Author Archives: Isaac Butler

Based on a True Story: Thinking About Talking About Watching “Zero Dark Thirty”

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(1)  Even before you see the movie it seems like you’ve seen it. This isn’t only because Mark Boal’s screenplay is so sparse—under 10,000 words, apparently—that almost all of its memorable lines and moments are in the previews, largely in chronological order. No. Before you’ve seen Zero Dark Thirty, it’s likely that you already have some knowledge of and feelings about the film, thanks to a wide-ranging debate about whether or not ZD30 endorses torture.

(2)   “As a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic. As a piece of cinema, it’s phenomenally gripping — an unholy masterwork. The first masterstroke is the first thing you see — or, rather, don’t see. Under a black screen, the sounds of 9/11 build: a hubbub of confusion, reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center, and then, most terribly, the voice of a woman crying out to a 911 operator who tries vainly to assure her she’ll be okay. She won’t be. That prologue looks like restraint — there are no sensationalistic images — but it’s cruel: The recordings are genuine. You want revenge so much it hurts, but you’ll have to live with the pain because the ­sonovabitch bastard Muslims who killed that poor woman are elusive, and when you catch them they won’t talk. The next scene, a brutal interrogation at a CIA “black site,” is unpleasant but not unwelcome. To paraphrase Dick Cheney, you sometimes have to go to the dark side, and the big, bearded Dan (Jason Clarke) has made the trip…” – David Edelstein, New York.

(3)  “Portrayal is not endorsement.” – Kathryn Bigelow, director of Zero Dark Thirty.

(4)  Kathryn Bigelow didn’t actually say that. She said something similar to it and I summarized it. I conflated her words into other words, to make her argument simpler and clearer. I’m actually owning up to that here. The creators of Zero Dark Thirty, Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow, do not do the same with their film. Instead, it begins with a title card saying that it’s Based On A True Story.  “Just like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!” I thought to myself.

(5)  We live in a time inundated with “true” stories that are also “good” stories. Many of these stories turn out to not be true in the sense of factually accurate, even as their creators will claim that they are true in the sense of “getting to an emotional/personal/spiritual/political/etc. reality.”  Ultimately, true can have a lot of meanings.  So, it turns out, can good.

(6)  Right after the title card, the film cuts to a black screen with audio of real phone calls from inside the towers on 9/11. Whatever emotional purpose this serves—I was in New York on 9/11, and was so horrified by this sequence I nearly left the theater—there’s a signaling purpose here. This Is Real, the phone calls attest.  This Happened. In a way, the phone call sequence abrogates the hedging of “based on a true story.” It sets up a tacit contract that we’re getting at something close to the truth. This was only reinforced by the misguided and self-important pre-release decision on Boal and Bigelow’s part to portray the movie as somehow a just-the-facts-ma’am depiction of the hunt for Bin Laden derived from their exclusive “journalistic” access to people involved.

(7)  I should probably just note here that several characters in ZD30, including its protagonist, are composites. In other words, they don’t exist and stand in for groups of people.  This is in line with other Based On A True Story narratives, but also worth noting.

(8)  It seems in ZD30’s case that the multiplex and not the newspaper is going to be the first draft of history. Many more people have already seen Zero Dark Thirty than will ever read Mark Bowden’s The Finish, an actual-nonfiction prose account of the same story. Does this increase the film’s obligation to get the facts right? Or is its higher obligation to be a compelling work of quality cinematic entertainment? Or art, for that matter? Without the pre-release interview blitz on Bigelow and Boal’s part, would this obligation have changed? What, in other words, is the value of the truth here?

(9)Creative Nonfiction, the genre of writing I largely work in, is an odd beast, engaging with complementary, occasionally competing, systems of worth.  On one level, there’s the aesthetic worth of a particular work, and on the other there’s its truth value. The truth is a difficult beast. The work we create is both enhanced and restricted by it. Audiences and readers are far more forgiving of narrative structure issues (for example) in true stories because they are true, because on some level we recognize that fictional narratives are able to “cheat” in order to satisfy us. Works with a high level of truth value can often get away with being on some level aesthetically unsatisfying, while works that are exquisitely crafted are often able to elide some of the problems of the truth, be they gaps in memory, or conflicting accounts, or a baggy structure, or what have you. Part of what is at work with Zero Dark Thrity’s first five minutes and with Boal and Bigelow’s publicity tour is an attempt to sell you on the work’s truth value prior to your having any experience of its aesthetic one.

(10)Were it not for this, I do not believe the debate over the use of torture in the film would be occurring. Were the film about a CIA agent pursuing, say, Homeland’s Abu Nazir, with a 9/11-like terrorist attack in the first shot, I don’t think anyone would care, not really. More importantly, they wouldn’t be so sure that they were so sure about the film’s stance towards torture, as ZD30 isn’t nearly as cut and dry as everyone seems to be pretending it is.

(11)The case against torture—one I find persuasive, to be clear—rests on two arguments: morality and effectiveness.  Simply put: Torture is wrong and it doesn’t work. These aren’t completely separate. While we’re all fond of the expression the ends don’t justify the means, the truth of the matter is we often make decisions about morality and ethics based on whether or not a specific end is worth a specific mean. So one of the reasons why torture is wrong is because it doesn’t work. The ends—shoddy intel, innocent people destroyed, the dehumanizing effect on the torturer, the cost to our moral standing etc.—aren’t worth whatever crumbs we’d get from torturing people. It’s helpful then to think about Zero Dark Thirty in terms of both of these standards. Does it portray torture as effective? And how does it portray it morally?

(12) The answer to the first question is complicated, but I believe that the movie has its thumb on the scale in favor of torture’s effectiveness.

(13) ZD30  is divided into roughly two halves, one about the CIA’s failure to find Bin Laden, and one about its success. The torture takes place entirely during the “failure” half of the film, and there are many moments in this half where it’s made at least tacitly clear that the CIA isn’t getting anywhere with torturing people.  Also, the one piece of important intel—the name of Bin Laden’s courier—comes as the direct result not of torture but rather from an old interrogation room bluff: Jessica Chastain’s Maya and Jason Clarke’s Dan convince a detainee that he has already helped them and he gives them the name.

(14) It’s easy to point to this and say “see, the film is showing that old school law enforcement tactics work and torture doesn’t,” and, indeed, some have. The problem is that this bluff only works because the detainee has been waterboarded, starved, sleep deprived, beaten, walked around like a dog and shoved in a small wooden box until his short-term memory has disintegrated, allowing them to convince him that he has forgotten helping them. Later on, Maya interrogates a different detainee who says without prompting, “I don’t want to be tortured anymore, I’ll tell you whatever you want.” He provides no useful information, but he provides the next moment of narrative satisfaction to the audience, by intoning the ominous line “he is one of the disappeared ones.” Torture is thus narratively effective in the film regardless of how effective it is as an intel-gathering tool.

(15) Oh yeah, there’s also the glaring fact that torture did not, in real life, get us the name of the courier.

(16) “‘The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden,’ acting CIA Director Mike Morell wrote in a letter to employees in December. ‘That impression is false.’ The Senate intelligence committee, which last month completed a 6,000-page report on the CIA interrogation program based on its examination of 6 million pages of CIA records, was more definitive: ‘The CIA did not first learn about the existence of the UBL courier from CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques. Nor did the CIA discover the courier’s identity from CIA detainees subjected to coercive techniques.’ Yet in their film, Bigelow and Boal depict the exact opposite.” – Adam Serwer, Mother Jones.

(17) “Torture may be morally wrong, and it may not be the best way to obtain information from detainees, but it played a role in America’s messy, decade-long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty is right to portray that fact.” – Mark Bowden.

