Avengers and Chronicle: Disorganized Musings and Origin Stories

Tags

Avengers, Chronicle, Joe Hill, Joss Whedon, pornography, The Hulk

Origin Stories: Marvel’s The Avengers and Chronicle:

Near the beginning of Boogie Nights, right before Dirk Diggler’s first scene as a porn star, Burt Reynolds, the director, turns to William H. Macy and asks, basically, what the scene-by-scene breakdown of his current film is.  William H. Macy’s response is something like this: “Karen and Frank get it on, then Molly and Frank get it on.  Karen walks in on Molly and Frank and all three get it on.  Mike and Amber get it on, the Amber and Dirk get it on, the Dirk and Molly get it on…” and on and on.

The joke, of course, is that William H. Macy is recounting the plot of every single pornographic film ever made.  He is also, unbeknownst to him, giving a pretty good summary of The Avengers.  George Carlin made the point in Class Clown that if progressive parents would rather see two people making love than killing each other on film, then he should be able to replace the word “kill” with the word “fuck” and have everything remain copasetic (“Alright Sheriff, we’re gonna fuck you now.  But we’re gonna fuck you slow…”).  The Avengers turns that idea on its head, by basically making a porn film for families to watch together.

David Foster Wallace has already made the point that the gradually escalating violence, mayhem, and effects of most Hollywood blockbusters runs parallel to the way the intensity, creativity and population density builds in the sexual gymnastics of long-form pornographic films (Vanilla-sex coupling turns to flexible threesomes turns to Olympic displays of gangbangery).  It’s not a new point, nor a very original one.  However, I’ve never seen the adult-film structure so rigidly adhered to by a mainstream Hollywood film.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect Joss Whedon of some kind of metafictional prank.

The movie begins with a brief and entirely incomprehensible explanation of the Tesseract, which Whedon wisely leaves mysterious and confusing and ultimately no more important in and of itself than the weird powder spilling out of the bottles in Claude Rains’s basement in Hitchcock’s Notorious.  We have a Macguffin, in other words, and an excuse to get the party invitation s in the mail.

And then, this is basically the plot: Black Widow fights henchmen, Black Widow stares down The Hulk, Thor fights Loki, Thor fights Iron Man, Thor fights Captain America, Captain America fights Iron Man, Black Widow fights The Hulk, Thor fights The Hulk, Black Widow fights Hawkeye, and then they team up for an interstellar, intergalactic gangbang where everybody fights everybody and they destroy New York City.

I’m sure I’ll be called to task for my summary, not because the central thesis is wrong, but because some schmo will correct the order of the list above, because details are important, and the Tesseract is important, and how could I call one of the most important fictional energy sources in fictional history a MacGuffin (I teach high school students, and though I have not let them know my thoughts on  my “Avengers as pornography for the whole family” idea, they are quick to point out anything I get even slightly wrong in their geek-iverse.  These are the same young men and women who cannot successfully staple two sheets of paper together, but I’m an idiot because “Iron Man fought Captain America BEFORE Thor did!!??!”)?

It’s a strange conundrum: Whedon borrowed a extremely lowbrow trope to make a middlebrow movie, and it probably has significance, and if I was smarter I could probably equate it with some hokum about Jungian thoughts concerning the sacred and the profane or perhaps the idea that the establishment, when confronted by an aberration, has no choice but to circle the wagons and reject it outright (the original Norse myths tied Loki to the bottom of the world; the coyote in Hopi fables was killed repeatedly, Warner Bros. style; the entire career of Bill Pullman was thwarted even though he had, according to Greil Marcus, one of the most amazing faces in film) or envelope it, celebrate it, and make it lose its original, disruptive power (The Monkey in Buddhist mythology, Edgar Allen Poe, Bob Dylan, Keanu Reeves), but I’m going to let it slide and talk about the film itself.

The truth is that the film is important mainly because the studio allowed Whedon—a smart, untested, frequent failure—the chance to wrote and direct what some consider to be one of the more important projects to come about in recent memory.  It’s not important-important.  It’s not Raging Bull, which ultimately legitimized 70’s film culture.  It’s not The Piano, which kicked open an only-unlocked door for female filmmakers.  It’s not Brokeback Mountain, perhaps the most socially-relevant film of the past fifteen years.  It will not change lives, at least not those in the Cineplex, but it is important in that a relatively untested writer-director was given the keys to the hottest car in the lot, and he won the Daytona 500 with it.

Whedon is a god to many, but consider: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a critic’s darling with a cult following.  Firefly was cancelled midseason and the leftover episodes burned through like a s’more.  Dollhouse was never even a thing, even to people who really liked Joss Whedon.  Dr. Horrible was on the interwebs.  I haven’t even seen Serenity, and I liked Firefly.  They let him take Iron Man (two films, billions of dollars), Thor (franchise-in-the-making), The Incredible Hulk (two films, both successful, if uneven, and of which we’ll speak to in a minute), Captain America (another hit, like Thor, from last summer, and gee-whiz enjoyable) and build something impossible: the ultimate geek-out.

Then, he did.

Finally, a couple of notes on The Hulk, who is the highlight of the film, mainly due to Mark Ruffalo’s performance as Bruce Banner (and The Hulk, if we are to believe that he did his own motion-capture for the film).  Ruffalo has been one the most reliably excellent actors of the past decade, as at home in contemporary fare as he is in period pieces (notice his swagger in Shutter Island—Leo DiCaprio looks like he’s playing dress-up; Ruffalo looks right at home.  Also consider his work in Michael Mann’s Collateral).  Here he nails the central tragedy and comedy of what is, to my mind, the best comic book hero ever created.  He underplays, but never loses sight of someone trying desperately to reamin in control.  He’s also probably the only actor in the film with the exception of Samuel L. Jackson (maybe Jeremy Renner, who’s given very little to do…) fast and funny enough to go toe-to-toe with Robert Downey Jr. When he finally cuts lose, it approaches an emotional triumph the genre rarely sees.  He’s given a purpose, a chance to embrace and not run from his id, which the other Hulk films failed to employ (the Norton Hulk was spectacle, the Ang Lee was Greek Tragedy.  Both were humorless and dead).  Think about it, this is probably the only super hero whose ultimate power can and consistently does make the situation worse rather than better.  So the power lies not in the “SMASH” but in the ability to prevent it, except when it’s time.  It’s both the most ludicrous and most emotionally honest conundrum facing a contemporary superhero, and here it is just awesome.  He also tosses Loki around like he’s snapping a towel, which is the highlight f the film for me.

You could argue, that The Hulk, in essence, is the money shot, a fitting end to a superhero epic that is basically fetish porn.

If The Avengers is pornography, then Chronicle is the wildly masturbating teen on the other end of the streaming video.  This is a world that has seen The Avengers, and Spiderman, and Batman, then exited the theatre to take on the shit-sandwich of their lives, hoping beyond hope there was something they could do to get even.  Its setup is simple enough to be a fable (three teens gain telekinetic powers and lose their shit).  It is Spiderman for the YouTube generation, and it is masterfully done and hopefully a promise of things to come from the actors and creators behind it.  This set-up has been done before (Zapped! With Scott Baio comes to mind; so does Carrie, of course) and it has many of the same fears about male impotency, wish-fulfillment, and the malfunctioning, treasonous body that everyone is saddled with in high school.  It’s different in that its world is that of a generation completely convinced that if they aren’t recording everything they do, all the time, they somehow don’t exist.  The main character and eventual big bad even figures out how to manipulate the camera to achieve crane and tracking shots to document his rapidly developing powers.  The movie’s sick thrill is how it takes a ridiculous albeit common conceit (what if we were superheroes) and plays it out in such a realistic, psychologically fraught world.  If superpowers did exist, they would not just land in the laps of the truly selfless and good.  It would affect those with definite scores to settle.  There’s a Joe Hill story that has a similar thrust, about a boy who learns to fly and uses the power to take his lousy ex-girlfriend into the clouds, then drop her to her death.  It’s a good thing we don’t have these powers, I guess.  We are a cruel and unjust people, and the world is unfair enough.  If the lucky were to be even more powerful, that would be bad enough.  What if the people we’ve held down for so long developed the wherewithal to strike back in superhuman ways?  A complicated theme done with verve and panache.

