Magen Cubed's Blog, page 3

The Anti-New Year's Resolution

For some reason, New Years always makes me think of the ocean. Resolutions make me think of messages in bottles, cast out into the waves like a wish. Just hopes whispered to the sea.

This year, I made a very pointed decision not to make resolutions for 2016. I usually don't as a general rule, but this time around I knew it would be in my best interest to eschew the tradition entirely. Resolutions come pre-built with disappointment. Their very nature, being so loaded by expectation and peer pressure, all but assures failure. I don't have it in me to chase after lofty goals and empty promises made to myself, not after the year I had. I'm trying self-preservation on for size right now, after all.

Instead of resolutions, I've decided to take some emotional inventory of where I was in 2015, and decide where I want to be by the end of 2016. These are not big things. They're not particularly exciting things, either. But they are things I want to prioritize for myself, in order to continue getting right with myself. These are my messages to myself for the beginning of 2017, kept on my shelf rather than lost to the sea. Let's see how this goes.

Set My Goals, Not Somebody Else's.

I have to stop worrying about what my father wants. Stop worrying about what strangers want. Stop worrying about the narrative construction of my life. I have to just try to meet my own goals -- be they big or small -- in my own time, at a pace that is healthy and sustainable for me.

Stop Downplaying My Strengths.

I'm a good writer. I'm an intelligent person. I excel in academic settings. I really need to work on being okay with that, rather than hiding from it, or denying it outright.

Be Proud of My Work. Accept My Successes. No Matter How Small.

People respect me. People enjoy my work. People think I'm worthwhile. People think I deserve to be here, and don't judge me nearly as harshly as I judge myself. It would be nice to be able to feel as though that were the case, and not shrink away. I know I need to find a way to feel that my thoughts, my voice, and my work is strong enough to stand on its own, without apology.

Set My Boundaries. Stick to Them.

I have a nasty habit staying involved in friendships long beyond the point of reason. It comes of being isolated as a child, and being so often abandoned by friends as a teenager and young adult. So I cling to those who come under the guise of friendship, even when I'm miserable. Even when my own feelings are being ignored. Even when I'm being dragged around by people who in no way have my best interest in mind. I'm going to try to stick to my guns more often. To set boundaries, and cut that dead weight out of my life.

Be Okay with What I Want.

It's hard for my to do things for myself. Years of being told what I want doesn't matter, or is inconvenient for those around me, has made it difficult to take stock of my own goals. That kind of conditioning doesn't go away overnight, and I know that. I'm just trying to learn how to be okay with the things that I want, even when they conflict with the wants of others. Right now I'm in a place where people are trying to help and support me in my goals; I want to learn to accept their help, and not feel guilty for thinking of myself sometimes.

What are some of your anti-New Year's Resolutions?

These are a few of My Favorite Things: 2015

2015 is almost over. Now is the time when everybody puts together their obligatory Best Of listicles and blog posts, asserting highly debatable and totally subjective opinions on the greatest media produced all year. I suppose I'm going to do the same right now. Not to create some kind of definitive list, but rather for the sake of my own internal record-keeping. There were a lot of things that I enjoyed this year: a lot of stories that piqued my interest, made me laugh, made me cry, or helped me stay sane.

This is by no mean an exhaustive list. Just a small list of some things I loved. Feel free to make one of your own.

Books I Loved ReadingMaggot Moon, by Sally GardenerMonster, by Walter Dean MyersOryx and Crake, by Margaret AtwoodThe Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen ChboskyThe Chocolate War, by Richard CormierMovies I Loved SeeingIt Follows, directed by David Robert MitchellEx Machina, directed by Alex GarlandMad Max: Fury Road, directed by George MillerInside Out, directed by Peter Docter and Ronnie del CarmenThe Final Girls, directed by Todd Strauss-SchulsonStar Wars: The Force Awakens, directed by J.J. AbramsTV Shows I Loved WatchingHannibal, NBCRick and Morty, Adult SwimDaredevil, NetflixMr. Robot, USAHalt and Catch Fire, amcComics I Loved ReadingThe Wicked and the Divine, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvieBitch Planet, Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine de LandroPlutona, Jeff Lemire and Emi LenoxDescender, Jeff Lemire and Dustin NguyenShutter, Joe Keatinge and Leila del DucaStarve, Brian Wood and Danijel ZezeljMidnighter, Steve Orlando and Various ArtistsVirgil, Steve Orlando and J.D. FaithPower Up!, Kate Leth and Matt Cummings8House, Various Writers and Various ArtistsNegative Space, Ryan K. Lindsay and Owen Gieni

The Subtle but Persistent Feeling of Being Out of Place.