(18)  The film also contains many moments where characters go to bat for the efficacy of torture and not one moment in which anyone repudiates it.  This would be excusable by the dictates of realism (it’s doubtful CIA torturers would sit around talking about how it doesn’t work) were it not for the film’s inclusion of a scene where Mark Strong’s “George” argues that torture works to Stephen Dillane’s “National Security Advisor”—a guy who is fairly clearly based at least in part on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, by reputation the most argumentative man alive—and NSA/Rahm doesn’t argue about it.

(19) Regardless of its view on torture’s effectiveness, there is the question of ZD30’s take on the morality of torture. And it is here that the movie is at its most troubling, if most interesting. For Zero Dark Thirty has absolutely no moral perspective on torture.  It’s an essentially amoral film.  It’s not immoral. It’s view towards torture is not, say, 24’s, where it always works and is always awesome and the people who get tortured deserve it. Nor is it, say, Man on Fire where torture is the hilariously over the top and necessary path that Denzel Washington must take to find Dakota Fanning.

(20) In Zero Dark Thirty, torture is simply shown, generally in a filmic style we associate with “objectivity”: no underscoring, documentary-like cutting and camera movement, few POV shots, etc.  Much has been made of a few quick shots of Maya wincing, folding her arms, or otherwise seeming to disapprove of the interrogation she’s seeing. Yet, given that we later learn that in these first scenes she is at most 22 years old, and given that eventually she embraces torture, these moments can also be read as the squeamishness of the Rookie Cop who is about to become the Lone Crusader Who Works To Buck The System, Jimmy McNulty with better bone structure.

(21) Does Zero Dark Thirty have some kind of obligation—moral, political, ethical—to take a stance on torture, to be a “good” story in a moral sense? How would we treat a mainstream Oscar-nominated thriller that treated the Holocaust or slavery in a similarly “objective” and amoral way? Or a film that did the same with rape?  Why doesn’t torture, a very recent part of our history that is still being debated, belong in this group?

(22) Ultimately, these questions are far more interesting than the film itself, which may be why the debate over torture has obscured discussion of the actual film. The script, alas, is a clunker, filled with tin-eared lines, containing characters that lack even one dimension, and riddled with clichés, while the acting—particularly the dialect work from the film’s many British actors—is deeply uneven.

(23) Despite this, the film has a power, thanks in part to Kathryn Bigelow. Zero Dark Thirty is expertly, even brilliantly, directed. Each sequence in it is riveting in its construction as Bigelow uses her keen sense of color, light and rhythm to pull the audience through the film’s decade-long story.  Its second source of power is, of course, that it is true. Or rather true-ish. Or truthy. From the moment those phone calls start in, you can’t help but think that everything they’re showing you really happened, even when a part of you screams that it didn’t. This is Zero Dark Thirty’s trick, and it’s a good one. It can justify its weaknesses through claiming a level of access to the people involved in the story that you the viewer will never, can never, have, while also changing things when necessary for the sake of being a good story. The end result is something neither particularly true nor particularly good that somehow feels like both. And if feeling is a kind of truth, maybe, at the end of the day, it is both of these things.

Car Ride Lacuna

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Memory is merely one form of imagination.—Steven Millhauser

The trouble starts when I get onto the New Jersey Turnpike. That’s the moment my memory of Christmas 2007 begins to break down. The night before, the phone call from Mom—we’re talking your Dad to the emergency room—the mad scramble to pack my bags while my girlfriend calls rent-a-car companies, the phone calls to and from various relatives, learning words like gangrene and phrases like septic shock, all of that remains intact, crystalline. Ditto the moment two days later when Dad says he wants to leave Christian Science behind and I breathe a sigh of relief because he’s finally going to stop relying on prayer to heal him.

But the car ride from Brooklyn to DC is one of many moments—perhaps significant, who can tell—that I cannot remember. The ride down isn’t even a blur; it’s a snapshot:

            I’m in the passenger seat of a car, looking at the air vents and the dashboard and finally it’s just too much and I’m crying and trying not to cry. My girlfriend looks over at me. She wants to help, she wants to soothe, but she also needs to keep her eyes on the road.  It’s a brief moment, and soon I’m looking out the window at the New Jersey Turnpike with its low price gasoline and rest areas named after famous Jersians of the 19th Century and reeking factories.

The rest of it is gone. Removed, like my father’s leg.

I am terrified of this empty space in my mind.

 

 

If there’s one thing I hold onto with some sense of pride, it’s the flypaper of my memory. When it works, anything that zooms past it gets stuck.  How, then, to explain its failure as I tendril my way back into my recent past? Perhaps my memory has become corrupted. Abort/Retry/Ignore.

Memory— like many words in our polyglot bastard tongue— comes from many sources. Anglo-norman. Old French. Classical Latin. Eventually we arrive at an unprintable Ancient Greek word meaning baneful or fastidious.  This suggests that even in classical times, the Poindexters who remembered everything weren’t exactly popular.

Let me try this from memory:

            To be or not to be, that is the question

            Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

            The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

            Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

            And by opposing end them.

            To die, to sleep, no more and…

That’s as far as I can get, and I’m fairly sure some of the above is wrong. Perhaps I’m not as good at this whole remembering thing as I thought.  Maybe those facts, figures, Simpsons quotes and Monty Python routines that I love to trot out are similarly wrong.


 

Perhaps were I still a professional actor, I could remember the lines from Hamlet or what I did in our rented car on the New Jersey Turnpike. When you perform in front of school kids, they always want to know how long it took you to rehearse and how you memorize all those lines. I phone an acquaintance of mine, the actor James Urbaniak, to talk about his methods.

 

 

When Hamlet’s father’s ghost—also named Hamlet, sorry English students everywhere—appears to the distraught Prince, he charges him with three tasks.  The first is vengeance.  The second is not to harm his mother.  The third, often forgotten, is remember me.

 

 

Remember. What are we to make of the peculiar, troublesome “b” when memory shifts to the past tense?  Re-member, not re-memor. To reincorporate something into the group, the whole. To take the distinct particle and add it to the organism. To put back together something that has been broken. When Christ Jesus takes the ear his disciple has cut off of one of his tormenters and rejoins it to the man’s face, he has remembered the ear. A member is part of an organization, a collection, a body, whether that’s the physical body or the body politic.  It’s also a penis, of course.

 

 

Urbaniak’s method for memorization involves linking difficult lines to images. It’s very instinctive, he tells me, the first weird image, and frankly, those images can get very sexual and very scatological. The method comes from a television infomercial he happened to catch as a child about how to remember names.

 

 

Shouldn’t the opposite of remember be dismember, rather than forget? Perhaps dismember feels too much like a choice, the choosing to separate a person from a group, or a limb from a body.  Thinking of forgetting as an amputation makes it somehow moral. The Latin word amputare refers specifically to the chopping off of a thief’s hands. Our language, then, implies sin, a crime needing to be punished. The crime of joining the army. Or having diabetes. Or relying on God.

 

 

On the phone, James pulls out a script of Thom Pain (based on nothing) a one-man show he performed in New York. He finds a particularly abstruse line: Picture the readiness, the stillness, the virtuosity. He walks me through translating this into an image to help him remember. I might first imagine a picture frame.  “Picture.”  And in that picture is me. And I’m surrounded by books reading. Reading. And if I see that, I would remember that r-e-a-d was for “Readiness”. “Stillness”. So I’m frozen while reading. It’s a picture of me reading and I’m frozen, maybe I’m sitting on ice. Frozen would remind me of stillness. “Virtuosity.” And meanwhile someone is behind me playing the violin. He bursts into laughter, amazed at the workings of the mind and how we trick it into doing what we need it to do.

 

 

If you trace the path of the word “forget” it actually means to lose one’s hold. Your butterfingers mind slips on the handles of both the things you want to keep and the things you want to lose. Unlike dismember, forget is indiscriminate, is involuntary, is amoral.