Mad Men: It’s only a Dream…Really?…It’s only a Dream?

Tags

Daniel Mendelsohn, Hallucinations, Mad Men, Melodrama

Mad Men: Mystery Date (Season 5, Episode 4)

Okay, let’s talk about this.  I was out of town and a little late getting to the most recent episode.  I purposely avoided the blogs, and I’m glad I did, because I cannot imagine that they were kind.  It’s entirely possible that this episode will be spoken of, by those of a more alarmist bent, as the harbinger of end times for this series.  Let’s begin by pointing out some of the more egregious missteps:

1. I’ll allow that this season has had a lighter, more madcap tone—“Zou Bizou Bizou”, Harry’s White Castle splurge, etc.–but forcing Roger Sterling to creep behind Pete in the hallway, like some stooge in a junior high production of Tartouffe, was pretty painful to watch.  Mad Men has never been a farce, and it came very close to Three’s Company/Scooby Doo territory here.  In addition, are we to believe that Roger Sterling has become such a worthless sot that he would forget to put together an entire presentation for the only account he’s even marginally responsible for?  Wasn’t he bird-dogging Pete’s accounts just days before?  Which leads us to…

2. Peggy’s Blackmail.  Does Peggy do this?  To Roger?  Has he fallen so far?  Would she overstep so egregiously?  Apparently he has and she does.  Of course, I would to if management was so lax as to…

3. Let the new guy run the presentation for the panty-hose account.  What has this guy done to show Don Draper that he isn’t a loose cannon?  He has done nothing to demonstrate that he isn’t a mouthy, untrustworthy–albeit talented–flake.  Do you give that guy the main speaking role when you’re trying to nail down an important client?  And Don basically lets it slide.  If this is the brand new Don we’ve seen the past few episodes, I’m done, because one of the main pleasures of this show is watching Don Draper emotionally destroy people.  Of course Dan wasn’t himself.  He was sick, and having…

4. Hallucinations.  Again: he was hallucinating.  Oh my Holy Jehovah, no.  No.

I’m going to let the Joan subplot slide, because I thought it was handled pretty well and any way they can get Joan back to work and get her husband out of the picture is fine with me.  Let’s forget the fact that the guy was a rapist and a Class-A d-bag.  He’s also boring as a dog’s ass and provides nothing for Joan to bang up against.  He’s too dumb to do anything but hurt.  Good riddance.  Look out for land mines.

Also, the pieces that dealt with the Chicago murders and Sally were deeply creepy, if a little heavy-handed.  The shot of Sally in a deep, Seconal-induced sleep is a disturbingly framed masterpiece, especially since Don’s—ahem—hallucination mirrored her position.  Her step-grandmother is a monster.  Sally’s ordeal has become something that would make Dickens vomit in his mouth.  Don’s a good dad, if being a good dad involves being present and nice when the circumstances demand it, and the less we say about Betty the better.  Sally’s about three years away from a stripper’s pole.

Look, we demand that Mad Men maintain a level of excellence that may well be unattainable, and truth be told, it has never shied away from the soapier aspects of the format.  In a piece written last year, Daniel Mendelsohn, whom I deeply respect and admire, took the series to task for its lack of Drama (read: classical, traditional, Greek) in favor of Melodrama (convenient, manipulative, Common), and I bridled at the criticism, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s wrongheaded.  Mad Men IS melodrama, and commonly employs tropes that are shopworn and, even, hackneyed.  This is the show that has given us hidden pregnancies, rampant infidelity and convenient misunderstandings.  The central mystery of the show, that “Don Draper” is an assumed identity, and Dick Whitman is always on the run from an unfortunate past, is pretty cheap, and when you strip off the silky veneer, the fine performances, and the metaphorical hullabaloo about American entitlement, re-invention, substance vs. surface, and the plastic bombast of the lovingly recreated period at which take place, the boards and nails that make up the frame are that of a dime-store novel, far more James M. Cain that F. Scott Fitzgerald.

And I think that’s intentional, and instructive.  The trick has always been to make a TV dinner taste like filet mignon, or, more appropriately, to make Falcon Crest look like, well, Mad Men.  Isn’t that what the men of Sterling, Cooper Draper, Price are supposed to do?

And yet…hallucinations?  As a way to show the internal struggle of a Don Draper disposed for the first time in decades to care about what he has to lose?  Look, I like that Don’s growing.  Has anyone noticed that he hasn’t had a drink so far this season (I could be wrong.  He’s certainly cut back.)?  My wife believes that the woman in the “dream” is someone Don’s fucked since he’s been married to Megan, but I don’t think so.  I think he’s been faithful.  I also think that he cannot, by his nature, remain so, and that the struggle will kill him.

And that’s where the hope lies.  The idea that Don Draper will be done in by his best intentions is very interesting, and in fact Dramatic, as opposed to Melodramatic.  If we, as an audience, have to endure an episode that feels more like Dallas than the Sopranos to get there, it will be well worth it.

Maybe it’s me.  I didn’t like the dream-sequence shit in The Sopranos either.  It seems too convenient, too Freudian, to manipulative.  It lets the seams show.  It pokes through the silky veneer and shows the board and nails underneath, which is simply unacceptable.  Matthew Weiner wrote for The Sopranos too, so it’s understandable that this would be a trope he’s comfortable with, and I will go so far as to say that the direction of those scenes was off in an interesting way.  It felt wrong, without looking obviously wrong, even when he was strangling her and tucking her under the bed (another nice touch, what with the serial-killer story that haunted the entire episode).  Altogether the episode was an audacious curveball, and I admire the chances it took even though I fear the episode, as a whole, was unsuccessful and at times embarrassing.

One more thing: wouldn’t it be great if Dawn stole the money from Peggy’s purse?  If the show took the very obvious “white-guilt-clutch-the-purse-lock-the-car-doors-when-black-people-are-about” bit that has been in every show that concerns white and black people since television was invented and turns it on its head?  What if Dawn is a thief?  What if she’s more than “the black girl in the office”?  What if she’s an asshole?  Like a real person?  Everyone else in the office is an asshole.  Why should she be any different?  Not to mention it opens all manner of complications at SCDP.  Would Peggy confront her?  It’s a lot of money.  $400 in 1966 is like, let me do a little math here, a bajillion dollars today.  Would Peggy have to admit where she got the bajillion dollars?  That puts Roger, who has become the King Midas of shit recently, in the crosshairs again.  Lots of possibilities.

Mad Men

Tags

Mad Men, Richard Yates, V.S. Pritchett, William Trevor

In the seventeen months between Mad Men’s 4th and 5th seasons, I have all but given up smoking and drinking and lost sixty-five pounds.  My daughter has played two seasons of softball, my other daughter has learned to read, and my son has learned to shit and piss in the toilet rather than his pants.  My wife has damn-near completed an ENTIRE GRADUATE DEGREE.

So bring it Mad Men, you glorious fuckers!

At this point, I think most people have made up their minds whether or not they want to watch this show.  By season five, you’re on board or your not.  At least that’s how it used to be.  With streaming and DVD, you could conceivably catch up in two weeks if you wanted to, and were unemployed, and a month easy even if you are a busy bee.  I say go for it.  What else is there to do in the spring?

Here are five observations from the recent two-hour premiere:

1. I love Megan, Don’s new wife.  Didn’t want to, but I see how necessary she is now. If this season is about change and the advent of outsiders (read: African-Americans and civil rights) then she provides the perfect gateway.  She reminds us, in an artful way, that we are watching people who are not very nice and deeply flawed.  You realize that you, a a watcher, have become an insider too.

2. Joan and her mom are so fucking mean to each other.  It’s awesome.

3. The subplot involving Lane Price and the wallet in hour two was masterful, basically a William Trevor or V.S. Pritchett story squeezed into ten or fifteen minutes of airtime.

4. There was a looseness and friskiness in this premiere that was welcome.  At times, the show ratchets up the tight-lipped, sardonic, early-’60s-Richard Yates-style tension to the point where it feels written and not like life.  The office banter, especially on Peggy’s team, is perfect–comfortable, catty, and real.

OK, so FOUR observations, since I have to go dress my son and get to work, which is not-at-all like Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price.  Thank God.

New Story!