That is the definition of Monachopsis: the subtle yet persistent feeling of being out of place.  It's a feeling that I've known very well for the last few years. It's also a feeling that has, for better or worse, motivated a lot of my decisions over the last year.

In 2015, I tried a lot of things I'd never tried before. I did my diligence in efforts of being a Professional Author and tried to secure an agent. I signed a book deal with a hybrid publisher. I started a podcast on comics and pop culture called Comics Squared. I attempted to make the leap into more established comics writing and journalism by writing for ComiConverse for a while. I even wrote a few articles that I was pretty proud of at the time, such as Image Comics and The Female Experience, Starve and America's Relationship with Food, and Why Midnighter is So Important for Queer Fans.

You might say that I did well for myself this year. My podcast had some loyal listeners. I garnered some attention for my critical writing. Comics opened up the doors to a lot of interesting conversations with creators and journalists alike, and I really enjoyed having the opportunity to interact with people in the comics community. Most of all, a lot of people seemed to legitimately enjoy and look forward to what I had to say about comics and media.

But the reality is -- as terrible as it sounds -- that I hated nearly every waking moment of this year. I hated doing the podcast. I hated writing about comics. Not because I hated the work, or that I was being forced to do it, or that pop culture writing was somehow beneath me. In fact, I loved what I was doing. For a long time, I even thought I had some kind of future in it. However, I was unhappy because every minute was fraught with the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.

I had no home in the world I had made for myself, and it was killing me every single day.

I was an unnecessary element in an otherwise fruitful ecosystem. There were writers out there doing vital and meaningful work with their writing. I was puttering around with formalism and half-useful ideas. Other writers were dealing with important issues. I was hung up on aesthetics and allusions. Other writers had a niche. I was constantly terrified that I would be found out as some kind of fraud and excused from the community.

This may not be true. It very likely isn't. That's just my anxiety talking, I'm sure. People have told me for years that criticism is an art in and of itself. I do, in my heart, believe that. But it doesn't change the fact that I felt unwanted, unneeded, and ultimately out of place in that world. So, I quit the podcast. I quit writing about comics, after three years of being known for just that. It was the only way to feel like I wasn't just wasting everyone's time -- including my own.

In my own way, it was the only way I could protect myself against my own grim, insular thinking. It was the only way I could get a bit of peace and quiet.

Sure, very polite and supportive people have offered me space on their websites to return to longform criticism should the desire strike me. I do appreciate it. Deeply and truly. But I don't think I can. I don't think I could, even if I wanted to. The feeling of alienation is just too profound sometimes, even in the face of helpful voices. Perhaps one day, when my decisions aren't motivated by fear, I can enjoy that part of my life again -- but not today.

So, in the spirit of progress, I'm workshopping projects for 2016. At the moment, my podcast co-host Blaine and I are just beginning to assemble a semi-narrative comedy podcast in the style of NPR's RadioLab. Think a thoughtful liberal discussion show, but set in a completely absurdist world where language can literally be turned into a weapon, cannibals are petitioning to be recognized as a legally protected minority group, and Nicki Minaj is running for President of the United States. (Her plans to improve education and the space program are looking really promising, by the way.)

While I've been known for fiction and comics writing for the last few years, I've actually been writing sketch comedy for quite a while now. Without the resources to shoot sketches properly, this part of my life has always been on the back-burner. Blaine and I plan to collaborate with several local comedians, writers, and actors to put the show together. I have no idea when it'll be ready for public consumption, or if anybody will even care, but I'm feeling really good about it. I want to work on things that make me feel good, if nothing else.

2015 may have been the year that I quit, but hopefully 2016 is the year that I begin again.

Drawing to a Finish

The holidays are now well underway. I've turned in all my final papers, given my final presentation, and am now studying for my last two exams for the semester. My latest manuscript have been turned in, and I have another manuscript to work on over the holidays. As it stands right now, The Crashers will be coming to you very soon. This is both exciting and very scary, in equal measures.

Things are now beginning to wind down for me as 2015 draws to a quiet, odd close. I have reading to catch up on, and projects I'd like to finish. The second Crashers book Koreatown will hopefully be in something close to working order by mid-January. In a perfect world, I'd like to have this book out by the end of 2016 or the beginning of 2017, but we'll see. Books come together as they need to, and not a moment before. I'm trying to bear that in mind as much as possible, these days.