 

 

Remember me the Ghost charges, the father asks of the dutiful, loving son. In keeping this oath, Hamlet will come to reach all the way back through memory’s roots, to trace “memory” past its ancient Greek banefulness to the delightful Sanskrit smri, the mother of both memory and witness. It means martyr.

 

 

After turning one line into an image, James then links it to the lines that surround it, forming a nonsense narrative that takes him through the script. Let’s say prior to the line about the readiness, I had another line that was to be or not to be.  I might picture two bees and then they’re shot, so they don’t exist anymore. So two bees and they’re not. And then their bodies fall on the frozen lake where I’m reading.

The most surprising aspect of James’ memorization trick is that he needs no help in remembering the images themselves. I’m able to conjure up these images very very quickly because I can see them as bizarre pictures. I see the bees on the ice and see the picture and boom, I’m there, as opposed to seeing a sequence of words. The memorization per se is just an early technical necessity. It has nothing to do with acting whatsoever. And then eventually with acting, you figure out why the character is saying these things. Memorization then is a purely technical first step. Real memory involves actions and motivations, the building blocks of character, including the fussy, discomfiting characters of ourselves.

 

 

Here’s how Hamlet responds to his charge to remember his father:

Yea, from the table of my memory

            I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

            All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,

            That youth and observation copied there;

            And thy commandment all alone shall live

            Within the book and volume of my brain,

            Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by heaven!

That passage isn’t from memory. I googled it. Google substitutes for memory, the way Facebook substitutes for The Director’s list. No one knows how these online replacements will impact on our memory. Perhaps in the future there will be no lacunae, and thus no creative bridging of these gaps, and thus no art. The Universe, after all, is mostly made up of empty space.

 

 

Hamlet promises his dead father that he will clear space in the attic of his brain by forgetting all the unnecessary information of his youth. He will sculpt himself into a First Corinthians kind of man. He will stop speaking as a child, understanding as a child, thinking as a child and, as St. Paul instructed, he will put away childish things. This is Hamlet’s ultimate act of love, to transform himself into a monument, which in English means anything that preserves a memory, but in Welsh means a graveyard.

 

 

Science teaches us that forgetting can be an act of self-defense, but art teaches us that memory is an act of love. I want so desperately to remember that car ride, to remember every minute spent in waiting rooms, every thought and word and deed of the weeks surrounding Christmas of that year. Yet I have to look at a calendar to recall what year it was. Time and the workings of the human mind wrap weights around all the locked safes and drop them into the uttermost parts of the sea.

When I was growing up, I learned in Sunday School the tenants of my family’s faith. I learned that these corporeal, finite, decaying bodies of ours did not exist. I learned that the real me was perfect. I learned that the real me was in Heaven, with the Father/Mother God. I learned that God is Love, God is perfect, God is all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-acting, all-wise, and made us in His image. I learned that the limits of the self were an illusion, called Mortal Mind, that this Mortal Mind was responsible for illness, that treating the illusion through medicine reinforced its existence. I learned that if we studied hard enough, prayed hard enough, attuned ourselves to God, we could realize our real perfection and leave Mortal Mind behind, the way Jesus did when he ascended to heaven. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.

Perhaps this is why I cannot shake the belief that my inability to remember even trivial details is a failure. Not a failure of the mind, like the Director’s deleted words, or a failure of art like James stumbling to recall a memory palace of images, but a failure of love.

 

V For Vile

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At first, I was nervous.  I am not a hater by nature; I generally consider myself an enthusiast. How could I, then, participate in this Festival of Hate? Is there a way to responsibly choose something that’s worth hating on? Perhaps, I thought, I should just refuse to participate all together.

Noah asked me to pick my candidate for Worst Comic Of All Time. Being a good graduate student, I decided I needed some kind of rubric for determining Worst. Whatever I chose had to (A) Be made by competent, even skilled, creators (Ed Wood style badness wouldn’t do!), (B) Fail on its own terms to the extent they can be determined by a good-faith reading of the text, (C) Be not only bad but hateful in some way and (D) Influential.

There were several candidates that leapt to mind, but were unable to fulfill all four. The 300, for example, is hateful, made by a skilled creator and influential. But it doesn’t fail on its own terms. It is trying to be The Triumph of the Will of American Empire, a racist, pro-fascism pamphlet in which Western Society is attacked by ever darker, more exotic and queerer antagonists. On this front, it succeeds. It is, as a friend of mine put it, “a delicious pie baked by Goebbels.”

This search eventually lead me to Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta, a work that fulfills all four criteria with aplomb. It’s a competently made, terrible, hateful failure on its own terms that has, sadly, had some influence, particularly on the radical left, who really should know better by now. It manages to be brazenly misogynist, horrifically violent, and thuddingly dull all at the same time. It’s one of the few books that spawned a film adaptation that is both borderline-unwatchable and an improvement on its source[1]. Moore and Lloyd appear to have set out to make Nineteen Eighty-Four with a happy ending, and instead ended up making a leftish The Fountainhead.

For those not in the know, V For Vendetta is Alan Moore’s first longform work with original characters.  An anarchist response to the election of Margaret Thatcher, V takes place in a fascist England after the whole rest of human civilization has been wiped out in WWIII[2]. Seemingly out of nowhere arrives V, a faceless terrorist who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and pursues two goals: revenge on the people who imprisoned and medically experimented on him in a concentration camp, and bringing down the government.

The book sets out to be a kind of action-thriller with political content, a work that uses a compelling story and the basic tools of mainstream comics (read: violence) to smuggle in a lot of pro-anarchism speeches and “thought provoking” sequences about individual and political freedom.  On both of these fronts, it fails massively.  It does not work as a thriller because we are never as readers in any doubt that V will succeed. He assures us again and again that he has a plan and at no point in the book does this plan seem in any kind of jeopardy[3]. He suffers no setbacks. He in no way struggles. Everything moves forward with the inexorability of a Greek Tragedy, but one that takes the gods’ point of view instead of the mortals. This sabotages any potential thrill the story might have as a story. Narrative tension generally relies on some mix between questions the audience needs answered and answers the audience has that the characters don’t.  Neither is present in this book. The mystery as to V’s origin—really, the only even mildly compelling question in the text—is resolved before the first third is over.

The political content, such as it is, is no great shakes either. Yes, radical anarchy is preferable to jackbooted fascism. And in a world in which sanity means conformity to a genocidal, hyper-consumerist, corrupt authoritarian society, maybe we all need to go a little mad. V, however, ends just before fascist England actually falls. Moore gets to have it both ways, making a case that a radical anarchist state would be a really great thing without ever having to imagine for the reader what that world would look like. He even has V go to great lengths to explain that the riots, looting and murder taking place in England’s streets as the government collapses aren’t anarchy at all, but rather chaos.  I suppose anarchy, like Communism, can never fail; it can only be failed.

The problem with shoddy political allegories like V For Vendetta (or The Dark Knight) is that the alternative realities they rely on to make their experiments work are so preposterous and rigged that they end up disproving themselves.  True, were England to be taken over by Nazis, terrorism would likely be justified.  But making a book arguing this case is a waste of time and energy. You might as well write a book making the in depth argument that if your Aunt had bollocks, she’d be your Uncle.

Well-crafted dystopian narratives understand this. Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing to the reader that the INGSOC should be overturned.  Neither does Brazil contain a stemwinding speech about the tyranny of bureaucracy that Sam Lowry toils under. Instead, both bring to the table a rich examination of the psyche of those living under a dystopian state. Sam Lowry’s inner conflict between being a distracted dreamer and a bureaucratic climber slyly interacts with his gradual education into how his world and privilege work.  Nineteen Eighty-Four’s portrayal of the gradual wearing down of Winston Smith’s psyche and of the way the totalitarian mindset is formed and reinforced at every turn, is harrowing and moving[4].