Here’s a little doodle I’ve been working on that’s a little different from what I’ve written before.  Please tell me what you think.  It’s an attempt at a Donald Barthelme story, I guess…

Without Us

It begins with all of the letters.  Consonants and vowels wander from the page before they can be read, marching like ants in straight lines down library shelves and out into the street.  Signs on street corners stand befuddled and blank, as if waiting for a cab that will never arrive.  Old men who’ve waited to savor Proust, or Joyce, or Tolstoy until they could put in the time, after kids and jobs, flip through the books of blank pages and weep.  Keyboards go dead.  Pencil points dull under the weight of worried hands but leave no mark on the page.  The internet has become unusable, a repository of pornographic pictures no one can access.  GPS is completely fucked.

The music follows, note by note.  Each plucked string or blown, brassy blast floats out and away, never to be heard again.  John Cage fans are smug and ecstatic.  Some pianists, frenzied and hopeless, pound out reams of Rachmaninov until their instruments fall dumb and become nothing more than furniture, which the same pianists chop into kindling to warm their houses.

Art slides off of gallery walls in great rectangular glops, slapping onto the marble floors like vomit and ooze out the open museum doors. Some say the Pollocks look better that way.  Some pretend nothing is happening, and stare at the blank canvases, convinced that the obscene, woven ecru staring back at them is simply a new exhibit in minimalism.  Rodin’s sculptures rise and walk, refusing eye contact, not answering questions.  Gigantic steel girders–fused, abstract, jutting—rip away from their mornings and trudge down city streets like prehistoric mantises.

Everything heads East.

Film stars watch as their projected selves wander off screen, into their living room, and out of their houses, ghosts, dead behind the eyes, though their stride is purposeful, their steps sure.  Sets slide off screen.  Landscapes fade.  Nothing is left but the white rectangular glare of a chugging lantern.  Godard declares this a new golden age of film.

East.  All of it.

The words in our mouths, the sounds that we make, are next.  Tongues swell and grow fuzzy, like a child’s mitten.  Teachers welcome the silence, though they’ve run out of things to teach, and courtrooms are filled with wildly gesticulating puppets and lots of pointed fingers.  There is a lot of staring, except those who can’t bear to watch anymore.  They cover their eyes with silver strips of duct tape and lay on their couch.  They look dead, and happy.

Studies are instigated but dropped when no one can decide how to record the results.  Lawmakers call emergency sessions only to sit stern and silent; legislation has become staring contests, nursed along by past resentments.  Not a lot changes, politics-wise.

One morning the pets and children rise from silent but vivid dreams, turn towards the rising sun, and set off.  They walk, crawl, skip, drag themselves.  To the east.  It’s tragic, and would be unbearable if anyone could remember why they are so alone.

The grown-ups spin in lazy circles on their front lawns for days, wondering why they feel so sad and wondering what it is they have lost.  Their faces are blank.  The expressions change only to block out the sun or blink away the rain.

They will head east too.  That is what they will do.  And great masses of wandering feet move as one, lock-step, through the yards and ball fields and shopping mall parking lots until their bare feet feel the sand of the coast, and the cool lapping waves against their shins, and knees, and waists, and necks, and the salty wash rinses against their lips and the taste is elemental and pure and the only thing they know.

Adult Situations and Language

Tags

Ghost, Indiana Jones, Jenna Jameson, Nazis, pornography, Special Agent: OSO

This is my fiftieth post, which is a lot.  Wordpress gives you little badges for every ten posts or so, and I shouldn’t care about that stuff, but I do.  I get excited about my badges on Livestrong too.  Oddly enough, the spellcheck for WordPress does not recognize the word “WordPress”.  It also does not recognize the word “spellcheck”.

I wrote this essay four years ago, but I took it out and rewrote it over the past two weeks.  It’s long, but I can’t really figure out where to cut it.  I just sent it off for consideration, so tell me what you think.  Special thanks to Christene who took a look at it and gave me some ideas for cuts.

Adult Situations and Language

 

My wife and I rarely argue; most of the time she explains why I’m wrong and I listen and nod.  I’ve stopped pointing out things that annoy me about her.  I might as well pull the pin on a grenade and eat it with salsa. She is, aside from being far more rational, caring, and blameless than I, a world-class arguer at her most convivial; cornered, she’s a wolverine.  She will attack past any and all reason and logic.  She will listen only enough to find things to disagree with.  There is no truth she cannot find objectionable.  There is no hatchet too deeply buried.

She is an artist.

The only argument I am still adamant about is what my kids are (or aren’t) allowed to watch.  My gut reaction is anything with no sexual penetration, but I dial it back to PG-13, except that rare occasion (Aliens, Terminator 2, Die Hard) when the film’s overwhelming quality and life-affirming message trumps the recommendations of the MPAA.

My children are ten, seven, and four.

They are good kids.

As I type this, all three of my children are spending their leisurely Sunday morning with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  It’s rated PG, but the movie is famous for creating the need for the PG-13 rating due to its violence and intense scenes of monkey-brain eating and anesthesia-free heart surgery.  They are unsupervised–which is really the point of putting them in front of the television anyway, right?–and seem completely at ease, even while an evil and overwhelmingly stereotypical Indian reaches into some poor schmo’s chest and removes his still-beating heart before giving him an elevator ride into an active volcano.

“Sweet,” my youngest says, as if he were watching a replay from last night’s 49ers-Saints game.

“Does he eat it now?  The bald guy?” my middle asks.

“No dummy.  Eating a heart’s gross,” says my oldest.

“Don’t say dummy,” I call.

“Sorry!” they all say in unison.

See?

Good kids.

 

All three of my kids have probably seen movies they shouldn’t; my oldest has seen the most, and shows the most interest, followed by the middle, as would be expected.  My middle daughter, however, is the most sophisticated wit and understands the naughty bits more quickly, so we have to be careful.

I’m never that careful.

My four-year-old is still in the early haze of childhood, not quite a toddler, but still seemingly unaware of what constitutes good and poor behavior.   He understands that he can’t shout “poop” at dinner (he does anyway) or play with his scrotum at the park (he does anyway) but he’s still seemingly oblivious to overtly violent or sexual imagery on television.[1]

They have seen, to this point, all of the Indiana Jones movies, as well as Star Wars (the old ones; we pretend the new ones were never made), Close Encounters of Third Kind, Terminator 2, Inception, Batman Begins, Speed, Superman Returns, Spiderman I and II, Back to the Future I, II, and III, and Rocky I, II, III, IV, and Balboa, among others.

They’ve also wandered into Celine and Julie Go Boating, The Seventh Seal, The Conformist, and L’Aventura, as well as suffered an unfortunate run-in with Jackass II, when I thought they were asleep.

Try explaining to a five-year-old why a violently swearing, tattooed putz is taking a shit in a dollhouse toilet.  If you can do it with some modicum of grace, you deserve either a medal or a free pass to hell.  I’m still waiting on the medal.

 

My father and mother let me watch whatever I wanted, or to be fairer, indulged and tolerated my curiosity for film.  They didn’t have much of a choice.  Accessibility to movies, in terms of procuring and consuming, exploded in the early eighties, a time rivaled only now in the free-streaming, online era.  When my parents grew up, and even during the first few years of my life, one saw movies in the theater, or had to wait until they were run on network television years later.  It was a tightly-controlled environment.

VCRs and recordable cassettes changed that, as did pay cable.  I was six when my dad came home with a new television, VCR, and video store rental membership.  It was a grand day.  He rented Old Yeller and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  The television was wood-paneled and as big as my current oven, with a screen about the size of, well, the window on my current oven.  Enormous.  We invited neighbors over, air-popped some popcorn, and watched Raiders three times in one night.

Before, movies were a sitter, a car-trip, blankets in the back for the drive-in.  Now film was not performed but procured, a consumable thing, part of the fabric of your home life.  HBO and Cinemax cemented that relationship by showing movies 24/7.

When VCR prices dropped significantly in 1984 or ‘85, we bought two: one to play a movie and another to dub it.  All of a sudden, we had copies of The Godfather, Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, Revenge of the Nerds, and Porky’s just lying around the house.  All a kid needed was a couple hours alone.

My education in the dirty realms of sex and violence was not uncommon, before or after the videocassette deluge.  Print pornography has been around since Plato and before.  Intrepid kids snuck into grindhouses to catch exploitation films.  However, the chance to watch people fuck or kill each other, even in simulation, was never so easy.

