RAGING BULL concludes on a note of positivity which rings false. Not that redemption or change is by any means impossible, but because this particular note strikes me as a contrived, editorially-mandated sort of ending, a sort of simple, feel-good, bright-light Hollywood moment grafted onto an otherwise complex and shadowy tale of human failings in action. This ending speaks to commercial appeal, of course, but also to the need we seem to have to walk into sunsets just for the aesthetics of it even when everything behind us is broken or on fire. As it happened, LaMotta lived until the age of 95, finally passing away in 2017, and by all accounts managed his affairs reasonably well; but the sort of demons that drove him don't simply evaporate with age or moderate living, and I think it's important to keep in mind that reform takes work. Like training for a prize fight, it requires serious daily commitment, but unlike prize fighting, the commitment must be lifelong. It has been said the nature of a man doesn't change, and while this is superficially true, it is false in the sense that one's actual nature hardly matters except to oneself: it is how we treat others that matters to them. La Motta spent a lot of his life paying for his sins, but his greatest sin was making others pay for them as well.
When most people hear the words "raging bull," their minds immediately move to the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. That infamous movie had a point of origin, however, and this is it: the life story of the Raging Bull himself, middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta.
Years after his death and three quartes of a century after his last war in the ring, La Motta's name is still synonymous with a toughness that crosses the border into masochism, as well as misogyny, paranoia and selfishness. It is recorded that when the real-life La Motta left the premiere of Scorsese's film, he asked his ex-wife Vicki in a whining tone, "I really wasn't that bad, was I?" Her reply? "No, you were worse."
It was partially in an attempt to find out what La Motta thought of himself that I located and bought this surprisingly difficult-to-find book. Which was also surprisingly expensive. So be it, and here we go.
The autobiography reads like a well-written pulp fiction crime novel, and no wonder: La Motta, was as much a crook as a boxer. Indeed, this terse little memoir has more robbery, larceny, rape, bribery, depravity and assault in it than any three hardboiled detective flicks set in the era in which the La Motta fought (1941 - 1954). Not since Errol Flynn's tell-all MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS have I read such an warts-and-all, honest-in-spirit confessional from a public figure. He lays his dark and tortured soul absolutely bare. Most people, writing autobiographies, make at least some attempt to rationalize or justify the evil they have done in life, and to apportion some share of the blame to others, or to "the system" or something even more generalized, like poverty or racism: the Bronx Bull does not. This profoundly irresponsible man takes the lion's share of responsibility for his mistakes, caprices and cruelties, attacking himself with the same vigor he once swarmed his middleweight opponents.
La Motta depicts himself as a brutalized boy growing up in a filthy Bronx slum in the 1920s and 30s (he vividly describes the stench of his tenement housing, abetted by the foul practice of boiling dirty diapers on the stove, as well as the dog-sized rats) in which the brutality of the local Mob was balanced by the near-equal savagery of the NYPD. His early years were spent fighting bullies (he used an ice pick), committing a series of petty crimes, and auditioning for the Mafia via a series of robberies. Learning how to box in reform school, he found he had a real talent for structured violence as well, and blazed a bloody trail on the boxing circuit, where he rapidly became known as the Bronx Bull or the Raging Bull for his furious aggression and near-indestructability. He even handed the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson his first-ever defeat, but was denied a title shot until he agreed to throw a fight so Mafia fatcats could get rich on crooked bets. This led to a lengthy suspension and serious damage to his reputation, but La Motta was not to be denied, defeating Marcel Cerdan to claim the middleweight title.
Of course, when he finally won the belt and its attendant glory, he quickly cratered his marriage, career, finances and everything else so thoroughly that he ended up on a chain gang in Florida on a morals charge just a few years after his retirement. This fall, not from grace, which is a state he never visited, but from financial success and public adoration, seems earned and then some, but it also carries the tragedy implicit in the rags-to-riches story, which so often ends "and back to rags again." We, as a society, are literally born into the idea of of the "happily ever after." We very seldom wonder what happens after ever-after. Much of this book is devoted to it.
In fact, La Motta was so tormented by a youthful robbery gone horribly wrong, in which he savagely beat a bookie with a lead pipe, that he sought contrition and repentance in the suffering implicit in the ring, and basically shit on everyone in his life -- his wives, his brother, his best friend -- every chance he got, because he didn't believe he deserved to be the focus of anyone's love. As Vicki said, the loathsome creature portrayed by De Niro in RAGING BULL is perhaps even uglier in his own words than he seems through Scorsese's lens: a jealous, self-hating, pathologically violent beast who didn't quite understand the difference between rape and sex and whose main virtue was a mule-like refusal to bend his knee to the Mafia, even though at times he was quite the armed robber and thief himself. La Motta, as a psychological study, is at least as fascinating as he is disgusting, though sometimes it's a bit of a horserace. There is no doubt that he was a victim of poverty, but he was also a creature of free will like all men, and much of that freedom he used poorly to say the very, very least.
RAGING BULL is extremely well-written; as I said above, it actually turns pages just like a novel, and has the benefit of real emotional honesty: but it is not always easy to read. La Motta is at times so vile that you almost wish someone had shot him dead just to put him out of society's misery. In two chapter he details needlessly violent robberies he committed, and in another the rape of a friend's girlfriend, who later disintegrates mentally as a result of her trauma. What redeems RAGING BULL, at least to a degree, is that some men -- Salvador Dali for example, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sammy Hagar, Arnold Schwarzenegger, even Athony Keidis -- write confessionals that often sound more like boasting than contrition. RAGING BULL is not in that category. In fact, the salvation of this book lies in the fact that you cannot possibly despise La Motta more than he does; you cannot hold him up to greater scrutiny, ridicule and attack than he has done in these pages. Errol Flynn came to believe that he had wasted his life and talents in a mindless pursuit of pleasure, but exhibited very little if any remorse for the damage he'd done to others; La Motta makes it clear that he at least had the decency to truly hate himself for the wreckage he left behind in his wake. If you want a beautifully ugly depiction of poverty, the mob, and the tormented life of a pro fighter who could lick any opponent save himself, you cannot beat this book, whose only real weakness is an unrealistically happy ending. And as a final note I want to touch upon that.