In order for V for Vendetta to pull something similar off, it would have to care about the characters who inhabit it.  Sadly, the souls wandering its richly illustrated pages are mere pawns—or, to use the book’s own recurring image, dominoes—they are there to be set up and moved around as the narrative sees fit, toppled when expediency demands.

Nowhere is this more true than in the work’s treatment of Evey Hammond, V’s female sidekick[5] and eventual replacement.  Evey is a shopworn narrative trope, the neophyte who joins the narrative so that the world can be explained to her, and via her, the audience[6]. Evey is the reader-surrogate within the novel, the person who has to try to make sense of V’s actions, while V is placed as the author’s surrogate, the explainer and shaper of the narrative. Repeatedly, we are reminded that V is creating something for us, something that seems chaotic, but that will reveal a pattern if we just wait and are patient.  For example, this section comes from a journal of one of V’s “doctors” at the prison camp:

While later on, we see a recurring image of V setting up dominoes in his home base without being able to see the pattern, only to have it be revealed that it is his trademark V symbol right before he topples them all and the state of England:

If Evey is meant to be the reader and V is meant to be creator, it’s worth pointing out exactly how V For Vendetta’s creators feel about their audience. “I’m a baby,” Evey says to V.  “I know I’m stupid.”:

V for Vendetta is the kind of book that proceeds from the assumption that the reader is a moron, and if only we were properly enlightened, we would agree with its creator. We are the gutless conformists, who just need a good stern talking to (and a little bit of torturing) to convince us of our errors. And here comes a guy who talks a lot like Alan Moore—all allusions and quotes from other sources, weird obscure jokes and puns, cryptic clues—to show us the way. It is, in that way, no different from The Newsroom: the work of a blowhard who is incapable of imagining anyone ever disagreeing with him, or a world in which he could possibly be wrong.

I suppose this shadow agenda of proving Alan Moore smarter than us would be all fine and good were the book to succeed in it.  Sadly, amidst all that allusion and reference there’s a glaring neon sign that V for Vendetta is not nearly as smart as it thinks it is:

That’s our man V there.  He’s wearing his trademark Guy Fawkes mask. Guy Fawkes is the book’s symbolic hero.  Lloyd mentions in an afterward that he wanted to rehabilitate Fawkes because blowing up parliament was a great idea. But—and I hope this is obvious to many of you when you stop and think about it—it’s patently absurd to take Guy Fawkes as an anarchist-leftist superhero. Fawkes was a ex-soldier and Catholic extremist trying to overthrow an authoritarian anti-Catholic State and replace it with an authoritarian Catholic one.  It’s just plain dumb to borrow the symbol of Fawkes without the slightest care for what it represents, just as it is an act of idiocy for the hacker group Anonymous and various members of Occupy—a movement I support, I hasten to add— to adopt the Fawkes mask as their icon.

As the book wears on (and on, and on) it also gets derailed by its panic and anger at female infidelity, a crime that is punished with gleeful violence at every turn.  On pages 39-41, V recasts his quest to free England as a lover’s spat with the female statue of Justice, who has cheated on him with Authority:

Care to guess how it ends?:

When Evey propositions V, he abandons her on the streets of England. Having nowhere else to go, she briefly takes up with a liquor smuggler named Gordon. With the inexorability of an early-eighties horror movie, as soon as she has sex with him, he gets killed by gangsters. After this, she is kidnapped, tortured, and interrogated, as faceless interlocutors demand to know the location of V and his plans.  At night, she reads a letter from a fellow inmate which gives her the courage to accept death rather than betray V. It is then revealed that the whole kidnap/torture/interrogation thing was an elaborate ploy by V to set Evey free by helping her get down to the individual freedom that exists within us, the last thing that we control.  While initially upset, here’s Evey’s eventual response from page 174:

This would be hard enough to swallow were it not for the fact that Evey’s incarceration included sexualized imagery:

And actual sexual assault:

You see, dear reader, if you won’t see the light, we have the freedom, as filmmaker Michael Haneke put it, to rape you into enlightenment. Stockholm Syndrome is liberty. Also, War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength. Just shut your pretty little mouth and do what the author tells you.  Never you mind that this is supposed to all be about radical individuality being the only way forward. You are radically free to agree and that’s about it.

Finally on the docket of cheating women who need to be punished, we have Helen Heyer. Helen becomes a regular presense in the third act of the book, as the (oddly fragile given that it’s supposed to be frighteningly all-powerful) society crumbles. The wife of a high-ranking fascist, Helen tries to maneuver her husband into the role of Leader by sexually manipulating his colleagues.  She also refuses him sex. Helen is a classic misogynist caricature, simultaneously frigid and a whore, using her body to get ahead. It doesn’t work, of course.  V sends her husband a videotape of her sleeping around, he murders her lover and is killed in the process. Helen’s plans come to naught and the book’s supposedly-cathartic orgy of chaos and violence ends on the final page with her about to be gang raped by hobos because she’s sick of trading sexual favors to them for food. Seriously.  That’s the book’s ending.

All of Moore’s bad habits as a writer are on display in V, from its misogyny to the stentorian, hectoring tone of the text whenever its eponymous hero shows up to its frantic, desperate need to impress us with its creator’s brilliance.  I feel I’ve only really scratched the surface of V For Vendetta’s terribleness here. Part of me was tempted to simply scan the song on pages 89-93 and write “Game, Set, Match,” underneath, or discuss the hackneyed and emotionally manipulative story about what happens to one of the prominent fascists’s wives after he dies, how she comes to miss his physical and emotional abuse when she has to take up a stripping job for money.  Or catalogue the way in which each allusion—to everything from MacBeth to Sympathy for the Devil—is constructed not because of its actual relation to the material, but because it’s impressive.

Instead, let me close on a personal note. The reason why I find V For Vendetta so upsetting, the reason why it makes me so angry, is on some level political. I am a leftist. Unapologetically so. That V For Vendetta—with its nihilistic embrace of violence, it’s distrust of the institutions that will be required to enact any lefty agenda, its hatred of women and its love of coercion— has caught on amongst lefties, that in particular Guy Fawkes has been taken as a symbol of anything other than far-right religious terrorism is something I find particularly galling. I worry that at heart some of my fellow travelers on the Left feel reified by this work’s subtextual assertion that anyone who disagrees with them must be blinkered, an uninformed idiot who simply needs to be enlightened or blown up.

I suppose there is another way to read V, one where the surface and subtext are actually in constant conflict. One where the first chapter’s title (The Villain) is meant to be taken more seriously, where we are meant to see Evey’s torture not as she comes to eventually see it, but for the problematic and rapey coercion of one who disagrees with our main character. Maybe we are meant to see the downfall of the state as a complicated thing, and the gang-raping hobos not as a darkly ironic enforcement of Moore’s id but rather as a sign of complexity in the work. Perhaps V’s anarchist utopia is never shown because utopia means no-place and V is, in fact, wrong. Certainly there are panels and excerpts one could use to make this argument, but I am not the one to make it, nor would I really be convinced by that argument. It’s a bit too clever by half, a way of taking the book’s considerable weaknesses and claim them as strengths. Besides, Moore does a far better job in Watchmen of having the character whose worldview is closest to his also be a monster who does something unforgiveable for “the greater good.”

[1] This is almost entirely due to the presense of Stephen Fry

[2] Somehow this authoritarian hellscape on an isolated island nation with limited land and resources also manages to have a hyper-advanced sci-fi surveillance state and all of the middle class comforts of late twentieth century life, but there’s so many bigger problems with the text, we should probably let that one slide.

[3] V’s plan, by-the-by, is implausible within the world Alan Moore has constructed.  We’re meant to believe that V, an escaped political prisoner, has somehow managed to amass a huge fortune, a wide network of real estate, hacked into Fate, the central computer that oversees all surveillance and activity within England and designed a meticulous plan to bring down the Government in under 5 years.

