Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 8
April 13, 2024
DEVILS YOU KNOW IS A READERS' FAVORITE FIVE STARS
Eight years ago I released Devils You Know, a collection of thirteen short stories which walked a staggering line between horror, satire, black comedy and tragedy. This baker's dozen of tales, which I wrote over a quarter of a century, was a Hoffer Awards Finalist in 2019, but like most anthologies written by obscure authors, it struggled to get the publicity or readership that I felt it deserved. In the last couple of years, however, this has inexplicably changed: in addition to having reached the tops of the Kindle rankings on multiple occasions, it is now a Readers' Favorite Five Stars, the third of my works to achieve this distinction. I guess my aggravating, somewhat demented persistence, which some of low character might write off as an egotistical refusal to accept defeat, is beginning to pay off. I sure as hell hope so. Here at any rate is the review....
Devils You Know by Miles Watson is a brilliant collection of short stories, some with WW2 themes, gangsters, and paranormal settings, and, of course, the devils we all know make an appearance too. All the stories are great, but I do have favorites. In Nosferatu, a Nazi officer learns that we are all the same under the skin. Pleas And Thank Yous is a story with unexpected justice or is it? Shadows And Glory is a hard-hitting WW2 story of morality and the ideological impact from a Nazi family's perspective. This short story would be amazing as a full-length novel. In Identity Crisis, a young man has always identified himself as per other people’s expectations of him, never finding out his true identity until he goes to the YMCA gym. On this self-discovery journey, the identity he f inds is not what you would expect. In Devils You Know, each short story is brought to life in a poetically descriptive way. I enjoyed the conclusions of the stories, which are all unusual or unexpected. The themes brought out in the collection include self-identity and social justice, but the one that stands out the most to me is the message about societal delinquency, of not taking accountability for oneself and the consequences of one’s actions. Never acknowledging the devil we know the best: ourselves. The pace of the stories kept me turning the pages, wanting to read more. Miles Watson has a lyrical way with words, describing the scenes most beautifully. Five Stars.
Given the references in the review, I thought it fitting to give a brief refresher in just what's contained within Devils:
The Adversarial Process -- Every now and again a writer pens something which is so painful that he cannot himself bear to read it: "Process" is like that for me, a story about how a successful lawyer's refusal to accept the loss of a loved one leads to a full-on war with God.
Unfinished Business -- Originally published in Eye Contact in 2010, this began as the prologue to my first novel, but subsequent editorial changes made it surplus to requirements. I could not, however, let the story of two gangsters meeting in a West Side tavern to settle an outstanding debt go unread, and lo, "Business" was transacted.
A Story Never Told -- When this tale about a drunken infantry officer who runs into Ernest Hemingway in a bar was passed around my graduate school writing program, it produced truly distinct reactions: readers either loved it or hated it. Nobody sat on the fence. Interestingly enough, it is based on a footnote I found in Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers.
Nosferatu -- Now a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award winner as a novella in its own right, "Nosferatu" is the story of Hannibal Raus, a German officer who witnesses firsthand just how far his countrymen fighting in Russia will go to stay alive. This is fiction but based on real-life incidents from WW2.
Identity Crisis -- Another story I find rather painful to consider, "Crisis" is about one man's search for idenity in a cruel and indifferent world.
The Shroud -- I originally scribbled this sucker in college after reading The Killer Angels. "The Shroud" is the story of a wounded Confederate soldier trying to make it home in the closing days of the Civil War.
Shadows and Glory -- This is the story of a German boy whose father becomes a Nazi war hero. It is about delusions and illusions, the complexity of family relationships, the power of love and the price of hero-worship.
D.S.A. -- When I originally wrote this story about a second American Civil War, the idea seemed about as realistic as a "Tom & Jerry" cartoon. That was back in '99, before the Twin Towers fell, before hate radio poisoned the minds of millions of Americans, before...just before. Today, "D.S.A." seems more like a forecast than a flight of fancy.
Roadtrip -- It is quite impossible for me to say anything about "Roadtrip" without ruining the story: I will simply say that it is one of my favorites, and demonstrates that your humble correspondent has a taste for horror with humor in it; or humor with horror in it. Whatever.
A Fever in the Blood -- A trivial incident sparks an orgy of vigilantism which in turn bursts into revolution. All over woman with bad cell phone manners! I had such fun writing this I felt guilty afterwards. Like "D.S.A.," however, this story is uncomfortably more plausible in 2024 than it was when I wrote it about eight years ago.
The Action -- The first story I ever published, waaaaay back in 1990 in Green's magazine (a small Canadian literary magazine), "The Action" is the story of a platoon of German soldiers during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
Pleas and Thank Yous -- I have a confession to make. The violence in this story about a gangster who turns vigilante against his own kind disturbs me enormously, in large part because it was written to editorial order. The original version of this story was far more uplifting and redemptive: this version, more or less forced upon me by a guy who decided at the last moment not to publish it in his pulp fiction magazine, is darker and infinitely more vicious, yet still unmistakbly leans toward justice. As The Crow once remarked: "It's not a good day to be a bad guy."
The Devil You Know -- Another confession: This one is so heavy-handed it may render you unconscious, but it was a great pleasure to write, and what it lacks in subtlety, which is everything, it tries to make up for in wit...and sincerity. I can't explain more without spoiling the surprise, so I'll just say that Dirty Harry was right when he said you meet a different class of people in the dark.
And that, my friends, is Devils You Know, which I sincerely hope you will.
Devils You Know by Miles Watson is a brilliant collection of short stories, some with WW2 themes, gangsters, and paranormal settings, and, of course, the devils we all know make an appearance too. All the stories are great, but I do have favorites. In Nosferatu, a Nazi officer learns that we are all the same under the skin. Pleas And Thank Yous is a story with unexpected justice or is it? Shadows And Glory is a hard-hitting WW2 story of morality and the ideological impact from a Nazi family's perspective. This short story would be amazing as a full-length novel. In Identity Crisis, a young man has always identified himself as per other people’s expectations of him, never finding out his true identity until he goes to the YMCA gym. On this self-discovery journey, the identity he f inds is not what you would expect. In Devils You Know, each short story is brought to life in a poetically descriptive way. I enjoyed the conclusions of the stories, which are all unusual or unexpected. The themes brought out in the collection include self-identity and social justice, but the one that stands out the most to me is the message about societal delinquency, of not taking accountability for oneself and the consequences of one’s actions. Never acknowledging the devil we know the best: ourselves. The pace of the stories kept me turning the pages, wanting to read more. Miles Watson has a lyrical way with words, describing the scenes most beautifully. Five Stars.
Given the references in the review, I thought it fitting to give a brief refresher in just what's contained within Devils:
The Adversarial Process -- Every now and again a writer pens something which is so painful that he cannot himself bear to read it: "Process" is like that for me, a story about how a successful lawyer's refusal to accept the loss of a loved one leads to a full-on war with God.
Unfinished Business -- Originally published in Eye Contact in 2010, this began as the prologue to my first novel, but subsequent editorial changes made it surplus to requirements. I could not, however, let the story of two gangsters meeting in a West Side tavern to settle an outstanding debt go unread, and lo, "Business" was transacted.
A Story Never Told -- When this tale about a drunken infantry officer who runs into Ernest Hemingway in a bar was passed around my graduate school writing program, it produced truly distinct reactions: readers either loved it or hated it. Nobody sat on the fence. Interestingly enough, it is based on a footnote I found in Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers.
Nosferatu -- Now a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award winner as a novella in its own right, "Nosferatu" is the story of Hannibal Raus, a German officer who witnesses firsthand just how far his countrymen fighting in Russia will go to stay alive. This is fiction but based on real-life incidents from WW2.
Identity Crisis -- Another story I find rather painful to consider, "Crisis" is about one man's search for idenity in a cruel and indifferent world.
The Shroud -- I originally scribbled this sucker in college after reading The Killer Angels. "The Shroud" is the story of a wounded Confederate soldier trying to make it home in the closing days of the Civil War.
Shadows and Glory -- This is the story of a German boy whose father becomes a Nazi war hero. It is about delusions and illusions, the complexity of family relationships, the power of love and the price of hero-worship.
D.S.A. -- When I originally wrote this story about a second American Civil War, the idea seemed about as realistic as a "Tom & Jerry" cartoon. That was back in '99, before the Twin Towers fell, before hate radio poisoned the minds of millions of Americans, before...just before. Today, "D.S.A." seems more like a forecast than a flight of fancy.
Roadtrip -- It is quite impossible for me to say anything about "Roadtrip" without ruining the story: I will simply say that it is one of my favorites, and demonstrates that your humble correspondent has a taste for horror with humor in it; or humor with horror in it. Whatever.
A Fever in the Blood -- A trivial incident sparks an orgy of vigilantism which in turn bursts into revolution. All over woman with bad cell phone manners! I had such fun writing this I felt guilty afterwards. Like "D.S.A.," however, this story is uncomfortably more plausible in 2024 than it was when I wrote it about eight years ago.
The Action -- The first story I ever published, waaaaay back in 1990 in Green's magazine (a small Canadian literary magazine), "The Action" is the story of a platoon of German soldiers during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
Pleas and Thank Yous -- I have a confession to make. The violence in this story about a gangster who turns vigilante against his own kind disturbs me enormously, in large part because it was written to editorial order. The original version of this story was far more uplifting and redemptive: this version, more or less forced upon me by a guy who decided at the last moment not to publish it in his pulp fiction magazine, is darker and infinitely more vicious, yet still unmistakbly leans toward justice. As The Crow once remarked: "It's not a good day to be a bad guy."
The Devil You Know -- Another confession: This one is so heavy-handed it may render you unconscious, but it was a great pleasure to write, and what it lacks in subtlety, which is everything, it tries to make up for in wit...and sincerity. I can't explain more without spoiling the surprise, so I'll just say that Dirty Harry was right when he said you meet a different class of people in the dark.
And that, my friends, is Devils You Know, which I sincerely hope you will.
April 11, 2024
CRUEL WORLDS
I've been thinking a lot lately about comments I have made over the years about other authors, and I don't just mean their work: I mean them, the authors themselves. More specifically, observations I made about how the personality and world-view of a writer outs itself in his works in ways both deliberate and accidental, conscious and unconscious, giving us a much clearer picture of his soul than any biography or autobiography ever could. Take any novelist you care to name, I mean any novelist writing in any era, in any genre, have a go at their works, and by their third novel at the latest, you will come away with a strong sense of just what kind of person wrote it. Writing is like poker that way: you can't play without giving away a few of your tells.
I try to be as honest as I can in this blog, and honesty means nothing if it doesn't mean admitting fault. There are quite a few authors I enjoy, and a few who I don't, who I have attacked on the grounds that their books revealed a certain ugliness within them as human beings; or if not ugliness, then at least distasteful, or in some cases merely ridiculous, characteristics. But I confess that until recently I never gave more than lip service to the thought that I, too, was exposing more of myself through my work than I intended; that while I may have been quite conscious of what I was writing and the effect I intended it to have, I was not fully aware of the effect it might actually produce in the reader, which was to make them speculate about me, personally. Not my work; me.
I bringf this up because I had occasion the other night to glance at a Goodreads review of my novella WOLF WEATHER. I have reproduced the opening lines in full:
This is a strange and eerie tale of the kind that Miles Watson tells so well – lonely misfits in desperate situations, finding a way through a world where they don’t belong. And a cruel world at that: Watson’s worlds are always cruel.
Like all authors, I am a sap for good publicity, and shamelessly enjoy compliments about my books, and this was quite a complimentary review. But this particular comment got me thinking about just how many reviewers have left similar notices about my fiction -- remarks to the effect that I am revealing something about myself, my view of life and the world around me, which is unintented, and not terribly nice. "Watson's worlds are always cruel" was simply the most direct, the most pointed of these observations. But here's another one, taken from a review of THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER:
Miles Watson is fascinated – haunted perhaps – by the mindset of soldiers. Again and again in his books he returns to the inner world of men at the bitter edges of human experience, where they face the pointlessness of their own struggle, their own deaths, the need to kill rather than to be killed, the imperative of following orders, even foolish ones, out of duty to a senior officer, a general, an army, a state. I don’t believe he has ever been a soldier himself. Around the edges of reading this book, after several others by this author, in different genres, I found myself wondering about the author, and what personal journey has brought him to these preoccupations.
What personal journey, indeed?
Another one:
In all his writing, Miles Watson is a master of liminal spaces, not just the worlds that we inhabit in the extremes of our experience but the other worlds just beyond those, the doors we don’t open.
I confess I had to look up the word "liminal" ("the uncertain transition between where you've been and where you're going physically, emotionally, or metaphorically...to be on the precipice of something new but not quite there yet."), but the point here is the compliment is more of an observation than praise when you think about it: this reviewer is pointing out that space where I am supposedly dominant is a place of uncertainty...a position on the edge, past the extremes of experience.. This particular phraseology really resonated with me, because "extremes of experience" are precisely my target, not only in fiction but in life. And this itself is a reaction to the lazy-sensual part of my writer's nature, my innate apathy, my tendency to say "no" to the possibilities of existence. We often find ourselves in the mirror, not because it is a reflection but because it is a reversal of one: we see not who we are but who we want to be.
You don't actually need to have read any of my works to get some sense of me as a human being; it would be enough to read a random sampling of these blogs. And I suppose aside from a tedious tendency toward nostalgia and a refusal to bring any system of organization to this blog itself, the main takeaway would be a certain fascination with the inescapability, necessity, and benefits, of pain. One of the most profound treatises I've ever read was Ernst Jünger's On Pain, in which examined humanity's relationship with pain from both a literal and a metaphysical point of view: the 47 page essay is full of gems such as "boredom is pain diffused over time," discipline is "the way [civilized] man maintains contact with pain" and terrorism is simply "a cult of pain." Viewed through Jünger's lens, a great deal of human life constitutes either embracing or fleeing pain in all of its forms: physical, psychological, spiritual, mental; but there is no doubt which school he belongs to. Jünger considers his multi-faceted definition of pain a blessing, without which very little of value can be accomplished, nor in the last analysis, any of life's pleasures be truly appreciated. "Show me your relationship to pain," he thunders in his opening. "And I will show you who you are!"
Why does his viewpoint enthrall me? Because, as lazy and sensual as I am -- as all writers are -- I agree with it and do my damndest to make his creed my own. Crowning, the protagonist of WOLF WEATHER, has "disciplina vivimus" tattooed and branded onto one forearm, and "per disciplinam morimur" seared and inked into the other: this means "by discipline we live" and "by discipline we die." Well discipline is just code for pain, and I am strongly considering getting these words inked upon my own flesh. There is no deep hypocrisy in this, but a position so externally paradoxical and at odds with itself requires explanation.
That which we wish to be, we admire, and often imitate. I imitate men of discipline because they possess a superior relationship to suffering than I do, and by imitating them I get closer to the me I wish to be: a man who can endure suffering on any scale without breaking. This desire pours into my writing and the characters who inhabit it: Mickey Costarelli, of the CAGE LIFE series, is a professional fighter who was torture his body into perfect condition so he can pit it, in the most painful way possible, against the bodies of other men. Ed Tom Halleck, Robert Breese, Martin Zenger, August von Cramm and all the others who populate the universe of SINNER'S CROSS are men who by virtue of war are in perpetual contact with suffering, like blades held permanently to a whetstone. It is the same for those in THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS and in my novellas and my short stories. Always, or nearly always, the characters dwell in literal or figurative darkness, outside the warm glow of civilization or human love, in barren windblown places where little or no comfort is to be found. And yet the point is not merely to torment them. All, or nearly all, my fiction describes an arc: the endpoint of that arc is transformative, as I believe pain to be transformative. Darkness is something they must walk through to get what they want, and even if they don't survive the journey, the fact they are making it is what really matters. What is at stake is not victory, but the moral courage which effort implies -- and effort is by nature a species of pain. Everyone dies and everyone is eventually forgotten, in many cases before their body is even cold, and while some maintain death to be the ultimate defeat, it seems to me that the only real defeat is not to make the journey, or at least give it the old college try.
A dear friend of mine once told me that pain is the universe's way of testing one's commitment to life; that those who avoided conflict and discomfort and danger their whole lives were, in essence, already dead -- the supreme irony, since it is precisely fear of death which underlays all conservatism of this type. My characters are always deeply flawed, as I am deeply flawed, but like me they seek a greater contact with pain than life has given them: not out of masochism, but because it is only by walking through those fires that they can even hope to achieve their goals.
All of this is a way of defending myself, I suppose; it is a justification. I write dark and violent tales because I enjoy writing about darkness and violence: they are atmospheric and make for good copy. Drama is conflict, after all. But the reason that I enjoy writing about them is because within the realms of fiction -- where I am the master -- I can make some sense of that which is otherwise senseless. I can, for example, describe the bitter struggle of two armies for a worthless crossroad and find within that carnage a sort of bitter nobility. Perhaps that bitter nobility is pure invention; perhaps the carnage was in reality wholly without virtue. But not in my world. Not in my worlds. In my worlds, the cruelty always present, but it is never the point.
I try to be as honest as I can in this blog, and honesty means nothing if it doesn't mean admitting fault. There are quite a few authors I enjoy, and a few who I don't, who I have attacked on the grounds that their books revealed a certain ugliness within them as human beings; or if not ugliness, then at least distasteful, or in some cases merely ridiculous, characteristics. But I confess that until recently I never gave more than lip service to the thought that I, too, was exposing more of myself through my work than I intended; that while I may have been quite conscious of what I was writing and the effect I intended it to have, I was not fully aware of the effect it might actually produce in the reader, which was to make them speculate about me, personally. Not my work; me.
I bringf this up because I had occasion the other night to glance at a Goodreads review of my novella WOLF WEATHER. I have reproduced the opening lines in full:
This is a strange and eerie tale of the kind that Miles Watson tells so well – lonely misfits in desperate situations, finding a way through a world where they don’t belong. And a cruel world at that: Watson’s worlds are always cruel.
Like all authors, I am a sap for good publicity, and shamelessly enjoy compliments about my books, and this was quite a complimentary review. But this particular comment got me thinking about just how many reviewers have left similar notices about my fiction -- remarks to the effect that I am revealing something about myself, my view of life and the world around me, which is unintented, and not terribly nice. "Watson's worlds are always cruel" was simply the most direct, the most pointed of these observations. But here's another one, taken from a review of THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER:
Miles Watson is fascinated – haunted perhaps – by the mindset of soldiers. Again and again in his books he returns to the inner world of men at the bitter edges of human experience, where they face the pointlessness of their own struggle, their own deaths, the need to kill rather than to be killed, the imperative of following orders, even foolish ones, out of duty to a senior officer, a general, an army, a state. I don’t believe he has ever been a soldier himself. Around the edges of reading this book, after several others by this author, in different genres, I found myself wondering about the author, and what personal journey has brought him to these preoccupations.
What personal journey, indeed?
Another one:
In all his writing, Miles Watson is a master of liminal spaces, not just the worlds that we inhabit in the extremes of our experience but the other worlds just beyond those, the doors we don’t open.
I confess I had to look up the word "liminal" ("the uncertain transition between where you've been and where you're going physically, emotionally, or metaphorically...to be on the precipice of something new but not quite there yet."), but the point here is the compliment is more of an observation than praise when you think about it: this reviewer is pointing out that space where I am supposedly dominant is a place of uncertainty...a position on the edge, past the extremes of experience.. This particular phraseology really resonated with me, because "extremes of experience" are precisely my target, not only in fiction but in life. And this itself is a reaction to the lazy-sensual part of my writer's nature, my innate apathy, my tendency to say "no" to the possibilities of existence. We often find ourselves in the mirror, not because it is a reflection but because it is a reversal of one: we see not who we are but who we want to be.
You don't actually need to have read any of my works to get some sense of me as a human being; it would be enough to read a random sampling of these blogs. And I suppose aside from a tedious tendency toward nostalgia and a refusal to bring any system of organization to this blog itself, the main takeaway would be a certain fascination with the inescapability, necessity, and benefits, of pain. One of the most profound treatises I've ever read was Ernst Jünger's On Pain, in which examined humanity's relationship with pain from both a literal and a metaphysical point of view: the 47 page essay is full of gems such as "boredom is pain diffused over time," discipline is "the way [civilized] man maintains contact with pain" and terrorism is simply "a cult of pain." Viewed through Jünger's lens, a great deal of human life constitutes either embracing or fleeing pain in all of its forms: physical, psychological, spiritual, mental; but there is no doubt which school he belongs to. Jünger considers his multi-faceted definition of pain a blessing, without which very little of value can be accomplished, nor in the last analysis, any of life's pleasures be truly appreciated. "Show me your relationship to pain," he thunders in his opening. "And I will show you who you are!"
Why does his viewpoint enthrall me? Because, as lazy and sensual as I am -- as all writers are -- I agree with it and do my damndest to make his creed my own. Crowning, the protagonist of WOLF WEATHER, has "disciplina vivimus" tattooed and branded onto one forearm, and "per disciplinam morimur" seared and inked into the other: this means "by discipline we live" and "by discipline we die." Well discipline is just code for pain, and I am strongly considering getting these words inked upon my own flesh. There is no deep hypocrisy in this, but a position so externally paradoxical and at odds with itself requires explanation.
That which we wish to be, we admire, and often imitate. I imitate men of discipline because they possess a superior relationship to suffering than I do, and by imitating them I get closer to the me I wish to be: a man who can endure suffering on any scale without breaking. This desire pours into my writing and the characters who inhabit it: Mickey Costarelli, of the CAGE LIFE series, is a professional fighter who was torture his body into perfect condition so he can pit it, in the most painful way possible, against the bodies of other men. Ed Tom Halleck, Robert Breese, Martin Zenger, August von Cramm and all the others who populate the universe of SINNER'S CROSS are men who by virtue of war are in perpetual contact with suffering, like blades held permanently to a whetstone. It is the same for those in THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS and in my novellas and my short stories. Always, or nearly always, the characters dwell in literal or figurative darkness, outside the warm glow of civilization or human love, in barren windblown places where little or no comfort is to be found. And yet the point is not merely to torment them. All, or nearly all, my fiction describes an arc: the endpoint of that arc is transformative, as I believe pain to be transformative. Darkness is something they must walk through to get what they want, and even if they don't survive the journey, the fact they are making it is what really matters. What is at stake is not victory, but the moral courage which effort implies -- and effort is by nature a species of pain. Everyone dies and everyone is eventually forgotten, in many cases before their body is even cold, and while some maintain death to be the ultimate defeat, it seems to me that the only real defeat is not to make the journey, or at least give it the old college try.
A dear friend of mine once told me that pain is the universe's way of testing one's commitment to life; that those who avoided conflict and discomfort and danger their whole lives were, in essence, already dead -- the supreme irony, since it is precisely fear of death which underlays all conservatism of this type. My characters are always deeply flawed, as I am deeply flawed, but like me they seek a greater contact with pain than life has given them: not out of masochism, but because it is only by walking through those fires that they can even hope to achieve their goals.
All of this is a way of defending myself, I suppose; it is a justification. I write dark and violent tales because I enjoy writing about darkness and violence: they are atmospheric and make for good copy. Drama is conflict, after all. But the reason that I enjoy writing about them is because within the realms of fiction -- where I am the master -- I can make some sense of that which is otherwise senseless. I can, for example, describe the bitter struggle of two armies for a worthless crossroad and find within that carnage a sort of bitter nobility. Perhaps that bitter nobility is pure invention; perhaps the carnage was in reality wholly without virtue. But not in my world. Not in my worlds. In my worlds, the cruelty always present, but it is never the point.
April 3, 2024
"EXILES" IS A READER'S FAVORITE FIVE STARS
As I write this, it is raining again. It has now been raining almost continuously for the last three days, very heavily at times, and indeed, the convenience store across the street was just rendered "unfit for human habitation" by the local department of health after its ceiling caved in. This weather matches the internal weather I've endured since I returned from California: in addition to the fact it's tax season, that my cat Spike is clearly nearing the end of his earthly journey after almost eighteen years at my side, well, evidently I bear all the stigmata of stage two of clinical burnout. I'm tired, I'm anxious, I'm distracted, I find it difficult to concentrate, I get irritable -- or enraged -- over trivial setbacks but feel numb toward the real problems of my life, et cetera and so on. Most writers are generally depressive in and by nature, but throw in a job, victim advocacy, where you take the full brunt of vicarious trauma for thousands of people each year, and you can imagine how I get sometimes.
Every now and again, however, amid the showers of bad news and black humor, a ray of sunshine gleams. This cliche is annoying but it persists because it is true, so here is the gleam:
You may remember, and if you don't I'll obnoxiously remind you, that late last year I went down to Miami to receive the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal for my third novel, Sinner's Cross. Well, that venerable organization has just posted its review of my fifth, Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus, and here it is, word for word:
Reviewed by Pikasho Deka for Readers’ Favorite
Exiles is a gripping dystopian thriller by Miles Watson. The story follows Marguerite Bain, a smuggler and captain of the Sea Dragon, who gets an unusual assignment to provide supplies to an exile living on the remote island of Beausejour. But Marguerite doesn't adhere to the strict instructions of the Employer, and when she gets her hands on the journal of the exiled Enitan Champoleon, she delves into his story. Champoleon was a tramp, deserter, and masterful liar who inadvertently spawned the influential revolutionary group Solution to fight against the Order's ruthless regime. However, he soon realized that by doing so, he was offering Europe to a complete megalomaniac with grand plans to set up his own totalitarian regime. Meanwhile, someone from the Watch has infiltrated Marguerite's crew.
Mystery, espionage, and political intrigue lace the pages of Exiles. Miles Watson has built a believable futuristic dystopian world featuring authoritarian regimes, likable rogues, and revolutionaries with flexible morals. The setting is fascinating and immersive, while the plot is full of surprises and unexpected twists and turns that you never see coming. Watson moves the plot at a brisk pace, with compelling characters who have layers to unpeel beneath their outer personas. The narrative features a story within a story, and I enjoyed Champoleon's backstory almost as much as Marguerite's action-packed adventures. Their brief interaction toward the end was immensely satisfying to me. The author also excels in building suspense, tension, and intrigue through the narrative, which is absolutely captivating. As a fan of dystopian tales that mirror real-world issues, I loved this book and can't recommend it highly enough.
Not bad for a rainy Wednesday, eh? Of course I must confess that Exiles holds a special place in my heart, because it was at once the most fun I've ever had on a writing project and also, relatively speaking, the easiest big literary job I have ever undertaken. No book or story writes itself, but this came as close as one can come to such an experience, where the writer himself stands aside and merely encourages and conducts the flow of ideas into words. I believe I slammed out the first draft in something like four months, and scarcely needed revisions: compare that to the nightmare that was the still-unpublished Something Evil, which took six and a half grinding years to break the tape, and must now undergo a lengthy and tedious drafting process! But my enjoyment and affection for Tales go deeper than that. Never before had I attempted world-building on anything close to the scale which I attempted here, and by all (preliminary) accounts I have succeeded in my aim: but whether I have or I haven't, I cherished the process of building, and the host of new ideas which followed each small epiphany about this new world I had made.
So if you haven't already, I encourage you to give Exiles a try, and see if you agree with Reader's Favorite's five star review. While you're at it, why not read the preceding novella in the same universe, Deus Ex? I won't claim that it can't hurt -- these books dig deep into the psychology of power, sometimes in a way that is a bit painful, as bright light is painful -- but any discomfort you experience will be more than compensated for by the resulting illumination.
Every now and again, however, amid the showers of bad news and black humor, a ray of sunshine gleams. This cliche is annoying but it persists because it is true, so here is the gleam:
You may remember, and if you don't I'll obnoxiously remind you, that late last year I went down to Miami to receive the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal for my third novel, Sinner's Cross. Well, that venerable organization has just posted its review of my fifth, Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus, and here it is, word for word:
Reviewed by Pikasho Deka for Readers’ Favorite
Exiles is a gripping dystopian thriller by Miles Watson. The story follows Marguerite Bain, a smuggler and captain of the Sea Dragon, who gets an unusual assignment to provide supplies to an exile living on the remote island of Beausejour. But Marguerite doesn't adhere to the strict instructions of the Employer, and when she gets her hands on the journal of the exiled Enitan Champoleon, she delves into his story. Champoleon was a tramp, deserter, and masterful liar who inadvertently spawned the influential revolutionary group Solution to fight against the Order's ruthless regime. However, he soon realized that by doing so, he was offering Europe to a complete megalomaniac with grand plans to set up his own totalitarian regime. Meanwhile, someone from the Watch has infiltrated Marguerite's crew.
Mystery, espionage, and political intrigue lace the pages of Exiles. Miles Watson has built a believable futuristic dystopian world featuring authoritarian regimes, likable rogues, and revolutionaries with flexible morals. The setting is fascinating and immersive, while the plot is full of surprises and unexpected twists and turns that you never see coming. Watson moves the plot at a brisk pace, with compelling characters who have layers to unpeel beneath their outer personas. The narrative features a story within a story, and I enjoyed Champoleon's backstory almost as much as Marguerite's action-packed adventures. Their brief interaction toward the end was immensely satisfying to me. The author also excels in building suspense, tension, and intrigue through the narrative, which is absolutely captivating. As a fan of dystopian tales that mirror real-world issues, I loved this book and can't recommend it highly enough.
Not bad for a rainy Wednesday, eh? Of course I must confess that Exiles holds a special place in my heart, because it was at once the most fun I've ever had on a writing project and also, relatively speaking, the easiest big literary job I have ever undertaken. No book or story writes itself, but this came as close as one can come to such an experience, where the writer himself stands aside and merely encourages and conducts the flow of ideas into words. I believe I slammed out the first draft in something like four months, and scarcely needed revisions: compare that to the nightmare that was the still-unpublished Something Evil, which took six and a half grinding years to break the tape, and must now undergo a lengthy and tedious drafting process! But my enjoyment and affection for Tales go deeper than that. Never before had I attempted world-building on anything close to the scale which I attempted here, and by all (preliminary) accounts I have succeeded in my aim: but whether I have or I haven't, I cherished the process of building, and the host of new ideas which followed each small epiphany about this new world I had made.
So if you haven't already, I encourage you to give Exiles a try, and see if you agree with Reader's Favorite's five star review. While you're at it, why not read the preceding novella in the same universe, Deus Ex? I won't claim that it can't hurt -- these books dig deep into the psychology of power, sometimes in a way that is a bit painful, as bright light is painful -- but any discomfort you experience will be more than compensated for by the resulting illumination.
March 29, 2024
GEORGE ORWELL: THE CHARACTERS
You must make it less painful to submit than it is to rebel. -- George Orwell
When we think of Mr. Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, the first things which come to mind are his terrifying dystopian masterpiece,1984, and his equally terrifying fable about revolution betrayed, Animal Farm. Beyond that, the image begins to blur. Orwell was, of course, a man with many hats upon his rack: he was a journalist, an advocate for democratic socialism, a writer of BBC radio scripts, investigative books and semi-memoirs; he began his career as an official in the Burmese Imperial Police and later served as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War; he was known alternatively as "St. George" or "The Truthteller," for his near-suicidal devotion to emotional and intellectual honesty. It is easy to sum up a man like Hemingway in a few brief sentences because he spent a lifetime promoting a specific image -- toughness, manliness, stoicism in the face of cruel Fate. Likewise Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald or even Hunter S. Thompson. Orwell was a more complex figure -- a firebrand socialist who spent much of his career attacking socialists, an eminent hater of fascism who was nonetheless willing to point out its selling points and compare it, sometimes favorably, to British imperialism; a man who detested cruelty yet could not abide pacifists and spoke calmly of killing when necessary; a man revolted by the amoral nature of politics who was nonetheless obsessed with them. There is so much dust and smoke swirling around Orwell's memory that it is easy to forget he was, perhaps before and after everything else, a novelist whose small but powerful body of work was so overshadowed by his own masterpiece, 1984, that most people are unaware of its existence.
Now, before you stop me, I am well aware that Down and Out in Paris and London is quite a famous book, but this is not in any real way a novel; it is a somewhat fictionalized memoir of actual events Orwell experienced in those two cities. Likewise, the lesser known Road to Wigan Pier is a book-length investigative report of British poverty interwoven with his own experiences of same, and Homage to Catalonia is his memoir of the Spanish Civil War. No, I am talking about Orwell's novels, the ones most people have never heard of Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up For Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Each is a testament to his strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller, a demonstration of his eagerness to explore the effects of poverty, class, capitalism and oppression upon the human spirit; but notably, they are also indicative of the sort of characters Orwell chose as protagonists...something which will tell us a great deal more about the man than any biographer ever could.
What I propose here is a brief analysis of each of the five protagonists (I wouldn't dare use the word "heroes") Orwell created for his full-length novels.
John Flory, Burmese Days: Orwell's first novel was a savage attack on British imperialism, delivered by a man who had helped facilitate it as a member of the Imperial Police, and whose conscience never quite recovered from the experience. "To truly hate imperialism," he was later to write, "You have had to be a part of it." Though John Flory is not a policeman as Orwell was, he is a willing if embittered tool of that imperialsm; an agent of a British timber firm, Flory's years in Burma have turned him into a lonely, hard-drinking, self-loathing, loner who detests his fellow British colonialists but benfits from the "pukka sahib" lifestyle colonialism gives him: servants, horses, a mistress, big game hunts, access to a snobbish Europeans Only club which is little more than a haven of racist alcoholics who recycle the same conversations day after day, year after year. Smitten by the arrival of a young Englishwoman on the prowl for a husband, Flory humiliates himself endlessly trying to win her affections, failing all the while to realize she embodies the snobbery, bigotry and intellectual deadness he hates. Flory's one consolation is an earnest "native" doctor, Veriswalmi, to whom he can unburden himself in private; but even this friendship is poisonous, because friendship with "natives" violates the unwritten but sacred code by which all Britons living in the Empire must live.
Flory is in some ways the template for the protagonists which follow him. Of ordinary origins, disfigured by a birthmark, physically courageous but morally weak, he is at once rotted almost completely through by his own dalliance with colonialism yet bursting with progressive, humanist opinions he dare not voice in real life. While not an antihero, and possessing some definite virtues, his default position a mixture of impotent self-pity and unhappy passivity. He can neither embrace the system he lives in nor change it in any way, and his fetishization of Elisabeth, who is so obviously stupid, ends up destroying him in the end. Like Hemingway, Orwell was no fan of the happy ending, and tended to view life as a brutal struggle against cruel realities which always got the upper hand sooner or later; the difference here is that Orwell does not romanticize the life of a gin-swilling big-game hunter in a Palm Beach suit, or accepting colonialism on its face without endeavoring to show that the face is a mask hiding all manner of horrors. Orwell's own streak of brutality and irony shows strongly in this book, but it is threaded into deeply felt criticisms of imperial rule. John Flory is a wretch, but his wretchedness is the end product of the system into which he was born, one which offers the poor and lower middle class of England, the sorts who have the most in common with the "natives," a chance at a better life if they will take an active hand in exploiting and bullying those "natives" for cash profit.
Dorothy Hare, A Clergyman's Daughter: It is hardly a secret that Orwell did not think all that much of women taken as a whole; certainly many of his female characters tend toward stupidity or bitchiness. It is therefore rather surprising that Orwell crafted a rather interesting and sympathetic character in Dorothy Hare, the only child of a viciously snobbish rural clergyman presiding over a dying congregation in rural, small-town England. Dorothy, like most of Orwell's protagonists, is rather a mess: cruelly overworked, she spends most of her days suffering from both hunger and exhaustion as she attempts to hold up the failing church by sheer force of faith. Bathing in cold water, denying herself sleep, pricking herself with needles whenever she feels a "selfish" impulse, she toils night and day for the ungrateful minister and an increasingly indifferent and shrinking flock. Suffering a mental breakdown from overwork, she wakes up in London with no memory of her own identity, and over the course of most of the rest of the book endures first homeless poverty, then life as an intinerant agricultural worker, and then finally the ultimate misery: working as a teacher in a wretched girls' school governed by a pitiless mistress interested only in profit. Clergyman is certainly Orwell's least impressive book: it does not hang together as a novel, Dorothy's loss of faith (which ought to be a central point of the book) is not explored, he fails to make the town Dorothy hails from feel like a real place, and the ending is, for all of its downbeats, surprisingly and somewhat unbelievably convenient. However, as a bare-faced examination of poverty, and the especial cruelty of poverty on those who were raised in genteel environments with some sense of pride and class consciousness, it is deeply affecting. Dorothy's sufferings, particularly at the school, are visceral: we feel not only her hunger pangs and loneliness but the desperate frustration of a woman who isn't allowed to teach anything meaningful, and is treated more or less like a servant or even a slave. Dorothy is much more fundamentally decent than most of Orwell's characters: she's also an intellectual and a frightfully hard worker. Her Achilles heel is acceptance of fate: enduring one terrible misery after another, she suffers without taking the obvious option to salvation, marriage, simply because she is sexually frozen and cannot abide the touch of a man. There is scarcely a moment in the book when she fights back against anyone or anything, or acts selfishly even when selfishness is warranted. Orwell was said to believe that man was inadequate to deal with the demands of the era in which he lived; Dorothy is a demonstration of this belief. The era in which seh was raised is visibly crumbling, and she has little place in the future which is arriving: she simply clings, ever more tightly, to her notions of decency and propriety, rendering her both noble and tragic. This glint of nobility is an Orwellian trait seldom acknowledged by his critics, but it exists -- and persists -- in most of his protagonists, however faintly.
Gordon Comstock, Keep the Aspidistra Flying: Of all of Orwell's characters, the unfortunate Gordon Comstock is probably the closest to Orwell himself, both in attitudes and lifestyle. A failed and embittered poet living in a dismal quarter of London, Gordon is engaged in a ridiculous "war against money" which sees him reject a "good" job at an advertising firm for a life of artistic poverty. It is Gordon's theory that no poet can possibly produce great verse while in the clutches of mindless capitalism, but he discovers the grinding, numbing, humiliating regime of poverty has almost entirely killed his Muse. Unable to write, suffering from loneliness, boredom and sexual frustration, he grows increasingly bitter and irrational as the book progresses, alienating the few people who actually care about him and, in one of the book's most memorable scenes, squandering his sole moment of literary and artistic success with a massive bender that lands him in jail. Comstock is a tremendous jerk, selfish and self-righteous, alternating moods of egoistic confidence with black depressions, constantly picking fights with Rosemary, his sometimes girlfriend, and Ravelston, the wealthy friend whose charity more or less keeps him going. He has polyps of human decency, but he is so far gone into bitterness, self-pity and misanthropy sometimes you wish he'd just stick his head in the gas oven and end it. What makes him fascinating is the way he manages the levels of poverty in which he exists, and the way he clings to his principles -- and they are sincere -- despite the terrible privations he endures every single day. Orwell uses Comstock to explore poverty in a novel way: not as merely lack of money or food, but lack of dignity, lack of human contact, lack of stimulation, and of the simple intimacies granted by friendship and love. Orwell's genius shows in the fact that Comstock remains sympathetic throughout the book even when you'd like to punch him in the nose, in no small part because his numerous criticisms of society -- some captured in memorable verse -- are accurate, and in part because you feel as if he is fighting your war for you; taking the bullet, as it were, for the rest of us who lack the guts to quit our soulless day jobs and reject the shiny bait of materialism. If Gordon's rebellion is foolish and futile and harms only himself, that is simply in keeping with Orwell's unspoken belief that rebellion itself is futile, however worthwhile it may be.
George Bowling, Coming Up For Air: None of Orwell's protagonists is nearer my heart than "Fatty" Bowling, a hard-bitten insurance salesman living in the soulless inner-outer suburbs of London with his nagging shrew of a wife and two ungrateful children. On the surface every bit as blunt, shallow and cynical as he appears to be, his "eyes of boiled blue" mask a thoughtful soul nursing what he calls "a hangover from the past." Worried about the coming war -- the story is set in 1938 -- he is more worried about what he refers to as "the after war," meaning the half-totalitarian, half-dystopian world he fears is coming on its heels. He's also quite disgusted with the present: the suburbs, the rat race, the endless worry about bills and money and getting the sack and ending up on the dole. Reminiscing about his childhood in a small market town on the Thames, he takes us through an unbelievably vivid and beautiful reconstruction of life in rural England in the early 1900s, showing us an extinct world through the eyes of the young boy who lived in it. And yet -- this is critical -- Bowling is not purely sentimental in his reminiscences. He is well aware that life was physically harder back then in almost every way. It is the peace of mind that he misses, the feeling that nothing will ever change, and your grandchildren will have the same experiences as your grandfather did. What he detests more than anything is the pace of modern life, its mindless noise and fury, its fundamental instability, and more than that, where it seems to be headed -- into the very world Orwell later describes in "1984."
Bowling is a marvelous character. Having more or less accidentally survived the "bloody balls up" that was WWI and the crushing economic slump that followed, he is almost brutally cynical, particularly about politics, patriotism, capitalism, women and marriage; some of his observations would 100% get you slapped if you repeated them in mixed company today, and there are times he seems as gritty and amoral as a Film Noir private eye. On the other hand, he is also remarkably thoughtful and sentimental, with a deep appreciation of nature -- there are endless passages about the smells, the sights, the tactile feeling of being in the woods or the fields in the summertime. He admits to being "blunt and insensitive" yet he's the sort that will pick flowers when he thinks nobody's looking, and confesses no adult pleasure -- whisky, tobacco, sex -- compares to the "pure bliss" he experienced when fishing or even reading a good book. Bowling's quest to recapture the feelings of childhood by taking a furtive holiday away from his wife to go fishing in his old hometown is, of course, doomed; it is hardly a spoiler to remark that Orwell doesn't do "happily ever after." But it follows that Bowling is not so easily disposed of as some of Orwell's other protagonists. Resilient to a fault, determined to see at least black comedy in the farce of life, he turns the disastrous vacation into a question: is it even possible to come up for air in a world that seems to have run out, not of air, but the time to breathe it? The answer won't surprise you, but the way he responds to the answer might.
Winston Smith, 1984: With the exception of Boxer from Animal Farm, the most tragic of all of Orwell's characters is Winston Smith, whose very name beckons to both the majesty of the past and the dull, gray facelessness of the present. Smith lives in a totalitarian state so oppressive that it actually polices the thoughts of its citizens; yet Smith's thoughts are full of seditious desires for freedom, putting him on a collision course with O'Brien, a sort of "High Inquisitor" of the Party, whose job is to torture thought-criminals not merely into outward comformity with the Party's goals, but an inward love of Big Brother, the Party's leader. Smith's rebellion is only fancifully directed at attacking the Party; his real goal is simply to retain a sense of sanity and humanity, despite the torments he must endure. Smith is the archetype of Orwellian protagonists: described as "frail" and "meager," with three false teeth and a vericose ulcer, he is hardly a romantic figure; nor is he very courageous in the purely physical sense. Smith's strengh lies in his intellect, his sense of individuality, and his ability to hope in a hopeless environment; also to experience the emotion of love, both romantically and in the larger sense of appreciating beauty, specifically natural beauty, something he holds in common with George Bowling, John Flory, Dorothy Hare and even Gordon Comstock.
I say that Smith is an archetype because in the end, as everyone knows, he is broken completely -- he betrays his romantic partner Julia to save himself, and the last line of the novel expresses his newfound and sincere love for Big Brother. The unhappiness of this ending is not precisely typical Orwell, but it is quintessential in that the only thing more certain than their acts of rebellion against society is that they will fail: John Flory rebels against the "pukka sahib" code and achieves nothing but his own destruction. Dorothy Hare rebels against the tyranny of her fate but circles back to it in the end, minus the religious convictions which made it seem virtuous. George Bowling rebels against modern life only to find he cannot escape it, and Gordom Comstock rebels against money, only to abandon his rebellion and his poetry both in favor of a "good job."
And yet despite the uniformity of these failures, there is at no point in any of Orwell's novels a sense that rebellion is wrong because it is futile; indeed, it is implied that these doomed rebellions are the most important and virtuous acts the protagonists will undertake in their lives. Winston Smith is not noble because he rebels against Big Brother, but because he does so in spite of the total and inevitable futility of his actions. The very act of fighting an evil system is in Orwell's mind a victory of sorts, one which is not outcome-based; it is the Hemingwayesque view that "man can be destroyed but not defeated." Orwell clearly saw virtue in the act of fighting against insurmountable odds, and this in itself is a romantic outlook and casts an equally romantic glow over his characters, however broken, cynical, callow or cowardly they might be.
In these five characters, then, we find certain commonalities which reveal much about their creator. We have already noted that they are all rebels whose rebellions are doomed to failure; they also hold in common a love of or appreciation for the beauty of nature; they are physically mediocre (Comstock and Smith are of a type; Bowling is fat; Hare is "frozen"; Flory is disfigured by a facial birthmark); and that they desire freedom, though their concept of freedom takes on different forms. These are all manifestly traits which Orwell possessed, even though his own physical mediocrity was of a dysmorphic rather than actual quality: told he was preternatually ugly when a child, he seems to have carried some belief this was true into adulthood. And indeed, his love of nature overflows in all of his fictional and some of his nonfictional writing, a love which is mixed up with his interest in what he called "the surfaces of things, the processes of life, and scraps of useless information." In one memorable essay, he describes the joy he found perusing old junk shops in London: a junk shop dutifully appears in 1984. In another, he discusses being arrested for drunkenness and spending a miserable hung-over night in a London cell; this exact sequence is detailed in Aspidistra. Clergyman sees Dorothy picking hops in the countryside for slave wages; Orwell simply drew on his own experiences in this regard, which are so lavishly described that we can pratically smell the hops on our bleeding, green-stained hands after a hard day in the fields. The list goes on endlessly, but it is important not because these things happened to Orwell in real life, but because of the interest he took in them. Orwell was a man who threw away a promising career in the police so he could experience the misery of poverty and war firsthand, and it seems that along with disgust and horror there was a great deal of fascination with actual aesthetics, the tacticle characteristics, of suffering and privation. None of his protagonists escapes this suffering, whether it comes from within or without or both, but none of them are defined by it, either. His characters are rebels doomed to failure within their own respective rebellions, but never once does he question their need for rebellion: never, as Henry Miller might have, does he suggest that surrender is the only sane course. Indeed, Orwell's protagonists seem to think that sanity is maintained by the very act of fighting back against the cruelty, the injustice, the ugliness and stupidity of modern life, even if the fight itself is futile and can end in only one outcome. This was Orwell's view, and in his private diaries, when contemplating a German invasion of England and whether he should flee or remain, he remarked, "better to stay here and keep up the fight, if only from inside the concentration camp." He must have known such a stance was futile and would lead to a meaningless death, but he saw resistance as a thing-in-itself, and therefore neither meaninless nor futile. This is a far more hopeful and romantic outlook than Orwell -- or his characters -- have ever been given credit for.
When we think of Mr. Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, the first things which come to mind are his terrifying dystopian masterpiece,1984, and his equally terrifying fable about revolution betrayed, Animal Farm. Beyond that, the image begins to blur. Orwell was, of course, a man with many hats upon his rack: he was a journalist, an advocate for democratic socialism, a writer of BBC radio scripts, investigative books and semi-memoirs; he began his career as an official in the Burmese Imperial Police and later served as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War; he was known alternatively as "St. George" or "The Truthteller," for his near-suicidal devotion to emotional and intellectual honesty. It is easy to sum up a man like Hemingway in a few brief sentences because he spent a lifetime promoting a specific image -- toughness, manliness, stoicism in the face of cruel Fate. Likewise Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald or even Hunter S. Thompson. Orwell was a more complex figure -- a firebrand socialist who spent much of his career attacking socialists, an eminent hater of fascism who was nonetheless willing to point out its selling points and compare it, sometimes favorably, to British imperialism; a man who detested cruelty yet could not abide pacifists and spoke calmly of killing when necessary; a man revolted by the amoral nature of politics who was nonetheless obsessed with them. There is so much dust and smoke swirling around Orwell's memory that it is easy to forget he was, perhaps before and after everything else, a novelist whose small but powerful body of work was so overshadowed by his own masterpiece, 1984, that most people are unaware of its existence.
Now, before you stop me, I am well aware that Down and Out in Paris and London is quite a famous book, but this is not in any real way a novel; it is a somewhat fictionalized memoir of actual events Orwell experienced in those two cities. Likewise, the lesser known Road to Wigan Pier is a book-length investigative report of British poverty interwoven with his own experiences of same, and Homage to Catalonia is his memoir of the Spanish Civil War. No, I am talking about Orwell's novels, the ones most people have never heard of Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up For Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Each is a testament to his strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller, a demonstration of his eagerness to explore the effects of poverty, class, capitalism and oppression upon the human spirit; but notably, they are also indicative of the sort of characters Orwell chose as protagonists...something which will tell us a great deal more about the man than any biographer ever could.
What I propose here is a brief analysis of each of the five protagonists (I wouldn't dare use the word "heroes") Orwell created for his full-length novels.
John Flory, Burmese Days: Orwell's first novel was a savage attack on British imperialism, delivered by a man who had helped facilitate it as a member of the Imperial Police, and whose conscience never quite recovered from the experience. "To truly hate imperialism," he was later to write, "You have had to be a part of it." Though John Flory is not a policeman as Orwell was, he is a willing if embittered tool of that imperialsm; an agent of a British timber firm, Flory's years in Burma have turned him into a lonely, hard-drinking, self-loathing, loner who detests his fellow British colonialists but benfits from the "pukka sahib" lifestyle colonialism gives him: servants, horses, a mistress, big game hunts, access to a snobbish Europeans Only club which is little more than a haven of racist alcoholics who recycle the same conversations day after day, year after year. Smitten by the arrival of a young Englishwoman on the prowl for a husband, Flory humiliates himself endlessly trying to win her affections, failing all the while to realize she embodies the snobbery, bigotry and intellectual deadness he hates. Flory's one consolation is an earnest "native" doctor, Veriswalmi, to whom he can unburden himself in private; but even this friendship is poisonous, because friendship with "natives" violates the unwritten but sacred code by which all Britons living in the Empire must live.
Flory is in some ways the template for the protagonists which follow him. Of ordinary origins, disfigured by a birthmark, physically courageous but morally weak, he is at once rotted almost completely through by his own dalliance with colonialism yet bursting with progressive, humanist opinions he dare not voice in real life. While not an antihero, and possessing some definite virtues, his default position a mixture of impotent self-pity and unhappy passivity. He can neither embrace the system he lives in nor change it in any way, and his fetishization of Elisabeth, who is so obviously stupid, ends up destroying him in the end. Like Hemingway, Orwell was no fan of the happy ending, and tended to view life as a brutal struggle against cruel realities which always got the upper hand sooner or later; the difference here is that Orwell does not romanticize the life of a gin-swilling big-game hunter in a Palm Beach suit, or accepting colonialism on its face without endeavoring to show that the face is a mask hiding all manner of horrors. Orwell's own streak of brutality and irony shows strongly in this book, but it is threaded into deeply felt criticisms of imperial rule. John Flory is a wretch, but his wretchedness is the end product of the system into which he was born, one which offers the poor and lower middle class of England, the sorts who have the most in common with the "natives," a chance at a better life if they will take an active hand in exploiting and bullying those "natives" for cash profit.
Dorothy Hare, A Clergyman's Daughter: It is hardly a secret that Orwell did not think all that much of women taken as a whole; certainly many of his female characters tend toward stupidity or bitchiness. It is therefore rather surprising that Orwell crafted a rather interesting and sympathetic character in Dorothy Hare, the only child of a viciously snobbish rural clergyman presiding over a dying congregation in rural, small-town England. Dorothy, like most of Orwell's protagonists, is rather a mess: cruelly overworked, she spends most of her days suffering from both hunger and exhaustion as she attempts to hold up the failing church by sheer force of faith. Bathing in cold water, denying herself sleep, pricking herself with needles whenever she feels a "selfish" impulse, she toils night and day for the ungrateful minister and an increasingly indifferent and shrinking flock. Suffering a mental breakdown from overwork, she wakes up in London with no memory of her own identity, and over the course of most of the rest of the book endures first homeless poverty, then life as an intinerant agricultural worker, and then finally the ultimate misery: working as a teacher in a wretched girls' school governed by a pitiless mistress interested only in profit. Clergyman is certainly Orwell's least impressive book: it does not hang together as a novel, Dorothy's loss of faith (which ought to be a central point of the book) is not explored, he fails to make the town Dorothy hails from feel like a real place, and the ending is, for all of its downbeats, surprisingly and somewhat unbelievably convenient. However, as a bare-faced examination of poverty, and the especial cruelty of poverty on those who were raised in genteel environments with some sense of pride and class consciousness, it is deeply affecting. Dorothy's sufferings, particularly at the school, are visceral: we feel not only her hunger pangs and loneliness but the desperate frustration of a woman who isn't allowed to teach anything meaningful, and is treated more or less like a servant or even a slave. Dorothy is much more fundamentally decent than most of Orwell's characters: she's also an intellectual and a frightfully hard worker. Her Achilles heel is acceptance of fate: enduring one terrible misery after another, she suffers without taking the obvious option to salvation, marriage, simply because she is sexually frozen and cannot abide the touch of a man. There is scarcely a moment in the book when she fights back against anyone or anything, or acts selfishly even when selfishness is warranted. Orwell was said to believe that man was inadequate to deal with the demands of the era in which he lived; Dorothy is a demonstration of this belief. The era in which seh was raised is visibly crumbling, and she has little place in the future which is arriving: she simply clings, ever more tightly, to her notions of decency and propriety, rendering her both noble and tragic. This glint of nobility is an Orwellian trait seldom acknowledged by his critics, but it exists -- and persists -- in most of his protagonists, however faintly.
Gordon Comstock, Keep the Aspidistra Flying: Of all of Orwell's characters, the unfortunate Gordon Comstock is probably the closest to Orwell himself, both in attitudes and lifestyle. A failed and embittered poet living in a dismal quarter of London, Gordon is engaged in a ridiculous "war against money" which sees him reject a "good" job at an advertising firm for a life of artistic poverty. It is Gordon's theory that no poet can possibly produce great verse while in the clutches of mindless capitalism, but he discovers the grinding, numbing, humiliating regime of poverty has almost entirely killed his Muse. Unable to write, suffering from loneliness, boredom and sexual frustration, he grows increasingly bitter and irrational as the book progresses, alienating the few people who actually care about him and, in one of the book's most memorable scenes, squandering his sole moment of literary and artistic success with a massive bender that lands him in jail. Comstock is a tremendous jerk, selfish and self-righteous, alternating moods of egoistic confidence with black depressions, constantly picking fights with Rosemary, his sometimes girlfriend, and Ravelston, the wealthy friend whose charity more or less keeps him going. He has polyps of human decency, but he is so far gone into bitterness, self-pity and misanthropy sometimes you wish he'd just stick his head in the gas oven and end it. What makes him fascinating is the way he manages the levels of poverty in which he exists, and the way he clings to his principles -- and they are sincere -- despite the terrible privations he endures every single day. Orwell uses Comstock to explore poverty in a novel way: not as merely lack of money or food, but lack of dignity, lack of human contact, lack of stimulation, and of the simple intimacies granted by friendship and love. Orwell's genius shows in the fact that Comstock remains sympathetic throughout the book even when you'd like to punch him in the nose, in no small part because his numerous criticisms of society -- some captured in memorable verse -- are accurate, and in part because you feel as if he is fighting your war for you; taking the bullet, as it were, for the rest of us who lack the guts to quit our soulless day jobs and reject the shiny bait of materialism. If Gordon's rebellion is foolish and futile and harms only himself, that is simply in keeping with Orwell's unspoken belief that rebellion itself is futile, however worthwhile it may be.
George Bowling, Coming Up For Air: None of Orwell's protagonists is nearer my heart than "Fatty" Bowling, a hard-bitten insurance salesman living in the soulless inner-outer suburbs of London with his nagging shrew of a wife and two ungrateful children. On the surface every bit as blunt, shallow and cynical as he appears to be, his "eyes of boiled blue" mask a thoughtful soul nursing what he calls "a hangover from the past." Worried about the coming war -- the story is set in 1938 -- he is more worried about what he refers to as "the after war," meaning the half-totalitarian, half-dystopian world he fears is coming on its heels. He's also quite disgusted with the present: the suburbs, the rat race, the endless worry about bills and money and getting the sack and ending up on the dole. Reminiscing about his childhood in a small market town on the Thames, he takes us through an unbelievably vivid and beautiful reconstruction of life in rural England in the early 1900s, showing us an extinct world through the eyes of the young boy who lived in it. And yet -- this is critical -- Bowling is not purely sentimental in his reminiscences. He is well aware that life was physically harder back then in almost every way. It is the peace of mind that he misses, the feeling that nothing will ever change, and your grandchildren will have the same experiences as your grandfather did. What he detests more than anything is the pace of modern life, its mindless noise and fury, its fundamental instability, and more than that, where it seems to be headed -- into the very world Orwell later describes in "1984."
Bowling is a marvelous character. Having more or less accidentally survived the "bloody balls up" that was WWI and the crushing economic slump that followed, he is almost brutally cynical, particularly about politics, patriotism, capitalism, women and marriage; some of his observations would 100% get you slapped if you repeated them in mixed company today, and there are times he seems as gritty and amoral as a Film Noir private eye. On the other hand, he is also remarkably thoughtful and sentimental, with a deep appreciation of nature -- there are endless passages about the smells, the sights, the tactile feeling of being in the woods or the fields in the summertime. He admits to being "blunt and insensitive" yet he's the sort that will pick flowers when he thinks nobody's looking, and confesses no adult pleasure -- whisky, tobacco, sex -- compares to the "pure bliss" he experienced when fishing or even reading a good book. Bowling's quest to recapture the feelings of childhood by taking a furtive holiday away from his wife to go fishing in his old hometown is, of course, doomed; it is hardly a spoiler to remark that Orwell doesn't do "happily ever after." But it follows that Bowling is not so easily disposed of as some of Orwell's other protagonists. Resilient to a fault, determined to see at least black comedy in the farce of life, he turns the disastrous vacation into a question: is it even possible to come up for air in a world that seems to have run out, not of air, but the time to breathe it? The answer won't surprise you, but the way he responds to the answer might.
Winston Smith, 1984: With the exception of Boxer from Animal Farm, the most tragic of all of Orwell's characters is Winston Smith, whose very name beckons to both the majesty of the past and the dull, gray facelessness of the present. Smith lives in a totalitarian state so oppressive that it actually polices the thoughts of its citizens; yet Smith's thoughts are full of seditious desires for freedom, putting him on a collision course with O'Brien, a sort of "High Inquisitor" of the Party, whose job is to torture thought-criminals not merely into outward comformity with the Party's goals, but an inward love of Big Brother, the Party's leader. Smith's rebellion is only fancifully directed at attacking the Party; his real goal is simply to retain a sense of sanity and humanity, despite the torments he must endure. Smith is the archetype of Orwellian protagonists: described as "frail" and "meager," with three false teeth and a vericose ulcer, he is hardly a romantic figure; nor is he very courageous in the purely physical sense. Smith's strengh lies in his intellect, his sense of individuality, and his ability to hope in a hopeless environment; also to experience the emotion of love, both romantically and in the larger sense of appreciating beauty, specifically natural beauty, something he holds in common with George Bowling, John Flory, Dorothy Hare and even Gordon Comstock.
I say that Smith is an archetype because in the end, as everyone knows, he is broken completely -- he betrays his romantic partner Julia to save himself, and the last line of the novel expresses his newfound and sincere love for Big Brother. The unhappiness of this ending is not precisely typical Orwell, but it is quintessential in that the only thing more certain than their acts of rebellion against society is that they will fail: John Flory rebels against the "pukka sahib" code and achieves nothing but his own destruction. Dorothy Hare rebels against the tyranny of her fate but circles back to it in the end, minus the religious convictions which made it seem virtuous. George Bowling rebels against modern life only to find he cannot escape it, and Gordom Comstock rebels against money, only to abandon his rebellion and his poetry both in favor of a "good job."
And yet despite the uniformity of these failures, there is at no point in any of Orwell's novels a sense that rebellion is wrong because it is futile; indeed, it is implied that these doomed rebellions are the most important and virtuous acts the protagonists will undertake in their lives. Winston Smith is not noble because he rebels against Big Brother, but because he does so in spite of the total and inevitable futility of his actions. The very act of fighting an evil system is in Orwell's mind a victory of sorts, one which is not outcome-based; it is the Hemingwayesque view that "man can be destroyed but not defeated." Orwell clearly saw virtue in the act of fighting against insurmountable odds, and this in itself is a romantic outlook and casts an equally romantic glow over his characters, however broken, cynical, callow or cowardly they might be.
In these five characters, then, we find certain commonalities which reveal much about their creator. We have already noted that they are all rebels whose rebellions are doomed to failure; they also hold in common a love of or appreciation for the beauty of nature; they are physically mediocre (Comstock and Smith are of a type; Bowling is fat; Hare is "frozen"; Flory is disfigured by a facial birthmark); and that they desire freedom, though their concept of freedom takes on different forms. These are all manifestly traits which Orwell possessed, even though his own physical mediocrity was of a dysmorphic rather than actual quality: told he was preternatually ugly when a child, he seems to have carried some belief this was true into adulthood. And indeed, his love of nature overflows in all of his fictional and some of his nonfictional writing, a love which is mixed up with his interest in what he called "the surfaces of things, the processes of life, and scraps of useless information." In one memorable essay, he describes the joy he found perusing old junk shops in London: a junk shop dutifully appears in 1984. In another, he discusses being arrested for drunkenness and spending a miserable hung-over night in a London cell; this exact sequence is detailed in Aspidistra. Clergyman sees Dorothy picking hops in the countryside for slave wages; Orwell simply drew on his own experiences in this regard, which are so lavishly described that we can pratically smell the hops on our bleeding, green-stained hands after a hard day in the fields. The list goes on endlessly, but it is important not because these things happened to Orwell in real life, but because of the interest he took in them. Orwell was a man who threw away a promising career in the police so he could experience the misery of poverty and war firsthand, and it seems that along with disgust and horror there was a great deal of fascination with actual aesthetics, the tacticle characteristics, of suffering and privation. None of his protagonists escapes this suffering, whether it comes from within or without or both, but none of them are defined by it, either. His characters are rebels doomed to failure within their own respective rebellions, but never once does he question their need for rebellion: never, as Henry Miller might have, does he suggest that surrender is the only sane course. Indeed, Orwell's protagonists seem to think that sanity is maintained by the very act of fighting back against the cruelty, the injustice, the ugliness and stupidity of modern life, even if the fight itself is futile and can end in only one outcome. This was Orwell's view, and in his private diaries, when contemplating a German invasion of England and whether he should flee or remain, he remarked, "better to stay here and keep up the fight, if only from inside the concentration camp." He must have known such a stance was futile and would lead to a meaningless death, but he saw resistance as a thing-in-itself, and therefore neither meaninless nor futile. This is a far more hopeful and romantic outlook than Orwell -- or his characters -- have ever been given credit for.
March 23, 2024
THE GIFT OF SUFFERING
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. -- Agent Smith, The Matrix
I believe the year was 1979. I was seven years old, and playing in a local soccer league. My team was good -- the only time in the five seasons I played for Montgomery Soccer, Inc., which that happened to be the case -- and we actually made it to the county championship final. The match was long, grueling and highly competetive, but we lost -- on a shootout, if memory serves, which is a particularly galling and cruel way to lose, when you think about it. The winners walked away with enormous trophies, which in my (undoubtedly false) memory were nearly as large as they were; the losers, who had gone undefeated all season 'til that point, who had sacrificed their Saturday mornings for games and several afternoons per week for practices, were given palm-sized consolation pieces. I still have mine somewhere. It is a plastic gold-colored soccer ball, about the size of a golf ball, sitting on a plastic gold-colored spike, embedded in a square of fake marble upon which a small brass plate was fixed, bearing the year of the tournament and the name of the league (MSI). That was it. That was the reward we got for coming out second best: a small chunk of fakery whose value couldn't have been a dollar even when a dollar was worth something.
I confess an especial bitterness in this, one I felt compelled to voice to my father at the time. It hardly seemed fair to me to work so long and so hard only to lose on a caprice of fate, and then receive a trophy which served more a badge of shame than a monument to effort. This I communicated to him with my seven year-old vocabulary, but he understood plainly enough. I can't remember his exact reply, but it amounted to, "If you want the big trophy, you have to win. Nobody cares how hard you worked to lose."
It was roughly around this time, perhaps two years later at most, that I failed to win any ribbons in my elementary school Field Day competeitions for the first time in my life. I have never been a star athlete per se, my endurance was never any good, but up 'til the age of about ten I possessed speed and agility sufficient to dominate any activity or sport which required those qualities: I was always among the best swimmers, I was actually on two swim teams at the same time at one point, and while not quite the fastest kid on the playground, I was always the fastest in my own circle and could hold my own with anybody over short distances. Whenever a competition was held, I knew a couple of red second place ribbons would come home with me; the only question was whether a prized blue ribbon would also accompany. Nevertheless, by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade, I came home from Field Day with nothing -- not even a wretched third place ribbon, whose color I couldn't even tell you, because I had never stooped so low as to receive one. I can still remember arguing furiously with Mrs. Previc, the soulless monster who ran that final Field Day, as if something much more than a small scrap of synthetic cloth were on the line, but coming away, nevertheless, with nothing.
There is a third memory which also stands out, more painfully than the others which to me are merely silly: I'm twelve years old, coming to bat in a softball game, and praying as hard as I can that I will hit a massive home run and thus impress the classmates who now bully, quietly despise, or simply ignore me. By this time I have gotten quite chunky, but I'm still very strong and somewhere beneath the flab is a goodish bit of muscle that should remember how to whack the hell out of a ball. Because I still hope that hope will be rewarded, I even channel The Natural theme song into my mind. Neverthless, after a few strikes all I manage is a clinker and am easily thrown out.
Looking back on these seemingly trivial incidents after more than forty years, it seems to me that both the anger I felt and the lesson I learned come to me quite clearly: even as I child I hated losing, and even as I child I was not dull-witted enough to ignore the lessons imparted by my defeats and failures: If you want the big trophy, you have to win: nobody cares how hard you worked to lose; what's more, if you didn't work at all, you should not be disappointed or surprised when you fail. Bad luck is simply the residue of poor preparation.