RAGING BULL concludes on a note of positivity which rings false. Not that redemption or change is by any means impossible, but because this particular note strikes me as a contrived, editorially-mandated sort of ending, a sort of simple, feel-good, bright-light Hollywood moment grafted onto an otherwise complex and shadowy tale of human failings in action. This ending speaks to commercial appeal, of course, but also to the need we seem to have to walk into sunsets just for the aesthetics of it even when everything behind us is broken or on fire. As it happened, LaMotta lived until the age of 95, finally passing away in 2017, and by all accounts managed his affairs reasonably well; but the sort of demons that drove him don't simply evaporate with age or moderate living, and I think it's important to keep in mind that reform takes work. Like training for a prize fight, it requires serious daily commitment, but unlike prize fighting, the commitment must be lifelong. It has been said the nature of a man doesn't change, and while this is superficially true, it is false in the sense that one's actual nature hardly matters except to oneself: it is how we treat others that matters to them. La Motta spent a lot of his life paying for his sins, but his greatest sin was making others pay for them as well.
July 1, 2024
HORIZONS LOST AND FOUND
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not.
I spent the weekend past at my alma mater, Seton Hill University, teaching and attending fiction-writing classes, appearing at a surprisingly successful book signing, reuniting with old friends and making new ones, and drinking entirely too much Yuengling Lager. It should have been a grand occasion. In a sense it was. But a pall hung over the lovely old campus (think: Hogwarts on a large green hill), and I could not escape its shadow -- the shadow of death.
There is never a good time to lose a good friend. Still, some losses can come at moments which seem not only to stick the knife between your ribs but slowly turn the blade, as if the Reaper is trying to exact as much pain as possible from the loss.
To be honest, I had not seen Chris in years, and it had been a long time since we had spoken even over the internet. We hardly fit the status of "good friends" as any reasonable person would define the term. But I am not a reasonable person, never have been, and don't really give a fuck if some would think I am appropriating the grief which rightfully belongs to others. There are times in life that you meet someone with whom you form a certain bond, feel a little simpatico, share a certain connection. You may not become friends in the classical sense, due to distance or other factors, but whenever you're together or even engage in a discussion by some cold electronic means, there's a strong unspoken sense of tribe. In my half-century of life I have had many friendships which seemed solid, complete and rang true when tested, yet also evaporated almost immediately upon the imposition of distance, leaving almost no trace behind. I have also enjoyed others -- not as many, but a number -- which shut down as if by a switch when one of us moved away, only to be reignited years or even decades later, the almost literal example of "picking up where we left off." And between these two and indeed, beyond them, there are a range of other types, the most precious I suppose being the sort that goes at full steam regardless of whether the two of you live next door or on other sides of the planet. My point is simply that friendship is harder to define than we would assume. It fits Michael Ruppert's quirky definition of a paradigm as "what we think about something before we think about it." I feel the same way about friends, and I feel the same way about Chris.
We met in graduate school, in the Masters of Fine Arts program, more years ago now than I care to tell you and certainly more than I believe possible. Actually we met without meeting, and this peculiar first impression lingers to this day. As an aspirant to the Writing Popular Fiction program, I was required to submit a sample of my fiction for the approval or disapproval of those responsible for my admittance to the school. It must have impressed somebody, because I was accepted, and thereafter as one of the tasks to be completed in preparation for my first residency at the school, I had to resubmit this piece to my peers for critique, as they had to submit their own pieces to me. I had a total of ten of these submissions to peruse, and it so happened that Chris P's was the first I plucked off the pile.
Now, I must confess here to a failing which I no longer believe applies to me generally as a person: arrogance. I retain a high belief in self, but only in certain specific areas, and I have come to understand that the more humble one tries to be even in those areas where one considers oneself greatly or supremely talented, the better one can become. And this process by necessity opens the door to further humility by virtue of understanding that if there is room for improvement, well, one is not as good as one thought. There is more to it than that, but for the moment we'll leave it there, and I'll just say that at the time, I always entered any situation assuming that I was the best in the room. So when I took Chris' work off the heap, I was prepared to look down my nose at it.
Five minutes later I distinctly recall feeling sweat on my upper lip. Not figurative sweat. Real sweat. I remember either saying aloud or thinking very loudly, "If this is representative of what they've got, how the hell am I even going to stand out?"
When I arrived at school -- this was the summer of 2006 -- I was eager to meet the guy that had clubbed my well-hidden insecurities with his typewriter. I don't actually remember if I wanted to hate him or not, but I do remember telling him what an amazing writer I thought he was, and meaning it, as Salieri meant his initial compliments to Mozart in Amadeus. Thankfully, Chris was not the sort to compete, or to gloat, or to let compliments go to his head. Indeed, as I was to discover, he was actually far too humble for his own good. Beneath that dryly witty-looking face (the more serious a look he tried to put on it, the more he looked as if he were about to burst out laughing) there lay a great creative genius, it is true, but that genius was untouched by egotism, by pride, or even self-belief as I understand the word. And it was here that I found him utterly infuriating, but I'm getting a touch ahead of myself.
Chris and I hit it off, and last weekend, as I was walking and driving around the campus and the town in which it resides, I kept encountering the places where he and I and others had gone while jammed into my wine-red Buick LaSaber sedan. I remember how he told me that Primani Bros boasted "The Salad As Big As Your Head" -- and it turned out to be bigger, since the last time I checked my dome was 61 cm around (must be all that brain). I remember when we needed beer on a Sunday, and the only place we could get it, thanks to Pennsylvania's blue laws, was a dirty hole-in-the-wall dive bar nestled in the basement of a run-down brick building in the shadow of an overpass. We walked in, the room -- full of barflies and meth-heads -- stopped, and then a smoky-faced old junkie drunk, with shards of yellow teeth, allegedly female, screamed, "Lookeee here at them handsome boys! Hows a bout youse buy an old girl a drink!" And Chris, who was kind to seemingly everyone, replied suavely, "Another time, ma'a'm, for sure," as she wolf-whistled us out the door. And I remembered the nerdy arguments we'd have in the dining hall or somebody's hotel room, where a dozen of us would sit around, drinking and eating take-out and fighting about this or that novelist, whether he sucked or was over-rated or truly the genius everyone said he was, and Chris was generally the sole voice of diplomacy, if not necessarily reason. He seemed to be a natural diplomat, incapable of giving or taking offense, genuinely concerned with keeping the peace, willing to take a stand but not willing to hurt someone as a result. And this was why he drove me nuts.