 

[4] Both also try to create analogues for our own time within their world, things that feel both exaggerated and frighteningly real at the same time.  Brazil begins with a typographical error leading the State to torture and murder the wrong man, which feels ridiculous until you recall Maher Arar. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Two Minutes Hate isn’t exactly Talk Radio, but it’s not not Talk Radio.

[5] You could argue that Evey is the protagonist of V and V the mentor figure. I actually think the book is confused about who its main character is. V doesn’t change, so he makes a shitty protagonist. Evey changes but is so thinly rendered and boring you can feel the book wanting to focus more often on V.

[6] Think Ellen Page in Inception.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Election vs. the Wire: Brutal Cage Match of Gritty Despair

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Where oh where do I begin in my attempt to get you to watch Election and Triad Election?  I could start in oh so many places.  I could start by telling you that Johnnie To is one of the greatest living action film directors, a man who invests his films with his peculiar thematic and aesthetic fixations while only rarely forgetting viewer pleasure. I could talk about the grace and beauty of his frequently long takes.  I could talk about his other films, like Breaking News, which begins and ends with nine-minute, single-take action sequences, one a shoot-out, one a car chase filmed from inside the lead vehicle. I could talk about the small repertory company of actors and writers he works with again and again. Or I could just talk about The Wire.
 

Tony Leung Ka Fai as Big D

 
It’s a cliché, of course, to recommend something to someone these days by using The Wire. “Oh, it’s like the British The Wire,” or “It’s like The Wire of theater” or “You know this guy wrote the episode where Stringer dies,” and it’s sometimes difficult to divine what we mean when we say this.  On some level, we’re just talking about quality, right? We mean that this is an exceptionally well-crafted piece of televisual entertainment. But we also mean that there’s a low level of bullshit and wish fulfillment to its unfolding, a willingness to confound audience expectations and a refusal to pander more than is necessary.  By this standard, of course, Season 5 of The Wire isn’t The Wire and neither is anything involving Bubs after Season 4, but we just let that go because, goddamnit, it’s the greatest work of narrative art created by man in the last however many years we want to use to temporally bound our judgment, right?

Okay, so The Wire-as-compliment is a cliché. But clichés become clichés because they have a certain value and in Election/Triad Election’s case, the cliché is particularly apt.

Election and its sequel Triad Election are two halves of a gangster saga set in Hong Kong a couple of years after reunification with mainland China.  The premise is not what you’d expect from a Mob Epic. It’s not about family strife, or a war between different mobs—there is one, but if you blink you’ll miss it—or control over territory. No one goes to a therapist or has domestic troubles. No. For if the American Gangster Epic is frequently about the interaction between Capitalism and Family steeped in immigration and the American Dream, the Election films are squarely about Capitalism and Democracy, with Tradition and Individuality thrown in for good measure.
 

Simon Yam as Lok

 
The first film opens on the dawn of an upcoming election, but it’s not for Mayor or Local Dog-Catcher, no, instead it’s for Chairman of one of the dozens of Triads in Hong Kong. A group of old “Uncles” meets to discuss who should be the next Chairman, the flashy and highly profitable Big D (played by Tony Leung Ka Fai) or the sturdy, dependable, quietly ambitious Lok (played by Simon Yam).  The early contrast between the two couldn’t be clearer, as Big D is shown buying flashy suits while Lok, a widower, goes to a local butcher for meat to feed his son.

The Uncles quickly settle on Lok, despite Big D’s attempts to bribe his way to the Chairmanship.  In his rage, Big D refuses to accept defeat and attempts to steal the Dragon Baton, the symbol of the Chairman’s power, without which he cannot rule. A Macguffin Hunt begins throughout Mainland China while the Uncles try to stop violence from breaking out on the streets of Hong Kong.

Louis Koo as Jimmy

I won’t spoil what happens next, as it all gets resolved in ways you wouldn’t expect and defy the western gangster conventions with which To is clearly enamored, but along the way we meet a few other key figures, including Jimmy (played by Canto-Pop idol Louis Koo), a businessman and mid-level Triad operative who just wants to make his money, Big Head (Lam Suet) a dutiful, tradition-minded dunce, Jet (Nick Cheung) a feral enforcer who obeys orders like a dog and Kun (Gordon Lam Ka Tung) an ambitious and violent soldier. Eventually, the hunt for the baton and the election dispute are resolved, paving the way for Triad Election.

In Triad Election, the same cast of characters returns, and it is two years later.  The winner of the previous film refuses to step down despite the fact that the Chairmanship is a term-limited position. Meanwhile, due to his business dealings, Jimmy is forced to run for Chairman by the Mainland Security Bureau even though he wants to quit the Triad, which he only joined for protection in the first place. If the first film is a dark but often fun romp that unfolds in unexpected ways, Triad Election is a slow and violent descent into multiple kinds of personal hell, as the various players lose all they really care for—including their humanity—as their desire to win overtakes them.

Despite having the backing of big players like Quentin Tarantino, Election only received an art-house release in the US, while Triad Election (which is incomprehensible without the first film) received a wider release and, predictably, flopped. But thanks to Netflix Streaming, that Valhalla of the Worthy and Cheap to License, both are finally available in an easy-to-obtain form, and what’s more, like The Wire, they reward rewatching, as the films are densely packed, stylistically exquisite and nearly exposition free.
 

To’s visuals often place characters in heavy shadow, here we see
several of the Uncles gathered to discuss the vote

Many pixels have been spilled documenting David Simon’s perspective on our crumbling institutions of government.  As he told The Believer, societal institutions are like the Gods in Greek Tragedy, inexorable, powerful forces that undermine individual agency.  The truth teller in a Simon piece is always the head that’s eventually going to be on the block. Attempts to improve the overall situation are doomed to succeed only on a small level, and only for a brief period of time, but are still noble and worthwhile.  Simon believes in individuals. Individuals may, in fact, be the only thing in which he’ll invest his faith. This forms a tension with his Democratic Socialist political leanings and this tension is part of what makes his work so electric and alive when it is at its best.

The perspective of the Election films inverts this equation. In To’s Universe, individuals are the problem and institutional tradition’s bulwark against individual will is the only thing standing between order and chaos. The problem in the Election films is that post-Millenial capitalism, with its empowering of individual will, embrace of selfishness, and temptations of money has eroded these institutions to the point where they are a hollow, symbolic shell.  To makes this point again and again, most vividly in the first film when the chase for the baton climaxes in one Triad brother beating another with a log while the victim recites the oaths of the Triad, hoping (incorrectly) that they will protect him.  The Hong Kong of Election is devoid of Bunny Colvins and McNultys and Daniels, it is instead a world where the sun is setting on an old guard who do not realize that their time is up, that “brotherhood” has become meaningless, that, to paraphrase one of the candidates, money is all that matters now.

The films are, then, an allegory that speaks to our present moment in America, despite being a violent realization of Reunification Anxiety. We live in a time where the series of “gentleman’s agreements” undergirding many of our institutions have completely eroded.  We now need sixty votes to pass anything or appoint anyone in the Senate due to filibuster abuse. The various financial scandals—in particular the recent LIBOR manipulation—stem in part from relying on people choosing to do the right and honorable thing. One party campaigns on Government not working and then, when elected, ensures that it doesn’t. The open politicization of the Supreme Court has eroded its credibility to such an extent that the Military is now the only widely trusted public institution.  The picture of our future painted by the Election films is a dark one.  If anything, the films seem fairly convinced that we’re all doomed, that because we do not keep to our traditions democracy is on its way out and that business, aided by a corrupt government, will win every time.