These are, of course, not overly fond memories, but like many sad, upsetting or embarassing moments from our past, they are far more valuable than their trivial nature actually warrants. We were told that our athletic activities were to keep us fit and release excess energy so we could concentrate in class, and also to teach the value of teamwork; we had to figure out for ourselves (though later, in high school, it was explicity explained by gym teachers who took sour relish in the speech) the harsh life lessons contained within these hours of street hockey, softball, soccer, relay races, and all the rest of it. Sometimes you can try as hard as you are physically capable at something, and still lose and come away with nothing; sometimes you are so good at something that it seems to define you as a human being in your own eyes as well as the eyes of others, only to encounter someone who does it better. And as you get a little older, something else is made clear by these little after-lunch skirmishes: if you're gifted at something, but don't practice, you will inevitably be crushed by someone of equal or even lesser gift who is out there, practicing, every day, while you are home eating Ring Dings and watching He Man.
It has been said that my generation, X, is the last to have fully experienced the cold cruelties of athletic competition in its most unvarnished form, the form in which victory is rewarded and defeat punished, if only with disappointment and humiliation. After X, it is said, the process of sanding down gym class, recess, Field Day, team sports and all the rest of it began in earnest, so that now, today, the idea of "winners and losers" has been erased so completely from whatever is left of our collective K-12 athletic programs that it's as if it never existed in the first place. I do not know the exact timeline, and I certainly can't give my generation any credit for the way it was raised since we had no hand in it, but I can say they very notion of placing children into competition is now likened by millions of people to child abuse. And it is worth noting that many of these same people, who believe a skinned knee on a playground and the tears which may follow amount to crimes, have very little issue with watching that same child drink 40 ounces of soda while hooked to an X-box or a cell phone for ten or twelve hours a day.
It so happens that I have been both children -- the athletic one who lived outdoors, ran or swam or pedaled everywhere he went at maximum speed, thought nothing of jumping gorges, rolling down hills, or hurtling off trampliones -- and the soda-guzzling, basement-dwelling, video-game addicted slob who was the butt of cruel jokes and even crueler indifference. So I am in a position to say with authority that it is much less painful to get hit in the face -- or the groin -- by a soccer ball kicked with maximum force, or to be choked out while practicing judo, or to swim full speed into the concrete wall of the pool, than it is to be weak, friendless and living life vicariously through a television screen. Like Judy Collins, I've seen the world from both sides, and each carries its own cross. But the cross that comes with accepting the darker, harsher realities of life and then learning to cope with them, is considerably lighter than the other variety.
As always when I rant about something that seems too small to merit the invective, I am not actually talking about that thing. The idea that thornier side of life is something we can actually hide from if we just get rid of dodge ball is merely a single thread in a much larger tapestry of cultural deterioration which has been going on for a quarter of a century or more; it is part of the general decay of strength which we have seen overtake the West since the early 90s, when this bizarre idea that life could be made easier if it was made softer began to take root within our civilization. The idea that trials, tribulations, struggles, and depravations actually strengthen us mentally, spiritually and physically -- an idea as old as the West itself -- is sloughing away and has sloughed away, and in its place is this flabby cult of the participation trophy, this belief that the answer to the essential harshness and cruelty of life is an ever-deeper retreat into softness. That if only we could protect our emotions as well as our bodies from all pain and discomfort and dissonance that the dream of Paradise would be realized, on earth rather than in heaven. And of course there is such a Paradise, and it does not require any religious faith, for it is self-evident condition of life: it is called death.
Dag Hammarskjöld once remarked that many people believe happiness came from pleasure; he countered that true happiness comes from discipline and denial, which allows us to enjoy the pleasures we experience more fully. By balancing what we want with what we actually need, we not only obtain more of what we want, we enjoy more fully that which we actually acquire. In my experience he is 100% correct. I have had, in my life, extended periods of utter hedonism, during which I did nothing but drink myself insensible, chase women, watch television, sleep into the afternoon, and so on. Each and every one of these idylls was provoked by some traumatic event -- death, the end of a relationship, a terrible work experience. And as much fun as was had during these periods, they were either followed or accompanied by deep spiritual misgivings; by feelings of self-loathing and self-disgust; by a craving to be doing more, even if "more" included its fair share of suffering. I began to understand, reluctantly and somewhat sullenly, that as far as I retreated from pain, that was how far pain would seek me out, albeit in a different, inward sort of form. Like the humanity which Agent Smith references in The Matrix, the paradise I sought, I also rejected whenever I found it. It is not that I defined life by suffering and misery for its own sake, as he claimed; rather that I began to understand that what I wanted and what I needed stood distinct from one another. Instead of thinking about what I wanted, I needed to start thinking about what I wanted to be, which is not the same thing at all. Indeed, even what I wanted and what I wanted were in open, unwinnable conflict, because greatness and fulfillment are irreconcilable with staying in bed all day. I craved -- I still crave -- the big trophy, and the big trophy takes work. And work means, literally or figuratively or both, sweat and blood and tears and calluses and all the rest of it, up to and including the utter humiliation of falling on your fucking face in public. What's more, and what so many people today simply do not understand (including myself in my weaker moments) is that nobody will compensate me in any way should I fail despite doing the work. There are no Purple Hearts for the emotional scars of giving one's absolute all in pursuit of a dream only to be rewarded with a donut hole. But rather than weep over this, I take comfort, however cold, in something Hemingway wrote almost a hundred years ago:
Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.
A grim philosophy? Well, sure: it's Hemingway, whose cuba libre was always half-empty. But if we probe a little deeper we can see what he's driving at here, something almost Asiatic in its stoical acceptance of the unfairness of life, its caprciousness, its cruelty. Something reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, who declined the reward of a knighthood with the remark, "I play the game for the game's own sake." It is the idea that while winning is attractive, it is not actually the trophy or the ribbon which is the reward; indeed, there is no reward; only the fight itself, the holy purifying struggle, the battle between what we were and what we are and what we are becoming, which is beyond the idea of winning and losing, the knowledge that when everything else is taken away, as well it will be, we will always have the fight so long as we live...and though the fight be not much, it is enough.
I believe the year was 1979. I was seven years old, and playing in a local soccer league. My team was good -- the only time in the five seasons I played for Montgomery Soccer, Inc., which that happened to be the case -- and we actually made it to the county championship final. The match was long, grueling and highly competetive, but we lost -- on a shootout, if memory serves, which is a particularly galling and cruel way to lose, when you think about it. The winners walked away with enormous trophies, which in my (undoubtedly false) memory were nearly as large as they were; the losers, who had gone undefeated all season 'til that point, who had sacrificed their Saturday mornings for games and several afternoons per week for practices, were given palm-sized consolation pieces. I still have mine somewhere. It is a plastic gold-colored soccer ball, about the size of a golf ball, sitting on a plastic gold-colored spike, embedded in a square of fake marble upon which a small brass plate was fixed, bearing the year of the tournament and the name of the league (MSI). That was it. That was the reward we got for coming out second best: a small chunk of fakery whose value couldn't have been a dollar even when a dollar was worth something.
I confess an especial bitterness in this, one I felt compelled to voice to my father at the time. It hardly seemed fair to me to work so long and so hard only to lose on a caprice of fate, and then receive a trophy which served more a badge of shame than a monument to effort. This I communicated to him with my seven year-old vocabulary, but he understood plainly enough. I can't remember his exact reply, but it amounted to, "If you want the big trophy, you have to win. Nobody cares how hard you worked to lose."
It was roughly around this time, perhaps two years later at most, that I failed to win any ribbons in my elementary school Field Day competeitions for the first time in my life. I have never been a star athlete per se, my endurance was never any good, but up 'til the age of about ten I possessed speed and agility sufficient to dominate any activity or sport which required those qualities: I was always among the best swimmers, I was actually on two swim teams at the same time at one point, and while not quite the fastest kid on the playground, I was always the fastest in my own circle and could hold my own with anybody over short distances. Whenever a competition was held, I knew a couple of red second place ribbons would come home with me; the only question was whether a prized blue ribbon would also accompany. Nevertheless, by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade, I came home from Field Day with nothing -- not even a wretched third place ribbon, whose color I couldn't even tell you, because I had never stooped so low as to receive one. I can still remember arguing furiously with Mrs. Previc, the soulless monster who ran that final Field Day, as if something much more than a small scrap of synthetic cloth were on the line, but coming away, nevertheless, with nothing.
There is a third memory which also stands out, more painfully than the others which to me are merely silly: I'm twelve years old, coming to bat in a softball game, and praying as hard as I can that I will hit a massive home run and thus impress the classmates who now bully, quietly despise, or simply ignore me. By this time I have gotten quite chunky, but I'm still very strong and somewhere beneath the flab is a goodish bit of muscle that should remember how to whack the hell out of a ball. Because I still hope that hope will be rewarded, I even channel The Natural theme song into my mind. Neverthless, after a few strikes all I manage is a clinker and am easily thrown out.
Looking back on these seemingly trivial incidents after more than forty years, it seems to me that both the anger I felt and the lesson I learned come to me quite clearly: even as I child I hated losing, and even as I child I was not dull-witted enough to ignore the lessons imparted by my defeats and failures: If you want the big trophy, you have to win: nobody cares how hard you worked to lose; what's more, if you didn't work at all, you should not be disappointed or surprised when you fail. Bad luck is simply the residue of poor preparation.
These are, of course, not overly fond memories, but like many sad, upsetting or embarassing moments from our past, they are far more valuable than their trivial nature actually warrants. We were told that our athletic activities were to keep us fit and release excess energy so we could concentrate in class, and also to teach the value of teamwork; we had to figure out for ourselves (though later, in high school, it was explicity explained by gym teachers who took sour relish in the speech) the harsh life lessons contained within these hours of street hockey, softball, soccer, relay races, and all the rest of it. Sometimes you can try as hard as you are physically capable at something, and still lose and come away with nothing; sometimes you are so good at something that it seems to define you as a human being in your own eyes as well as the eyes of others, only to encounter someone who does it better. And as you get a little older, something else is made clear by these little after-lunch skirmishes: if you're gifted at something, but don't practice, you will inevitably be crushed by someone of equal or even lesser gift who is out there, practicing, every day, while you are home eating Ring Dings and watching He Man.
It has been said that my generation, X, is the last to have fully experienced the cold cruelties of athletic competition in its most unvarnished form, the form in which victory is rewarded and defeat punished, if only with disappointment and humiliation. After X, it is said, the process of sanding down gym class, recess, Field Day, team sports and all the rest of it began in earnest, so that now, today, the idea of "winners and losers" has been erased so completely from whatever is left of our collective K-12 athletic programs that it's as if it never existed in the first place. I do not know the exact timeline, and I certainly can't give my generation any credit for the way it was raised since we had no hand in it, but I can say they very notion of placing children into competition is now likened by millions of people to child abuse. And it is worth noting that many of these same people, who believe a skinned knee on a playground and the tears which may follow amount to crimes, have very little issue with watching that same child drink 40 ounces of soda while hooked to an X-box or a cell phone for ten or twelve hours a day.
It so happens that I have been both children -- the athletic one who lived outdoors, ran or swam or pedaled everywhere he went at maximum speed, thought nothing of jumping gorges, rolling down hills, or hurtling off trampliones -- and the soda-guzzling, basement-dwelling, video-game addicted slob who was the butt of cruel jokes and even crueler indifference. So I am in a position to say with authority that it is much less painful to get hit in the face -- or the groin -- by a soccer ball kicked with maximum force, or to be choked out while practicing judo, or to swim full speed into the concrete wall of the pool, than it is to be weak, friendless and living life vicariously through a television screen. Like Judy Collins, I've seen the world from both sides, and each carries its own cross. But the cross that comes with accepting the darker, harsher realities of life and then learning to cope with them, is considerably lighter than the other variety.
As always when I rant about something that seems too small to merit the invective, I am not actually talking about that thing. The idea that thornier side of life is something we can actually hide from if we just get rid of dodge ball is merely a single thread in a much larger tapestry of cultural deterioration which has been going on for a quarter of a century or more; it is part of the general decay of strength which we have seen overtake the West since the early 90s, when this bizarre idea that life could be made easier if it was made softer began to take root within our civilization. The idea that trials, tribulations, struggles, and depravations actually strengthen us mentally, spiritually and physically -- an idea as old as the West itself -- is sloughing away and has sloughed away, and in its place is this flabby cult of the participation trophy, this belief that the answer to the essential harshness and cruelty of life is an ever-deeper retreat into softness. That if only we could protect our emotions as well as our bodies from all pain and discomfort and dissonance that the dream of Paradise would be realized, on earth rather than in heaven. And of course there is such a Paradise, and it does not require any religious faith, for it is self-evident condition of life: it is called death.
Dag Hammarskjöld once remarked that many people believe happiness came from pleasure; he countered that true happiness comes from discipline and denial, which allows us to enjoy the pleasures we experience more fully. By balancing what we want with what we actually need, we not only obtain more of what we want, we enjoy more fully that which we actually acquire. In my experience he is 100% correct. I have had, in my life, extended periods of utter hedonism, during which I did nothing but drink myself insensible, chase women, watch television, sleep into the afternoon, and so on. Each and every one of these idylls was provoked by some traumatic event -- death, the end of a relationship, a terrible work experience. And as much fun as was had during these periods, they were either followed or accompanied by deep spiritual misgivings; by feelings of self-loathing and self-disgust; by a craving to be doing more, even if "more" included its fair share of suffering. I began to understand, reluctantly and somewhat sullenly, that as far as I retreated from pain, that was how far pain would seek me out, albeit in a different, inward sort of form. Like the humanity which Agent Smith references in The Matrix, the paradise I sought, I also rejected whenever I found it. It is not that I defined life by suffering and misery for its own sake, as he claimed; rather that I began to understand that what I wanted and what I needed stood distinct from one another. Instead of thinking about what I wanted, I needed to start thinking about what I wanted to be, which is not the same thing at all. Indeed, even what I wanted and what I wanted were in open, unwinnable conflict, because greatness and fulfillment are irreconcilable with staying in bed all day. I craved -- I still crave -- the big trophy, and the big trophy takes work. And work means, literally or figuratively or both, sweat and blood and tears and calluses and all the rest of it, up to and including the utter humiliation of falling on your fucking face in public. What's more, and what so many people today simply do not understand (including myself in my weaker moments) is that nobody will compensate me in any way should I fail despite doing the work. There are no Purple Hearts for the emotional scars of giving one's absolute all in pursuit of a dream only to be rewarded with a donut hole. But rather than weep over this, I take comfort, however cold, in something Hemingway wrote almost a hundred years ago:
Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.
A grim philosophy? Well, sure: it's Hemingway, whose cuba libre was always half-empty. But if we probe a little deeper we can see what he's driving at here, something almost Asiatic in its stoical acceptance of the unfairness of life, its caprciousness, its cruelty. Something reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, who declined the reward of a knighthood with the remark, "I play the game for the game's own sake." It is the idea that while winning is attractive, it is not actually the trophy or the ribbon which is the reward; indeed, there is no reward; only the fight itself, the holy purifying struggle, the battle between what we were and what we are and what we are becoming, which is beyond the idea of winning and losing, the knowledge that when everything else is taken away, as well it will be, we will always have the fight so long as we live...and though the fight be not much, it is enough.
March 15, 2024
AS I PLEASE XXIII: POST CALI BLUES EDITION
Apologies for my recent silence, but I was on a rare vacation which took me away from the keys for a week or so. It was much needed, and while I was gone many an idea for blogs passed through my head and left baggage behind; however, as I am not yet fully settled in, I'm not ready to unpack it. What I can do is shake out some of the travel dust. I daresay some of it is worth sharing.
* This last week marked my first visit to California in two years; the visit was itself only my second since I moved in 2020. One of the features I had forgotten is how much bluer the sky is there than in Pennsylvania or Maryland. It often takes on a deep, deep cobalt which makes any passing cloud look almost supernaturally white. This is not hyperbole or sentiment: compared to the skies of SoCal, the Eastern sky looks washed out, dull, and boring.
* On top of this, the sun is infinitely stronger even well inland than it is anywhere around here except the beach, and then only for about maybe six months out of the year. A few hours hiking in the morning left me red as a beet and brought out long-dormant freckles from deep hibernation. To get the same effect out here, I'd have to spend eight hours hammering shingles in July.
* Maybe it was the perfect weather, maybe it was being reunited with dear friends and family, maybe it was just the much-needed break from responsibility, but I found myself missing Cali for the first time since I moved. I was very nearly regretful about it until my buddy Mark and his wife told me what rents were like now in my old neighborhood: $2,500 is evidently the standard for a studio apartment. If one proceeds from the idea that nobody should pay more than 1/3 (at the most) of their total income towards rent/mortgage, one would need to make a bare minimum of $78,000 annually to barely afford a studio. A studio. The average income in the United States is $31,133. The average income in California is $33,719. Even if a couple each making the latter figure were living (closely) together in said studio, their total income would be more than ten thousand dollars short of the minimum mark. Working poverty now seems to be the norm in my former state and adoptive hometown. If I hadn't left of my own free will four years ago, I would have been forced out anyway.
* Ten days ago I went down Memory Lane to remember T.J. Hooker. Driving around my old neighborhood in Burbank this past weekend, I not only recognized dozens of the shooting locations from that old show (which debuted almost 40 years ago) I was struck by how little Burbank itself had changed. Obviously most of the businesses of that time are long gone; hell, a few from my time are gone; what I mean is that the architecture hadn't much changed. It's still recognizably the same place in every respect. I found this very comforting. The Maryland neighborhood in which I grew up is now largely unrecognizable. My high school was torn down decades ago. McMansions loom where middle-class houses once reposed. The downtown is overbuilt to a dystopian degree. That comforts me not at all.
* SoCal is notorious for its "car culture." The notoriety is earned. I wasn't in town an hour before I remembered how immense, how poorly and inconveniently designed, this area is, or how it does everything possible, consciously and unconsciously, to encourage its residents to drive even short distances rather than walk. In my present situation I can do the following on foot: go to work, get a haircut, go to market, go to bookstores, shop for clothing, visit the Post Office and the gym, get coffee, and hit any number of restaurants and bars. When I was in L.A. county, I visited my brother, my cousin and my friend Mark, and not one of them can walk anywhere to do any of these things. The design of everything either prevents it or makes it an infernal nuisance. And yet light rail remains largely a fantasy. It is the best solution to the otherwise insoluble problem. How do we know this? L.A. used to have the best streetcar system in America. It was famous for its ease of use, efficiency and breadth. The old "Big Three" motor companies bought it up and destroyed it after WW2 so they could sell cars. They are gone but their legacy remains -- impenetrable traffic and smog.
* As you may remember, because I seldom stop complaining about it, when I moved in 2020, I was forced to leave my books behind -- a huge library, accumulated over many years. On this trip I managed to mail home somewhere around 15 boxes' worth, which will make my mailman miserable but will finally put (mostly) right a terrible wrong. No reader should be stripped of his personal library. I can't wait to cram my dusty, empty bookshelves with the things they were meant to carry. There is another, smaller trove of books that need to be sent on, but that will have to wait for a future visit. At some point this year, however, it seems likely that I will have mailed the very last of all my personal belongings presently gathering dust in California. That will not only constitute an accomplishment, it will represent the closing of a chapter of my life, and strangely enough, I think I will feel more sad than happy.
* When I was in town, I made a point of trying to see as many of the old places and the old faces as possible. I fell somewhat short of my goals, but among the boxes I actually checked was sitting down to some good, old fashioned In N Out Burger. It so happens that In N Out is the one fast foot joint I frequented in California -- indeed, it is the only fast food I will actually eat, or have eaten, in the last 24 years, not considering it "fast food" of the McDonald's/Taco Bell type at all. What separates In-N-Out in this regard is the fact the ingredients are fresh. You actually watch them take the potatoes out of the sack, cut them, fry them, serve them. It's real food. It may not be real good for you, but that's another matter. Anyway, it was fine. But not as fine as I remember. Nostalgia can be a little deceptive. Then again, you can catch anyone on a bad day, even In-N-Out.
* On the whole, however, I caught L.A. on a "good day." The weather was absolutely perfect. There was not one trace of smog. Traffic was never a factor. I found myself in a wistful mood, almost wishing I had never left, almost wishing I could return. Almost. Los Angeles is a terrific place to visit, but living there is another matter entirely. And it's not just the cost of living. The entertainment industry can be a terrible grind when things are going well; lately, in the aftermath of the writer's strike, and with other strikes potentially looming, the prospect of making a living that way is not so much bleak as terrifying. Maybe it's just the middle age talking, but there comes a time when stability and security become more appealing than social cachet.
And that wraps me up for tonight. My suitcases are unpacked, my laundry is done, the cat has been mollified and various television shows from the 80s and 90s beckon upon my television machine. Sorry for the absence, but I should be able to return to form in short order.
* This last week marked my first visit to California in two years; the visit was itself only my second since I moved in 2020. One of the features I had forgotten is how much bluer the sky is there than in Pennsylvania or Maryland. It often takes on a deep, deep cobalt which makes any passing cloud look almost supernaturally white. This is not hyperbole or sentiment: compared to the skies of SoCal, the Eastern sky looks washed out, dull, and boring.
* On top of this, the sun is infinitely stronger even well inland than it is anywhere around here except the beach, and then only for about maybe six months out of the year. A few hours hiking in the morning left me red as a beet and brought out long-dormant freckles from deep hibernation. To get the same effect out here, I'd have to spend eight hours hammering shingles in July.
* Maybe it was the perfect weather, maybe it was being reunited with dear friends and family, maybe it was just the much-needed break from responsibility, but I found myself missing Cali for the first time since I moved. I was very nearly regretful about it until my buddy Mark and his wife told me what rents were like now in my old neighborhood: $2,500 is evidently the standard for a studio apartment. If one proceeds from the idea that nobody should pay more than 1/3 (at the most) of their total income towards rent/mortgage, one would need to make a bare minimum of $78,000 annually to barely afford a studio. A studio. The average income in the United States is $31,133. The average income in California is $33,719. Even if a couple each making the latter figure were living (closely) together in said studio, their total income would be more than ten thousand dollars short of the minimum mark. Working poverty now seems to be the norm in my former state and adoptive hometown. If I hadn't left of my own free will four years ago, I would have been forced out anyway.
* Ten days ago I went down Memory Lane to remember T.J. Hooker. Driving around my old neighborhood in Burbank this past weekend, I not only recognized dozens of the shooting locations from that old show (which debuted almost 40 years ago) I was struck by how little Burbank itself had changed. Obviously most of the businesses of that time are long gone; hell, a few from my time are gone; what I mean is that the architecture hadn't much changed. It's still recognizably the same place in every respect. I found this very comforting. The Maryland neighborhood in which I grew up is now largely unrecognizable. My high school was torn down decades ago. McMansions loom where middle-class houses once reposed. The downtown is overbuilt to a dystopian degree. That comforts me not at all.