It wasn’t parents’ faults, either.  Kids are little spies.  Not in the sense that they are watching and recording everything around them[2], but that they are tremendously sophisticated little actors, and sneaky as hell.

So, given the demonic combination of curiosity, stealth, and opportunity, and suddenly everyone I knew had at his or her disposal a treasure trove of educational sin.

On top of that, my dad was tired of waiting for his firstborn to grow old enough to share all his favorite movies.  Despite my dad’s middle-brow exterior, he was quite the cinephile, and we had afternoons of spaghetti-westerns, gangster movies, and sci-fi spectaculars.  I remember an argument he had with my mom one evening about how I was old enough to watch First Blood.  I was seven.  The only evidence he could provide was that I’d seen all the Dirty Harry movies and hadn’t succumbed to nightmares, so this one would be cake.  An airtight defense.

So, because my life is really all I know, I imagine that letting my kids watch inappropriate films is a necessary step to their self-fulfillment and maturity.  It’s like the cycle of violence or abuse, only on celluloid.  And though I am well-aware that my reasons are as shaky as my father’s that night he convinced my mom to let me watch Sylvester Stallone impale local cops on skewers and lay waste to an unsuspecting town, the alternative is having to watch these movies alone.

That is unacceptable.

 

Truth is, we have great conversations when we watch these movies.  We recently discussed why Indiana Jones seems to have to punch everyone.  Everyone.   In the three films[3] he hits Nazis (shitloads), Egyptians, Frenchmen, Chinese, and Indians (both foreign and domestic); soldiers, policemen, gangsters, sherpas, domestic help, and on one unfortunate occasion an unsuspecting cigarette girl who got in the way while he was trying to punch a Chinese gangster who may or may not have been affiliated with the police, the Nazis, or a random group of sherpas.

Weirdly, it was the domestic–a butler–that upset my kids the most.  Perhaps you remember the scene: it occurs during The Last Crusade, when Indiana and his duplicitous sidekick Elsa infiltrate the Nazi-infested castle where they are holding Indy’s father (Sean Connery).  Indiana Jones is dressed unconvincingly—in fact laughably—as Scottish law, with an accent that would get him tarred-and-feathered in Glasgow.  When the butler calls him on his stupid beret and hambone accent be knocks him out[4].  It’s a cold move, and though you can chalk it up to the stress level Jones is feeling at the time (his father has been kidnapped by Nazis, after all), all three of my kids cried foul.

“Why’d he hit the butler?” asked my oldest.

“The butler wasn’t buying the Scottish law deal,” I reply.

“Punching is mean,” says my middle.  She has some experience with punching, giving and receiving, so she knows of which she speaks.

“The butler is a Nazi,” I explain.

“Oh,” they say, though I can tell they aren’t convinced.

I’ve already had to thumbnail the Nazi movement for my kids.  They were German’s in the 1930’s and 1940’s who killed people for no reason.  When they asked whom they killed, I said “Jews”[5].  When they asked who the Jews were/are, the only thing I could come up with on the fly was that they were a people who didn’t eat pork or shellfish (fucking pathetic, I know, but should I start at Genesis 1:1 and go from there?  Indiana Jones is on!).  Armed with this embarrassingly scant explanation, and deformed by their father’s insistence that they watch age-inappropriate programs with little to no context, they made due.  Immediate synaptic adaptation.

Jews=Awesome.

Nazis=Shit.

Not a bad day’s work, Pop.

Still, the butler is dressed in a tux and looks like a grandpa.  He’s not in jackboots, not goose-stepping, not smoking a cigarette between the middle and ring fingers of a black leather-gloved hand.  They want to know, in so many words, how a butler, some dude trying to provide for him and his during wartime, can be all bad.

“He’s a Nazi butler,” I say again, hoping repetition carries us through.

“He kills Jews?” my oldest asks.

“Well, no.”

“So he isn’t bad?” my middle asks.  I can feel their hero-worship for Dr. Jones fading.  Change gears, fast!

“Well, he cleans and cooks and irons and washes for Nazis, and that gives them more time to kill Jews.”

Bam.

“Does he know they kill Jews?” asks my oldest, who’s seriously starting to get me worked up.  At this point it’s tempting to preface Hannah Arendt and her thoughts on the banality of evil set forth in her seminal work Eichmann in Jerusalem, or maybe the quiet tragedy of the butler in The Remains of the Day, but I defer to a more time-honored approach.  Lies.

“Totally.  Loves it.  Loves that they kill Jews.  Makes swastika-shaped pancakes to celebrate.”

“What’s a swastika?”

Fuck.

Not a shining moment, and I don’t even want to get into the body count in those films, a majority of which are notched by the titular hero, though for some reason my kids don’t get upset about Indy killing the bad guys, just hitting them.  This is a strange and perhaps even chilling paradox, but not impossible to explain.  It’s really about schemata; their concept of hitting has been well established.  It’s bad.  You don’t hit.  If you get hit, you don’t hit back.  If hitting occurs, the punishment is a spanking, which is a parent-approved way of silently asserting: “Hitting’s wrong.  Hit and you’ll get hit.”

Getting hit hurts.  They know this.  Dying—in whatever way it happens—is the undiscovered country and can be explained away.  The guy isn’t really dead; it’s just a movie.  I actually think this conversation, distinguishing the real from make-believe, can only be broached when watching more “grown-up” films.

Maybe it’s because in having such a conversation, I’m not just hinting at the darkest corners of the human heart or the sickest nooks and crannies of the mind, but of my mind, my heart.  I am aware that the world is, can be, such an awful place.  I’m selfish.  I want to keep my kids innocent for as long as I can, but whom am I really doing it for?  My kids make me realize that this planet can be good and funny and hopeful.  They let me reclaim a small portion of innocence.  Despite my somewhat cavalier instincts concerning what they should be allowed to watch, I have rules I follow and lines I don’t cross and rationales for those rules and lines.

Random, contradictory, ridiculous rules and lines, but nonetheless…

And that’s why they aren’t allowed to watch two people fucking.

This is finally a stupid rule, right?   They will, presumably, have a (hopefully) happy, well-adjusted and healthy sex life.  I really, really hope they do.  I hope all three of my kids find someone they love and respect and cherish and fuck that someone stupid.  No joke.  Fuck ‘em blue.  It’s one of the more profound human connections we make with another life form.  Go for it.

But don’t watch it yet.  Please?  Not with me in the room or aware of what you’re watching?  I can’t handle it.

So I let my children watch a human being kill another human being, something I hope they never have to do or have done to them.  But I am adamant that they do not watch one person fuck another person or get fucked by them.  Even though they will, presumably, have that experience (hopefully) more than once in their life?

You bet.

Let’s speak of schema and schemata[6], shall we?  I would argue that most humans could not seriously conceive of, consider, decide upon and undertake killing a person.  We may want to; we may daydream elaborate scenarios; but when it comes down to it, we will probably not get the opportunity, we are respectful of the laws that restrict that kind of behavior, and we just couldn’t actually go through with it[7].

It’s within the realm of fantasy.  That’s true whether it’s Saw or Saving Private Ryan, Amistad or Aladdin.  It’s dismissible because it is, ostensibly, out of the realm of experience of any and all watching[8].

But if kids see two people fucking, they’re going to ask their parents what’s going on.  If their parents are honest[9] they’re going to explain.  And somewhere deep in the kid’s brain, in the animal part, the evolutionarily vital part that keeps us, as a race, still here and multiplying, a breaker’s going to flip and the kid’s going to understand.

They will ask, “Do you and mommy/daddy do that?”

And you’re going to have to answer: Not Anymore, because you’re here.  But we used to, all the time, and it was glorious.

Just kidding.  I don’t know what you say, because my kids don’t watch people fuck on my shift.

I think what scares me most is my kids connecting the act to me, my wife, and our life.  We build a wall around us when it comes to that behavior, like most people with kids, and the mixed motivations of our various roles—father, brother, husband, lover, etc.—is a difficult thing to explain.

Enough blabber.  HERE’S what I’m scared of:

What if I’m watching something with my kids, and it gets steamy-dirty-sexy, and my kids get turned on?  They’re not that young, and I’m not old enough to have forgotten that it happens pretty early.  That’s fucking terrifying!