I also have a presentation to begin work on over the break, for an academic conference I'll be attending in March. After many months of wrestling with whether to go to graduate school, I'm using this as an opportunity to cut my teeth a bit. It's just a small annual conference, highlighting exceptional undergrad research, but it's a start. My favorite professor, whom I admire a great deal, is going to mentor me through the process. I'm pretty nervous, but also pretty excited, about it.

I'm looking forward to having some quiet for a little while, before the semester starts back up. I want to get back to work. Back to feeling productive. In January, my girlfriend Melissa will be flying in for a visit, which is something to look forward to. More than anything, I'm just trying to slow down and enjoy things as much as I can. And to give myself the space to enjoy them. Life isn't a race, as I've been so often reminded.

For now, I'm doing my best to believe it.

On Making Plans

I don't make plans.

The soft, human urge to look toward the future with expectation in mind was beaten out of me sometime ago. That sounds profoundly melodramatic, I know. Such is the nature of mental illness and emotional abuse. When the voices that surround you make it clear that you don't have a future and you have nothing to look forward to -- because what you want simply doesn't figure into the big picture -- the voices inside you begin to concoct a similar narrative.

Then one day, you find yourself in your late 20s. You were pretty sure you weren't supposed to survive this long, but here you are, anyway. Suddenly, and quite rudely, everybody wants to know the answer to the biggest question of all: "What's the future look like for Magen?"

Of course, the only answer you can muster is a befuddled: "I get to have one of those?"

Oh, I write. I'm in school. I'm working on novels. I'm in therapy. I'm in a long-term, long-distance relationship with my girlfriend of five years. These things sound they're all working toward a future, like a picture on a dart board. They coalesce into some fuzzy Polaroid picture of a plan, foxed around the edges, and maybe a little out of focus. At least I'm pretty sure they do. That's what people tell me when they fondly punch me on the shoulder, like people do to kids in movies, and say, "Aw, you'll be fine. You've got this figured out."

Yeah, I, like, super-duper don't, though. Most of the time I feel like I'm talking with glass in my mouth, and my insides are threatening to spill over onto my outsides. I'm just standing there, holding it all in, because I've gotten really good at that. I'm assured that nobody else has it figured out, either. Somehow that doesn't really make me feel any more put-together, though.

If I allow myself the space to think about the future, I don't quite know what to imagine. I'm so used to drifting from one thing, one job, one day to the next. Doing what I have to in order to survive and forgetting about everything else. What I want, what I need -- those things aren't important, because they were never important to other people.

But when I think about the future -- when I really think about it -- I know I will be writing books. I know I will be in therapy, trying to figure out how to put my insides back in where they belong. I know I will stay in school to continue my education, because I love academia and it's the only thing that makes me feel like my life has a direction. I know I will be with my girlfriend, even if we're still separated by space and financial hardship.

It isn't the answer people want to hear. They want to hear about big plans, big moves, impressive incomes. Living fast, dying beautiful, and leaving an accomplished corpse behind for people to resent. I don't have plans for anything like that. It isn't real, and I don't have time to entertain other people's fantasies.

I just have to allow myself to have this -- to learn that I'm allowed to have it, and to keep it for myself.

Leaving the Scene of the Crime

When people think of "episodes," they like to think of crime scenes. They imagine gory photos from cramped angles, with pills or razors strewn on counter tops. Smashed glass, chalk on the floor, maybe blood. But not too much blood. They wouldn't want to seem vulgar, now would they? This is a touchy subject, after all.

I don't have that same train of thought. "Episodes" make me think of coffins with the lids still off. They make me think of lying there, in the dark, my arms folded over my heart like Count Dracula. Lying there, waiting -- never quite sure when someone will finally come along and nail me inside.

To be frank, about three weeks ago, I popped like a tick. Not literally, of course, but emotionally. I felt my insides on my outsides, leaking out of me like gore. It happened one bright, cool Monday afternoon before Thanksgiving break. I was sitting alone in the cluttered, gray little office in the guts of the campus library, and, quite suddenly, I knew I was about to pop. I could feel my bones and my skin, my arteries and my tendons -- the loose, generalized construction of me, broken down into constituent parts. And I felt terrified. I couldn't breathe. I wanted to burst out of the coffin I found myself in.

So, anyway. To cut a long story short, I found myself pulling a Holden Caulfield. I was very worried about the ducks in the pond at Central Park, and not covering up the real questions I was asking as well as I thought. Nothing dramatic happened. No crime scenes, no pills, no razors. I waited until the work day was over, drove home, and decided I needed to slow down.

There were a lot of reasons for the "episode" in question. They are all rooted in the reality that I had taken on way too much, way too fast. Work, school, writing, therapy -- therapy, most especially, was why I needed to slow down. I was a raw nerve, still unpacking nearly three decades of guilt and self-loathing and fear, all tangled up in words I've had to choke down for the sake of my own survival. There were just too many coffins to contend with, and I needed to breathe.