This is not a worldview that I personally agree with, but then again, David Simon’s pro-individual-but-we’re-all-fucked-anyway cynicism grates on me too.  Luckily, both works also contain rich strains of ambiguity and conflict. For example, the Uncles safeguarding the traditions of the Wing-Ho society are feeble old men, many of them easily bribable, dim-witted, and lecherous.  We learn early on in a throwaway line that the last election for chairman was rigged. And, while To is oddly sentimental about Triad ways, pausing with stirring, nostalgic music to watch the old Uncles take tea together, using what were rumored to be real secret hand gestures in an initiation ceremony, some of this can simply be chalked up to To’s Michael-Mannish love of men manning up and being manly-men while also I might have mentioned doing man things, but sensitively.

To’s films frequently take place in a world that’s not-quite-ours. Exiled—a quasi-Western set in Hong Kong and Macau—replaces blood with red dust. The Mad Detective’s world is fractured, allowing fantasy and reality to spill into each other.  Sparrow posits an underground of competitive pick-pockets in an elegant, swirling city that’s equal parts Hong Kong and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Throw Down takes place in a world where everyone knows Judo.  In the Election films, there are no guns (one is held and waved around but never used). This lends the violence an excruciating visceral quality. Each assault (with rocks, logs, fists, hammers and, often, sabers) is fully felt by the viewer, even though the violence is (with two very important exceptions) visually restrained, choosing instead the tools of sound, shadow and your imagination.

Throughout, there are also little details that reveal themselves in later viewings.  The way that Jimmy, the businessman and reluctant candidate for the Chairmanship, is the only lieutenant who knows the proper way to drink wine, and is first shown looking on with dismay as his desiccated boss commands a busty prostitute to jump up and down in front of him faster and faster. The look on Lok’s face when he learns he will be chairman that lets you know early on he’s not quite the modest hard worker he seems. The subtle, matter-of-fact camera work that lends the work a lean and mean economy. The way the propulsive drum-and-guitar score of the first film becomes a sparser, darker, atonal piano-and-strings affair in the second.
 

It’s easy to miss amidst everything else how beautiful many of To’s compositions are.

There is a part of me that is concerned that, by writing two pieces of breathless enthusiasm in a row for despairing entertainments about contemporary life, I’m both revealing biases I was heretofore unaware of and cutting way too far against the Hooded Utilitarian grain, but the Election films are, taken together, a dark-hearted masterpiece. Even thought they’re imbued with a nostalgia I don’t share for a lost time that almost certainly never existed, To’s mastery and reinvention of genre tropes are on equal display, and his ability to use pulp conventions to create a sweeping autopsy of the world around him is remarkable.

Your City’s a Sucker: Chronic City, Complicity, and Internet Fiction, Part 2

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In part one I discussed how the existence of the internet complicates and modifies many of the ideas laid out in David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibas Pluram and in particular how our transition from a nation where human labor is engaged in making objects to one in which it is engaged in making images is a key societal change that a recent crop of novelists are trying to address. Today, I’ll talk at length about Jonathan Lethem’s recent novel Chronic City as an example of this.
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It’s hard to summarize or even introduce the plot of Chronic City, as its gradual unfolding and the realizations that come with it is an important part of the experience of a first reading, but as Hooded Utilitarian is a pro-spoiler kind of place, let’s give it a shot.  Chronic City concerns the (mis)adventures of a washed-up former child star named Chase Insteadman who enjoys a mid-thirties second celebrity due to his engagement to a doomed astronaut named Janice Turnbull. Janice is stranded in a space station behind a line of Chinese mines, a series of letters she writes to Chase her only communication with the Earth (or the reader). Chase meets and befriends a washed-up cultural critic named Perkus Tooth, who is one of contemporary literature’s great eccentric side-kicks. Perkus, who made his reputation posting hand-scrawled broadsides on the walls of buildings all over New York, now lives in a rent-controlled Upper East Side apartment where he does lots of drugs, eats cheeseburgers and muses about the hidden connections between various pop culture ephemera.

Perkus and Chase’s crew is rounded out by two other friends: Richard Abneg and Oona Lazlow.  Abneg, a former tenant-rights radical, now works for New York’s billionaire mayor undoing rent stabilization laws. Oona, Perkus’s former protégé with whom Chase begins an affair, ghost-writes celebrity autobiographies.  Together, they discover and begin chasing after quasi-mystical objects called chaldrons, odd sparkling urn-like containers that they’ve only glimpsed images of on Ebay.

The novel moves with the episodic rhythms of a difficult friendship.  There are bursts of and gestures towards an overriding narrative involving a conspiracy that remains thoroughly in the background until the final few chapters. In its place, are many many conversations about pop cultural artifacts, soirees amongst the elites of Manhattan and ongoing searches for capital-t Truth.

Wallace talks about us being one big audience, but Chronic City is after something a little bit different. Through Chase’s eyes, what we see is an age where we are spectators and consumers, yes, but we’re also performers. We’re also the ones making the very culture we’re the audience for. Via YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, Tumblrs, Twitter, Pinterest, through Vimeo and Etsy and Soundcloud and countless other outlets, we are audience and performer at the same time. We can no longer claim—as Wallace does— that a culture is being imposed on us, one that’s simultaneously delightful and infantilizing and isolating.  We are both halves of the equation now.  Whatever happens, we are complicit in it.

Complicity is the big wrinkle that Chronic City brings to this issue. And it turns out that once you start looking for it, the word complicit appears all over the book[1].  The word first surfaces on page 13 when Chase is trying to explain his newfound friend Perkus to the reader, when, after a litany of different cultural subjects Perkus would rant about, Chase sums it up thusly:

 

In short, some human freedom had been leveraged from view at the level of consciousness itself.  Liberty had been narrowed, winnowed, amnesiacked.  Perkus Tooth used the word without explaining—by it he meant something like the Mafia itself would do, a whack, a rubout.  Everything that mattered most was a victim in this perceptual murder plot.  Further: always to blame was everyone: when rounding up the suspects, begin with yourself.  Complicity, including his own, was Perkus Tooth’s only doubtless conviction. (emphasis mine)

 

The tone here is not moralistic. Chronic City is not saying—and never says— that we are evil for our participation. If anything, it views this participation that we all do (including Perkus, including Jonathan Lethem, including me, including you) as a fact. The book may be trying to make us see this participation, but it’s not scolding us for it. Instead of judging us as Perkus does, Lethem tries to make us aware of the ways that we all make our bargains, have our scripts and have to pay a price for being in and enjoying this society we’ve made.

And we do enjoy it. Let’s not bullshit each other. Like Richard Abneg screaming that he wants to fuck a Chaldron the first time he sees one, there’s something very ecstatic about all of this.  It’s not without joy. But it’s not without its price either, particularly for us artistically-inclined folk.  The internet has both devalued creativity and enabled it.  There’s more writing—and reading—going on than at any point in human history, and much of it is for free. Facebook is able to have a small staff because its users make its content for them.

That content is worth pausing to consider. I find it striking, for example, that the first major internet meme most people I know encountered involved baby talk gibberish scrawled on pictures of kittens, and much of the writing we generate is poisoned with reflexive bad-faith and a kind of unquashable rage. And there’s a constant feedback loop of participation, anger and trollery begetting anger and trollery like the two warring factions in The Butter Battle Book.

I’m complicit right now, come to think of it. I am writing this post for free on the internet. Generating more content, some of it fueled with internet skepticism, a skepticism that is immediately defanged because you have to get onto the internet to read it in the first place. Indeed, I don’t watch DFW’s six hours of television a day, but I spent a great deal more time than that staring into my computer screen, interacting with people online, passing along memes and hashtags, doing a lot of things that feel like work but aren’t, participating in this culture I also try to critique.  What choice do I, do any of us, have?

Chronic City is examining this world built on complicity, built on active—if often unwitting—participation in the very systems that we are angry at and want to overthrow. And it examines that world through the very specific—and very odd—eyes and words of narrator and protagonist Chase Insteadman.