Now there’s all three, four or five of us, sitting in the same room, all of us watching the same thing,[10] and then a scene rolls through, and I’m aware of it, and when it’s going to occur in the film, and I know its coming, and suddenly Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze[11] are fucking, standing up, in the enviably spacious Manhattan loft.  It’s an intense, passionate scene, with nothing that overtly rates an “R”, and yet I can hang a coat off my dick.

What if my daughters, or my son, are feeling the same way?

We ain’t nothin’ but mammals, right?

Can you feel me?

Can I get an amen?

Am I responsible for the budding and awakening tumescence that has made itself known to my children?  Am I the catalyst of their sinful awakening?  The snake in their garden?

Holy shit.  I would be the snake in their garden.

So do I, as the adult, as the responsible parent, consider such things and skip ahead or, God forbid, refuse to screen that particular film for my children?  Of course not.  I wade in, often wrong but never in doubt, Bush on the aircraft carrier, dressed like a soldier, dumb as a corncob, convinced that “certain” is far superior to “right” and hell-bent to sacrifice whomever or whatever I have to, to get what I want.

When it’s all said and done, though, I would probably opt for the dump-truck-sized piles of discomfort I would feel watching two people have simulated, on-screen sex with my kids[12] over watching the overweening, sentimental, LSD-fueled bullshit that television produces for children.

It hasn’t really changed since I was a kid.  There are three kinds, as far as I can tell: hyper-ironic, humorless sitcoms/sketch shows in the Full House/You Can’t Do That on Television vein, scatological nonsense such as Cat-Dog and Gumball, and precious, lesson-driven over-simplications like Caillou, Special Agent: OSO and Dora the Explorer[13].  The last of these are absolute mind-melters and the reason the terrorists are winning.

What really distresses me is the general tenor of self-congratulatory accomplishment theses shows tries to engender.  Tying your shoes?  Acting like a human being towards another human being?  That makes you a hero?

I don’t advocate that Disney start screening Shoah for kids at six in the morning.  But if the people responsible believe that this is really what the incipient generation of Americans can handle and need to accomplish in order to be successful human beings, then we are all truly and profoundly fucked.

It’s finally about connection and discussion.  You can teach a group of struggling learners how to read Shakespeare.  I’ve done it.  It just takes time and the commitment to sit down with them and explain how it works.  They aren’t going to get it at first.  They will have questions.  I’ll need to answer them.  But they will.  They will understand if I put in the time.

Instead, we’d rather give canned lessons that are immediately comprehensible and call it learning.  Then we, as teachers and parents[14] can pat ourselves on the back.  Success!

Nope.  Not even close.

My parents made a lot of mistakes.  Some I know about, others I don’t.  I’m sure, extra sure, that my kids will one day understand the same thing about me.  However, one thing (of many) that they did right is they saw how smart my sisters and I were and did not fear it.  Did not try to fight it with compromise and easy lessons in terms of what we read, watched, or listened to.  They treated us like people.

I mentioned my father’s influence on me in terms of film.  But the most instructive story I can think of is about my mother.  One Saturday evening, we were alone.  I was eight.  I have no idea where my sisters were.  Possibly with grandparents. My father was out of town.  My mom and I went out to dinner[15] and then home to watch the Olympics.  It was the night Mary Lou Retton won the all-around and became an icon.

The Terminator came on HBO.  My mom had seen it, so she knew it had about everything you’d want to shield an eight-year-old from: sex, violence, and a twisty, paradox-filled plotline that could induce seizures in an eight-year-old’s brain and murderous urges in a beleaguered mother after too many questions.

She didn’t even hesitate.

“You’re going to love this,” she said.

And I did.  Still do.

It’s my all-time favorite movie; not just because it’s such a well-designed brain-cruncher, but because it’s a memory.  My mom and I, watching a movie, together.

So when I argue with my wife, I bring up this story.  And I can tell she understands.

Then she hops on the internet and tells me that Mary Lou Retton won the All-Around Gold Medal on August 3^rd, 1984.

A Friday.

---

[1]            Not that I’ve done tests.  That would be heinous. Nor do I regularly watch snuff porn when he’s in the room.  But he can wander in, glance at True Blood or Saw III, and wander out without asking questions.  Those days, I fear, are numbered.

[2] They are, by the way.  My kid wrote a story, for a classroom project, about getting me beers from the fridge when she was in first grade.

[3] Like the recent Star Wars prequels, we pretend the fourth Indiana Jones does not exist.  In addition, my kids and I have made a pact that the Karate Kid ends at number 2, Rocky V never happened, there’s no such thing as Grease 2, and Mel Gibson died shortly after Signs was released, in 2002.

[4] Quick side note: Indiana Jones is capable of knocking anyone his size or smaller stone-cold unconscious with one punch whenever the script demands it.  Though I am aware that this is a convention of the 1930’s and 40’s adventure serial that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are celebrating with the films, realistically the motherfucker must have heavier hands than Roberto Duran to inflict so much damage.  Watch the castle scene I’m referring to above; he doesn’t even punch him.  He bitchslaps the poor bastard, and the guy drops like he took the business end of a spud bar.  How many poor, Indiana-Jones-raised saps had unrealistic expectations of such power only to get their heads kicked in after their opponent shook off their best shot?

[5] An obvious and quite possibly offensive oversimplification.

[6] Confession: I don’t know the difference between these two words.  I included both so it looks like I’m being repetitive for style’s sake, but the truth is I’m just hedging my bets.

[7] This is born out by a study I read about former soldiers who fought in World War II.  Almost all (75-80%) admitted they shot to miss and fired high and wide on purpose.  20% said they shot to kill, but imagined that they would be troubled by their actions for the remainder of their lives.  2-5% seemed comfortable with killing, either at home or abroad.  There’s an excellent book by Dave Grossman called On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society that I have not read but showed up on the first Google search I conducted to back up my figures.  Solid research, right there.

[8] I often wonder what it would be like to watch The Godfather with a hit man, or Silence of the Lambs with Charles Manson.  Would they cry foul or complain about the general lack of verisimilitude?  I’ve seen movies about teachers, and as a teacher myself, all I can say is if they screw up slasher movies as badly as they do classroom dramas, there’s a lot of corrections to be made.  I know a cop who won’t watch police procedurals because the sloppy research pisses him off, so who knows?

[9] Or at least strive for honesty…

[10] Dirty Dancing, say.  Or Footloose.  Ghost.  Something mildly potent.  I just want you to know that I’m not talking about porn.  I’m not watching Jenna Jameson with my kids.  Kids should find porn the old fashioned way: from the skeezey kid next door and his dad’s pile of Penthouse.

[11] R.I.P. Dalton.  “Pain don’t hurt.”

[12] To clarify: I would be watching it with my kids.  I would not be watching my kids have sex.

[13] I’m oversimplifying to make a point.  There are quality programs for kids, both cinematic and televised.  Hugo came out this year.  Pixar, with the exception of Cars 2 (overcomplicated and elitist) is always a homerun despite some troubling thematics.  Spongebob and Phineas and Ferb are first rate.

[14] Same thing, by the way.

[15] Bonanza Bar and Grill: weird that I remember where we ate but not where my sisters were.  Understandable, though: I was a chunky kid.  Food was important.

Login and Password, Please

Tags

Identity Theft, Memento, Porn, Rainman

It’s been a while since I blogged.  I would like to blame it on an overly hectic schedule or a hospital visit caused by injuries sustained in a hotel fire rescue, but the truth is, I forgot my login and password and it took me a week to remember the correct combination of half-remembered personal trivia, significant dates, obscure capitalizations, and weird juxtapositions between letters and numbers.

I used to complain to my wife that all I did was turn off lights.  Three or four hours a day I would wander the house like a janitor with a needle buried in the right-hand extreme of the autism-spectrum speedometer, flipping switches, cursing under my breath.  I was like a peculiarly helpful street-corner hobo.  An obscene prayer forever on my lips, my eyes lost and unfocused, distinguishing lights that I knew, in some still sane cranny of my brain, would be turned back on by an intrepid seven-year-old immediately after I’d rounded the corner.