* SoCal is notorious for its "car culture." The notoriety is earned. I wasn't in town an hour before I remembered how immense, how poorly and inconveniently designed, this area is, or how it does everything possible, consciously and unconsciously, to encourage its residents to drive even short distances rather than walk. In my present situation I can do the following on foot: go to work, get a haircut, go to market, go to bookstores, shop for clothing, visit the Post Office and the gym, get coffee, and hit any number of restaurants and bars. When I was in L.A. county, I visited my brother, my cousin and my friend Mark, and not one of them can walk anywhere to do any of these things. The design of everything either prevents it or makes it an infernal nuisance. And yet light rail remains largely a fantasy. It is the best solution to the otherwise insoluble problem. How do we know this? L.A. used to have the best streetcar system in America. It was famous for its ease of use, efficiency and breadth. The old "Big Three" motor companies bought it up and destroyed it after WW2 so they could sell cars. They are gone but their legacy remains -- impenetrable traffic and smog.
* As you may remember, because I seldom stop complaining about it, when I moved in 2020, I was forced to leave my books behind -- a huge library, accumulated over many years. On this trip I managed to mail home somewhere around 15 boxes' worth, which will make my mailman miserable but will finally put (mostly) right a terrible wrong. No reader should be stripped of his personal library. I can't wait to cram my dusty, empty bookshelves with the things they were meant to carry. There is another, smaller trove of books that need to be sent on, but that will have to wait for a future visit. At some point this year, however, it seems likely that I will have mailed the very last of all my personal belongings presently gathering dust in California. That will not only constitute an accomplishment, it will represent the closing of a chapter of my life, and strangely enough, I think I will feel more sad than happy.
* When I was in town, I made a point of trying to see as many of the old places and the old faces as possible. I fell somewhat short of my goals, but among the boxes I actually checked was sitting down to some good, old fashioned In N Out Burger. It so happens that In N Out is the one fast foot joint I frequented in California -- indeed, it is the only fast food I will actually eat, or have eaten, in the last 24 years, not considering it "fast food" of the McDonald's/Taco Bell type at all. What separates In-N-Out in this regard is the fact the ingredients are fresh. You actually watch them take the potatoes out of the sack, cut them, fry them, serve them. It's real food. It may not be real good for you, but that's another matter. Anyway, it was fine. But not as fine as I remember. Nostalgia can be a little deceptive. Then again, you can catch anyone on a bad day, even In-N-Out.
* On the whole, however, I caught L.A. on a "good day." The weather was absolutely perfect. There was not one trace of smog. Traffic was never a factor. I found myself in a wistful mood, almost wishing I had never left, almost wishing I could return. Almost. Los Angeles is a terrific place to visit, but living there is another matter entirely. And it's not just the cost of living. The entertainment industry can be a terrible grind when things are going well; lately, in the aftermath of the writer's strike, and with other strikes potentially looming, the prospect of making a living that way is not so much bleak as terrifying. Maybe it's just the middle age talking, but there comes a time when stability and security become more appealing than social cachet.
And that wraps me up for tonight. My suitcases are unpacked, my laundry is done, the cat has been mollified and various television shows from the 80s and 90s beckon upon my television machine. Sorry for the absence, but I should be able to return to form in short order.
March 2, 2024
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "T.J. HOOKER"
Stakeouts used to be a terrific deterrent. Smoke one bandit, robberies would drop to zero overnight. Stay that way for months. I'd vote for that one...unfortunately it's not on the ballot. Progress. -- T.J. Hooker
Ah, Memory Lane. Where else can we wander with such a sense of self-indulgent purpose as upon this charming little road, whose houses are so full of fond memories? There is an especial pleasure in the idea of revisiting the entertainment of yesteryear. I would be lying, however, if I said every stop on this journey yielded the same set of emotions. Some of the showhouses we visit are full of almost painful nostalgia; some contain unexpected surprises; a few still retain their old power to shock or terrify or amuse; still others are disappointing because our memories have betrayed us, and what was magic viewed through the golden haze of childhood is merely silly and cheap and obvious now. But when we come upon the rather stern-looking, barracks-like home of T.J. HOOKER, we feel none of these things. What we experience, mainly, is happiness. We do not experience this happiness because what lies behind the door is good: oh no. We are happy because we know it is bad, but it is entertainingly bad, and yet, if we care to probe a little deeper into what we are seeing, discover it offers us some insight into ourselves and the society in which we once lived -- and may live in again. So let's kick down the door and get this party started.
Way back in 1982, William Shatner made his much-anticipated return to television with an Aaron Spelling-produced melodrama originally and revealingly titled THE PROTECTORS. Shatner was cast in the role of T.J. Hooker, a hardass veteran cop reeling from a painful divorce, now assigned as a partner a cocky, happy-go-lucky young trainee named Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed). The embittered, hard-drinking, all-knowing Hooker tries to educate the naive "Junior" in the ways of the streets while fighting the department's sluggish bureaucracy, epitomized by oafish stickler Captain Dennis Sheridan (Richard Herd), who dislikes Hooker's take-no-prisoners attitude. And in fact Hooker is, and is meant to be, a walking embodiment of the "club-'em-'n-shoot-'em" school of law enforcement popularized by DIRTY HARRY. Hooker is a man who would rather blast a crook with his .357 than arrest him, who doesn't believe in pesky things like Miranda or search warrants, and generally feels society is crumbling at the foundations because of excessive liberalism and overtolerance for evildoers. In the show's pilot episode, he rails against criminals and the laws and lawyers which he believes enable them, and slaps heavy coats of sentimental gloss over the Old Days, when justice was swift and brutal. As an instructor at the Academy, he presents police work as war, and trains his probationary cops as soldiers who must shoot to kill, jeering at all soft-headed, well-intentioned, newfangled ideas and technologies. "I've seen the past," he laments over his bourbon. "And it works."
The PROTECTORS name was quickly scrapped in favor of the eponymous HOOKER title, probably to flatter Shatner's ego, or because of the cold realization that most of the viewers were STAR TREK fans tuning in solely because their captain was now once more available each week, albeit in a different uniform; however, the idea behind the original title -- that the police are all that keeps the ordinary citizen from being robbed, raped and murdered, and that cops are unappreciated and unfairly hobbled by red tape and pettifogging laws that favor the crooks -- remained not close to the show's heart but its actual center for its entire five year run. Over and over again Hooker would pound away at the idea that criminals needed to be scared of the police, at one point even saying that if you killed one bandit, robberies would go down for months afterwards. In another episode, he fumes that a murderer who beat a rap is "laughing at us, and at the system." I italicize this for a reason. Hooker may be frustrated as all get out by the inequities and failings of "the system" but he cannot abide it being mocked. His power, the power to beat the hell out of crooks and gun them down if he sees fit, devolves from it: he is both its beneficiary and its guardian. Like Charles Dickens, whose thesis was essentially that capitalism was not evil but rather that individual capitalists sometimes behaved wickedly, Hooker does not feel "the system" is bad, merely that it is in the wrong hands and using the wrong tactics. There is no deeper social criticism in T.J. HOOKER, just an implication that if "they" (courts, politicians, social workers, journalists, the big public) stopped trying to interfere and gave the cops a free hand, justice would be served and served cold. Shatner himself, a Canadian who is wisely uninterested in American politics, later noted that the show was a big hit with the real-life LAPD cops he encountered during its broadcast run: as over-the-top and melodramatic as it was, it presented "their side of the story" to an anxious and conflicted public caught between touchy-feely 70s ideas of rehabilitation and Reagan-era "law & order" hardassery.
HOOKER's plots tended to be simple to the point of idiocy -- you could describe many in half a sentence -- and therefore the series relied heavily on the repartee and chemistry between Shatner and Zmed, which was very good and livened up unimaginative storylines such as "Hooker must protect a witness," "Hooker must stop a serial killer," "Hooker must hunt down armed robbers." Romano's excessive virility was an ongoing joke, as were Hooker's alimony payments and terrible diet, and both cops' penchant for destroying patrol cars during pursuits; indeed, the series was at its best when it climbed down from off its soapbox and had a little fun at its own expense. Although objectively mediocre and occasionally laugh-out-loud dumb, HOOKER was usually fun and sometimes even a little charming, especially in its first two seasons. By the end of the second, it had expanded its cast to include both Heather Locklear as Stacey Sheridan (another trainee cop) and James Darren as her training officer and partner, Corporal Jim Corrigan. This added some depth to the roster and a surprisingly progressive male-female dynamic, but reduced Romano to one-fourth of an ensemble rather than one half of a partnership, and cooled off the show's strongest asset, the buddy-buddy relationship between the lead and the sidekick. An unrealistic series is always strengthened by humor: it invites the audience to laugh with rather than at the series, and removing some of the humor simply highlighted HOOKER'S scribbled-on-a-napkin plots and lazy writing. This was exacerbated when Adrian Zmed left the show at the end of the fourth season, giving Shatner no one to facetiously banter with as he prowled the streets. The producers -- or maybe it was the network -- compensated by making the stories darker and grittier, which probably improved HOOKER's objective quality, but killed its sense of fun stone dead.
HOOKER was an extremely formulaic show, and one quite at odds with its own concept. The whole raison d'etre of the character was that he'd willingly given up his detective's badge to return to street policing, yet in almost every episode, he acts as a detective, either because “the [actual] detectives are spread too thin right now,” or because the case was “personal” to Hooker. In one scene, later lampooned by THE SIMPSONS, Captain Sheridan tells Hooker he's off a case; Hooker barks, “Wrong – I'm ON the case!” and storms off, leaving the Captain to scowl impotently into the middle distance, as usual. Even as a kid this kind of insubordination insulted my intelligence, but you can't apply logic to a show like T.J. HOOKER, in which gunshot wounds can be shrugged off with gritted teeth and will-power, getting thrown off a car going 40 mph doesn't hurt, and nobody ever seems to have to do any paperwork. Hell, I have never, in my entire life, seen a series in which more cars explode. Literally anything will make a car explode on T.J. HOOKER, and an episode where a car or a truck (or both, if one collided into the other) didn't blow itself to pieces in a holocaust of flame. In one unforgettable scene, a police car catches fire and then explodes so violently it splits in two as it is lifted into the air, bathing the entire street in oily flame...simply because it spun out. I laughed at this in 1983, and I laugh at it now, but I confess if watch an episode of HOOKER and I do don't see car annihilated by explosives, I'm disappointed. Like inexplicable jumps in the DUKES OF HAZZARD, the absurdity was baked into the concept.
Most episodes followed a strict pattern. A crime would be committed, Hooker would be assigned (or assign himself) to the case, and following a predictable series of car chases, foot pursuits, fist fights and shootouts, punctuated by lectures from Hooker to all and sundry and arguments between Hooker and lesser mortals who couldn't see he was right in his hunches, there would be a culminating final fistfight or shoot-out, where the criminal or criminals would either be captured (as was the case early in the series) or killed off (as was the case later). It is interesting to note that while he shot plenty of people, Hooker seldom killed anyone directly: they would swing at him with a knife, overbalance and fall off a roof; or he would shoot them during a gun battle, and then they would stagger and fall off a bridge. This applied to the other characters as well. The subtext here seemed to be that, as The Shadow had warned a couple of generations earlier, "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit:" that criminals end up destroying themselves through their own short-sighted wickedness. Or as Sherlock Holmes put it: "The schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another."
Because the formula was so repetitious, and because as the years wore on Hooker became increasingly all-knowing and invincible, the real pleasure in the show rested entirely in watching Shatner growl insults at hapless hoodlums – “maggot,” “scum” and “dirtbag” were his favorites – and say things like, “Resist arrest...resist arrest, PLEASE!” as some drug dealer or hit man trembled in his sights. Also in the boyish hijinks of Vince Romano and the somehow wholesome sex appeal of Stacey Sheridan, who was dressed in a bikini or hot pants at every possible opportunity. Occasionally the writers dug deeper and produced stories of genuine merit, or tampered with the formula enough to create a feeling of freshness, and there were episodes where the actors got hold of a decent script, seemed to come alive and put real blood, sweat and tears into their performances; but HOOKER remained until its final episode an enormously predictable affair, striking over and over again at the same "law and order" note in which the cops always get their man, and police are well justified in bending the law (and civil rights) to get the scum off the streets. It's worth mentioning that Mark Snow, that brilliant creator of TV themes (THE X-FILES is probably his most famous work), composed for HOOKER the most exuberant, pulse-pounding, bombastic score imaginable for this series, one which seems to encapsulate the view it takes of police and police work. I must say that even while it was on the air, HOOKER was regarded as fully disposable entertainment, a sort of shake 'n bake mix of scenery-chewing and explosions, and to its credit, it seldom pretended to have larger ambitions. Jack Klugman once famously explained his crusade to turn QUINCY, M.E. into a social justice campaign with the remark "it can't all just be screeching tires." Well, by 1987 audiences had grown bored with the screeching tires of HOOKER and it disappeared into what Shatner referred to as "syndication, and then oblivion." When I saw Shatner do his one man show in Los Angeles some time ago, he devoted no words, and only a single slide of an old publicity photo, to the five years of his life he spent portraying the role. HOOKER is not going to be the subject of any fan conventions or reboots. If the name is uttered today, it is generally as a punch line.
So why bother opening this door, you ask? Why not simply pass on by and discuss a better TV show, like MAGNUM, P.I. or BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER? The fact is that despite its shallowness and predictability, HOOKER is culturally quite significant. It presents us not merely with a a whole slideshow of 80s-era thought on the subject of crime and policing, and more than that, with insight as to how we as Americans tend to look at the world.
One does not need to be an expert on criminology to know there was a huge upgrade in crime in the late 1960s which had by no means exhausted itself by the early 80s when Sergeant Hooker first drove through the streets of my old hometown, Burbank, CA, on his quest to spit justice out of his Magnum. A lot of this was simple Baby Boom demographics at work: the massive Boomer generation hadn't yet aged past the point where its meanest members were too gray in the muzzle to rape, murder, rob banks or burn down buildings. The surge in street crime, however, scared the shit out of millions of ordinary people who, by the end of the 70s, often felt that law and order had collapsed or was collapsing and that it was the crooks and not the citizens who owned the streets of America's cities. This surge pushed its own wave of vigilante and cop-vigilante movies into theaters, where audiences could experience some make-believe wish-fulfillment as Bronson or Eastwood mowed down criminals without compunction or remorse and made the world safe again. HOOKER's conception and its success were reflective of the desire Americans had to see crooks get bashed in the teeth. But it was also emblematic of a desire, perhaps even a need, to live (if only for an hour each week) in a simpler world.
The simplicity of the view HOOKER takes on crime and society is incredibly seductive. I work in law enforcement, and if you don't think if I dreamed of smashing a smug little street hood in the face so hard his teeth flew out of his asshole then you're sadly and sorely mistaken. But actions of this type only provide momentary satisfaction: they don't solve anything. And the deeper roots of social problems and crime hardly exist in Hooker's universe, just as they do not exist in the world of The Shadow or any DEATH WISH or DIRTY HARRY film. The drug dealer is inevitably called a "drug pusher" because this view of life demands that your children smoke dope or shoot heroin because they were basically forced to do it, not because they want to. The embezzler in the suit and tie steals because he is greedy, not because he is desperate. The woman beaten by her alcoholic slob husband is purely an innocent victim and never codependant and an enabler. Crime and evil are almost indistinguishable from one another in this morality model, just as the motivation to commit crime is always wickedness, laziness, amorality, lack of discipline, etc., and there is never any other driving force (except wrath, and even that is condemned; governmental sanction is necessary before you can mow down criminals like so many rusty tin cans parked on a fence; then it's just peachy). The idea that laws can be unjust, and that factors other than an evil disposition can motivate illegal acts, scarcely enters the mind of Sergeant Hooker or Rick Husky, the writer who created him. Individuals in office can be bad, but the office itself is never. The deeper and more sinister factors that drive a great deal of the problems any society faces go entirely unmentioned, either because they are too complex, have no recognizable solution, or would point the finger in the wrong direction. Hooker often nosed out corrupt cops or dirty city politicians, but there is never any suggestion that the system itself is corrupt, racist or classist: it is merely presented as having been hijacked by sniveling liberals, paper-pushing bureaucrats and amoral ambulance-chasers. If only we took a fat black marker to some of those pesky amendments and Supreme Court decisions, Los Angeles would look like Mayberry!
Mind you, I no longer occupy the inevitable collegiate position that crime is entirely a function of poverty, racism and inequality and all the rest of that nonsense they drum into everyone's head at university: life in law enforcement beat that out of me with alacrity. There are indeed many crooks who would be crooks even if they were born into extreme wealth, and infinities of poor people who never turn to crime no matter how desperate they become. My point here is merely that a simple view of the world carries with it great comfort. Shades of gray go cheerfully unacknowledged. Life is now heroes and villains. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Us and them. It's why the WW2 narrative is so sacred to Americans: it appeals to our sense of simplicity. After WW2, things got very blurry indeed, and Americans cannot cope with blurriness. They want everything as clear and sharp as a John Wayne movie, and in essence, that is what all five years of T.J. HOOKER amounted to: five years of watching a walking archetype of traditional American values and attitudes punching one-dimensional bad guys through plate-glass windows.
My father used to say that American politics are pendular: they swing from one extreme to the other, touching on the middle along the way but never resting there. The 70s saw a whole slew of what Sgt. Hooker would describe as "bleeding heart" criminal justice reforms which failed to curb the rising tide of crime. Perhaps unfairly, these measures were blamed for a condition which was neither created by them nor in the final analysis curable through them. Nevertheless, there was a perception that "the system" was coddling criminals, and that harsher medicines were required. The success of T.J. HOOKER was in part a reflection of this fact, for he embodied harsh medicine. You would not, in today's virulently anti-police political climate, be able to make a show even remotely similar to T.J. HOOKER now, but unless I miss my guess, the nationwide shortage of cops will soon bring about another swing of the pendulum, and the climate will change once more, and before long the streets of Burbank -- my old stomping ground -- might once again reverberate with the sound of screeching tires.
Ah, Memory Lane. Where else can we wander with such a sense of self-indulgent purpose as upon this charming little road, whose houses are so full of fond memories? There is an especial pleasure in the idea of revisiting the entertainment of yesteryear. I would be lying, however, if I said every stop on this journey yielded the same set of emotions. Some of the showhouses we visit are full of almost painful nostalgia; some contain unexpected surprises; a few still retain their old power to shock or terrify or amuse; still others are disappointing because our memories have betrayed us, and what was magic viewed through the golden haze of childhood is merely silly and cheap and obvious now. But when we come upon the rather stern-looking, barracks-like home of T.J. HOOKER, we feel none of these things. What we experience, mainly, is happiness. We do not experience this happiness because what lies behind the door is good: oh no. We are happy because we know it is bad, but it is entertainingly bad, and yet, if we care to probe a little deeper into what we are seeing, discover it offers us some insight into ourselves and the society in which we once lived -- and may live in again. So let's kick down the door and get this party started.
Way back in 1982, William Shatner made his much-anticipated return to television with an Aaron Spelling-produced melodrama originally and revealingly titled THE PROTECTORS. Shatner was cast in the role of T.J. Hooker, a hardass veteran cop reeling from a painful divorce, now assigned as a partner a cocky, happy-go-lucky young trainee named Vince Romano (Adrian Zmed). The embittered, hard-drinking, all-knowing Hooker tries to educate the naive "Junior" in the ways of the streets while fighting the department's sluggish bureaucracy, epitomized by oafish stickler Captain Dennis Sheridan (Richard Herd), who dislikes Hooker's take-no-prisoners attitude. And in fact Hooker is, and is meant to be, a walking embodiment of the "club-'em-'n-shoot-'em" school of law enforcement popularized by DIRTY HARRY. Hooker is a man who would rather blast a crook with his .357 than arrest him, who doesn't believe in pesky things like Miranda or search warrants, and generally feels society is crumbling at the foundations because of excessive liberalism and overtolerance for evildoers. In the show's pilot episode, he rails against criminals and the laws and lawyers which he believes enable them, and slaps heavy coats of sentimental gloss over the Old Days, when justice was swift and brutal. As an instructor at the Academy, he presents police work as war, and trains his probationary cops as soldiers who must shoot to kill, jeering at all soft-headed, well-intentioned, newfangled ideas and technologies. "I've seen the past," he laments over his bourbon. "And it works."
The PROTECTORS name was quickly scrapped in favor of the eponymous HOOKER title, probably to flatter Shatner's ego, or because of the cold realization that most of the viewers were STAR TREK fans tuning in solely because their captain was now once more available each week, albeit in a different uniform; however, the idea behind the original title -- that the police are all that keeps the ordinary citizen from being robbed, raped and murdered, and that cops are unappreciated and unfairly hobbled by red tape and pettifogging laws that favor the crooks -- remained not close to the show's heart but its actual center for its entire five year run. Over and over again Hooker would pound away at the idea that criminals needed to be scared of the police, at one point even saying that if you killed one bandit, robberies would go down for months afterwards. In another episode, he fumes that a murderer who beat a rap is "laughing at us, and at the system." I italicize this for a reason. Hooker may be frustrated as all get out by the inequities and failings of "the system" but he cannot abide it being mocked. His power, the power to beat the hell out of crooks and gun them down if he sees fit, devolves from it: he is both its beneficiary and its guardian. Like Charles Dickens, whose thesis was essentially that capitalism was not evil but rather that individual capitalists sometimes behaved wickedly, Hooker does not feel "the system" is bad, merely that it is in the wrong hands and using the wrong tactics. There is no deeper social criticism in T.J. HOOKER, just an implication that if "they" (courts, politicians, social workers, journalists, the big public) stopped trying to interfere and gave the cops a free hand, justice would be served and served cold. Shatner himself, a Canadian who is wisely uninterested in American politics, later noted that the show was a big hit with the real-life LAPD cops he encountered during its broadcast run: as over-the-top and melodramatic as it was, it presented "their side of the story" to an anxious and conflicted public caught between touchy-feely 70s ideas of rehabilitation and Reagan-era "law & order" hardassery.