Chase is a retired act-or.  He no longer acts.  That’s the key aspect of his character. Within the book there are only a handful of moments when Chase consciously commits some kind of action in pursuit of an objective (or, in other words, acts the way we expect a protagonist to act). Instead of being an actor, Chase is imbued with a kind of monstrous self-awareness. He might be blind to the realities of his life, but he knows he’s blind. One of the great pleasures of the book is reading Chase talking about himself, which he does with some regularity.  Pay particular attention to the way he phrases the following on 63 and 64:

 

The only role I ever played to anyone’s complete satisfaction was Warren, on Martyr & Pesty… The show itself was avowedly “dumb” and we all (writers and actors, network, critics, audience) flogged ourselves those days for our complicity in its runaway success, but I, the exception was unaccountably “soulful.”… I no longer act, that is unless you’d call my every waking moment a kind of performance.

 

Or this on 66-67:

I’m outstanding only in my essential politeness.  Exhausting, this compulsion to oblige any detected social need. I don’t mean only to myself; it’s frequently obvious that my charm exhausts and bewilders others, even as they depend upon it to mortar crevices in the social façade…. But if beneath charm lies exhaustion, beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. It would be misleading to say I’m screaming inside, for if I was I’d soon enough find a way to scream aloud.  Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknown. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps.

 

It is a very curious thing for a protagonist to be someone who doesn’t act. Doubly curious when that person is also the narrator. We are used to our protagonists wanting things and then taking certain actions to get them. But other than sex with Oona, we know very little about what Chase wants. Chase has little inner life, and is open about this. To drive the point home, Insteadman’s apartment is basically empty, devoid of any belongings worth describing. Instead, what he wants to describe to the reader is the view outside of his window, a view being slowly eclipsed by a high rise going up in front of it.

Chase’s mix of self-awareness and blindness, politeness and rage results from his transformation prior to the book’s beginning from a subject into an object. He understands that his existence is predicated on being used by other people. His life is lived as an extra man at a series of high-society functions; his politeness, sit-com childhood and newfound fame as the fiancée of a doomed astronaut get him invited to various soirees where he sings for his supper by discussing his love of his lost Janice Trumbull, whom he cannot even remember anymore.

Via Chase, Chronic City shows how we are losing pieces of our subjectivity in all our constant performing for other people; we are instead becoming—and treating others as—objects. As our culture moves from making things to making images of things—a subject Chronic City turns to overtly in the second half of the book—we in turn objectify ourselves. Chase talks about this frequently. As he goes to a fancy dinner with the richest couple in New York, he remarks that his “presence for an evening, or at least the duration of an elegant dinner, had been auctioned off as a premium, at a benefit for one of Maud Woodrow’s charities. I couldn’t anymore recall which.”  Six pages later, he says that his face is a mask. Chase has turned himself into an object to be sold by one person to another and he can’t even remember for what cause he’s doing it. Is it any wonder that, in the midst of the dinner, he comes down with a crippling flu?

I also don’t think that it’s a coincidence or authorial oversight that both Chase and Richard Abneg treat the women in their lives as objects. We know Oona has large incisors, heavy glasses, a black bob haircut, that she’s very skinny and that she has peach sized, impertinent breasts.  We don’t know who her parents are or where she comes from. We don’t know what she desires. Chase says he loves her, but his love largely boils down to trying to investigate her, to solve the problem of who she is against her own will[2].  Abneg, meanwhile, gazes upon the sleeping form of his lover Georgina Hawkmanaji and intones to his friends, “Such an amazing shape. How can anyone ever sit in a meeting, or make a plan, or add up a column of fucking numbers, when there’s a shape like that somewhere out there, a shape like that with your name on it, coming to get you?” The Hawkman, as she is called in the book, is a shape rather than a person.

The novel situates these people, these shapes, these performers in a very particular environment, for the Manhattan of Chronic City (and I hate to spoil this, but the book is undiscussable without this knowledge) is not our New York. It’s an alternate one, a kind of Earth-2, one where instead of 9/11 a great, never-ending fog descended on lower Manhattan, one where film directors Morrison Groom and Florian Ib have directed movies starring The Gnuppets and Marlon Brando or where people listen to groundbreaking post-punk band Cthonic Youth.

There’s a heavy emphasis within the novel on spaces-within-spaces.  Chase meets Richard at a party that takes place in a Brownstone within an Apartment building. A restaurant might hide a secret room. Perkus’s apartment, like a TARDIS is “a container bigger on the inside than the outside.” An installation artist named Laird Noteless’s signature artworks involve huge chasms dug into cities.

Children’s stories often begin with a kind of familiar cadence.  Once there was the Land Of _______ and in the Land there was a forest, and in the forest there was a house and in the house there was a room and in the room there was a cabinet and in the cabinet there was a drawer and in the drawer there was a box and in the box there was a….

What’s delightful about this for children (and adults) is that you are waiting to get to this end of the chain, because at the end of the chain is what really matters. It’s the magic ring. Or the truth. But on the internet, when you follow the series of boxes within boxes, you always hit another link in the chain, another rabbit hole to go down. You are always going deeper and deeper into new boxes and the truth, if it exists, becomes destabilized.  After all, in a world in which editing a Wikipedia article can change Marlon Brando from dead to alive, who knows what’s real and what’s fake?  Chronic City takes this idea and spins a world of it.  Its central trio of men—the brain, the body and the raging erection of Perkus Tooth, Charse Insteadman and Richard Abneg—seem to be on a search for truth. But the truths they eventually discover—I’ll leave them unarticulated here— might not even be true, and might not be actionable even if they are.

This all comes to a head once chaldrons show up and Perkus, Chase and Richard begin a series of mad scrambles to get their hands on one. Their first attempt leads to one of the book’s great setpieces, a mad Ebay-and-borrowed-credit-card pursuit fueled by high grade marijuana and the improvised guitar stylings of Sandy Bull (who, it turns out, actually exists).  It takes quite awhile for the trio to figure out why they even want a chaldron so badly in the first place.  It’s a perfect locus of desire… but a desire for what?:

“For something so warm… it casts a sort of … brusque… watery…. Shadow… over so much else… that I took for granted…”

“Despite sounding like a retarded Wallace Stevens I actually get you,” said Richard.  “That thing’s the ultimate bullshit detector–“

“Sure, and what it detects is that your city’s a sucker[3], Abneg.” Perkus spoke with a startling insistence, but his tone wasn’t needling. “Your city’s a fake, a bad dream.” This was somehow the case, the chaldron interrogated Manhattan, made it seem an enactment. An object, the chaldrone testified to zones, realms, elsewhere. Likely we’d lost the auction because one couldn’t’ be imported here, to this debauched and insupportable city. The winners had been rescuing the chaldron, ferrying it back to the better place.

 

And so we return back to Perkus’s essential truth: that somehow a fast one has been pulled on the world by the world, leaching everything real out of the universe and, to coin a verb, ersatzing it. Perkus responds to this perceived conspiracy in two seemingly contradictory ways.  He both attempts to reject the world that he views as corrupt and looks for vibrational evidence for his one truth in pop cultural ephemera.  In this, Marlon Brando serves as Perkus’ Space-Coyote-Spirit-Guide, a human signpost revealing hidden truths. Or rather, the same truth, over and over again.

Whether or not the secret Perkus has uncovered is, in fact, true is an open question within the novel. Chronic City is suffused with contradictory moments, ambiguous clues, impossible moments. The reality of the novel—like the reality of Wikipedia— is too unstable to permit anything like an objective truth.  As a result, the book avoids the kind of modernist and romantic clichés about outsider artists. All of Perkus’s ideas could just be a bulwark against his sense of failure, a way for him to sabotage any chance at a recognition he claims to not want but also craves[4].