As a writer, as in every other creative pursuit and many which are not creative, it is necessary to have a certain core of arrogance. Not just self-belief; arrogance. I use the word specifically because to be great means to believe one is great even if the evidence periodically indicates otherwise. One must believe that one has a claim which one may in fact not have, or not have yet; and one must cling to this belief in the face of discouragement, false counsel, and counsel which is well-intentioned and possibly correct in the moment but not in the main. In short, one must possess a certainty of greatness independent of logic or likelihood. And this Chris did not possess. Not creatively, I mean. He was far too malleable and pliable, far too open to accepting criticism at face value, far too willing to accept suggestions and submit to attacks from people grossly unqualified to give them. He seemed to lack any ability to discriminate between remarks made by fools and those made by people of genuine talent. His natural goodness meant he had to take everyone seriously, even those operating out of stupidity or jealousy, and his natural diplomacy meant he had to accept every critique with perfect democracy. This seriously effected his writing and it was the subject of a number of arguments between us, conducted primarily over e-mail, but occasionally in person.
"Chris," I'd say in exasperation. "Not everyone with a voice box is worth listening to."
And of course Chris, ever the conciliator, would agree and fail to mention my own reputation, justly deserved at the time, as an arrogant asshole with little regard for othe people's feelings and little respect for their abilities. He would just agree with whatever I said, make one of his heavily ironic jokes, and then change the subject and go right on listening to clowns unfit to carry his pencil. His writing suffered accordingly, yet when we graduated, and I was chosen to give the valedictory (admittedly after an utterly shameless campaign of self-promotion), he was the only person in my graduation class of twenty-eight that I called out by name. There were of course other large talents in the bunch, but Chris was something special, someone with the potential to go all the way -- agent, traditional publishing contract, Hollywood options, all of it. And I was sufficiently respectful of his talent and his human qualities, few of which I shared at the time but all of which I admired, that I wanted him to succeed to the fullest even if it meant he would be running rings around my sorry ass for the rest of our respective writing careers.
After graduation, I had only sporadic contact with Chris. Every couple of years I'd get intensely curious as to what he was doing -- the guy was legitimately a stud, if you can use that word in relation to writers -- so I'd hit him up by e-mail, or on Facebook or by some other means, and we'd get to jawin'. Then, following the birth of his daughter, he disappeared from social media for a long time - years, if memory serves. Can't say as I blame him: by all accounts being a father was the focus of his being. But eventually our ships passed in the night once more, and I distinctly remember him telling me, the last time we communicated directly, that he'd fallen away from writing for a long time, but was now working on a project and would let me know when it was complete. I was excited enough to offer him the services of my editor without actually asking that long-suffering individual if he wanted another client. But I never did hear back from him and once again we fell out of touch completely, with the exception of the occasional "like" on a social media status or a secondhand howdy.
A few days before I left for the In Your Write Mind Workshop at Seton Hill last Thursday, I was at my sink, washing the dishes, when my glance fell upon one of the numerous (we're talking hundreds, folks) of framed photographs I hang from floor to ceiling in my rather overlarge single bedroom apartment. These pictures change from time to time, reflecting new experiences and cataloging old ones, but they are primarily of people that I care about, even if no longer speak to them anymore. This one depicted a much younger and infinitely more handsome version of myself standing between Chris and a third writer. I'd forgotten the photo was even there, and it pained me to see how badly I've decayed in the intervening years, but the mock-serious look on Chris's face made me laugh. It was stern and pompous, incredibly reminiscent of the character of Wesley Wyndham-Price in Buffy and Angel, so ably played by Alexis Denisoff, but from the very compression of Chris's lips in the picture, you knew the son of a bitch was about to start laughing. The guy was simply incapable of taking himself seriously. I thought, "I hope he goes to the conference. I miss that guy."
The next day, or the one after that, I was at my desk at work when a random e-mail from the Alumni Relations Department at the university hit my inbox. It informed me that Chris had passed away. For a few moments I just stared at it with what must have been a very puzzled look upon my face. Then I set out to prove that it was nonsense, a mistake, the wrong guy's obituary. If only. Chris was dead all right, gone.
The news hit me much harder than I would have expected. I am now almost 52 years old, and certainly past the age where one is rawly shocked by the news of a premature passing. My relationship with Chris was intermittent at best: no one was going to mistake us for Butch and Sundance, or even Fonzie and Richie. We were two guys who knew each other from graduate school and had gotten on well together; we respected each other's work, and that respect survived over the years we had little to no contact. So too did the knowledge that if we ran into each other in an airport lounge in Phoenix, a dive bar in Quebec City, or a charity marathon in Chicago, we'd be able to resume our last conversation as if it had ended the previous evening. Yet it is precisely because I was confident in my ability to reconnect with him at will that I never did so. I didn't even reach out to ask him if was going to attend IYWM this year, which would have been easy enough. I just took it for granted. I took him for granted. And now he's gone.
I am unashamed to say that later that night, long after work had ended and I was sitting here, where I write this now, I wept a little. What shames me is that the tears were not really for Chris. I did not know Chris well enough to weep for him. The tears were for myself. They were for the sadness that overcomes me when I see my reflection and realize I'm not looking at a picture of my father, who died at 54, but myself at almost 52. The tears were for the missed opportunities, the unfulfilled dreams, the lost horizons. To quote Lawrence Sanders: "I wept for all of us. The losers."
So yes, my four-day excursion to Seton Hill, successful as it was, left me feeling thoughtful and sad. Very few of the people attending the conference ever met Chris or even knew who he was, which furthered my feelings of isolation. It heartened me slightly to raise a toast to him at dinner with friends, but it heartened me more that I was having dinner with friends, and making new ones in the bargain. It heartened me that at least this tragedy had made me realize how rare and precious such moments truly are in our lives, how little time we actually spend with the people we care about. To quote Orwell, "There is time for everything in life except that which is worth doing."
There is a song which has been playing in my head for a week straight. Unlike most earworms it is not annoying or aggravating: it seems completely appropriate, even if the lyrics apply more to the vast circle of people I have cared about or care about than Chris specifically:
Do I have to die to hear you miss me?