HOOKER's plots tended to be simple to the point of idiocy -- you could describe many in half a sentence -- and therefore the series relied heavily on the repartee and chemistry between Shatner and Zmed, which was very good and livened up unimaginative storylines such as "Hooker must protect a witness," "Hooker must stop a serial killer," "Hooker must hunt down armed robbers." Romano's excessive virility was an ongoing joke, as were Hooker's alimony payments and terrible diet, and both cops' penchant for destroying patrol cars during pursuits; indeed, the series was at its best when it climbed down from off its soapbox and had a little fun at its own expense. Although objectively mediocre and occasionally laugh-out-loud dumb, HOOKER was usually fun and sometimes even a little charming, especially in its first two seasons. By the end of the second, it had expanded its cast to include both Heather Locklear as Stacey Sheridan (another trainee cop) and James Darren as her training officer and partner, Corporal Jim Corrigan. This added some depth to the roster and a surprisingly progressive male-female dynamic, but reduced Romano to one-fourth of an ensemble rather than one half of a partnership, and cooled off the show's strongest asset, the buddy-buddy relationship between the lead and the sidekick. An unrealistic series is always strengthened by humor: it invites the audience to laugh with rather than at the series, and removing some of the humor simply highlighted HOOKER'S scribbled-on-a-napkin plots and lazy writing. This was exacerbated when Adrian Zmed left the show at the end of the fourth season, giving Shatner no one to facetiously banter with as he prowled the streets. The producers -- or maybe it was the network -- compensated by making the stories darker and grittier, which probably improved HOOKER's objective quality, but killed its sense of fun stone dead.
HOOKER was an extremely formulaic show, and one quite at odds with its own concept. The whole raison d'etre of the character was that he'd willingly given up his detective's badge to return to street policing, yet in almost every episode, he acts as a detective, either because “the [actual] detectives are spread too thin right now,” or because the case was “personal” to Hooker. In one scene, later lampooned by THE SIMPSONS, Captain Sheridan tells Hooker he's off a case; Hooker barks, “Wrong – I'm ON the case!” and storms off, leaving the Captain to scowl impotently into the middle distance, as usual. Even as a kid this kind of insubordination insulted my intelligence, but you can't apply logic to a show like T.J. HOOKER, in which gunshot wounds can be shrugged off with gritted teeth and will-power, getting thrown off a car going 40 mph doesn't hurt, and nobody ever seems to have to do any paperwork. Hell, I have never, in my entire life, seen a series in which more cars explode. Literally anything will make a car explode on T.J. HOOKER, and an episode where a car or a truck (or both, if one collided into the other) didn't blow itself to pieces in a holocaust of flame. In one unforgettable scene, a police car catches fire and then explodes so violently it splits in two as it is lifted into the air, bathing the entire street in oily flame...simply because it spun out. I laughed at this in 1983, and I laugh at it now, but I confess if watch an episode of HOOKER and I do don't see car annihilated by explosives, I'm disappointed. Like inexplicable jumps in the DUKES OF HAZZARD, the absurdity was baked into the concept.
Most episodes followed a strict pattern. A crime would be committed, Hooker would be assigned (or assign himself) to the case, and following a predictable series of car chases, foot pursuits, fist fights and shootouts, punctuated by lectures from Hooker to all and sundry and arguments between Hooker and lesser mortals who couldn't see he was right in his hunches, there would be a culminating final fistfight or shoot-out, where the criminal or criminals would either be captured (as was the case early in the series) or killed off (as was the case later). It is interesting to note that while he shot plenty of people, Hooker seldom killed anyone directly: they would swing at him with a knife, overbalance and fall off a roof; or he would shoot them during a gun battle, and then they would stagger and fall off a bridge. This applied to the other characters as well. The subtext here seemed to be that, as The Shadow had warned a couple of generations earlier, "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit:" that criminals end up destroying themselves through their own short-sighted wickedness. Or as Sherlock Holmes put it: "The schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another."
Because the formula was so repetitious, and because as the years wore on Hooker became increasingly all-knowing and invincible, the real pleasure in the show rested entirely in watching Shatner growl insults at hapless hoodlums – “maggot,” “scum” and “dirtbag” were his favorites – and say things like, “Resist arrest...resist arrest, PLEASE!” as some drug dealer or hit man trembled in his sights. Also in the boyish hijinks of Vince Romano and the somehow wholesome sex appeal of Stacey Sheridan, who was dressed in a bikini or hot pants at every possible opportunity. Occasionally the writers dug deeper and produced stories of genuine merit, or tampered with the formula enough to create a feeling of freshness, and there were episodes where the actors got hold of a decent script, seemed to come alive and put real blood, sweat and tears into their performances; but HOOKER remained until its final episode an enormously predictable affair, striking over and over again at the same "law and order" note in which the cops always get their man, and police are well justified in bending the law (and civil rights) to get the scum off the streets. It's worth mentioning that Mark Snow, that brilliant creator of TV themes (THE X-FILES is probably his most famous work), composed for HOOKER the most exuberant, pulse-pounding, bombastic score imaginable for this series, one which seems to encapsulate the view it takes of police and police work. I must say that even while it was on the air, HOOKER was regarded as fully disposable entertainment, a sort of shake 'n bake mix of scenery-chewing and explosions, and to its credit, it seldom pretended to have larger ambitions. Jack Klugman once famously explained his crusade to turn QUINCY, M.E. into a social justice campaign with the remark "it can't all just be screeching tires." Well, by 1987 audiences had grown bored with the screeching tires of HOOKER and it disappeared into what Shatner referred to as "syndication, and then oblivion." When I saw Shatner do his one man show in Los Angeles some time ago, he devoted no words, and only a single slide of an old publicity photo, to the five years of his life he spent portraying the role. HOOKER is not going to be the subject of any fan conventions or reboots. If the name is uttered today, it is generally as a punch line.
So why bother opening this door, you ask? Why not simply pass on by and discuss a better TV show, like MAGNUM, P.I. or BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER? The fact is that despite its shallowness and predictability, HOOKER is culturally quite significant. It presents us not merely with a a whole slideshow of 80s-era thought on the subject of crime and policing, and more than that, with insight as to how we as Americans tend to look at the world.
One does not need to be an expert on criminology to know there was a huge upgrade in crime in the late 1960s which had by no means exhausted itself by the early 80s when Sergeant Hooker first drove through the streets of my old hometown, Burbank, CA, on his quest to spit justice out of his Magnum. A lot of this was simple Baby Boom demographics at work: the massive Boomer generation hadn't yet aged past the point where its meanest members were too gray in the muzzle to rape, murder, rob banks or burn down buildings. The surge in street crime, however, scared the shit out of millions of ordinary people who, by the end of the 70s, often felt that law and order had collapsed or was collapsing and that it was the crooks and not the citizens who owned the streets of America's cities. This surge pushed its own wave of vigilante and cop-vigilante movies into theaters, where audiences could experience some make-believe wish-fulfillment as Bronson or Eastwood mowed down criminals without compunction or remorse and made the world safe again. HOOKER's conception and its success were reflective of the desire Americans had to see crooks get bashed in the teeth. But it was also emblematic of a desire, perhaps even a need, to live (if only for an hour each week) in a simpler world.
The simplicity of the view HOOKER takes on crime and society is incredibly seductive. I work in law enforcement, and if you don't think if I dreamed of smashing a smug little street hood in the face so hard his teeth flew out of his asshole then you're sadly and sorely mistaken. But actions of this type only provide momentary satisfaction: they don't solve anything. And the deeper roots of social problems and crime hardly exist in Hooker's universe, just as they do not exist in the world of The Shadow or any DEATH WISH or DIRTY HARRY film. The drug dealer is inevitably called a "drug pusher" because this view of life demands that your children smoke dope or shoot heroin because they were basically forced to do it, not because they want to. The embezzler in the suit and tie steals because he is greedy, not because he is desperate. The woman beaten by her alcoholic slob husband is purely an innocent victim and never codependant and an enabler. Crime and evil are almost indistinguishable from one another in this morality model, just as the motivation to commit crime is always wickedness, laziness, amorality, lack of discipline, etc., and there is never any other driving force (except wrath, and even that is condemned; governmental sanction is necessary before you can mow down criminals like so many rusty tin cans parked on a fence; then it's just peachy). The idea that laws can be unjust, and that factors other than an evil disposition can motivate illegal acts, scarcely enters the mind of Sergeant Hooker or Rick Husky, the writer who created him. Individuals in office can be bad, but the office itself is never. The deeper and more sinister factors that drive a great deal of the problems any society faces go entirely unmentioned, either because they are too complex, have no recognizable solution, or would point the finger in the wrong direction. Hooker often nosed out corrupt cops or dirty city politicians, but there is never any suggestion that the system itself is corrupt, racist or classist: it is merely presented as having been hijacked by sniveling liberals, paper-pushing bureaucrats and amoral ambulance-chasers. If only we took a fat black marker to some of those pesky amendments and Supreme Court decisions, Los Angeles would look like Mayberry!
Mind you, I no longer occupy the inevitable collegiate position that crime is entirely a function of poverty, racism and inequality and all the rest of that nonsense they drum into everyone's head at university: life in law enforcement beat that out of me with alacrity. There are indeed many crooks who would be crooks even if they were born into extreme wealth, and infinities of poor people who never turn to crime no matter how desperate they become. My point here is merely that a simple view of the world carries with it great comfort. Shades of gray go cheerfully unacknowledged. Life is now heroes and villains. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Us and them. It's why the WW2 narrative is so sacred to Americans: it appeals to our sense of simplicity. After WW2, things got very blurry indeed, and Americans cannot cope with blurriness. They want everything as clear and sharp as a John Wayne movie, and in essence, that is what all five years of T.J. HOOKER amounted to: five years of watching a walking archetype of traditional American values and attitudes punching one-dimensional bad guys through plate-glass windows.
My father used to say that American politics are pendular: they swing from one extreme to the other, touching on the middle along the way but never resting there. The 70s saw a whole slew of what Sgt. Hooker would describe as "bleeding heart" criminal justice reforms which failed to curb the rising tide of crime. Perhaps unfairly, these measures were blamed for a condition which was neither created by them nor in the final analysis curable through them. Nevertheless, there was a perception that "the system" was coddling criminals, and that harsher medicines were required. The success of T.J. HOOKER was in part a reflection of this fact, for he embodied harsh medicine. You would not, in today's virulently anti-police political climate, be able to make a show even remotely similar to T.J. HOOKER now, but unless I miss my guess, the nationwide shortage of cops will soon bring about another swing of the pendulum, and the climate will change once more, and before long the streets of Burbank -- my old stomping ground -- might once again reverberate with the sound of screeching tires.
February 16, 2024
THEMS THE (POINT) BREAKS EDITION
This was never about the money, this was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls, inching along the freeways in their metal coffins, we show them that the human sprit is still alive. -- Bodhi
I have long wanted to release audiobook versions of my entire catalog of novels, novellas, and short stories. As of tonight, this process has finally begun: DEUS EX and THE NUMBERS GAME are now available as audiobooks on Amazon -- the latter even read in an appropriately British accent. Aside from exposing a few grammatical errors and repeated or missing words which somehow survived gauntlets of drafts and editors, I enjoyed the process of putting them into this format, a process which was considerably easier than I was expecting, and far cheaper (by which I mean it cost me nothing) than doing it myself in a studio. As a friend recently explained, studio time cost between $50 - $75 an hour, which was fine for my short stories and novellas, but more problematic for my lovels, especially the lengthier ones.
These thoughts got me thinking about the role of money in life. The actual role, not the obvious one. Perhaps it is merely the somewhat grim or Darwinian view I take of existence, but it seems to me my take on money is different from that of most people. The majority of my relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances view it merely as the means by which things are acquired. I view it in an almost opposite manner. For me, money symbolizes not the keys to a better life but a bar to same: money, as a concept, is an obstacle to the things we most want rather than a facilitator. This is of course merely a variation on the glass half-empty versus half-full argument, but there is more to it than that.
Since the audiobook process is somewhat tedious, or at least time-consuming, I played various "soundscapes" in the background while I sipped my whiskey and made notes and corrections in the virtual studio. One of these soundscapes is called "Point Break," after the classic 1991 movie. It's a combination of atmospheric music inspired by the film and waves lapping a beach. Very beautiful and inspirational. It did, however, spark some festering resentment within me. Back in 2017, when I was at rather a low point in my personal and professional life, I attended a double feature of "Point Break" and "Roadhouse" somewhere down in Santa Monica. At that time I was both struggling with both my health and my happiness, and I cannot tell you how inspired I was by the message of "Point Break," a movie that had meant little to me when I originally saw it as a college student, but everything as a man facing the proverbial crossroads of middle-aged American life.
For those who have never seen it, "Point Break" is something very rare in cinema -- a style-heavy cop-crook action movie which also aspires to say something profound, or at least important, about human existence. While no "Heat" in terms of its acting, writing, or storytelling, it is nonetheless a profound experience if you watch it at the right time in your life, because the message of "Point Break" is not just that cops and crooks are often mirror images of each other, but that there is an ironic paradox buried at the very center of life: that fear of death prevents us from living.
Having spent a half century on this planet, however, I am now of the opinion that it is not fear anywhere near much as money -- lack of money, I mean -- that prevents us from truly living. Because when you really think about it, the world we live in is in essence a tier system. Those without money occupy the lowest tier, and in doing so, are debarred from the things which, to use the movie as an example, are what allow people to suck the sweetest juices out of life.
In "Point Break," the crooks, led by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) rob banks to fund what amounts to an Endless Summer: they travel the world to obtain the best surfing possible, and spend the rest of their time making campfires on the beach, where they drink beer, chase girls, and make pot-fueled observations about life. Their favorite observation, once precisely articulated in the quote above but also continuously implied for the entire film, is that only they truly understand what matters -- excitement, adventure, freedom -- and everyone else is gray, dead, and cowardly: emasculated by the rat race, by morning commutes, by flourescent lights and industrial carpeting and 401Ks they'll never live to spend. Even Johnny (Keanu Reeves), the FBI agent tracking the "Ex Presidents" (as the gang calls themselves) down, is drawn to and largely accepts this philosophy as he learns more and more from his quarry-cum-target, Bodhi. But the gang's supposed enlightenment, and their superiority, their campfire bull sessions and supplies of beer and dope, not to mention their surfboards and supplies of Sex Wax, are nonetheless purchased with cold, hard cash. Rebels they may be, but such is the nature of modern society that they can only rebel if they too can pay the freight. In short, there is a paradox within their philosophy just as there is a paradox within the society they despise: free as they are or think they are, their entire lifestyle still requires a hefty income.
You see, when I lived in Southern California, what struck me harder there than anywhere else I've lived is the fact that, in order to be free as the "Ex-Presidents" were -- I don't mean free to rob banks, mind you, I just mean free to spend all your time surfing and trying to bang beach bunnies by bonfire light -- you have to be rich. Or if not rich, at least plugged in to an upper middle class income, which in California is well into the six figure range. I dearly love Malibu, but living in Malibu is impossible unless you truly have some wealth in your pockets, and even Santa Monica costs a pretty penny for extremely modest accomodations well out of sight of the water. Money stands between the poor, the working class, and most levels of the middle class, and Bodhi's dream of surfing by day and philosophizing by starlight. I presently live in the heart of a large town, and when my car is out of service I am debarred even from something as simple interacting with nature. There are no woods, no forests or hills, safely reachable by foot. For people who are poor or struggling worse than I, this is often a permanent or pervasive condition. It is not merely that they cannot afford a "nice" house or a "nice" car or "nice" things, but that they cannot even go to the beach, or hike a mountain, or swim in a river, or go camping or fishing or any other of a million activities which should cost nothing or next to nothing. Like the Beatles, "Point Break" tells us that the best things in life are free, but then admits, without much if any sense of contradiction, that they are also unobtainable unless you pay for them.
George Orwell once remarked that it gave him pleasure that London was home to half a million birds and not one of them paid a penny in rent. Mel Brooks satirically depicted a society in which people paid for clean air. "The Simpsons," through the character of Mr. Burns, found a way for a rich man to block out the sun because he could not abide the poor getting their light for free. These japes reflect a very real and troubling trend which has been unfolding for centuries, and
one does not have to possess great genius to see that life, in its modern iteration, is a place where our birthrights are stripped from us and then returned, one at a time, as privileges for which we must pony up the dough. Nobody who is not a fool expects something for nothing when the "something" is a product of labor, but nobody who is not a swine finds endless ways to wring sheckels out of people for things they themselves did not create and have no right to keep from others.
It strikes me further that most adrenaline-pumping exercises in modern life, the shit that really makes you feel alive, also require liberal doses of cash. If you want to learn how to fly an aeroplane, how to skydive, how to mountaineer, or cliff-dive, or if you want to ride a Harley, ride horses, moto-cross, ski, snowboard, scuba dive, surf or just ride way up into Canada to see the Northern Lights, you'd better be prepared to melt that plastic, son. In any one of a hundred obvious ways, enjoying ourselves is made further difficult by our status and economic class. A thick green paper barrier separates us not only from living life up to its edge, but sometimes even from observing the edge from a distance. When I was at my poorest, living in a dirty, spider-infested, uninsulated garage apartment in Burbank, I would often long for a day at the beach, but between the price of gas, the crumbling state of my car, the lack of cash in my pocket, and the general malaise of the poor, which often prevents them from enjoying even those aspects of life that are within their grasp, I seldom bothered. The almost unbearable longing for adventure, for life, that films like "Point Break" evoked in me dissolved in the ugly glare of humiliating economic realities. The stark fact is that a great deal of what makes life enjoyable or at least endurable is either unavailble to the ordinary person or arranged in such a way that he can enjoy it only infrequently and at great inconvenience and hardship to himself. A Medieval peasant's life was brutish and hard and full of suffering, but even he could put an onion, bread and cheese into a sack, walk into the woods, and enjoy a picnic by a pond once in awhile, without asking anyone's permission or having to clink a coin into someone's bucket.
I am by no means as poor or as broken, mentally and spiritually, in 2024 as I was in 2017, and I make a point, each year since I moved East, of coming up with plans to drink as much of life's wine from its vine as I can get away with. This year is no different, and in fact is even more ambitious than others, but that ambition is tempered by economic reality -- by the barrier money presents in doing anything truly worthwhile in life. Last year my brief trip to Miami to celebrate winning the Readers Favorite Gold Medal required a month of belt-tightening afterwards, just as my lengthy stay in Quebec province necessitated several months of the same. And I will never forget how quickly my carriage-ride to Hollywood's red carpet back in 2019, when I was invited to the Writers of the Future Awards and took a beautiful actress as my date, turned into a pumpkin after the tux was returned, the limo paid off, and I had to return to my spider-populated shack on Avon Street.
The point I'm trying so clumsily to make here is that the finest things life has to offer are ever-increasingly available to us in the manner of the cable packages of the late 90s: basic, expanded, plus, deluxe. Anything halfway decent has to be paid for in cold, hard cash, and the more decent it is the more cash has to be laid down. To get to the decency one must scale the green wall. It's one thing if we're talking about cars or yachts or condominiums, or some other direct offspring of civilization; it is quite another when we're discussing that which is our actual, human heritage: stars, beaches, northern lights. Why I have to save for months to feel beach sand beneath my bare feet will forever be a mystery to me.
I have long wanted to release audiobook versions of my entire catalog of novels, novellas, and short stories. As of tonight, this process has finally begun: DEUS EX and THE NUMBERS GAME are now available as audiobooks on Amazon -- the latter even read in an appropriately British accent. Aside from exposing a few grammatical errors and repeated or missing words which somehow survived gauntlets of drafts and editors, I enjoyed the process of putting them into this format, a process which was considerably easier than I was expecting, and far cheaper (by which I mean it cost me nothing) than doing it myself in a studio. As a friend recently explained, studio time cost between $50 - $75 an hour, which was fine for my short stories and novellas, but more problematic for my lovels, especially the lengthier ones.
These thoughts got me thinking about the role of money in life. The actual role, not the obvious one. Perhaps it is merely the somewhat grim or Darwinian view I take of existence, but it seems to me my take on money is different from that of most people. The majority of my relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances view it merely as the means by which things are acquired. I view it in an almost opposite manner. For me, money symbolizes not the keys to a better life but a bar to same: money, as a concept, is an obstacle to the things we most want rather than a facilitator. This is of course merely a variation on the glass half-empty versus half-full argument, but there is more to it than that.
Since the audiobook process is somewhat tedious, or at least time-consuming, I played various "soundscapes" in the background while I sipped my whiskey and made notes and corrections in the virtual studio. One of these soundscapes is called "Point Break," after the classic 1991 movie. It's a combination of atmospheric music inspired by the film and waves lapping a beach. Very beautiful and inspirational. It did, however, spark some festering resentment within me. Back in 2017, when I was at rather a low point in my personal and professional life, I attended a double feature of "Point Break" and "Roadhouse" somewhere down in Santa Monica. At that time I was both struggling with both my health and my happiness, and I cannot tell you how inspired I was by the message of "Point Break," a movie that had meant little to me when I originally saw it as a college student, but everything as a man facing the proverbial crossroads of middle-aged American life.
For those who have never seen it, "Point Break" is something very rare in cinema -- a style-heavy cop-crook action movie which also aspires to say something profound, or at least important, about human existence. While no "Heat" in terms of its acting, writing, or storytelling, it is nonetheless a profound experience if you watch it at the right time in your life, because the message of "Point Break" is not just that cops and crooks are often mirror images of each other, but that there is an ironic paradox buried at the very center of life: that fear of death prevents us from living.
Having spent a half century on this planet, however, I am now of the opinion that it is not fear anywhere near much as money -- lack of money, I mean -- that prevents us from truly living. Because when you really think about it, the world we live in is in essence a tier system. Those without money occupy the lowest tier, and in doing so, are debarred from the things which, to use the movie as an example, are what allow people to suck the sweetest juices out of life.
In "Point Break," the crooks, led by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) rob banks to fund what amounts to an Endless Summer: they travel the world to obtain the best surfing possible, and spend the rest of their time making campfires on the beach, where they drink beer, chase girls, and make pot-fueled observations about life. Their favorite observation, once precisely articulated in the quote above but also continuously implied for the entire film, is that only they truly understand what matters -- excitement, adventure, freedom -- and everyone else is gray, dead, and cowardly: emasculated by the rat race, by morning commutes, by flourescent lights and industrial carpeting and 401Ks they'll never live to spend. Even Johnny (Keanu Reeves), the FBI agent tracking the "Ex Presidents" (as the gang calls themselves) down, is drawn to and largely accepts this philosophy as he learns more and more from his quarry-cum-target, Bodhi. But the gang's supposed enlightenment, and their superiority, their campfire bull sessions and supplies of beer and dope, not to mention their surfboards and supplies of Sex Wax, are nonetheless purchased with cold, hard cash. Rebels they may be, but such is the nature of modern society that they can only rebel if they too can pay the freight. In short, there is a paradox within their philosophy just as there is a paradox within the society they despise: free as they are or think they are, their entire lifestyle still requires a hefty income.
You see, when I lived in Southern California, what struck me harder there than anywhere else I've lived is the fact that, in order to be free as the "Ex-Presidents" were -- I don't mean free to rob banks, mind you, I just mean free to spend all your time surfing and trying to bang beach bunnies by bonfire light -- you have to be rich. Or if not rich, at least plugged in to an upper middle class income, which in California is well into the six figure range. I dearly love Malibu, but living in Malibu is impossible unless you truly have some wealth in your pockets, and even Santa Monica costs a pretty penny for extremely modest accomodations well out of sight of the water. Money stands between the poor, the working class, and most levels of the middle class, and Bodhi's dream of surfing by day and philosophizing by starlight. I presently live in the heart of a large town, and when my car is out of service I am debarred even from something as simple interacting with nature. There are no woods, no forests or hills, safely reachable by foot. For people who are poor or struggling worse than I, this is often a permanent or pervasive condition. It is not merely that they cannot afford a "nice" house or a "nice" car or "nice" things, but that they cannot even go to the beach, or hike a mountain, or swim in a river, or go camping or fishing or any other of a million activities which should cost nothing or next to nothing. Like the Beatles, "Point Break" tells us that the best things in life are free, but then admits, without much if any sense of contradiction, that they are also unobtainable unless you pay for them.
George Orwell once remarked that it gave him pleasure that London was home to half a million birds and not one of them paid a penny in rent. Mel Brooks satirically depicted a society in which people paid for clean air. "The Simpsons," through the character of Mr. Burns, found a way for a rich man to block out the sun because he could not abide the poor getting their light for free. These japes reflect a very real and troubling trend which has been unfolding for centuries, and
one does not have to possess great genius to see that life, in its modern iteration, is a place where our birthrights are stripped from us and then returned, one at a time, as privileges for which we must pony up the dough. Nobody who is not a fool expects something for nothing when the "something" is a product of labor, but nobody who is not a swine finds endless ways to wring sheckels out of people for things they themselves did not create and have no right to keep from others.
It strikes me further that most adrenaline-pumping exercises in modern life, the shit that really makes you feel alive, also require liberal doses of cash. If you want to learn how to fly an aeroplane, how to skydive, how to mountaineer, or cliff-dive, or if you want to ride a Harley, ride horses, moto-cross, ski, snowboard, scuba dive, surf or just ride way up into Canada to see the Northern Lights, you'd better be prepared to melt that plastic, son. In any one of a hundred obvious ways, enjoying ourselves is made further difficult by our status and economic class. A thick green paper barrier separates us not only from living life up to its edge, but sometimes even from observing the edge from a distance. When I was at my poorest, living in a dirty, spider-infested, uninsulated garage apartment in Burbank, I would often long for a day at the beach, but between the price of gas, the crumbling state of my car, the lack of cash in my pocket, and the general malaise of the poor, which often prevents them from enjoying even those aspects of life that are within their grasp, I seldom bothered. The almost unbearable longing for adventure, for life, that films like "Point Break" evoked in me dissolved in the ugly glare of humiliating economic realities. The stark fact is that a great deal of what makes life enjoyable or at least endurable is either unavailble to the ordinary person or arranged in such a way that he can enjoy it only infrequently and at great inconvenience and hardship to himself. A Medieval peasant's life was brutish and hard and full of suffering, but even he could put an onion, bread and cheese into a sack, walk into the woods, and enjoy a picnic by a pond once in awhile, without asking anyone's permission or having to clink a coin into someone's bucket.
I am by no means as poor or as broken, mentally and spiritually, in 2024 as I was in 2017, and I make a point, each year since I moved East, of coming up with plans to drink as much of life's wine from its vine as I can get away with. This year is no different, and in fact is even more ambitious than others, but that ambition is tempered by economic reality -- by the barrier money presents in doing anything truly worthwhile in life. Last year my brief trip to Miami to celebrate winning the Readers Favorite Gold Medal required a month of belt-tightening afterwards, just as my lengthy stay in Quebec province necessitated several months of the same. And I will never forget how quickly my carriage-ride to Hollywood's red carpet back in 2019, when I was invited to the Writers of the Future Awards and took a beautiful actress as my date, turned into a pumpkin after the tux was returned, the limo paid off, and I had to return to my spider-populated shack on Avon Street.
The point I'm trying so clumsily to make here is that the finest things life has to offer are ever-increasingly available to us in the manner of the cable packages of the late 90s: basic, expanded, plus, deluxe. Anything halfway decent has to be paid for in cold, hard cash, and the more decent it is the more cash has to be laid down. To get to the decency one must scale the green wall. It's one thing if we're talking about cars or yachts or condominiums, or some other direct offspring of civilization; it is quite another when we're discussing that which is our actual, human heritage: stars, beaches, northern lights. Why I have to save for months to feel beach sand beneath my bare feet will forever be a mystery to me.
February 11, 2024
AS I PLEASE XXII: EXTINCTION & THE SUPER BOWL EDITION
As I write this, the Super Bowl is playing on tens of millions of televisions and mobile devices all over North America. I am not watching. I can't remember the last time I did. There was a time -- before I'd heard the words "Dan Snyder," and after I heard the name "Bill Belichick" -- that I cared to some degree about football, and indeed, for a few years after; but the interest evaporated completely over time, leaving not even nostgalia in its wake. Given that I prone to a concerning degree to sentimentality, nostalgia, sehnsucht, "hiraeth" and so on, this is a remarkable fact, but some things are really not worth missing. Of course, this is subjective -- entirely subjective. That which I miss you may not consider worth missing; that which I write off without a qualm you may mourn very deeply indeed. And this sent my easily-distracted mind into a very deep rabbit hole with many branching corridors. Come with me?
* Today I was watching an episode of Matt Houston, circa 1985, in which the killer works at a clipping service. Hearing the words "clipping service" really gave me a turn, because it belongs to the realm of now-extinct professions, or at any rate professions that have changed out of recognition because of technology. Imagine going through newspapers, cutting out articles and pasting them into books all day long, and then filing the books away, to be bought by people who had need of them -- florists, for example, wanting stacks of upcoming wedding announcements so they could drum up business. I don't have to imagine it because in 1989, I had a part-time job doing just exactly that. But now the very profession is extinct. It's as extinct as the television, telephone repairman, operator or typesetter. It's as extinct as the milkman or the coalman.
* Speaking of the coalman. My parents moved into the house I presently consider "home" in 1977, when I was four or five years old. My mom still lives there today, and in fact I was just there, yesterday. I know every inch of that house, and yet I must have been in my twenties, visiting from college and building a fire, when I noticed a hinged metal slot on one side of the stone hearth. It had been painted over ages before, and was so flush with the bricks that I had never noticed it. I discovered this was the "coal slot" used for shooting coal down into the "coal bin" which, in 1948 when the house had been built, was a standard feature in every home. In the days before oil was used to heat homes, huge coal trucks rumbled all day and night through every neighborhood: coalmen in leather jerkins dragged hundredweights of coal up to each house and made it disappear down chutes and into bins. Consumption was massive: a home might order a half ton a week. Range top stoves in kitchens burned tons of the stuff a year. On the radio, commercials frequently featured advice on how to keep the firebed in the furnace properly stoked. And now all of that is gone. An entire ecosystem gone extinct.
* In the attic of my mom's house is a 1979 edition -- entire -- of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That's something like twenty-seven gilt-edged volumes bound in pebbled white leather. As recently as 2007 I had them in my apartment: not because I needed them or found them particularly useful, but for their sheer aesthetic beauty alone. That, and the fact that within each book still remains a pleasure unknown to anyone born after the Encyclopedia became extinct: you would go to look up a certain thing for, say, a homework assignment, open it to the wrong page, and instantly get lost in whatever map, chart, picture, schematic or article you accidentally discovered. The internet has a very similar effect on people, but it is not the same, because it lacks the tactile feeling of those glossy, gold-edged pages: in particular I remember the fold-out diagrams of the human body, which overlaid in a way that allowed you to see all the systems simultaneously or one system at a time. Beautiful. One day I'll have that set back again.
* In detective programs like Matt Houston, a key plot element is often the pay phone. In fact, in any movie or TV show, even in novels of the period, pay phones are available or not available, work or do not work, as the plot requires; they can even be death traps if the script requires them. And now that I think of it, Superman's favorite changing place of choice was the phone booth, which makes me wonder how he takes care of that business nowadays. But now, this staple of my youth is well and truly exterminated. Once in a great while I'll encounter the scarred, battered, graffiti-covered wreck of a pay phone stand on some forlorn street somewhere; but the actual pay phone booth, with its folding door and phone book secured by a jointed cord, is simply gone, as is the pay phone on the wall of your local tavern or high school. I remember, clear as day, the sound the quarter would make in the slot; and I remember as well the technique we used, in school, of unscrewing the receiver part of the handset, and touching a ring tab or a paper clip to the metal transistor, which would provide us a free phone call. That's gone. But once in a while, I'll stay in a grand old hotel, and see, in the lobby or a hallway, a long-disused luxury booth from the 1930s or so; these are beautiful things to be behold, done up in varnished wood, with a transom light, velvet cushions, the whole nine yards: the only thing missing is the actual phone.
* This in turn reminds me of the huge, ornate shoeshine stand they used to have in Callendar's, one of my favorite watering holes in L.A., on Wilshire Boulevard. In the lobby of this sadly extinct bar-restaurant, where my friend Jimmy the Bartender used to hold court amid a cathedral of polished glasses over the black marble countertop, was a shoeshine stand. I don't think I ever saw a shoeshine boy there: it was a relic of a bygone era. But I am just old enough to remember how, in the Washington D.C. of the early 80s, shoeshine boys plying their trade near the National Press Building where my father used to work. Does anyone get their shoes shined anymore? The last time I formally shined a shoe was probably when I was in the Academy, twenty years ago, and even then my lieutenant was pissed because I used that liquid boot polish you apply through a circular sponge, rather than a tin of polish and a rag -- a method that was outdated before I was even born.
* The record store was once the heart and soul of every mall in America. Today the record store exists only as a kind of nostalgic, faux-snob niche boutique, or in vintage stores where the dust lays so thick you need an allergy shot before you enter; but back in the 80s, and well after that, every mall worth its salt had a goodly-sized record store, and every record store was the certified, approved hangout of kids from the age of 12 - 21. If you wanted an obscure album, there was a great yellow tome, like something Gandalf might own, with thousands of onionskin pages you had to crinkle through as you thumbed endlessly through it, trying to find Shok Paris' Steel and Starlight. When CDs began to overtake LPs in sales, the industry tried to accomodate the shift by selling CDs in ridiculous 12" rectangular packages, which were twice as large as a CD actually required. I was reminded of this today when I opened an old steamer trunk in my living room and found a still-unopened copy of Guns 'n Roses Use Your Illusion which I got as a birthday gift in 1991.
* The mall, too, is dying -- nearly dead, in fact, if the statistics are to be believed. I myself was never sentimental about malls, but I am sentimental about certain stores within the malls. Department stores like Wooward & Lothrop were very satisfying to enter, in part because of the dark, quiet, civilized atmosphere within: if you were 18 or 81, the shopwalkers treated you with grave dignity. I remember buying sunglasses at Woody's when I was 22 or 23 years old and from the servility and formality of the clerk, you'd have thought I was the King of England waiting for someone to polish my scepter.
Does any of this mean anything? Yes and no. Technology is a butcher. Cavalry was wiped out by the machine gun. The pony express was wiped out by the locomotive. The locomotive was largely destroyed by the eighteen wheeler and the highway. Fax machines have been slogging toward extinction since e-mail was invented. My dormitory in college had cigarette machines in the lobby, and U.S. postage stamp machines, too, neither of which I have seen in longer than I can remember (in the latter case, outside the Post Office itself). And when was the last time anyone sent a telegram? Just as saddlers and blacksmiths gave way to auto mechanics, the world I came up in has yielded, is yielding, to another. Sometimes it tugs at me a little; sometimes it does make me a trifle sad. Not everything that is outdated deserved to be consigned to junk shops, and nobody under the age of thirty will ever know or even suspect the pleasure of reading the TV Guide. On the other hand, nobody under forty will ever endure the tedium of dialing an overseas number with a rotary phone, either.
* Today I was watching an episode of Matt Houston, circa 1985, in which the killer works at a clipping service. Hearing the words "clipping service" really gave me a turn, because it belongs to the realm of now-extinct professions, or at any rate professions that have changed out of recognition because of technology. Imagine going through newspapers, cutting out articles and pasting them into books all day long, and then filing the books away, to be bought by people who had need of them -- florists, for example, wanting stacks of upcoming wedding announcements so they could drum up business. I don't have to imagine it because in 1989, I had a part-time job doing just exactly that. But now the very profession is extinct. It's as extinct as the television, telephone repairman, operator or typesetter. It's as extinct as the milkman or the coalman.
* Speaking of the coalman. My parents moved into the house I presently consider "home" in 1977, when I was four or five years old. My mom still lives there today, and in fact I was just there, yesterday. I know every inch of that house, and yet I must have been in my twenties, visiting from college and building a fire, when I noticed a hinged metal slot on one side of the stone hearth. It had been painted over ages before, and was so flush with the bricks that I had never noticed it. I discovered this was the "coal slot" used for shooting coal down into the "coal bin" which, in 1948 when the house had been built, was a standard feature in every home. In the days before oil was used to heat homes, huge coal trucks rumbled all day and night through every neighborhood: coalmen in leather jerkins dragged hundredweights of coal up to each house and made it disappear down chutes and into bins. Consumption was massive: a home might order a half ton a week. Range top stoves in kitchens burned tons of the stuff a year. On the radio, commercials frequently featured advice on how to keep the firebed in the furnace properly stoked. And now all of that is gone. An entire ecosystem gone extinct.
* In the attic of my mom's house is a 1979 edition -- entire -- of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That's something like twenty-seven gilt-edged volumes bound in pebbled white leather. As recently as 2007 I had them in my apartment: not because I needed them or found them particularly useful, but for their sheer aesthetic beauty alone. That, and the fact that within each book still remains a pleasure unknown to anyone born after the Encyclopedia became extinct: you would go to look up a certain thing for, say, a homework assignment, open it to the wrong page, and instantly get lost in whatever map, chart, picture, schematic or article you accidentally discovered. The internet has a very similar effect on people, but it is not the same, because it lacks the tactile feeling of those glossy, gold-edged pages: in particular I remember the fold-out diagrams of the human body, which overlaid in a way that allowed you to see all the systems simultaneously or one system at a time. Beautiful. One day I'll have that set back again.
* In detective programs like Matt Houston, a key plot element is often the pay phone. In fact, in any movie or TV show, even in novels of the period, pay phones are available or not available, work or do not work, as the plot requires; they can even be death traps if the script requires them. And now that I think of it, Superman's favorite changing place of choice was the phone booth, which makes me wonder how he takes care of that business nowadays. But now, this staple of my youth is well and truly exterminated. Once in a great while I'll encounter the scarred, battered, graffiti-covered wreck of a pay phone stand on some forlorn street somewhere; but the actual pay phone booth, with its folding door and phone book secured by a jointed cord, is simply gone, as is the pay phone on the wall of your local tavern or high school. I remember, clear as day, the sound the quarter would make in the slot; and I remember as well the technique we used, in school, of unscrewing the receiver part of the handset, and touching a ring tab or a paper clip to the metal transistor, which would provide us a free phone call. That's gone. But once in a while, I'll stay in a grand old hotel, and see, in the lobby or a hallway, a long-disused luxury booth from the 1930s or so; these are beautiful things to be behold, done up in varnished wood, with a transom light, velvet cushions, the whole nine yards: the only thing missing is the actual phone.
* This in turn reminds me of the huge, ornate shoeshine stand they used to have in Callendar's, one of my favorite watering holes in L.A., on Wilshire Boulevard. In the lobby of this sadly extinct bar-restaurant, where my friend Jimmy the Bartender used to hold court amid a cathedral of polished glasses over the black marble countertop, was a shoeshine stand. I don't think I ever saw a shoeshine boy there: it was a relic of a bygone era. But I am just old enough to remember how, in the Washington D.C. of the early 80s, shoeshine boys plying their trade near the National Press Building where my father used to work. Does anyone get their shoes shined anymore? The last time I formally shined a shoe was probably when I was in the Academy, twenty years ago, and even then my lieutenant was pissed because I used that liquid boot polish you apply through a circular sponge, rather than a tin of polish and a rag -- a method that was outdated before I was even born.
* The record store was once the heart and soul of every mall in America. Today the record store exists only as a kind of nostalgic, faux-snob niche boutique, or in vintage stores where the dust lays so thick you need an allergy shot before you enter; but back in the 80s, and well after that, every mall worth its salt had a goodly-sized record store, and every record store was the certified, approved hangout of kids from the age of 12 - 21. If you wanted an obscure album, there was a great yellow tome, like something Gandalf might own, with thousands of onionskin pages you had to crinkle through as you thumbed endlessly through it, trying to find Shok Paris' Steel and Starlight. When CDs began to overtake LPs in sales, the industry tried to accomodate the shift by selling CDs in ridiculous 12" rectangular packages, which were twice as large as a CD actually required. I was reminded of this today when I opened an old steamer trunk in my living room and found a still-unopened copy of Guns 'n Roses Use Your Illusion which I got as a birthday gift in 1991.
* The mall, too, is dying -- nearly dead, in fact, if the statistics are to be believed. I myself was never sentimental about malls, but I am sentimental about certain stores within the malls. Department stores like Wooward & Lothrop were very satisfying to enter, in part because of the dark, quiet, civilized atmosphere within: if you were 18 or 81, the shopwalkers treated you with grave dignity. I remember buying sunglasses at Woody's when I was 22 or 23 years old and from the servility and formality of the clerk, you'd have thought I was the King of England waiting for someone to polish my scepter.
Does any of this mean anything? Yes and no. Technology is a butcher. Cavalry was wiped out by the machine gun. The pony express was wiped out by the locomotive. The locomotive was largely destroyed by the eighteen wheeler and the highway. Fax machines have been slogging toward extinction since e-mail was invented. My dormitory in college had cigarette machines in the lobby, and U.S. postage stamp machines, too, neither of which I have seen in longer than I can remember (in the latter case, outside the Post Office itself). And when was the last time anyone sent a telegram? Just as saddlers and blacksmiths gave way to auto mechanics, the world I came up in has yielded, is yielding, to another. Sometimes it tugs at me a little; sometimes it does make me a trifle sad. Not everything that is outdated deserved to be consigned to junk shops, and nobody under the age of thirty will ever know or even suspect the pleasure of reading the TV Guide. On the other hand, nobody under forty will ever endure the tedium of dialing an overseas number with a rotary phone, either.
February 7, 2024
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "V" (PART THREE OF THREE)
And now we arrive at the end of the road.
As you may remember, I have been taking an unusual journey down Memory Lane of late -- a journey by installments. It began with a reminiscence of the mini-series "V" (1983); it continued with a further reminiscence of the follow up mini-series "V: The Final Battle" (1984); and now it concludes with a knock on the door of the last cottage on this particular cul-de-sac of the Lane: "V: The Series" (1984-1985), an abortive attempt to turn the universe originally created by Kenneth Johnson into an episodic TV show.
I've no wish to burn a lot of oxygen recapping my previous blogs -- they are readily available on this site -- so I'll keep it brief: The original "V" was a television mini-series that debuted in 1983 to smash ratings. The story revolved around the arrival to Earth of seemingly benevolent, seemingly human aliens ("Visitors") who claimed that their homeworld was in dire need of certain raw materials, and in return for those materials they would supply humanity with all sorts of medical and scientific breakthroughs, and then depart in peace. Naturally, the Visitors weren't telling the truth: they weren't human, their agenda was decidedly nastier than they let on, and they had no intention of leaving...ever. "V" was an allegory about fascism: how it seduces people with false promises, warps the minds of its followers, and, once in power, crushes any resistance without mercy while it pursues its violent and selfish ends. It was also an allegory about resistance to fascism: specifically the way it unites people from all races, creeds and walks of life, but only at the price of turning them into embittered, hardened warriors who have to make all sorts of moral compromises and live in an atmosphere of terror and suspicion. "V" was enormously entertaining and very well done, and led to a follow-up seres, "V: The Final Battle" (1984), in which the Visitors and the Resistance ultimately went head-to-head in a climactic confrontation which left the Earthlings back in control of their own planet -- and the Visitors fleeing into space, evidently defeated. "The Final Battle" was more exiting than the original, with ceaseless action and tremendous brutality, but not quite as elegantly produced or written due to the absence of its creator Kenneth Johnson, who was trying to do more then merely entertain: still, it was satisfying and fun as hell to watch. It is still enjoyable after all these years, and in fact more timely in 2024 than it was forty years ago.
"V: The Series" was an attempt to capitalize on the huge ratings and fan enthusiasm for the two mini-series. It reunited nearly all of the surviving cast and carried the story forward quite literally from the moment "V: The Final Battle" ended. As a fan of the movies, I was slavering with enthusiasm when the series debuted...and like most people, ended up being bitterly disappointed with the result at the time. Even as a boy, I thought it was a cheesy, campy, ill-concieved and clumsily-executed mess that didn't seem to know where it was going, what it was doing, or even why it existed. To quote the review of the St. Louis Times-Dispatch: "How a TV series with so much promise – based on two successful, highly rated science fiction miniseries on NBC in the early 1980s – produced such a silly, loathsome mess is beyond comprehension. NBC tried to make a weekly series out of [the mini-series that created the show] so terribly it must surely rank as one of the worst TV sci-fi experiments ever. The cast becomes dangerously unstable. Michael Ironside quits in the middle of the show's run with no apparent reason. Others are killed without meaning. The special effects are cheapened and the use of stock footage – previously filmed scenes used again and again – is maddening. (At one point, they actually used stock footage from the previous week's episode.)... What was once a pretty decent science fiction saga with good drama, humor and suspense ends up becoming Dynasty with lizard makeup and laser guns."