The tone of the novel, as mentioned before, eschews judgment for a satirical, wise-cracking humor that covers over—and eventually gives way to—despair. For when you are trapped in a world where all is image, and those images may not even have real-world referents anymore, when the closest to freedom you can come is to realize you are a puppet, where hidden conspiracies are ever-present yet might simply be nothing more than the tacit acceptance and perpetuation of the world as it is, it’s hard not to despair.

Chronic City isn’t the only recent work to take this state of affairs as subject matter. Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me, the recent film Shame, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, even Dash Shaw’s recent Bodyworld are all suffused with information-age anxieties about identity, reality, and image. Obviously, these themes are not new—they’re present in work as diverse as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and much of Philip K. Dick as well as the Image-Fictioneers that Wallace celebrates— but in this new crop of information age literature we see these themes and anxieties jumbled and replayed in new ways.  If previously we were concerned with loneliness, now we’re concerned with a kind of alienating hyper-sociality. If before we wanted to penetrate surfaces to get at the realities underneath, now we’re worried there might not be any reality to get to. If before we were victims of a system imposed upon us, now we are creators and perpetuators of that very system.

Of course, maybe it’s always been thus. Perhaps it’s just more visible now. After all, Perkus can’t point to the time when we got amnesiacked. It exists outside of consciousness, fueled by the endless money of the inescapable Manhattan, a world rendered so insular in the book that the reader is likely to wonder along with Chase if the rest of the world even exists.  Of course, it does and it doesn’t. As Fozzy says in this clip, uttering the essential truth of his Gnuppet brethren, I do understand that I am not a real bear. But I know what I am… I’m a real puppet.


[1] Not for nothing, as well, are two of the four main characters sell-outs. Abneg has sold out his political beliefs and Oona has sold out her talents. Yet, and it’s a testament to the book’s charms, they remain loveable to us.

[2] There’s another essay to be written about how Oona is in many ways a response to all of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl/ Mysterious Woman Shaman clichés of early 21st century literature and film, particularly in her refusal to indulge or take care of Chase at his most immature and vulnerable moments. That’s for someone else to write.

[3] It’s not really germane, but this is one of the book’s many references to LCD Soundsystem, which joins a whole host of things that Lethem references with pithy one-liners.

[4] Perkus, we learn, turned down a book deal once because the book was going to be marketed as rock criticism and he hates rock critics.

Your City’s a Sucker: Chronic City, Complicity, and Internet Fiction Part 1

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(Note: The following is adapted from a talk given at the University of Minnesota)

Here’s a fun trick, if you happen to be teaching a college level class: Squint out from behind that big desk or lectern or black treated-rubber-covered laboratory table on which you are banging your fists in a desperate attempt to keep your students paying attention to you instead of to Facebook and say unto them, Alright, raise your hands if you can remember the first time you ever used the internet.

Try it. Not right now, obviously, as I’d prefer you read this, and if it happens to be in the twilight hours going and getting a bunch of kids together might get you in trouble. Should you ever be amongst a large quantity of the yoots of America, try it.  It’s an edifying experience.

And then, if you want to blow their minds, tell them that in ten years, none of the eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds you ask this question of will raise their hands. You’ll get lots of those mmms you hear from the audience during TED talks when someone has said something that feels profoundish.

I remember the first time I used the internet, of course. I had been logging onto BBSes—and even running one—for years.  In fact, I considered myself (mistakenly) a fairly techno-savvy person.  But I had never used the internet before the last week of August, 1997, when Joe Dickson showed me how to plug my computer in to Vassar’s Ethernet system, load up Netscape Navigator and go to visit a then obscure online bookseller called Amazon dot com.

Don’t worry. This isn’t going to be about nostalgia, even if nostalgia is one of the dominant modes of the internet.  No. I’m far more interested in the ubiquity of the web and in the ways webbiness has begun to infect and affect the narratives we consume and create.

Twenty two years ago, David Foster Wallace was thinking about similar questions with his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. Noting that people spend more time consuming television than doing almost anything else, Wallace inquired into what happens to us when we spend the plurality of our hours as spectators as an audience staring, as he points out, at our furniture.  What, he wonders, does it do to us when we stop interacting with the real world and spend most of our time not interacting with but rather absorbing fictionalized narratives about the world?

My guess is that a lot of HU readers have read the essay, and it’s way too long and complicated to summarize here. But to broad-stroke it for you, what Wallace ends up at is looking at the ways that “irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture… that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat.”  Along the way he notes that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture,” while calling TV a “malevolent addiction,” because it holds itself out as the solution to a problem (loneliness) that it is abetting.

What Wallace is really after is the ways fiction could (and does) respond to all of this. To do this, he describes what he calls “Image-Fiction.” This term is a bit slippery. Wallace seeks to unite many aesthetically divergent writers (such as Don DeLillo, AM Homes, Mark Leyner and himself) under a banner that’s more defined by core values than actual noticeable artistic commonalities:

 

If the postmodern church fathers found pop images valid referents and symbols in fiction….the new Fiction of Images uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about “real,” albeit pop-mediated, characters….The Fiction of Image is not just a use or mention of televisual culture but an actual response to it, an effort to impose some sort of accountability … It is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a ‘90s world whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. For one of realistic fiction’s big jobs used to be… to help readers leap over the walls of self and locale and show us unseen or –dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made the strange familiar. Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall’s fall… it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. (all italics in the original)

 
One of the problems with reading E Unibus Pluram today is that it’s a bit dated.  This essay was written prior to both The Sopranos and widespread internet use, and so it’s tempting to say that everything has changed.  Which, to some extent it has; the problems he’s discussing are true, but they’ve also radically shifted.  Nevertheless, it provides a rather nice lens through which we can look at Jonathan Lethem—one of Wallace’s near-contemporaries—and how his latest novel Chronic City assays American humanity in the age of the internet[1].

Wallace is worried about what happens to a culture when it moves from being A Nation of “Do-ers and Be-ers” (his words) to a nation of spectators and consumers.  We watch television, we buy things on QVC. Wash, rinse, repeat.  This is not exactly true anymore.

Many readers of this post have likely heard someone on the radio or the teevee say something akin to “We used to make things. America doesn’t make anything anymore!” as a way of tracing our decline as a nation.  Pretty much everyone who comments on the economy or politics, regardless of political ideology, ends up saying this at some point.

That statement—America Is Broken, We Don’t Make Things Anymore—is sort of true and sort of misleading.  It’s not true in the sense that it’s actually meant.  It turns out many many things are still manufactured in America. But—and this is an important but—not that many Americans are employed making them. Many of them are made, instead, by robots. So the statement “we used to make things” becomes true, even if the statement “we used to make things” is false.

It’s also worth thinking about the other word in that sentence: Things.  We. Used. To. Make. Things.  We don’t make things anymore. We have robots for that. So what do we make? We make cultural output and in particular, we make images.  And many of us are doing this all the time.  For free. On the internet. We are making animated .gifs and publishing them on tumblr. We are making memes of Ryan Gosling going “Hey Girl.” We’re writing long blog posts doing close readings of novels. We’re making short films and posting them to YouTube.  And we love these images we create so much that we will go to a festival to see a hologram of a dead rapper perform.

This is having a profound effect on who we are, what the world is and how we perceive and navigate it. This is what, to me, Chronic City is about.  As we’ll discuss in part two (now up!), It’s about these forces, ones that affect all of us, ones we don’t think about anymore because they’re the New Normal.


[1] NB: Chronic City is a large, long, thematically dense and at times deliciously contradictory and ambiguous novel. It’s also clearly meant to be read more than once.  So please take this as A reading of the book rather than The One True reading of the book. If you haven’t read it before, I hope this provides you some sign posts for your own explorations within its streets and boulevards.