So I made some decisions. I've been rather quiet on the subject in public, because people keep congratulating me on how well I've been doing. The Holden Caulfield in me kept talking about everything but the obvious, whether out of fear of being perceived as weak or a disappointment. Whatever. Ducks don't get me anywhere, and neither do coffins.

At the end of the day, I resigned from my post at the library, leaving my position a few weeks earlier than intended. I decided not to come back in the spring. I had a feeling I wouldn't be coming back in the spring regardless, since the job just wasn't a good fit for me. It conflicted with my other personal obligations, such as therapy, and kept me away from my studies. The people were all nice enough, but it wasn't a well-organized office. It was quiet, but stressful for all the reasons writing for a newsletter really shouldn't be. The other student workers were just as stressed out as I was, even for as little as we had to do.

That's never a good sign.

I did learn a few things about myself, while I was there. I think that alone made it worth it, in some small way. As weak and raw as leaving made me feel -- like I'd given up without even trying -- I know it makes more sense to focus on my own well-being than a temporary work-study job at the school library. Sometimes allowing yourself the space to say that aloud, and to believe it, is the biggest challenge of all.

So if you need me, I'll be over here -- remembering to breathe.

Life and Other Stories

I realized, with some dismay, that I haven't touched my website in a month. Life, as it happens, reared its ugly head with a vengeance.

For one thing, I've gotten a job at the campus library. I'm a staff writer and copyeditor in the internal marketing department. It's not quite the job I expected when I applied, so that's taken some getting used to. This has been both a good and a bad thing. My Monday through Friday is now spent wandering the weird, lonely guts of the library where students don't usually get to go, drifting from office to office on various odd errands.

The job is very quiet; that's taken some getting used to, as well.

The semester is also beginning to winding down as we march on towards the holiday season. I have stacks of papers to write and stacks of books to read. I have research to do and films to watch. I have A's in all my classes and I intend to keep it that way. On top of all this, I have two Crashers books I'm in the middle of writing and editing, and a third I've been poking at periodically. And a fourth, an unrelated horror title, because I hate free time. I'm writing other things on the side, too. It's a silly endeavor - just for fun, and for a very limited audience - but I'm enjoying it.

These days, however, if I'm not reading, I'm writing. If I'm not writing, I'm editing. It's all beginning to blur.

With so much happening, I find I don't have time for comics anymore. When it dawned on me that I was almost two months behind on nearly all my titles, I thought I would be stressed. It turns out I wasn't. I've already stepped away from comics reviewing and writing, for the sake of my own sanity and scheduling. I'm finding I miss that less and less. I miss podcasting less and less. I miss the constant anxiety and exhaustion less and less.

I do miss the people, though, and the sense of community. It's a bit lonely, but it's far less stressful. As I'm trying to remind myself everyday: if you don't love doing something, then don't do it.

During the weekends, I stay indoors and work on projects. During the weekdays, I live on campus, rushing between work and school. I can't remember the last time I went out with friends. My only outlet is genre television, Amazon Prime, and my increasing reliance on the warm, comforting glow of Tumblr. I'm trying to watch more documentaries, engage with more art films, and read more academic texts. I want to involve myself less in the soul-crushing daily grind of pop culture and focus on my primary interests in art, literature, and philosophy. I'm still considering graduate school.

None of this is exciting. This isn't a sad cry for help, either. 2015 has been a roller coaster of the highest order. Now it seems to be coming together into something resembling the shape of an adult life, which I've never had before. All of this takes some time to get used to.

I have no idea what I'm doing next month, once classes are done and I'm on break from the library between semesters. I want to write some essays, on various topics ranging from art history to pop culture. (I plan for them to be in the same vein as the one I recently did on Hannibal. Okay, spoilers: it may just be another Hannibal essay. I really love Hannibal and I have a lot of feelings.) I want to work on my various books. I want to enjoy my time off.

I just have to get there, and I'll feel much better.

On Managing Expectations

When dealing with an illness, doctors tell you it's all about managing your expectations. Keeping a healthy perspective. I find the same could be said of most things in life.

There's a lot going on in my life right now. School, work, writing, family and publishing; possibilities and opened doors. Some of it is very good; some it, of course, is very bad. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between these two concepts, the good and the bad. They're differentiated by meager degrees of separation, and even that is subjective. What matters are the expectations you're bringing to the table, I think.

I've had dentures for two months now, which has been a rollercoaster in and of itself. I've also been in therapy since September, and it's been a constructive and heartening process so far. After some delays, I'm moving forward with my edits as The Crashers gets ready for publication. I recently got hired part-time as a technical writer at the university library, which is the first proper paid writing gig I've ever had. My new boss is really excited to have me on, and it looks promising so far.

Then I found out that, for all my planning and scheming and hoping, I wouldn't be able to graduate school in the spring. It's a minor setback, at best; a puzzling spring course schedule that won't allow me to take the classes that I need until summer and fall. Even my academic adviser and professors are a bit baffled by the upcoming schedule. I'm sure it would seem like a minor inconvenience to a lot of other people, having to graduate in the fall instead of the spring. To walk the stage in December rather than May. To move into a full-time position a little later than expected - a career, rather than the day-job that threatens to turn their anxiety and chronic pain into a weapon against them - so they can finally support themselves.

But other people aren't in my situation. They're not living with the family that has relentlessly gaslit them their whole lives. They're not surrounded by people who have done and said horrific things, and then hid behind "character building" as a means to sleep soundly at night. They're not economically trapped in a house fraught with tiny cruelties, like knives strewn about the rooms, that must be gently navigated. They're not living every day faced with all the compounding reasons why they're in therapy. "In recovery." "Healing."

Or maybe other people do. Maybe other people don't talk about it. Maybe other people should.

When I have so much to look forward to - like publishing the book, and getting my feet wet at the library - things like this make them hard to recognize. After nearly three decades of being left to drown by people who found my mental illness unsavory, it's often difficult to see anything but darkness. To manage my expectations, and react proactively rather than from a place of fear.

But I'm learning, a little bit every day, to keep my head above water.

Let's Talk About Fleshtrap

October is here, and I'm feeling spooky. As such, my debut horror novel Fleshtrap is on sale for .99 through Halloween. I haven't talked about this book in a long time, for a lot of reasons. I started it in 2010, and it was published in 2013. Since then, a lot of other things have happened to me. I finished two other books, signed on at Booktrope, and am in the middle of getting The Crashers out into the world. I've gone back to school and taken an interest in comics criticism, although I've had more success with the former than the latter, I'd say.  I'm a very different Magen from the one that wrote this book what now feels like eons ago.

And that's a good, albeit very strange, thing.

With Fleshtrap, and its terminally remorseful protagonist Casey Way, this was the first time I'd written anything as brutal, angry, and sad. It's a book about hope and healing, as I've often said, but it's also a book about what it means to be broken. Casey is a broken character, and certainly the most broken I've written to date. He's haunted. He's angry. He's a little too sharp-tongued for his own good. He's oddly charming in his own earnest, well-meaning kind of way, always the first to fall on swords both real and imagined. He's trying very hard to stay alive in a world that doesn't seem to want him in it anymore, if it ever really did.

More than anything, he's his father's son, and that's destroying him a little bit every day.

Thinking on Casey now, on both his story and the season, I thought it might be nice to revisit him. So if you've read the book, and even if you haven't, below are some very Casey things about Casey Way. Even if you haven't read the book, stick around anyway. There might be something useful in here to change your mind.

Casey Way

The Protagonist. Thirty-two. Library cataloger. Daddy's favorite little weapon.

One: The Beginning

O Father, don’t you know?

You have made me into a quiet man.

Casey was born David Casey Way on August 30th 1978, to David and Christine Cohen-Way. He was supposed to be the third in a line of David Ways that had worked at the Berming and Sons Bank since it opened in 1949. Two pounds underweight at birth and smiling from cheek to cheek, Christine had felt that he wasn’t David Way III, insisting her only son be given his own name. His father had agreed and so he was simply Casey instead, after Christine’s great uncle Casey Barton of Charleston, South Carolina. He never went by David. That name was saved for the little brother he would never have.

Christine stayed home with her baby while David carved out a comfortable living as a housing loan officer as his father had been before him, affording them the quaint white house on 6621 Mooreland Street. Casey grew up there, behind manicured shrubs and pristine white shutters, two cars in the long driveway and a white picket fence. Christine kept a garden of flytraps in the backyard, transplanted from her father’s home in Greeneville, to David’s passive dismay. He would wrinkle his nose at them whenever he looked out the backdoor, flytraps a more morbid choice than the roses or daisies found in their neighbors’ yards. Flytraps made Christine happy, just as leaving her marketing position in the city had made her happy when Casey was born, and so David said nothing of the traps.