Do I have to die to let you say goodbye?
I don't want to act like there's tomorrow
I don't want to wait to do this one more time
I miss you
Took time but I admit it
It still hurts even after all these years
And I know that next time
Ain't always gonna happen
I gotta say "I love you" while you're here
Somewhere in this apartment I actually have a crystal ball. Unfortunately -- or perhaps very fortunately -- it doesn't tell the future. Like everyone else, I've no idea how much time I'm granted on this rock. I could live to be 103 like Ernst Jünger, publishing all the way, or tap out shy of fifty-five like my old man, with my pen very far from having gleaned my teeming brain. The only thing I do know is that the death of Chris, as much as any of the losses I have sustained in this year of loss, has served to remind me just how fragile a thing life is and just how much of it I have taken for granted. To break the pattern of entitlement, to shatter the belief that "next time is always gonna happen" is going to be a job of work, but by God I am going to give it a crack. I owe that much to Chris.
I spent the weekend past at my alma mater, Seton Hill University, teaching and attending fiction-writing classes, appearing at a surprisingly successful book signing, reuniting with old friends and making new ones, and drinking entirely too much Yuengling Lager. It should have been a grand occasion. In a sense it was. But a pall hung over the lovely old campus (think: Hogwarts on a large green hill), and I could not escape its shadow -- the shadow of death.
There is never a good time to lose a good friend. Still, some losses can come at moments which seem not only to stick the knife between your ribs but slowly turn the blade, as if the Reaper is trying to exact as much pain as possible from the loss.
To be honest, I had not seen Chris in years, and it had been a long time since we had spoken even over the internet. We hardly fit the status of "good friends" as any reasonable person would define the term. But I am not a reasonable person, never have been, and don't really give a fuck if some would think I am appropriating the grief which rightfully belongs to others. There are times in life that you meet someone with whom you form a certain bond, feel a little simpatico, share a certain connection. You may not become friends in the classical sense, due to distance or other factors, but whenever you're together or even engage in a discussion by some cold electronic means, there's a strong unspoken sense of tribe. In my half-century of life I have had many friendships which seemed solid, complete and rang true when tested, yet also evaporated almost immediately upon the imposition of distance, leaving almost no trace behind. I have also enjoyed others -- not as many, but a number -- which shut down as if by a switch when one of us moved away, only to be reignited years or even decades later, the almost literal example of "picking up where we left off." And between these two and indeed, beyond them, there are a range of other types, the most precious I suppose being the sort that goes at full steam regardless of whether the two of you live next door or on other sides of the planet. My point is simply that friendship is harder to define than we would assume. It fits Michael Ruppert's quirky definition of a paradigm as "what we think about something before we think about it." I feel the same way about friends, and I feel the same way about Chris.
We met in graduate school, in the Masters of Fine Arts program, more years ago now than I care to tell you and certainly more than I believe possible. Actually we met without meeting, and this peculiar first impression lingers to this day. As an aspirant to the Writing Popular Fiction program, I was required to submit a sample of my fiction for the approval or disapproval of those responsible for my admittance to the school. It must have impressed somebody, because I was accepted, and thereafter as one of the tasks to be completed in preparation for my first residency at the school, I had to resubmit this piece to my peers for critique, as they had to submit their own pieces to me. I had a total of ten of these submissions to peruse, and it so happened that Chris P's was the first I plucked off the pile.
Now, I must confess here to a failing which I no longer believe applies to me generally as a person: arrogance. I retain a high belief in self, but only in certain specific areas, and I have come to understand that the more humble one tries to be even in those areas where one considers oneself greatly or supremely talented, the better one can become. And this process by necessity opens the door to further humility by virtue of understanding that if there is room for improvement, well, one is not as good as one thought. There is more to it than that, but for the moment we'll leave it there, and I'll just say that at the time, I always entered any situation assuming that I was the best in the room. So when I took Chris' work off the heap, I was prepared to look down my nose at it.
Five minutes later I distinctly recall feeling sweat on my upper lip. Not figurative sweat. Real sweat. I remember either saying aloud or thinking very loudly, "If this is representative of what they've got, how the hell am I even going to stand out?"
When I arrived at school -- this was the summer of 2006 -- I was eager to meet the guy that had clubbed my well-hidden insecurities with his typewriter. I don't actually remember if I wanted to hate him or not, but I do remember telling him what an amazing writer I thought he was, and meaning it, as Salieri meant his initial compliments to Mozart in Amadeus. Thankfully, Chris was not the sort to compete, or to gloat, or to let compliments go to his head. Indeed, as I was to discover, he was actually far too humble for his own good. Beneath that dryly witty-looking face (the more serious a look he tried to put on it, the more he looked as if he were about to burst out laughing) there lay a great creative genius, it is true, but that genius was untouched by egotism, by pride, or even self-belief as I understand the word. And it was here that I found him utterly infuriating, but I'm getting a touch ahead of myself.
Chris and I hit it off, and last weekend, as I was walking and driving around the campus and the town in which it resides, I kept encountering the places where he and I and others had gone while jammed into my wine-red Buick LaSaber sedan. I remember how he told me that Primani Bros boasted "The Salad As Big As Your Head" -- and it turned out to be bigger, since the last time I checked my dome was 61 cm around (must be all that brain). I remember when we needed beer on a Sunday, and the only place we could get it, thanks to Pennsylvania's blue laws, was a dirty hole-in-the-wall dive bar nestled in the basement of a run-down brick building in the shadow of an overpass. We walked in, the room -- full of barflies and meth-heads -- stopped, and then a smoky-faced old junkie drunk, with shards of yellow teeth, allegedly female, screamed, "Lookeee here at them handsome boys! Hows a bout youse buy an old girl a drink!" And Chris, who was kind to seemingly everyone, replied suavely, "Another time, ma'a'm, for sure," as she wolf-whistled us out the door. And I remembered the nerdy arguments we'd have in the dining hall or somebody's hotel room, where a dozen of us would sit around, drinking and eating take-out and fighting about this or that novelist, whether he sucked or was over-rated or truly the genius everyone said he was, and Chris was generally the sole voice of diplomacy, if not necessarily reason. He seemed to be a natural diplomat, incapable of giving or taking offense, genuinely concerned with keeping the peace, willing to take a stand but not willing to hurt someone as a result. And this was why he drove me nuts.
As a writer, as in every other creative pursuit and many which are not creative, it is necessary to have a certain core of arrogance. Not just self-belief; arrogance. I use the word specifically because to be great means to believe one is great even if the evidence periodically indicates otherwise. One must believe that one has a claim which one may in fact not have, or not have yet; and one must cling to this belief in the face of discouragement, false counsel, and counsel which is well-intentioned and possibly correct in the moment but not in the main. In short, one must possess a certainty of greatness independent of logic or likelihood. And this Chris did not possess. Not creatively, I mean. He was far too malleable and pliable, far too open to accepting criticism at face value, far too willing to accept suggestions and submit to attacks from people grossly unqualified to give them. He seemed to lack any ability to discriminate between remarks made by fools and those made by people of genuine talent. His natural goodness meant he had to take everyone seriously, even those operating out of stupidity or jealousy, and his natural diplomacy meant he had to accept every critique with perfect democracy. This seriously effected his writing and it was the subject of a number of arguments between us, conducted primarily over e-mail, but occasionally in person.
"Chris," I'd say in exasperation. "Not everyone with a voice box is worth listening to."
And of course Chris, ever the conciliator, would agree and fail to mention my own reputation, justly deserved at the time, as an arrogant asshole with little regard for othe people's feelings and little respect for their abilities. He would just agree with whatever I said, make one of his heavily ironic jokes, and then change the subject and go right on listening to clowns unfit to carry his pencil. His writing suffered accordingly, yet when we graduated, and I was chosen to give the valedictory (admittedly after an utterly shameless campaign of self-promotion), he was the only person in my graduation class of twenty-eight that I called out by name. There were of course other large talents in the bunch, but Chris was something special, someone with the potential to go all the way -- agent, traditional publishing contract, Hollywood options, all of it. And I was sufficiently respectful of his talent and his human qualities, few of which I shared at the time but all of which I admired, that I wanted him to succeed to the fullest even if it meant he would be running rings around my sorry ass for the rest of our respective writing careers.
After graduation, I had only sporadic contact with Chris. Every couple of years I'd get intensely curious as to what he was doing -- the guy was legitimately a stud, if you can use that word in relation to writers -- so I'd hit him up by e-mail, or on Facebook or by some other means, and we'd get to jawin'. Then, following the birth of his daughter, he disappeared from social media for a long time - years, if memory serves. Can't say as I blame him: by all accounts being a father was the focus of his being. But eventually our ships passed in the night once more, and I distinctly remember him telling me, the last time we communicated directly, that he'd fallen away from writing for a long time, but was now working on a project and would let me know when it was complete. I was excited enough to offer him the services of my editor without actually asking that long-suffering individual if he wanted another client. But I never did hear back from him and once again we fell out of touch completely, with the exception of the occasional "like" on a social media status or a secondhand howdy.
A few days before I left for the In Your Write Mind Workshop at Seton Hill last Thursday, I was at my sink, washing the dishes, when my glance fell upon one of the numerous (we're talking hundreds, folks) of framed photographs I hang from floor to ceiling in my rather overlarge single bedroom apartment. These pictures change from time to time, reflecting new experiences and cataloging old ones, but they are primarily of people that I care about, even if no longer speak to them anymore. This one depicted a much younger and infinitely more handsome version of myself standing between Chris and a third writer. I'd forgotten the photo was even there, and it pained me to see how badly I've decayed in the intervening years, but the mock-serious look on Chris's face made me laugh. It was stern and pompous, incredibly reminiscent of the character of Wesley Wyndham-Price in Buffy and Angel, so ably played by Alexis Denisoff, but from the very compression of Chris's lips in the picture, you knew the son of a bitch was about to start laughing. The guy was simply incapable of taking himself seriously. I thought, "I hope he goes to the conference. I miss that guy."
The next day, or the one after that, I was at my desk at work when a random e-mail from the Alumni Relations Department at the university hit my inbox. It informed me that Chris had passed away. For a few moments I just stared at it with what must have been a very puzzled look upon my face. Then I set out to prove that it was nonsense, a mistake, the wrong guy's obituary. If only. Chris was dead all right, gone.
The news hit me much harder than I would have expected. I am now almost 52 years old, and certainly past the age where one is rawly shocked by the news of a premature passing. My relationship with Chris was intermittent at best: no one was going to mistake us for Butch and Sundance, or even Fonzie and Richie. We were two guys who knew each other from graduate school and had gotten on well together; we respected each other's work, and that respect survived over the years we had little to no contact. So too did the knowledge that if we ran into each other in an airport lounge in Phoenix, a dive bar in Quebec City, or a charity marathon in Chicago, we'd be able to resume our last conversation as if it had ended the previous evening. Yet it is precisely because I was confident in my ability to reconnect with him at will that I never did so. I didn't even reach out to ask him if was going to attend IYWM this year, which would have been easy enough. I just took it for granted. I took him for granted. And now he's gone.
I am unashamed to say that later that night, long after work had ended and I was sitting here, where I write this now, I wept a little. What shames me is that the tears were not really for Chris. I did not know Chris well enough to weep for him. The tears were for myself. They were for the sadness that overcomes me when I see my reflection and realize I'm not looking at a picture of my father, who died at 54, but myself at almost 52. The tears were for the missed opportunities, the unfulfilled dreams, the lost horizons. To quote Lawrence Sanders: "I wept for all of us. The losers."
So yes, my four-day excursion to Seton Hill, successful as it was, left me feeling thoughtful and sad. Very few of the people attending the conference ever met Chris or even knew who he was, which furthered my feelings of isolation. It heartened me slightly to raise a toast to him at dinner with friends, but it heartened me more that I was having dinner with friends, and making new ones in the bargain. It heartened me that at least this tragedy had made me realize how rare and precious such moments truly are in our lives, how little time we actually spend with the people we care about. To quote Orwell, "There is time for everything in life except that which is worth doing."
There is a song which has been playing in my head for a week straight. Unlike most earworms it is not annoying or aggravating: it seems completely appropriate, even if the lyrics apply more to the vast circle of people I have cared about or care about than Chris specifically:
Do I have to die to hear you miss me?