I am happy to report that I don’t do that anymore.  Because I am too busy logging in to shit.  It’s all I do.  My work has become like the scene in True Lies.  Sign in at the desk, key in the door of the classroom, turn on the computer.  Then the fun begins.  Login and password to access the server.  Login and password for my school email.  Login and password for my personal email.  Login and password for my Livestrong account, because it’s important to keep what I eat private and secure.  Login and password for my personal gradebook.  If I have time I check my submission managers (plural—different pubs use different online submission services) for the essays and stories I’ve written and sent away for publication.  Login and password times two.  I’d add Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin, but our school monitors our internet use and has firewalls against such shenanigans.  I can access them, as a teacher, but I’d need to submit a, you guessed it, login and password in order to access those site, which are protected by…you get the idea.

And I am a troglodyte.  I spend as much time on the internet as your average gerbil.  I can’t imagine someone completely wired in.  I suppose they could’ve just checked all those buttons that allows the prominent device user to have his/her logins/passwords “remembered” by the computer, but I doubt it.  These are the kind of people who, when I tell them that I try to keep the same password for everything whenever possible, look at me like I told them that I accidently cut my penis off with a pair of pinking sheers.  They are flabbergasted that I would voluntarily commit to such a casual, unsecured life.

I can only surmise that these people have four or five hundred different logins and passwords, all of them random series of numbers, letters, fonts, and obscure punctuations that they keep in a notebook roughly the size of the Annotated Ulysses and kept in a fireproof safe buried under three feet of cement in their back yard.  That or they have a system of mnemonics that would boggle Rainman or they’re tattooed on their torso like the guy from Memento.  I can’t live like that.  I’m simply not that important.  Nothing I have, do, said, or bought on the internet is that important.

And it doesn’t really matter, does it?  Last week a friend of mine had his wallet stolen from his gym locker.  He’s spent the last week, from the time he discovered the theft until about three minutes ago, cancelling cards, changing passwords, rewiring his life.  And it’s possible that he was too late.  Because with the advent of smart phones, a thief who snags a wallet can start spending immediately.  It’s not like the old days (old days=2004) when a thief had to go to the store to use a stolen card, or find a computer to purchase items online.  Now, he can grab the wallet, fire up his iPhone, and sit on the crapper in the same locker room he just jacked the wallet from and start shopping/withdrawing/destroying.

I get it.  Hackers are dangerous.  Identity fraud is a real thing.  But combating it by forcing decent, law-abiding, web-surfing citizens to spend three or four hours a day logging in to sites they want to access is basically copping to the idea that they have won, and we are at their mercy.  By the time I die, Identity thieves will be responsible for stealing a month of my life following various security protocols.  Even if they never stole a thing.  That’s probably the same amount of time I’d spend if they did take on my identity and I had to prove/reset my cyber-reality.

You know what?  I’m all for a chip.  A sub-dermal identification tool.  Bring it on.

Every time someone floats such an idea, people go nuts.  An attack on our personal freedoms.  We’ll be treated as commodities.  Because at this point, because we’ve always been as free as the mountain wind and always treated as autonomous humans.  It’s delusional to believe that.  These are the same people who go berserk when they have to take their shoes off at the airport or get carded at the liquor store.  “I fought in KOREA, YOU SONOFABITCH!”  And yet a chip would save everyone those hassles.  But no.  It’s the first step to letting the terrorists/communists/Iranians/North-Korean-Communist-Terrorists win.

A student at my high school wrote a tongue-in-cheek satire about replacing our current hall passes with computer chips that would monitor student location. People went APESHIT.  I had to field ten or twelve emails that expressed outrage and concern and assure the aggrieved parties that the article was written as a spoof.  This is a credit to how well-written the article was, but for the love of God, calm down, people.

If you fear you’re being marketed, I would suggest you stop watching television.  If you don’t want anyone to know where you are, leave your cell phone at home.  If you’re afraid that some unknown, nefarious agency will track your whereabouts and purchases for some equally nefarious plot to damage your reputation, then stop buying blow-up sex dolls and Mexican weed every Tuesday.   Really, no one gives that much of a shit about you.  I promise.  They’re too busy thinking about themselves.

You know the one thing you can get on the internet without a login or password?  Porn.   I’ve heard that, anyway.  From the television.  PBS.  In a show about the evils of porn.

Most of the time you don’t have to type in jack shit.  Sometimes you have to assure the site you’re eighteen.  A window will pop up that asks “Are you over eighteen?”  And you click the box that says “Yes.”

Porn thrives on anonymity.  It’s the lifeblood of the industry.  Which begs the question, what kind of world is it when m daughter has to get parent permission, via email password, to get on a Disney-sponsored site, but can watch a woman strap-on-fuck a llama strings-free?

Maybe the terrorists ARE winning…

 

Midseason Television: The River

Tags

Bruce Greenwood, Judd Apatow, Orin Peli, Paranormal Activity, The River

I promised I would review the premiere episode, but in all truth I very little to say.  I liked it.  I’m interested in seeing where it will go.  It’s A LOT like Lost, down to the “monster” and literary references (Shakespeare, John Fowles).

Of course, the big draw for the show is also what might turn people off—the handheld, pseudo-documentary style, handled so well by Orin Peli in the first Paranormal Activity film, who serves as the creative force behind the series.  The film gives off the same mojo as Paranormal Activity, with a healthy dollop of The Serpent and the Rainbow thrown in (the Amazonian setting and spirit-world mumbo-jumbo) for good measure, and is pretty clever about how it uses the “found footage” to provide a sick, peek-a-boo thrill to what you see, what you thought you saw, and what you imagined.

It’s really only a few times in the pilot that I felt overly manipulated by where, why, and when a camera happened to catch the action, and those really occurred in quieter, more emotionally driven parts, parts that seemed a little too charged and private to occur in front of the camera.  I don’t know if that’s praise or not, because here is really where the show shines, which is the depiction of the search party and the characters therein, and Bruce Greenwood’s performance.  I feel that, at least in the pilot, the family is so believably desperate to find the missing father, and so likable, that it pains me to believe that they would allow a camera crew to follow them for the entire trek, even if it is the only way to fund the rescue attempt.

But maybe that’s a needless quibble—the disquiet any family raised on television, in a reality-television driven culture must feel is that of what to reveal and what to keep private, and the family on the show has, for better or worse, been in the public eye for twenty-five years.  It could, in fact, lead to some interesting dramatic moments.

But, like any film or television show of this genre—the “found-footage” thriller—there comes a time, as an audience member, when you want to scream “PUT THE FREAKING CAMERA DOWN AND RUN AWAY!”

So far, the show has been pretty sly about how and why they’re keeping the cameras rolling, but I feel like it’s going to become pretty tortured pretty soon.  Are we really to believe that they will be able to sustain a roaming camera crew for three or four seasons?  They are going to need to recharge batteries and fill up on gas.  Any suggestions?

So, I tuned in for the jumps, and they were there, and pretty effective as well.  However, I wasn’t expecting the level of performance and commitment the principals bring to the roles.  Bruce Greenwood, as the missing Dr. Emmett Cole is always reliable, and he brings the unhinged joy and mania of an unfettered and overfunded nature host.  Think an even nuttier Steve Irwin or Jeff Corwin (I hesitate to bring up Jack Hanna, as he is often as cool as the underside of the pillow even when getting shit on by giraffes) and you’re thee, except he stumbles upon a level of magic he’s unprepared to deal with.  I was not prepared for the performances of Joe Anderson and Leslie Hope, as Cole’s son and wife, and how they hit the ground with such well-wrought and lived-in depictions.  I also really enjoyed Paul Blackthorne as the seemingly unscrupulous and ambitious television producer.  It’s a slam-dunk cliché of a role, but he’s slimy and British and that’s good enough for me.

 

I’m not going to waste time on summary.  It’s a haunted house story in the Amazon.  The big question is whether or not people will tune in for an extended dose of the same kind of shenanigans worked over in the Paranormal Activity films.  I’m betting that they won’t, and here’s where film and television diverge.  As many people hated Paranormal Activity as liked hit, but you have to pay your money to have an opinion.  If ten million people pay 9 bucks to hate a movie, the movie’s still a hit.  If ten million people watch a show and love it, it’s a middle of the pack underachiever, not to mention they have to watch it and love it week-to-week.  A film can recoup costs in a weekend.  Television has to maintain viewership, which is much more difficult (ask Tim Kring about Heroes).  Film is more prestigious, but television is more popular.  It’s why Judd Apatow is a more successful filmmaker than he is a television producer.  The same people who watched Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared paid money to see The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up (nobody saw Funny People).  However, the shows were considered noble failures and the films were smashes.  Why?  Because it was the same 8 million people.  For film that’s good business.  In television it’s a train wreck.