There were a lot of things they didn’t talk about, but Casey would never about that. Christine went to Heaven when her car was struck by a pick-up one September morning after Casey’s third birthday. After his fourth birthday, David was already courting a Berming and Sons administrative assistant named Alyona Kovol and her six-year-old Mariska. Before his fifth, their families were married together. Things were supposed to get better then. It only got worse.

David loved Mariska more than any of his wives, and came into her room to take photos at night. Alyona said nothing and ran their home like a dollhouse, throwing parties and redesigning the bathrooms, the kitchen, the master bedroom. Casey and Mariska lived like spies in a house of wires, soldiers behind enemy lines. One false move and it was all over. They always spoke about their parents in clinical terms. He and She, Them and They. Not Mom or Dad or Alyona or David. Casey’s father was never talked about, not even in private or when he was at work. It was just a matter of survival, two steps above Morse code, smoke signals or passing messages under doors. Soup cans on strings and sign language. They have no one but each other, nothing but blood pacts and whispers.

When Alyona found the photos, she killed David with a kitchen knife. The police found Casey sitting in the blood while Alyona sat in the corner and screamed about holes. Then Casey had to go away for a little while, and Aunt Cheryl took him and Mariska to live with Uncle Jeff and Cousin Heather, and nobody ever talked about what happened at the house on Mooreland Street.

Two: The Set-Up

Like a shotgun needs

An outcome,

I’m your prostitute

You’re gonna get some.

The last of David’s money paid for college, where Casey went to school for a journalism degree he didn’t care about and Mariska spent more time smoking than studying. Casey fought and drank his way through school. He slept with a lot of men he didn’t really care about (because he didn’t want to sleep alone) and didn’t regret but didn’t bring home for Sunday dinner either. Mariska wandered around the desert experimenting with drugs and lifestyles until she stopped hating her mother. Casey got a job at the campus library because he found out he was good at updating and reorganizing their catalog system. Mariska got a job getting coffee and cleaning up at the campus radio station and ended up being a DJ instead. After school they found real jobs doing these things but never let one another out of their sights.

Casey went through eighteen therapists, trying to figure out why he didn’t sleep at night, and saw his dead father all over town, at bus stops and at the grocery store and in his room. He still fought and drank, and slept with people he didn’t care about, and hated everyone, including his idiot therapists who couldn’t fix him. Until Dr. Jones gave him a card with a number on it, and said Casey should seek out group therapy for rape and incest survivors. Just to observe and see how people can move on after these things, to see that people like his father didn’t always win. Then Casey saw Joel, sitting in a community center gymnasium in a circle of tired, sad-looking people. Joel smiled and said everything would be okay.

Casey wanted to believe him. It was the first time he ever tried. Then everything changed.

Three: Appearance

Never gave a thought to an honorable living,

Always had sense enough to lie

It's getting hard to keep pretending I'm worth your time.

Casey drinks too much coffee and smokes too many cigarettes, and always looks skittish and pale from all the sleep he isn’t getting. His mother’s eyes don’t help that, big and intensely blue like he’s been staring into fluorescent lights. He has his father’s straight nose and strong jaw, full lips that he’s prone to licking when he’s nervous (but Casey doesn’t get nervous, he plays with matches instead), because he’s built like his father but two sizes smaller, two sizes shorter and thinner. Lean muscled, like a runner which he’s always ever been, long fingers, long neck, thin wrists that have seen the snap of handcuffs more than once. (Sometimes for fun, sometimes not, but he’ll never say which.)

He’s always seen in dark clothes, tissue-thin sweaters, t-shirts with cigarette burns in the collars, old jeans and jackets, his favorite pair of red Converse lo-tops. Always has a five o’clock shadow. Always looks just a bit rumpled, wind-swept, slept-on, hair (brown in the summer like his mother, black in the winter like his father, hovering between his parents seasonally) a little long and shaggy. Almost never smiles, but when he does his teeth are straight and he looks careless, maybe even happy. (Joel says he doesn’t smile enough.)

Four: Miscellany

I can’t justify my thoughts,

Draw symbols on carpeted parking lots

Popping pills to stay awake,

But all them pills make me shake.

Casey keeps a garden of Venus flytraps and a portrait of his mother by the patio door. He likes Thai food and Mexican beer and reading. He’s had his nose broken once and his index and middle fingers on his right hand broken three times. His sister Mariska is his best and only true friend. He hates sleeping alone. He’s been arrested twice. He liked to play with matches as a teenager, and once burned down a field. He lost his virginity when he was fifteen and doesn’t remember with whom. Joel is the only person he’s ever dated, ever lived with, ever said “I love you” to.