Do I have to die to let you say goodbye?
I don't want to act like there's tomorrow
I don't want to wait to do this one more time
I miss you
Took time but I admit it
It still hurts even after all these years
And I know that next time
Ain't always gonna happen
I gotta say "I love you" while you're here
Somewhere in this apartment I actually have a crystal ball. Unfortunately -- or perhaps very fortunately -- it doesn't tell the future. Like everyone else, I've no idea how much time I'm granted on this rock. I could live to be 103 like Ernst Jünger, publishing all the way, or tap out shy of fifty-five like my old man, with my pen very far from having gleaned my teeming brain. The only thing I do know is that the death of Chris, as much as any of the losses I have sustained in this year of loss, has served to remind me just how fragile a thing life is and just how much of it I have taken for granted. To break the pattern of entitlement, to shatter the belief that "next time is always gonna happen" is going to be a job of work, but by God I am going to give it a crack. I owe that much to Chris.
June 29, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: COLIN MCDOUGALL'S "EXECUTION"
In fact, of course, he had done the most a man could do, and although this thought would never occur to him, the most a man can do is everything.
EXECUTION is a rare find, a novel about war viewed through the lens of execution. Not war or murder per se, but execution: the formal, legitimized process by which human life is taken in a civilized society.
Colin McDougall, a decorated veteran of the small but ferocious Canadian expeditionary force in WW2, takes us through a novelized version of his own experiences between 1943 - 1945, when the Allies were making their torturous hop-and-crawl from Sicily up the seemingly endless boot of Italy, in the face of resistance that seemed to increase rather than decrease over time. In the history of the Second World War, the contributions of Canada are often marginalized or forgotten altogether, just as the Mediterranean Theater of Operations is marginalized and forgotten; McDougall's novel serves from its opening lines as a valuable reminder that war is war wherever it is fought, and that if debts to those who fight war are owed by those they fight to protect, those debts must be paid equally.
EXECUTION's inciting incident is the summary and brutal execution of two Italian prisoners of war by the Canadians in a Sicilian barnyard. The second is a massive attack on the seemingly impregnable Adolf Hitler Line south of Rome by the Canadian division, a bloody massacre which its own commanding general likens to a formal execution of his own men. The last is the actual execution by firing squad of a Canadian soldier following his somewhat dubious court-martial for murder. All of these incidents are woven together, as are the lives and the deaths of the characters involved, to form a tapestry -- not about war exactly, but rather the effect that ending human lives has on the human beings tasked with ending them. McDougall is not merely writing a war novel, he is quite blatantly comparing the various forms of execution created by society: informal (murder), mass scale (battle), and formal (firing squad).
The novel's principal character is John Adam, a dutiful young lieutenant whose burning enthusiasm for the job of war is blown into a sort of existential vacuum by the two murders he is ordered to commit by his superior officer. Adam is left only with his sense of duty, and by periodic attempts to submerge himself into the pleasures of R & R, but even when coupling with "ladies of the evening" he is unable to be truly cynical or unfeeling, and he seems to come fully alive only when love, friendship, or duty beckon: at all other times the war has left him hollow, almost indifferent to his own fate. He is not a bold character despite his battle courage, nor is he intended to be: he is simply a victim, and the theme of victimhood runs throughout the entire book. The executioners and the executed share a bond: their roles can reverse any moment, and in this novel, they frequently do.
McDougall himself is a startling writer. His prose often rises to the lyrical, and his insights into human nature buckling and occasionally strengthening under the extreme pressures of war is profound. Nobody who reads EXECUTION will forget Ian Kildare, the cigar-waving brigade commander who travels with a personal bagpiper and takes sadistic relish in insulting his superiors; or Philip Doorn, the platoon chaplain known as The Ghoul, who goes so thoroughly insane he has nowhere to go but back to sanity; or Bunny Bazin, the quirky battalion commander who accepts his own inevitable death in battle so completely he takes conscious steps not to try to avoid it. And McDougall's description of the Battle of the Hitler Line rises to the truly epic: I actually got goosebumps at its mixture of mindless butchery and accidental glory. McDougall is the sort who grasps by virtue of bitter experience that war is a catalyst for the most terrible but also the most powerful chemistries within mankind, which is not profound in itself; it becomes profound because he understands this applies also to civilization, that instrument designed to enhance and protect human life, which through the process of war, or law, can extinguish life. There is a madness implicit in this which cannot help but chagrin the reader as it chagrins characters like John Adam, who is fully committed to committing executions in combat but is gutted by execution in its crueler, more personal forms.
The cultural links between Britain and Canada show strongly in McDougall's writing. EXECUTION, despite its dark subject matter, is laced with dry (but stinging) English-style wit which occasionally rises to the level of black comedy or even satire; fans of Evelyn Waugh and Derek Robinson will smile at his tongue-in-cheek depictions of idiot bureaucracy, fools in uniform, ironic outcomes and eccentricities often indistinguishable from madness. And indeed (and not to repeat myself), madness is a recurring theme in the book: it is arguable that nearly all the characters in EXECUTION are insane at one point or another, and some continually. The dissonance that creates this is not merely cognitive, it is psychological and spiritual. It is the end product of the paradox of execution itself.
One extremely memorable scene takes place when the soldiers are gathered to be told about the great benefits which await them when the war is over -- cash payouts, job assurance, free schooling, et cetera and so on. The civilian speaker is in true earnest as he informs them that the mistakes of WW1 will not be repeated, this time the government will take care of its soldiery and not abandon them as they did before. The commanding officer cuts the presentation short and orders his men out of the room in a cold rage, knowing that the speaker means well but that filling the men with thoughts of what they will do after the war will merely distract them and contribute to their deaths. He views his men as condemned, with commutation possible only if they focus entirely on their task -- itself execution.
No novel is perfect, of course, and there are admittedly a few sluggish chapters in this book, and some which fall into war-cliche tropes. The narrative is more fractured than I would have liked, and as a result we do not get to know some characters as well as we should. Because the novel is constructed in four acts, the pace of the narrative sometimes loses its rhythm. In the end however I would not only say this is a terrific novel, I think it's one of the better novels I've ever read and certainly a legitimate classic of war literature. McDougall apparently never wrote another one, which is perhaps just as well, because it is difficult to believe he could have topped EXECUTION.