I worry that there won’t be enough of an audience for this show, which would be too bad.  I think this could become something special, and I always value when television takes risks, even if it’s a calculated one.

Kurt Vonnegut, Newt Gingrich, and the End of the World

Tags

Anne Coulter, Barack Obama, Crypto-fascism, Kurt Vonnegut, Michelle Bachmann, Mother Night, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum

Here’s a weak attempt at a political rant.  Enjoy!

Kurt Vonnegut, Newt Gingrich, and the End of the World

 

Hell in a handbasket.  Up shit creek without a paddle. Clusterfucked and FUBARed.

So it goes.

I can’t imagine that Newt Gingrich ever met Kurt Vonnegut.  If they did, I’m not sure what they’d talk about.  But curiously enough, I think both of them would agree on the above statements to describe the world in 2012, even if their reasons for thinking so differed.  Gingrich has said, about Democrats as a species, “These people are sick. They are so consumed by their own power, by a Mussolini-like ego, that their willingness to run over normal human beings and to destroy honest institutions is unending.”  Vonnegut once mused that he knew we were in for a rough go of it at the turn of the millennium when he turned around and noticed that our country was run by “a Dick, a Bush, and a Colin.”

Funny stuff.  But I bring Vonnegut to the conversation to try and understand the rhetoric employed by the candidates in the Republican primaries as well as those covering the proceedings, right and left.

In 1961, Vonnegut published Mother Night, which may be his masterpiece but has been eclipsed by Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and his free-floating, still-healthy media reputation as a sage and clown.  Mother Night concerns a radio personality, Howard W. Campbell, who is enlisted by the Nazi’s to broadcast war propaganda during World War II.  Unbeknownst to the Nazis, however, he has also been recruited by the U.S. War Department to insert different pauses, grunts and coughs in the propaganda transmissions as code to the allies for their military campaigns.  Campbell has no idea what the codes signify, which may or may not lead to an ironic tragedy later in the book.  The joke is, he doesn’t really care about what the copes signify, any more than he cares about the hate-filled vitriol he’s spilling for the Nazi Propaganda machine.  He’s essentially apolitical, though perhaps ethically apathetic would be a better term.

The book is about more than this central conceit, and flips back in forth in time, employs a frame device that’s pretty clever in and of itself, and manages to exist in a number of locales—Berlin, New York City, Israel—all at the same time.  It’s frankly a bitch to summarize, and I don’t really feel like trying.  The point is that Campbell is a public voice who doesn’t care what comes out of his mouth as long as people are listening.

I think that is a pretty apt description of the rhetoric of this year’s presidential primary, as well as dominate political mode of discourse for the past few years.

It’s been particularly nasty the last couple of years, however.  Now, it’s entirely possible that I, as a well-meaning but hopelessly shortsighted liberal, was privy to but willfully ignorant of the same kind of alarmist platitudes hurled at George W. Bush and John McCain in 2008 (and before—alarmist sentiment knows no political agenda).  However, the fact is that most of what we hear coming from those running for Republican Nominee and covering the primaries is drenched in this hateful, thoughtless Armageddon-laden sentiments.

We are all, in fact, doomed.  America is dying and the end of the world is near.

Here is Rick Santorum, opining about what will happen to America if we were to allow homosexuals to marry:

“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. … That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.”

To let two people of the same sex marry each other would “undermine the fabric of our society.”

Here’s Ann Coulter with a pithy opinion about liberals: “You will find liberals always rooting for savages against civilization.”

A liberal government will lead to the end of civilization.

Here’s Michelle Bachmann about the Obama Administration, from 2011, the height of memes like “death panels” and “Birther”: “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”

So, national and world catastrophes are in fact God’s warning signals to us that if we don’t start being more financially conservative, he will kill innocent Americans, as if the citizens of the United States are all on the top floor of Nakatomi Plaza and God is Alan Rickman from Die Hard.

OK, I’m going to back off for a minute.  First, it’s obvious that I’m cherry-picking, and locating the most insane quotes from people I find morally repugnant, taking them out of context, and throwing them back at them is not only too easy, but ultimately dishonest and of a piece with what I most revile in them.

But here’s the problem, and it exists regardless of one’s emotional, moral, or political beliefs: the people saying all of this stuff, the people overtly or insinuatingly stating that our country is on the brink of not only financial but physical and social collapse, whether they are politicians, lobbyists, religious demagogues, or the press looking for a juicy sound bite in our if-it-bleeds-it-leads media culture, don’t really believe it.

Not a word.  I’m convinced.

Maybe Ron Paul.

Now, if they did believe it, that would be one thing, and probably worse, but my question is, what’s the difference?

Because the people listening, a lot of them anyway, believe it, and repeat it, and live their lives based on these words, said so cavalierly and said almost always for simple, emotional effect or as an attack against an opponent they see as simply an obstacle to overcome by any means necessary.

This is an old and obvious point.  The corruption of language has existed since there was language, and ambition has been around before the first human spoke the first words.  It’s been attacked by people as ancient as Plato and as contemporary as Ezra Klein and Christopher Hitchens, and yet it’s effective still.

And I imagine that most people view it as simply part of the game.  But when and where does the game end?  When does the Armageddon-laced vitriol become real society, and the general opinion of the masses?  When did the only way to make a point about our country and the world, to rally support for a cause, become casting the opponents’ ideas as demonic, end-of-the-world scenarios?

When you jack up the stakes of EVERYTHING to a fire-and-brimstone, Jonathan-Edwards-style, fist-pumping, chest-thumping squeal of discordant, inhuman wrath, it eventually becomes the norm and good sense and logical discussion are seen as foolish, and worse, boring and ineffective.

It’s insulting, but it’s happened.  We nudge each other at Rome’s rabble and their gullible blood thirst in films like Gladiator, but you need to look no further than the last Republican Primary Debate to realize that the same values of both cultures hold true.  Which means, of course, that like Rome, we are on the brink of collapse.

WE”RE ALL GOING TO DIE!

I don’t believe that.  I’m relatively sure that regardless of who is elected or what bill is passed life will continue as it has for the last, long while.  A little different, but not much.  Minute-to-minute, day-to-day, we will live in roughly the same situation in which we’ve always lived.

WHICH IS WHAT THE JEWS SAID BEFORE WWII!  NOOOOOO!

OK, I get it.  Maybe I’m too lax, too comfortable.  Maybe I need a little fire.  I just can’t see how looking at this world, this country, as a partisan-locked battleground gets us anywhere.  We have such an opportunity to look at what works, and the problems we face could be such an opportunity for growth.

Obama’s health plan could, conceivably, give everyone in our country a fair shot at health care.  The jobs bill could, conceivably, not only put people to work but create altogether new industries for a new century.  Equal marriage rights could lead to more stability in the work force and at home.

And so it goes.

Because we’re back to Vonnegut, the old misanthrope.  Because he knew that would never happen.  He believed that we were doomed.  The difference was that he believed the doom would come not from “them” but from us.  From inside.  As a human species, we are selfish and hateful and thoughtless about the suffering of others, and that will destroy us.

Which leads back to Mother Night, and the crux of the matter.  Howard Campbell destroyed lives with his broadcasts.  With the codes he embedded in them, he gave out coordinates for bombs to be dropped upon and civilians to be incinerated.   His words killed untold thousands with the Nazi hate he spewed.  But he thought about none of this because he was just an entertainer and as long as he got what he wanted, it was OK.  Which leads to the moral of the book: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Something to think about.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

And another moral: more people need to read.

Midseason Television: The Finder

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Bones, Geoff Stultz, Hart Hanson, Michael Clarke Duncan, The Finder

The Finder:

 

So here’s a refreshing change-of-pace in the middle of a spate of dark and serpentine new shows.  A sunny, serio-comic crime show with a quirky, damaged hero, his level-headed partner, the totally-expected hot U.S. Marshall and the troubled girl they take in and try to help.  Set the whole thing in The Everglades and you basically have Elmore Leonard light, or something tailor-made for the USA Network (White Collar, Burn Notice, Psych).