Love and Abjection: The Curious Parallels Between Hannibal and In the Realm of the Senses

“The concept of ‘obscenity’ is tested when one dares to look at something that he has an unbearable desire to see but has forbidden himself to look at. When one feels that everything that one had wanted to see has been revealed, ‘obscenity’ disappears, the taboo disappears as well, and there is a certain liberation.”

- Nagisa Oshima

Interpretation is a very curious thing, especially when you're talking about pop culture. Pop culture, unlike the guarded world of art, belongs to everyone. This might be why I've spent so much time worrying about pop culture.

Lately I've been working on - completely for fun and of my own free-will - a queer studies retrospective on the history of the Hannibal Lecter book, film, and television franchise. Clearly, I have too much free time on my hands. My thesis is this: "Man, Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter's relationship is really complicated, right?" Well, admittedly my argument is a little more complex than that. Especially given the franchise's profoundly negative track record with puzzling sexual politics and queer-as-sociopath stereotyping, but I'll save that for the essay. I have a lot to say about how we got from infuriating portrayals of gay and transgender people as murderous deviants, to re-contextualizing queer attraction and experience as a compelling love story, the dramatic culmination of which is hauntingly scored by Siouxsie Sioux.

It was quite a ride, I have to say.

From Thomas Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon through Bryan Fuller's contemporary reimagining in the NBC drama Hannibal, I've been doing a lot of research. Furiously taking notes, compiling interview quotes, and scribbling analyses on the queer gaze and knife-as-phallus metaphors when you focus the power of male sexuality on the mouth rather than the phallus itself. (I have a lot of feelings on the Chekhov's gun presented as Will's knife in season three, oh man. My psychoanalytical senses are tingling.) In my many online travels, reading reviews and analyses of the final episode for context, however, something struck me as odd. I noticed a peculiar division in the general consensus of critical interpretation, which, up until this point, I kind of took for granted.

(Spoilers below this paragraph. Also inflammatory opinions. Proceed with caution.)

"When that which one had wanted to see isn’t sufficiently revealed, however, the taboo remains, the feeling of “obscenity” stays, and an even greater “obscenity” comes into being."

- Nagisa Oshima

Here's what we know: After murdering Francis Dolarhyde together in an elegantly choreographed tableau of intimate violence, Hannibal and Will enjoy a tender embrace. The viewers at home are likely searching for tissues and a place to download Love Crime. Hannibal tells Will that this is all he ever wanted for him, and for them. Will tells him that it is, in fact, beautiful. Then Will pushes them over the cliff they stand perched above, plummeting together into the water but never splashing down.

Many fans and critics - such as myself - have interpreted this as a symbol of their final transformation together: as men, as creatures, and as partners. Their leap into the roiling abyss, the looming darkness that Will has been running from for three seasons, is an act of acceptance. Having intimately shared a kill together, Will has finally embraced his true nature as surely as he embraced the complex, all-consuming love he and Hannibal share.

And, as Will describes it, the act in and of itself is beautiful.

Other fans argue - quite passionately, in fact - that this scene is literal. Will has crossed the indivisible line between law and lawlessness, order and chaos, man and animal. He embraces Hannibal in a fleeting moment of abandon, accepting the full totality of his actions and his inability to resist Hannibal's temptation. Knowing that he can't go back to the life he's tried so hard to carve for himself with Molly, and that he can't let Hannibal live, he decides to push them over the edge. His last act is a heroic sacrifice to take both him and Hannibal out of the equation, leaving the world a quieter, safer place in their absence. Jack can finally let them go without feeling compelled to keep saving Will from himself; Alana can finally stop looking over her shoulder, resting easy with Margot and their son.

It's tragic, but meaningful.

This reading is idealistic, romantic, and wholly typical of the western narrative canon. It salvages Will's intrinsic humanity while still reconciling that he and Hannibal can never, will never, let each other go. After all, viewers have wanted to save Will since the very beginning. Anybody who was on Tumblr during the show's first season probably remembers the Save Will Graham fan campaign. Save him from himself. Save him from Hannibal. Save him from imprisonment. Save him from illness. Put him in a blanket and feed him a sandwich, for god's sake. Just look at him.

However, I would argue that Will Graham doesn't need to be saved. He doesn't want to be saved. Moreover, he doesn't deserve it. Beyond the obvious complications of the post-credit dinner party, I say this because I interpret the relationship between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter as a contemporary parallel to Nagisa Oshima's 1976 French-Japanese film, In the Realm of the Senses. The highly controversial and sexually explicit retelling of Sada Abe and Kichizo Ishida's fatalistic real-life love affair seems like a strange connection to draw, but I can think of no more a fitting allusion to make.