EXECUTION is a rare find, a novel about war viewed through the lens of execution. Not war or murder per se, but execution: the formal, legitimized process by which human life is taken in a civilized society.
Colin McDougall, a decorated veteran of the small but ferocious Canadian expeditionary force in WW2, takes us through a novelized version of his own experiences between 1943 - 1945, when the Allies were making their torturous hop-and-crawl from Sicily up the seemingly endless boot of Italy, in the face of resistance that seemed to increase rather than decrease over time. In the history of the Second World War, the contributions of Canada are often marginalized or forgotten altogether, just as the Mediterranean Theater of Operations is marginalized and forgotten; McDougall's novel serves from its opening lines as a valuable reminder that war is war wherever it is fought, and that if debts to those who fight war are owed by those they fight to protect, those debts must be paid equally.
EXECUTION's inciting incident is the summary and brutal execution of two Italian prisoners of war by the Canadians in a Sicilian barnyard. The second is a massive attack on the seemingly impregnable Adolf Hitler Line south of Rome by the Canadian division, a bloody massacre which its own commanding general likens to a formal execution of his own men. The last is the actual execution by firing squad of a Canadian soldier following his somewhat dubious court-martial for murder. All of these incidents are woven together, as are the lives and the deaths of the characters involved, to form a tapestry -- not about war exactly, but rather the effect that ending human lives has on the human beings tasked with ending them. McDougall is not merely writing a war novel, he is quite blatantly comparing the various forms of execution created by society: informal (murder), mass scale (battle), and formal (firing squad).
The novel's principal character is John Adam, a dutiful young lieutenant whose burning enthusiasm for the job of war is blown into a sort of existential vacuum by the two murders he is ordered to commit by his superior officer. Adam is left only with his sense of duty, and by periodic attempts to submerge himself into the pleasures of R & R, but even when coupling with "ladies of the evening" he is unable to be truly cynical or unfeeling, and he seems to come fully alive only when love, friendship, or duty beckon: at all other times the war has left him hollow, almost indifferent to his own fate. He is not a bold character despite his battle courage, nor is he intended to be: he is simply a victim, and the theme of victimhood runs throughout the entire book. The executioners and the executed share a bond: their roles can reverse any moment, and in this novel, they frequently do.
McDougall himself is a startling writer. His prose often rises to the lyrical, and his insights into human nature buckling and occasionally strengthening under the extreme pressures of war is profound. Nobody who reads EXECUTION will forget Ian Kildare, the cigar-waving brigade commander who travels with a personal bagpiper and takes sadistic relish in insulting his superiors; or Philip Doorn, the platoon chaplain known as The Ghoul, who goes so thoroughly insane he has nowhere to go but back to sanity; or Bunny Bazin, the quirky battalion commander who accepts his own inevitable death in battle so completely he takes conscious steps not to try to avoid it. And McDougall's description of the Battle of the Hitler Line rises to the truly epic: I actually got goosebumps at its mixture of mindless butchery and accidental glory. McDougall is the sort who grasps by virtue of bitter experience that war is a catalyst for the most terrible but also the most powerful chemistries within mankind, which is not profound in itself; it becomes profound because he understands this applies also to civilization, that instrument designed to enhance and protect human life, which through the process of war, or law, can extinguish life. There is a madness implicit in this which cannot help but chagrin the reader as it chagrins characters like John Adam, who is fully committed to committing executions in combat but is gutted by execution in its crueler, more personal forms.
The cultural links between Britain and Canada show strongly in McDougall's writing. EXECUTION, despite its dark subject matter, is laced with dry (but stinging) English-style wit which occasionally rises to the level of black comedy or even satire; fans of Evelyn Waugh and Derek Robinson will smile at his tongue-in-cheek depictions of idiot bureaucracy, fools in uniform, ironic outcomes and eccentricities often indistinguishable from madness. And indeed (and not to repeat myself), madness is a recurring theme in the book: it is arguable that nearly all the characters in EXECUTION are insane at one point or another, and some continually. The dissonance that creates this is not merely cognitive, it is psychological and spiritual. It is the end product of the paradox of execution itself.
One extremely memorable scene takes place when the soldiers are gathered to be told about the great benefits which await them when the war is over -- cash payouts, job assurance, free schooling, et cetera and so on. The civilian speaker is in true earnest as he informs them that the mistakes of WW1 will not be repeated, this time the government will take care of its soldiery and not abandon them as they did before. The commanding officer cuts the presentation short and orders his men out of the room in a cold rage, knowing that the speaker means well but that filling the men with thoughts of what they will do after the war will merely distract them and contribute to their deaths. He views his men as condemned, with commutation possible only if they focus entirely on their task -- itself execution.
No novel is perfect, of course, and there are admittedly a few sluggish chapters in this book, and some which fall into war-cliche tropes. The narrative is more fractured than I would have liked, and as a result we do not get to know some characters as well as we should. Because the novel is constructed in four acts, the pace of the narrative sometimes loses its rhythm. In the end however I would not only say this is a terrific novel, I think it's one of the better novels I've ever read and certainly a legitimate classic of war literature. McDougall apparently never wrote another one, which is perhaps just as well, because it is difficult to believe he could have topped EXECUTION.
June 25, 2024
MURDERED IN LOVE
Today, come voleva la prassi, I was walking in the woods after work, and as if often the case on my hikes and rambles, my thoughts turned in a creative direction. I flatter, and probably delude, myself that some of you may remember the blog I wrote some time past on my experiments in poetry. They are humble experiments indeed, and today, as I climbed sweatily up a leaf-strewn, root-overgrown trail, I began to compose something which was not a poem but prose in what might be called the style of poetry. As soon as I arrived home, I sat down and wrote it out as best I could remember it, which, also come voleva la prassi, was not terribly well. But in the interests of sharing the creative process in its rawest form, here it is:
The Heart Murdered In Love
When a heart is murdered in love, it dies in five ways.
The first is the killing itself, which comes out of the dark, a flash of cold steel into the beating organ, yielding a moment of paralyzing shock, a moment of terrible comprehension when the full magnitude of the horror sinks in, and then the grim business of death itself, business of which we need not speak.