The series was actually created by Hart Hanson, who also created Bones.  I’ve never seen Bones, but from idly picking up the tone from commercials, I see the resemblance.  I believe The Finder is, in fact a spinoff (the characters were introduced in an episode of Bones last season).

Here’s what I find particularly refreshing: the whole series, from how it is conceived (from a series of books by Richard Greener), introduced (classic spinoff move: launch the characters in an episode of an established show), and executed (mystery-of-the-week, advancing but casually-followable character backstory) reminds me of the big Network shows of the eighties (Simon and Simon, Spencer for Hire, Remington Steele, Magnum P.I.).  They’ve tried this kind of show in the past ten years–usually as vehicles for older stars on the wane–with varying degrees of success (Nash Bridges, Castle, Murphy’s Law), but for the most part this kind of show has been the bread-and-butter of basic cable, with successes like the USA shows I mentioned above, Monk, and The Closer.

And that’s too bad, because the P.I. show is perfect for network television.  It provides an excellent launching pad for writers and actors, usually uses location better than most other shows, and gives the kind of mac-and-cheese a lot of people not as pathetically devoted to television as myself a chance to follow a show on-and-off without working too hard.

Also, it provides a counterpoint to the current independent-episode-driven show that is currently on the air–CSI, NCIS, Lie to Me, Criminal Minds, and House–which are more about mood and evidence-analysis techniques.  You feel, with The Finder, that you can help solve the mystery without a PhD in criminal forensics, which is what shows from the golden age of mystery-of-the-week television (Matlock, Columbo) excelled at, all the while seeming tailor-made for syndication.

The hero, Walter, played by Geoff Stultz, suffered an I.E.D. blast in Iraq and a two-month coma, only to emerge with an almost extra-sensory ability to locate things, as well as a possibly psychotic drive to do so.  His partner and caretaker, Leo, played my Michael Clarke Duncan, lost his family to tainted, E. coli infected meat, basically serves as muscle and as a translator for Walter’s more out-there proposals.  The U.S. Marshall is beautiful, but so far pretty thinly drawn.  The orphan they take in is on probation, was apparently raised by Gypsies (Fellow Travelers to those of us in the know…) and consumes with mixed feelings about her current living arrangements.

The mysteries are pretty satisfying.  The one that involved finding a bullet shot twenty years before in a swamp that has been paved over to make room for a storage facility and paid overt homage to the 1980’s television The Finder hopes to replicate with two boobs who look just like Crockett and Tubbs was especially good and snapped together like well-engineered home furniture.  However, the back-stories are a definite weak point.

I understand the need to provide a reason for these four people to hang out together, but I just don’t buy it.  The IED and Walter’s subsequent talents are a little too far-fetched, and Leo’s tragedy, while obviously a ploy to connect with every Joe Lunchbox who hates the one-percenters, is really kind of dumb.  I wouldn’t mind so much except every time the characters need to reveal a little of themselves, it throws the whole tone of the show into a spin.

Take the big reveal of Leo’s tragedy, which is heinous and would make anyone pretty angry, I imagine.  However, Michael Clarke Duncan, who’s always impressed me with the way he uses his ginormous bulk and Buddha-like calm to excellent effect, simply doesn’t strike me as all that haunted.  He’s far too pleasant, and though I know the role calls for that serenity, and we need to feel that though he’s to an extent broken but still trying, it becomes a little disorienting.  The orphan gypsy girl is a major problem.  Her reactions to situations are so confused, a blend of innocent and violent, that you can’t get a read on her.  She’s far too smart and cunning to misunderstand humans as much as she does.

In the second episode, she finds out about Leo’s tragedy and, in an effort to make amends for a prior mishap, tries to set things right by kneecapping the CEO of the company that sold the tainted food to Leo’s family.  Now, I hate me a CEO, and this guy looked pretty rancid, but taking a ball bat to him in a parking garage seemed such an overblown reaction that it was almost offensive.  It’s at points like this that the characters or less organic creations than marionettes, performing their duties based on plot contrivance rather than their own innate capabilities and weaknesses.

I certainly hope that the show moves away from the back-stories and concentrates on the mysteries, because that’s where it shines.  The show is quick, fun, and smart.  I just hope it ends up more like Columbo and less like Murphy’s Law.

Midseason Television: Touch

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Fibonacci, Georges Perec, Heroes, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Teen Wolf TooKiefer Sutherland, Tim Kring

Touch

 

Fox drew from their “Glee” playbook and launched this series two months before it’s scheduled to air regularly, in order to build word of mouth.  Its pedigree is solid, even celebrated.  Kiefer Sutherland starred in probably the most popular hour-long Fox series to date, 24, and Tim Kring created Heroes, which was awesome for a season and sucked hard for three more.  He also wrote Teen Wolf Too, which he probably tries to work into every conversation he has, with anyone.

“What do you mean it’s reservation only?  I wrote Teen Wolf Too, Motherfucker!”

From what I can tell from the pilot, it suffers from a lot of the same problems as Alcatraz, in that network writers and creators seem to confuse grab-bagging from other sources with creativity.  I know it’s a popular rather than artistic format, and high-concept always implies pre-cursors, but when the math (pardon the pun) squares so easily:

 

Babel(Numb3rs + 24 x What’s Eating Gilbert Grape)

M. Night Shyamalan

 

Well, you get the idea.  You’ve got a mute kid obsessed with numbers and averse to physical contact, his sad-sack dad, the most dedicated (and prompt) children’s services agent in all of New York City (seriously?  This is the kid most in need of your precious time? In all of Manhattan?  He lives in blissful comfort with a doting dad and a near-genius IQ.  So he climbs cell-phone towers and doesn’t talk—who gives a shit?), and what I imagine will be a revolving door of guest spots from hard-working, recognizable television actors (Titus Welliver, of Lost fame, in the pilot).  Also, Danny Glover is saddled with the crazy-but-correct-about-everything recluse-professor role, which is laughably bad casting, honestly.  Danny Glover is a lot of things, but he’s never struck me as the hermit type.

It looks like the episodes will follow the Babel formula, where the writers will introduce, say, twenty or twenty-five separate plot threads and then connect them together, solidly or tenuously, depending upon how hard they feel like working on the teleplay.  The pilot concerns incidents in Ireland, Japan, NYC, London, and Kuwait.  It’s all designed to show how connected we all are, and the conceit is that only mute kids who climb cell towers are able to see and even manipulate the connections.

I did think the ending was “touching,” though, if only because I’ve always felt like Kiefer Sutherland is a marvelous actor, better than his dad, and constantly capable of wrestling emotional truth from the most preposterous contrivances (he had a lot of practice in 24…).  As an aside, do you find it as odd as I do that Kiefer Sutherland is famous for playing desperate, barking men with the world on their shoulders while his father’s claim to fame lies in creating characters that seem hard-pressed to summon where they are, geographically, from one moment to the next?  Seriously, I sometimes wonder if he knows he’s on camera.

There’s lots of talk about the Fibonacci numbers and their relation to the natural world, a glancing nod towards complexity theory and fractals, etc.  It exists to make the show sound smart, but here’s the problem with these kinds of plots, whether it’s Signs, Babel, or Heroes: IN FICTION, EVERYTHING HAS TO HAPPEN FOR A REASON.

To point to the essential connectivity of human lives is one thing, but to build plots around it is a cheat.  Connecting the loose strands of seeming coincidence into the bow of a well-plotted story is what fiction does.  To do so and then use the contrivance inherent n why we like stories in the first place as a way of pointing out something true about life is a lie.  It’s not quite playing tennis without a net, to borrow Robert Frost’s dictum about free-verse poetry, but playing without a net, balls, or racquets and then pretending you won Wimbledon.  There’s nothing profound in making connections between characters in a narrative; it’s just good craft.  Constantly pointing it out to the viewer is only going to backfire and show off all the forced coincidences and far-fetched connections.

So, to put a bow on it, the conceit that the human race is connected in ways we can scarce comprehend, and that that connectivity is integral to our understanding of the world is a subject ripe for fictional analysis, and as the novels of Georges Perec, the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski, or the recent movie Incendies demonstrate, can provide a substantial intellectual and emotional wallop.  But basing an entire series around such an overt lynchpin could, I fear, lead to repetition and guffaws of disbelief.