All of this is true, and "V: The Series" was canceled in 1985. But now, having rewatched the 19 episodes of this first and only season of the TV show (and actually read the unproduced twentieth episode, meant as its season finale) I now view this move with some regrets. My first regret is that the story wasn't told better -- something which was entirely unnecessary even though it was rushed to series without the proper creative and logistical groundwork. My second is that it wasn't concluded: it ends on a cliffhanger. Why do I regret it? That's a complex question. "V: The Series" is bad, indeed at times it is awful, but it is not as bad as I remembered, it is more than occasionally entertaining, and there are quite a few things it does surprisingly well. There are important lessons to be learned from how it came about and why it met its demise, but first, since we've entered this abandoned and musty cottage, let's poke around and look at the furniture -- its premise:
Following the events of "TFB," the Visitors have finally been run off, and Earth is now supposedly unihabitable to them thanks to the creation of the "red dust" -- a bacteria harmless to humans but lethal to lizards -- which was the maguffin by which "The Final Battle" was won. Life has more or less returned to normal, and a year later, with the old Resistance members having gone back to their lives or sought out new ones, the Visitor leader, Diana (Jane Badler) is now on trial for crimes against humanity. It seems like justice is finally going to be done on this loathsome creature, but suddenly she is rescued from the noose by an amoral businessman named Nathan Bates (Lane Smith), who wants Diana to explain captured Visitor technology to his scientists in exchange for her life. Diana agrees, then promptly escapes and makes contact with a new Visitor fleet which has just arrived. The persistent Diana swiftly attempts to reconquer Earth, but is hampered by both the "red dust" virus, which is lethal now only in cold weather areas of Earth,
and by infighting with her co-commander, the sultry Lydia (June Chadwick). She must also contend with the powerful Bates, who controls the surviving supplies of red dust and thus has her at a constant disadvantage, one she works hard to undermine.
Naturally, the re-appearance of the hated Visitors re-unites most of the surviving resistance: Mike Donovan (Marc Singer), Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant), Willie (Robert Englund), Martin (Frank Ashmore), Elias Taylor (Michael Wright), Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), Elizabeth Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), the "Starchild," Elizabeth Maxwell (Jen Cooke), and Robert Maxwell (Michael Durnell), who struggle collectively to defeat the Visitors once more, but are also confronted by a new player -- The Bates Corporation, which takes control of Los Angeles and declares it an "open city" where neither the Resistance nor the Visitors are in control. Bates company, Science Frontiers, is rather an intriguing comment on the almost unexplored area of post-governmental capitalism: pure corporate power without law.
As you can see, the cast alone -- and it's actually much larger than what I listed here -- would have been difficult to wrangle even if the show had possessed first-rate writers and a clear technique for revolving storylines. It did not, and killing off various characters here and there didn't really alleviate the pressure. The "Open City" storyline, which for my Monopoly money was the best thing about the show by half, being an original idea and introducing a third party to the a-deux Resistance-Visitor dynamic, must have failed to ignite audiences, which in the minds of the network meant "drastic changes ahead." Thus, about 8 episodes in, the cast was suddenly cut nearly in half by a mass firing which Robert Englund called "The Coup." The Coup also changed the direction of the show, abandoning the "open city" angle and returning "V" to more of a Visitors-vs-Resistance thing with a sudden and extremely heavy emphasis on soap-opera conflict between characters; also a very cartoonish, silly, cringe-worthy exploration of Visitor culture which fell to the level of farce. This didn't work -- the decision to get rid of the show's most popular character, Michael Ironside's Ham Tyler, must rank as one of the dumber decisions ever made by studio suits -- and when the show was finally canceled, eleven episodes later, it was in the process of setting up yet another and even more drastic identity shift. As I said above, I have read the script for the unproduced season finale, and I can say that Ironside was to make a surprise return, whereupon the whole premise was to change to a kind of Mad Max style "roadshow" in which the surviving heroes would wander a dystopian landscape, each week encountering, one supposes, antagonists of either human or Visitor origin. I don't remember what fictional character once said in lament, "We've come so far from home," but this was very far indeed from Johnson's original, allegorical vision about fascism, and it may be for the best we never got to see it.
I must reiterate that at its worst, "V" sucked badly even by the wobbly standards of the mid-80s. Supposedly it was the most expensive show on TV at the time, but God knows where the money went because the production values, special effects and so forth are often absolutely terrible. On top of this, the continuity is poor, the editing makes use of stock footage way too often, and in general the show has a cheap, low-budget feel, in addition to some very bad writing and way too many damned characters. One of the most annoying tendencies of the series was to have the "Starchild," Elizabeth, a half-reptile, half-human hybrid, serve as a get-out-of-jail-free card who could save any situation with her conveniently vague super-powers that, like KITT in “Knight Rider,” were altered to suit the needs of each week's script. But probably nothing summed up the directionless nature of the show as the fate of Elias, a charismatic character who had featured prominently from the very start of the entire "V" universe. What should have been a heroic, or at least a shocking, death was treated with all the dignity of a dinnertime burp. Elias is casually disintegrated in a scene that is not even shot in close-up: he's actually barely a blip on the screen when he glows out of existence, and the scene has no setup, no resonance. Interestingly enough, in the unproduced final script, the Julie character met the same casual, unlamented fate -- an even greater sin, since she was literally the co-lead of the entire series. This kind of slovenly approach to critical moments made watching "VTS" a challenge even for tweens. It was occasionally fun to watch even in its latter days, but I could never get away from the feeling that a mighty opportunity had been lost.
Such was "V: The Series," a much-panned disappointment which died a sluggish, painful, and anonymous death, abandoned not only by its audience but, in spirit, by its cast, who were rightfully embittered at its mismanagement. And that leaves us to the part where I say, "So where does that leave us? What was this show's legacy, or does it even have one? Can we learn anything from looking back over four decades at this virtually stillborn failure of a TV series?"
There is basically a single answer to all of these questions. Unlike its progenitors, "V" as a TV series in itself has no legacy: it is merely a cautionary tale. But as a cautionary tale it has great value. "V" is a prime example of several cardinal sins:
1. It abandoned its original concept to the fullest degree.
2. It has no clear reason to exist within its own universe.*
3. It vandalizes its own characters.
Let us tackle the last point first. The way characters like Julie and Elias were treated is the absolute halmark of hack writing, a failure to handle characters with consistency or integrity. If one is a successful storyteller, you may know him by this sign: you can predict what his characters will say or do in any given situation with a high degree of accuracy, because they are "real" people with "real" characteristics. Human beings act as variations on a theme, and we call that theme "personality." Fans instantly detect when a character is acting out of character, and a writer's duty in this regard is to know what said characters would, and would not, do or say. Elias is almost unrecognizable when the show debuts, so his death his meaningless; Julie, on the other hand, seems to literally forget she's half in love with Donovan. Nor does she assert the same level of aggressive control over the Resistance she did in the previous series. Writers and producers would do well to remember that fans notice shit like this, and do not like it.
But really, I am diagnosing bruises on a headless corpse, because to speak to point 2, "V" failed much more fundamentally, in that it had no purpose other than to exploit the success of the two far superior mini-series. It was a simple cash grab, and a rushed one at that. "The Final Battle" ended in triumph. The pilot of "The Series" reverses that triumph and puts us collectively back to square one, minus the revelation that the Visitors are really aliens, and do not come in peace. "V: The Series" was clearly rushed to series without a proper Bible or a stack of finished scripts or even treatments for same, and even at its best looks like a hasty improvisation in search of a story. The folks who greenlighted this mess did so to make money, which is no sin, but they did it in such a half-assed, cynical way that they damned any chance of it succeeding almost from the gate. (Though the quality was much better, the same fate befell the original "Battlestar Galactica.") The one original aspect of the show, the intriguing "open city" premise, was scrapped after only eight or nine episodes: after that it was a vacuum of ideas.
The last point is simply that one can only wander so far afield from one's original premise before everyone forgets what the hell they are actually watching or why they are bothering with watching it. Kenny Johnson wanted to warn us, in a clever kind of way, about how fascism comes to power in a democratic society: that was his whole purpose in the original 83 miniseries. The follow-up series, in which he had little if any imput, was more on the level of simple entertainment, a movie about resistance against tyranny, but it stuck close enough to its guns that the difference was only noticeable and not fatal. "The Series" however had almost nothing more to say -- it neither continued the narrative of V1 nor expanded on V2. Its one attempt to do so -- the "open city" idea -- was successful in my eyes, but rapidly abandoned in favor of tawdry soap opera drama which was both distasteful and utterly ludicrous. And before I close this windy missive, I want to address this specially:
When I sit down to write anything, I always have an overriding purpose. My purpose may be to frighten, to titilate, to educate, to amuse, or merely to entertain, but regardless of my specific motive, I have one: there either is something definite I want to say about life or human nature, or a particular way I want to say something so as to achieve an emotional effect; I never write just to write and expect anyone else would want to pay for it...or even read it for free. Storytellers have one purpose which is paramount and overrides all the others, one which can not be abandoned even if all the others are: they must entertain. And the best way to entertain is to know why the hell you started telling the story in the first place. Anything else begins to sound like Grandpa Simpson.
“V” will always stand out to me as a kind of cautionary tale of why a television show, especially one based on TV movies or films, must have a very clear through-line, that is, a theme and a direction which it is following from episode one. It must grasp the mechanics of its own universe and also possess an understanding of how to employ its cast to the fullest effect. And when it hits upon something that works (the Open City) it must stick to that something in the hopes audiences will eventually catch up with it. “V” did none of this, and the best thing I can say about it is that there is, in pockets here and there, just enough of its original magic to be occasionally fun. But you have to poke around pretty thoroughly in those ashes.
As you may remember, I have been taking an unusual journey down Memory Lane of late -- a journey by installments. It began with a reminiscence of the mini-series "V" (1983); it continued with a further reminiscence of the follow up mini-series "V: The Final Battle" (1984); and now it concludes with a knock on the door of the last cottage on this particular cul-de-sac of the Lane: "V: The Series" (1984-1985), an abortive attempt to turn the universe originally created by Kenneth Johnson into an episodic TV show.
I've no wish to burn a lot of oxygen recapping my previous blogs -- they are readily available on this site -- so I'll keep it brief: The original "V" was a television mini-series that debuted in 1983 to smash ratings. The story revolved around the arrival to Earth of seemingly benevolent, seemingly human aliens ("Visitors") who claimed that their homeworld was in dire need of certain raw materials, and in return for those materials they would supply humanity with all sorts of medical and scientific breakthroughs, and then depart in peace. Naturally, the Visitors weren't telling the truth: they weren't human, their agenda was decidedly nastier than they let on, and they had no intention of leaving...ever. "V" was an allegory about fascism: how it seduces people with false promises, warps the minds of its followers, and, once in power, crushes any resistance without mercy while it pursues its violent and selfish ends. It was also an allegory about resistance to fascism: specifically the way it unites people from all races, creeds and walks of life, but only at the price of turning them into embittered, hardened warriors who have to make all sorts of moral compromises and live in an atmosphere of terror and suspicion. "V" was enormously entertaining and very well done, and led to a follow-up seres, "V: The Final Battle" (1984), in which the Visitors and the Resistance ultimately went head-to-head in a climactic confrontation which left the Earthlings back in control of their own planet -- and the Visitors fleeing into space, evidently defeated. "The Final Battle" was more exiting than the original, with ceaseless action and tremendous brutality, but not quite as elegantly produced or written due to the absence of its creator Kenneth Johnson, who was trying to do more then merely entertain: still, it was satisfying and fun as hell to watch. It is still enjoyable after all these years, and in fact more timely in 2024 than it was forty years ago.
"V: The Series" was an attempt to capitalize on the huge ratings and fan enthusiasm for the two mini-series. It reunited nearly all of the surviving cast and carried the story forward quite literally from the moment "V: The Final Battle" ended. As a fan of the movies, I was slavering with enthusiasm when the series debuted...and like most people, ended up being bitterly disappointed with the result at the time. Even as a boy, I thought it was a cheesy, campy, ill-concieved and clumsily-executed mess that didn't seem to know where it was going, what it was doing, or even why it existed. To quote the review of the St. Louis Times-Dispatch: "How a TV series with so much promise – based on two successful, highly rated science fiction miniseries on NBC in the early 1980s – produced such a silly, loathsome mess is beyond comprehension. NBC tried to make a weekly series out of [the mini-series that created the show] so terribly it must surely rank as one of the worst TV sci-fi experiments ever. The cast becomes dangerously unstable. Michael Ironside quits in the middle of the show's run with no apparent reason. Others are killed without meaning. The special effects are cheapened and the use of stock footage – previously filmed scenes used again and again – is maddening. (At one point, they actually used stock footage from the previous week's episode.)... What was once a pretty decent science fiction saga with good drama, humor and suspense ends up becoming Dynasty with lizard makeup and laser guns."
All of this is true, and "V: The Series" was canceled in 1985. But now, having rewatched the 19 episodes of this first and only season of the TV show (and actually read the unproduced twentieth episode, meant as its season finale) I now view this move with some regrets. My first regret is that the story wasn't told better -- something which was entirely unnecessary even though it was rushed to series without the proper creative and logistical groundwork. My second is that it wasn't concluded: it ends on a cliffhanger. Why do I regret it? That's a complex question. "V: The Series" is bad, indeed at times it is awful, but it is not as bad as I remembered, it is more than occasionally entertaining, and there are quite a few things it does surprisingly well. There are important lessons to be learned from how it came about and why it met its demise, but first, since we've entered this abandoned and musty cottage, let's poke around and look at the furniture -- its premise:
Following the events of "TFB," the Visitors have finally been run off, and Earth is now supposedly unihabitable to them thanks to the creation of the "red dust" -- a bacteria harmless to humans but lethal to lizards -- which was the maguffin by which "The Final Battle" was won. Life has more or less returned to normal, and a year later, with the old Resistance members having gone back to their lives or sought out new ones, the Visitor leader, Diana (Jane Badler) is now on trial for crimes against humanity. It seems like justice is finally going to be done on this loathsome creature, but suddenly she is rescued from the noose by an amoral businessman named Nathan Bates (Lane Smith), who wants Diana to explain captured Visitor technology to his scientists in exchange for her life. Diana agrees, then promptly escapes and makes contact with a new Visitor fleet which has just arrived. The persistent Diana swiftly attempts to reconquer Earth, but is hampered by both the "red dust" virus, which is lethal now only in cold weather areas of Earth,
and by infighting with her co-commander, the sultry Lydia (June Chadwick). She must also contend with the powerful Bates, who controls the surviving supplies of red dust and thus has her at a constant disadvantage, one she works hard to undermine.
Naturally, the re-appearance of the hated Visitors re-unites most of the surviving resistance: Mike Donovan (Marc Singer), Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant), Willie (Robert Englund), Martin (Frank Ashmore), Elias Taylor (Michael Wright), Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), Elizabeth Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), the "Starchild," Elizabeth Maxwell (Jen Cooke), and Robert Maxwell (Michael Durnell), who struggle collectively to defeat the Visitors once more, but are also confronted by a new player -- The Bates Corporation, which takes control of Los Angeles and declares it an "open city" where neither the Resistance nor the Visitors are in control. Bates company, Science Frontiers, is rather an intriguing comment on the almost unexplored area of post-governmental capitalism: pure corporate power without law.
As you can see, the cast alone -- and it's actually much larger than what I listed here -- would have been difficult to wrangle even if the show had possessed first-rate writers and a clear technique for revolving storylines. It did not, and killing off various characters here and there didn't really alleviate the pressure. The "Open City" storyline, which for my Monopoly money was the best thing about the show by half, being an original idea and introducing a third party to the a-deux Resistance-Visitor dynamic, must have failed to ignite audiences, which in the minds of the network meant "drastic changes ahead." Thus, about 8 episodes in, the cast was suddenly cut nearly in half by a mass firing which Robert Englund called "The Coup." The Coup also changed the direction of the show, abandoning the "open city" angle and returning "V" to more of a Visitors-vs-Resistance thing with a sudden and extremely heavy emphasis on soap-opera conflict between characters; also a very cartoonish, silly, cringe-worthy exploration of Visitor culture which fell to the level of farce. This didn't work -- the decision to get rid of the show's most popular character, Michael Ironside's Ham Tyler, must rank as one of the dumber decisions ever made by studio suits -- and when the show was finally canceled, eleven episodes later, it was in the process of setting up yet another and even more drastic identity shift. As I said above, I have read the script for the unproduced season finale, and I can say that Ironside was to make a surprise return, whereupon the whole premise was to change to a kind of Mad Max style "roadshow" in which the surviving heroes would wander a dystopian landscape, each week encountering, one supposes, antagonists of either human or Visitor origin. I don't remember what fictional character once said in lament, "We've come so far from home," but this was very far indeed from Johnson's original, allegorical vision about fascism, and it may be for the best we never got to see it.
I must reiterate that at its worst, "V" sucked badly even by the wobbly standards of the mid-80s. Supposedly it was the most expensive show on TV at the time, but God knows where the money went because the production values, special effects and so forth are often absolutely terrible. On top of this, the continuity is poor, the editing makes use of stock footage way too often, and in general the show has a cheap, low-budget feel, in addition to some very bad writing and way too many damned characters. One of the most annoying tendencies of the series was to have the "Starchild," Elizabeth, a half-reptile, half-human hybrid, serve as a get-out-of-jail-free card who could save any situation with her conveniently vague super-powers that, like KITT in “Knight Rider,” were altered to suit the needs of each week's script. But probably nothing summed up the directionless nature of the show as the fate of Elias, a charismatic character who had featured prominently from the very start of the entire "V" universe. What should have been a heroic, or at least a shocking, death was treated with all the dignity of a dinnertime burp. Elias is casually disintegrated in a scene that is not even shot in close-up: he's actually barely a blip on the screen when he glows out of existence, and the scene has no setup, no resonance. Interestingly enough, in the unproduced final script, the Julie character met the same casual, unlamented fate -- an even greater sin, since she was literally the co-lead of the entire series. This kind of slovenly approach to critical moments made watching "VTS" a challenge even for tweens. It was occasionally fun to watch even in its latter days, but I could never get away from the feeling that a mighty opportunity had been lost.
Such was "V: The Series," a much-panned disappointment which died a sluggish, painful, and anonymous death, abandoned not only by its audience but, in spirit, by its cast, who were rightfully embittered at its mismanagement. And that leaves us to the part where I say, "So where does that leave us? What was this show's legacy, or does it even have one? Can we learn anything from looking back over four decades at this virtually stillborn failure of a TV series?"
There is basically a single answer to all of these questions. Unlike its progenitors, "V" as a TV series in itself has no legacy: it is merely a cautionary tale. But as a cautionary tale it has great value. "V" is a prime example of several cardinal sins:
1. It abandoned its original concept to the fullest degree.
2. It has no clear reason to exist within its own universe.*
3. It vandalizes its own characters.
Let us tackle the last point first. The way characters like Julie and Elias were treated is the absolute halmark of hack writing, a failure to handle characters with consistency or integrity. If one is a successful storyteller, you may know him by this sign: you can predict what his characters will say or do in any given situation with a high degree of accuracy, because they are "real" people with "real" characteristics. Human beings act as variations on a theme, and we call that theme "personality." Fans instantly detect when a character is acting out of character, and a writer's duty in this regard is to know what said characters would, and would not, do or say. Elias is almost unrecognizable when the show debuts, so his death his meaningless; Julie, on the other hand, seems to literally forget she's half in love with Donovan. Nor does she assert the same level of aggressive control over the Resistance she did in the previous series. Writers and producers would do well to remember that fans notice shit like this, and do not like it.
But really, I am diagnosing bruises on a headless corpse, because to speak to point 2, "V" failed much more fundamentally, in that it had no purpose other than to exploit the success of the two far superior mini-series. It was a simple cash grab, and a rushed one at that. "The Final Battle" ended in triumph. The pilot of "The Series" reverses that triumph and puts us collectively back to square one, minus the revelation that the Visitors are really aliens, and do not come in peace. "V: The Series" was clearly rushed to series without a proper Bible or a stack of finished scripts or even treatments for same, and even at its best looks like a hasty improvisation in search of a story. The folks who greenlighted this mess did so to make money, which is no sin, but they did it in such a half-assed, cynical way that they damned any chance of it succeeding almost from the gate. (Though the quality was much better, the same fate befell the original "Battlestar Galactica.") The one original aspect of the show, the intriguing "open city" premise, was scrapped after only eight or nine episodes: after that it was a vacuum of ideas.
The last point is simply that one can only wander so far afield from one's original premise before everyone forgets what the hell they are actually watching or why they are bothering with watching it. Kenny Johnson wanted to warn us, in a clever kind of way, about how fascism comes to power in a democratic society: that was his whole purpose in the original 83 miniseries. The follow-up series, in which he had little if any imput, was more on the level of simple entertainment, a movie about resistance against tyranny, but it stuck close enough to its guns that the difference was only noticeable and not fatal. "The Series" however had almost nothing more to say -- it neither continued the narrative of V1 nor expanded on V2. Its one attempt to do so -- the "open city" idea -- was successful in my eyes, but rapidly abandoned in favor of tawdry soap opera drama which was both distasteful and utterly ludicrous. And before I close this windy missive, I want to address this specially:
When I sit down to write anything, I always have an overriding purpose. My purpose may be to frighten, to titilate, to educate, to amuse, or merely to entertain, but regardless of my specific motive, I have one: there either is something definite I want to say about life or human nature, or a particular way I want to say something so as to achieve an emotional effect; I never write just to write and expect anyone else would want to pay for it...or even read it for free. Storytellers have one purpose which is paramount and overrides all the others, one which can not be abandoned even if all the others are: they must entertain. And the best way to entertain is to know why the hell you started telling the story in the first place. Anything else begins to sound like Grandpa Simpson.
“V” will always stand out to me as a kind of cautionary tale of why a television show, especially one based on TV movies or films, must have a very clear through-line, that is, a theme and a direction which it is following from episode one. It must grasp the mechanics of its own universe and also possess an understanding of how to employ its cast to the fullest effect. And when it hits upon something that works (the Open City) it must stick to that something in the hopes audiences will eventually catch up with it. “V” did none of this, and the best thing I can say about it is that there is, in pockets here and there, just enough of its original magic to be occasionally fun. But you have to poke around pretty thoroughly in those ashes.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
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