The second is the onset of decomposition. This is not visible to the eye and the heart murdered in love very much resembles the beating version, so much so that most onlookers cannot tell the difference. They may get a faint whiff of corruption, a vague sense that something is wrong, but their interest will be passive in character, and any questions they ask will not require answers – it will be enough for their consciences that the questions were asked. After all, they have their own hearts to tend.
The third is rot. This phase, which sets in when all other phases of surprise, dismay, and humiliation pass and leave only the sickening leprosy of betrayal in their wake, is particularly tragic because the disgusting nature of full decomposition draws a crowd, many of whom wish well; but their intervention will of necessity come too late and at any rate the heart murdered in love is so repulsive to them that they will soon flee, as the dead heart is now monstrous and like all monsters drives away all things good as it gets about the business of destroying itself even more thoroughly.
The fourth phase is mummification. What remains of the heart murdered in love slowly becomes as so many dried leaves and branches and sticks, neither offensive nor frightening and only a little sad to behold, only a reminder that things end. Any odor will be faint and perhaps even pleasing in a nostalgic sort of way, a smell of dust and foxed paper and decaying leather, like an old secondhand bookshop where no one ever goes. A lonely quiet surrounds the heart murdered in love because none wish to disturb its loneliness with their fellowship, and they will call this respect for the dead.
The fifth way is a choice. The heart murdered in love, having passed out of shock, out of horror, out of humiliation and pain, is now a ghost come to a crossroads. On the left is the existence of a ghost, which is not life, but assumes its shape; the heart murdered in love passes over things without leaving a trace, neither in nor of the world, an echo of itself growing ever-fainter until it passes into greater and truer death years hence, its one balm being that it has no more pain because it does not feel. On the right is the soil where the leaves of the heart murdered in love have decayed into nothingness, and this is soil which can be tended even by a ghost, though the tending is slow and laborious and may yield little at first and for years afterwards; but if the ghost keeps to his work and tends his soil well, it may realize one day it is no longer a ghost but has taken human form and their human heart is beating once again, and all the heritage and legacy of human emotions they foreswore in their darkest hours are theirs again if they are strong enough and stupid enough to feel them. And they will realize further that they have no guarantees not to be murdered in love once more, that there are other hearts beating out there in the night but also other murderers, and the choice is simply to beat or not to beat.
I will spare you the prosaic details of what led me to this line of thinking, except that it is at least partially dedicated to a female friend of mine, but I assure you that whatever you think of the product, it was sincerely written. Indeed, I have found that the sort of creative energies that often flow when I am hiking through nature are, like nature itself, rambling and raw yet also real in a way that more cooly and deliberately constructed thoughts are not. They have the vitality of nature itself, and assume their own forms which you are free to take with you and subject to carving if you wish. Exactly what the hell I am to do with raw, free-form compositions like "Murdered in Love" beyond publish them here in their still-dripping form is beyond me, but it seems rather a crime not to hold them up to the light, because it's in the light that they are created.
The Heart Murdered In Love
When a heart is murdered in love, it dies in five ways.
The first is the killing itself, which comes out of the dark, a flash of cold steel into the beating organ, yielding a moment of paralyzing shock, a moment of terrible comprehension when the full magnitude of the horror sinks in, and then the grim business of death itself, business of which we need not speak.
The second is the onset of decomposition. This is not visible to the eye and the heart murdered in love very much resembles the beating version, so much so that most onlookers cannot tell the difference. They may get a faint whiff of corruption, a vague sense that something is wrong, but their interest will be passive in character, and any questions they ask will not require answers – it will be enough for their consciences that the questions were asked. After all, they have their own hearts to tend.
The third is rot. This phase, which sets in when all other phases of surprise, dismay, and humiliation pass and leave only the sickening leprosy of betrayal in their wake, is particularly tragic because the disgusting nature of full decomposition draws a crowd, many of whom wish well; but their intervention will of necessity come too late and at any rate the heart murdered in love is so repulsive to them that they will soon flee, as the dead heart is now monstrous and like all monsters drives away all things good as it gets about the business of destroying itself even more thoroughly.
The fourth phase is mummification. What remains of the heart murdered in love slowly becomes as so many dried leaves and branches and sticks, neither offensive nor frightening and only a little sad to behold, only a reminder that things end. Any odor will be faint and perhaps even pleasing in a nostalgic sort of way, a smell of dust and foxed paper and decaying leather, like an old secondhand bookshop where no one ever goes. A lonely quiet surrounds the heart murdered in love because none wish to disturb its loneliness with their fellowship, and they will call this respect for the dead.
The fifth way is a choice. The heart murdered in love, having passed out of shock, out of horror, out of humiliation and pain, is now a ghost come to a crossroads. On the left is the existence of a ghost, which is not life, but assumes its shape; the heart murdered in love passes over things without leaving a trace, neither in nor of the world, an echo of itself growing ever-fainter until it passes into greater and truer death years hence, its one balm being that it has no more pain because it does not feel. On the right is the soil where the leaves of the heart murdered in love have decayed into nothingness, and this is soil which can be tended even by a ghost, though the tending is slow and laborious and may yield little at first and for years afterwards; but if the ghost keeps to his work and tends his soil well, it may realize one day it is no longer a ghost but has taken human form and their human heart is beating once again, and all the heritage and legacy of human emotions they foreswore in their darkest hours are theirs again if they are strong enough and stupid enough to feel them. And they will realize further that they have no guarantees not to be murdered in love once more, that there are other hearts beating out there in the night but also other murderers, and the choice is simply to beat or not to beat.
I will spare you the prosaic details of what led me to this line of thinking, except that it is at least partially dedicated to a female friend of mine, but I assure you that whatever you think of the product, it was sincerely written. Indeed, I have found that the sort of creative energies that often flow when I am hiking through nature are, like nature itself, rambling and raw yet also real in a way that more cooly and deliberately constructed thoughts are not. They have the vitality of nature itself, and assume their own forms which you are free to take with you and subject to carving if you wish. Exactly what the hell I am to do with raw, free-form compositions like "Murdered in Love" beyond publish them here in their still-dripping form is beyond me, but it seems rather a crime not to hold them up to the light, because it's in the light that they are created.
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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