Banal Nightmare Quotes

“Suddenly it was like, Okay, what the fuck now? I went to fucking dinner and here I am again in my stupid little room, guess I’ll sit on the couch and think about my stupid life.”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare

“The pre-approved Gmail responses to your last email were “Oh?” “I don’t know what you mean” and “Okay.” Google suggests I respond with barely disguised hostility to your critique of Jeff Bezos’s space colony. “I don’t know what you mean.” My real response is that if I saw Bezos get shot on the street, I’d stand by and watch him bleed out.”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare

“Pam knew, instinctively, that Petra and Craig hadn’t crossed the line into something physical yet. She knew what would happen if they did, he’d go insane, he’d flood with the trifecta, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and he’d mistake lust for valor and he’d ask Pam to leave. Imagining Craig imagining himself as courageous and strong was embarrassing, but Pam acknowledged that she felt bloated with this, too, every time she was alone with David, the impending trifecta, the seductive doom, and the clearheaded understanding that if David only asked, she would leave Craig and start a new life, but he hadn’t asked, and when she reflected on this, she didn’t know if what she felt was relief or despair.

Sometimes she was disgusted and angry with David. He walked around with a cynical withholding depressive air, a knowing look in his eyes, bedraggled, dark circles, alone, both ugly and enthralling, and there Pam was, clean, fair, innocent, basically married. Wasn’t he supposed to seduce her and manipulate her into breaking her vows? He made himself come off like some dangerous lothario. Sometimes she wanted to go up to him and scream “Get that hankie out of your fucking pocket” like that scene in Cruising.”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare

“Pam described how everyone in the office had felt like this event was both retraumatizing because of the reckoning at work and how much care and concern they had for the students—they were all acutely aware of how dangerous these years were for young women—but also poignant in a solemn way, as if the pain of these things’ being brought to light was a necessary part of everyone’s healing. She said she found the woman’s testimony incredibly moving, and she found the woman herself to be incredibly brave. “I mean, I can’t imagine having to be in a room with someone who had done something like that to you, it’s disgusting, and it’s disgusting to think of him sitting next to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, too, of all people—I mean it all makes me sick, and I’m so angry on her behalf but also so grateful for her testimony and her strength and for what this will do in terms of moving the conversation forward. But, yeah, it was just a hard day overall,” she said, smiling sadly and breathing out in a way that Moddie found slightly theatrical.

Moddie had very much wanted to have a nice time at this dinner, and to look forward, not back, but the way that Pam was speechifying was beginning to get under her skin, was beginning to seem self-satisfied, and was beginning to seem like dangling bait. Moddie had liked it when Craig said she seemed to be holding it together, and she wanted to keep her shit together, but each borrowed and obvious statement from Pam was like a turn of the crank on an emotional vise, until it seemed as if she had no choice but to abandon this fleeting idea of herself as a calm, strong, and proud presence, because hearing Pam describe these as desirable attributes in the abstract—strength, bravery, etc.—made Moddie want to take a hammer to the stupid mental statue Pam was constructing, this sort of benevolent, martyred, middlebrow Venus, and smash it until it was dust.”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare

“Luckily, all of the students thought Moddie’s speech in David’s class had been a joke, a bizarre rant for their amusement structured around useful, practical information about making money as a fine artist. She said a lot of things about “the brotherhood” and about how making art was to manifest a tangible version of the soul, and that not all souls were equal. Tawdry work was the result of a tawdry soul, undeveloped work the result of an undeveloped soul, and even if you used a formula to make your art, hoping to hide behind the thoughts and gestures of the great minds who had come before you, even this laid bare your formulaic soul, your selfish feeble cowardice and fundamental lack of curiosity. Let every man be judged by what he makes real in this world. The man who plants and tends a geranium and remembers the name of his cashier at Kroger is higher in the eye of god than the charlatan who copies Cy Twombly at the coffee shop, charging thousands of dollars and thinking himself a guest at the dinner party of eternity. Woe to he who makes this error, and woe to he who mistakes accolades for artistic clarity.

...

Moddie was finishing an interesting story about having a blackout panic attack while trying to tell some freshman art undergrads about grant applications, but accidentally going on a winding incoherent rant instead.”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare

“I’m teaching early modernist literature, and my students have all of these very bizarre moral reads on the books, which I believe comes from their native narrative intake, which is mostly all of these stupid fucking comic book movies.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy,” said Moddie. “If you didn’t see Wonder Woman, I’m pretty sure you’re a rapist.”