The plot, borrowed from Wikipedia, is as follows:

In 1936 Tokyo, Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. The hotel's owner, Kichizo Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji), molests her, and the two begin an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments and various self-indulgences. Ishida leaves his wife to pursue his affair with Sada. Sada becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of Ishida, and Ishida more eager to please her. Their mutual obsession escalates to the point where Ishida finds she is most excited by strangling him during lovemaking, and he is killed in this fashion. Sada then severs his penis, walks around with it inside her for weeks, and writes, "Sada Kichi the two of us forever," in blood on his chest.

While banned in several countries for its numerous scenes of graphic, unsimulated sex between its actors, the film is much more than the sum of its scandalous parts. It is a complex, disturbing look at power dynamics, love, sex, death, and abjection. Not unlike the morbid, co-dependent emotional bond shared by Will and Hannibal, Abe and Ishida's relationship is one that operates outside the preordained boundaries of love and desire. This union doesn't yield the same causalities, but it is as equally shocking and taboo, given its place and time in 1930s Japan.

Abuse and manipulation, be it physical, emotional, or economic, plays an important role in the relationship between Abe and Ishida. First Abe is subject to Ishida's higher gender and social status before her jealousy and appetites fundamentally reshape Ishida. He becomes a submissive, willing partner, abandoning his life for her and their increasingly insular lifestyle. Ishida has no logical reason to comply to Abe's wishes; he has a wife and a business in the real world, beyond the very strange and narrow one he occupies with Abe. He is, and continues to be, compelled by his obsession as the power in their dynamic changes hands over the course of the film in intriguing ways.

The obsessive, destructive sexual relationship between Abe and Ishida pushes them further and further outside the boundaries of acceptable social behavior. Over the course of the film, they reject society, outside relationships, and even all forms of self-care as they become physically and mentally consumed by one another. They are strange and unwanted; other people begin to push Abe and Ishida away into further abjection as the unsustainable nature of their disturbing lifestyle becomes clear. Just as their relationship totally others them from the outside world, Abe's sexuality is increasingly engrossing and morbid. It bends and blurs the line between sex and violence, love and death, until Ishida sacrifices himself to her in a final act of devotion.

But this isn't a story of a man who is consumed by a woman. As tempting as it is to get caught up in the gender politics of the narrative, that's a little too reductive. It's a story of two people who reject the trappings of the human to embrace the animal, the physical, and the sensory. It's a story about retreating to abjection, and turning from a society that no longer recognizes you. 

In one of the film's most famous and haunting scenes, Ishida walks down the street in a daze, weakened by undernourishment and suffering from exhaustion. He's returning to his beloved Abe, and ultimately, entering the terminal stage of their relationship. As he walks, he moves counter to a platoon of soldiers marching down the street past him. The soldiers, representing Japan's imperialistic march toward World War II, are cheered on by children as Ishida shambles toward finality. Ishida is a man without time and place, moving stubbornly against the dominant cultural despite his own self-interest and survival. He is consumed.

In this moment, however, he is ostensibly free. If he so chose, he could run from Abe and return to society. He could save himself from her all-consuming physical desire and eschew their violent sexual transformation. Instead, Ishida returns to Abe, willingly, lovingly, to embrace her.

And it is, in its own way, so very beautiful.

“I think that our only route to freedom and our only route to pleasure can come after we have first recognized that freedom and pleasure are not possible in this world.”

-Nagisa Oshima

I see shades of Kichizo Ishida in Will Graham. I see shades of Sada Abe in Hannibal Lecter. (Let's not get too Freudian and focus on the castration here, guys.) Theirs is a love rooted in the animal and the abject. This is why I believe Will doesn't need to be saved, not by the narrative, by Jack, or by the viewers themselves. He isn't a knight whose armor has been tarnished, a hero in need of redemption. He is a man who faced darkness and chose it, wholly and knowingly, for himself.

Will and Hannibal manipulate, abuse, imprison, dehumanize, uplift, and ultimately redeem one another - if only in each others' eyes. Whether you interpret their relationship as cerebral or sexual, spiritual or romantic, it is a love that positions them against society. It endangers them, opening them up to not only physical imprisonment by larger society, but physical destruction at the hands of one another and finally of Dolarhyde. Just as Ishida is a man outside of his time and place, so too is Will, moving against the social currents that he tried so long to swim with. Hannibal is no more a creature to recoil from than Abe is, representing freedom from the human world through the unflinching acceptance of that which is totally othered.

Ishida looked at the state of Japanese society, and he walked the other way.

Will looked into the abyss, and he jumped.

In the end, someone was waiting to embrace them.