“Well, exactly!” said Peter. “Exactly. Well, film, but probably actually TV, has quite obviously replaced literature as the dominant narrative form. That’s not controversial, it’s just true. So now people are learning how to create narrative identity out of their own experiences using this model we see in film where good triumphs over evil. We see ourselves in the characters as good, and we internalize that to mean that we are good heroes and anything that upsets us or gets in the way of our heroic and constant ascent is evil. We don’t understand anything about the dark parts of our own nature. All of those parts are repressed, so of course, when we see those parts of ourselves expressed in another person, we attack. We vanquish the evil in ourselves by exerting control over others, through shaming, shunning, accusation, boycott. And this is the cultural norm right now, for some obvious and relatable reasons.”

“Sure.”

“In criticizing oversimplification and scapegoating, I’m not trying to oversimplify and create a new scapegoat. Some people and some actions should be condemned. Some things are objectively bad. But it’s gone too far, and when I see the Marvel Universe mind confronting the complexity of James—it’s wild. They get angry. So, I wanted to try to trace this narrative lineage back from Wonder Woman, for example, through Syd Field’s screenwriting books, Joseph Campbell—who was a Republican who fucked his students, if the author’s identity is important to you,” said Peter, raising and shaking his finger, “back in time to Freytag’s Pyramid, Debit and Credit, and this whole idea of the objectively perfect narrative form or structure, and how this entire notion, which has created the ‘new paradigm,’ ” Peter made a face, “of storytelling, is based on an intense philosophy of racial purity, is essentially propaganda, and is incredibly spiritually limiting, and the best thing we could do would be to become aware of exactly what it is we are consuming before we let it dictate our inner moral and aesthetic compasses.”

Peter was very excited.

“So, you wanted to do a lecture about how all of your students are fascists but don’t know it?” asked Moddie.

Peter shrugged. “I was high.”

“How did you imagine it would go?” asked Moddie.

“Dead Poets Society.”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare

“For example, is it an actual, inherent moral flaw not to work and ‘earn’ constantly, or is it cultural grooming for the masses that we feel this way?” said Moddie.

Pam nodded and tried to estimate how long this might take.

“I was in Barcelona once,” she continued, in a way that wasn’t looking so good to Pam, time-wise, “at the National Museum, and I saw room after room after room of medieval Jesus statues, and I was really struck by the repetition of it, and they started to seem like mass-produced government objects, and I imagined them placed strategically around town in order to remind the peasants that their suffering and their poverty were actually really great and that they should keep at it, because it made them holy. So, I’m sort of idly thinking about the cleverness of greed—and how the elite use their intellect to misdirect the masses from their swindles. I have a healthy anger toward billionaires, but do you think that an open disgust for privilege, which seems to be circulating on Facebook and elsewhere, is a kind of misdirection, and that maybe Zuckerberg and co. are algorithmically encouraging us to avoid the taint of leisure and to take pride in our slavish work schedules, and that there’s not something ironic and almost amusing about that?”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare

“I was in Barcelona once,” she continued, in a way that wasn’t looking so good to Pam, time-wise, “at the National Museum, and I saw room after room after room of medieval Jesus statues, and I was really struck by the repetition of it, and they started to seem like mass-produced government objects, and I imagined them placed strategically around town in order to remind the peasants that their suffering and their poverty were actually really great and that they should keep at it, because it made them holy. So, I’m sort of idly thinking about the cleverness of greed—and how the elite use their intellect to misdirect the masses from their swindles. I have a healthy anger toward billionaires, but do you think that an open disgust for privilege, which seems to be circulating on Facebook and elsewhere, is a kind of misdirection, and that maybe Zuckerberg and co. are algorithmically encouraging us to avoid the taint of leisure and to take pride in our slavish work schedules, and that there’s not something ironic and almost amusing about that?”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare

“Later, eating dinner with Bobby, cutlery resonating in the open-concept living and dining area like a tolling bell, Kimberly continued to express her position on people like Moddie.

“I hate these pretentious snobs going around telling me what to watch and what to read and what to think, honestly it makes me feel fucking attacked, and even if it’s women doing it, maybe even especially then actually, it is deeply deeply sexist to police people in this way, especially if you’re policing a woman. Honestly, no woman actually likes to read these dense, stupid, complicated books, and none of them actually like to watch foreign films, they’re just doing it because they think that’s what a certain type of guy wants them to do. And I like television. There’s nothing wrong with my liking television. I think everybody knows we’re in a television renaissance, nobody was looking at cave paintings for entertainment after the printing press was invented, and anyway I think everybody knows the most exciting writing is happening on Twitter, and I think everybody knows that the best works are those that are completely accessible and maybe working on multiple levels at once, and honestly to say otherwise is to reinforce a kind of classist rhetoric that is actually responsible for a lot of fucking poverty and actual violence against actual bodies, and if we want to dismantle the fucking patriarchy, we need to start by dismantling culture. And I’m just honestly done hearing shit from people who want to look down on me just because I prefer nonfiction that teaches me something, and just because I prefer TV over nonsense and because I prefer a novel with a fucking likable, relatable protagonist and an actual fucking plot that I can follow.”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare