Category Archives: Blog

Most Overrated Television Show…And Most Underrated, If Any Exist

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I’m watching Orange Is the New Black for an assignment, and being impressed again by how the new era of television drama seems to rely on basically overrating every single thing on the tube. With the exception of the Wire and the first season of Twin Peaks, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a television drama that managed to get past sporadically entertaining and onto “good”.

Anyway, the most overrated thing I’ve seen is probably “Breaking Bad,” which is supposed to be one of the great artistic triumphs of our time but to me (in the first season at least) seemed mired in all too familiar television cliches and lazy dramatic devices. Outside of drama, there are shows I love — the Batman TV show for example, or Warner Bros cartoons, and so forth. But I don’t know that any of them are underrated exactly.
 
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Utilitarian Review 3/22/14

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Travis Reynolds on comics gutters.

Kinukitty on bisexuality, reading yaoi, and the closet. (Part of our ongoing reposting of the Gay Utopia.)

I asked folks to list the best music of the year so far, a request that was for the most part met with indifference. Oh well; they can’t all be gems.

Ng Suat Tong on David B’s “Incidents in the Night” and the dream of books.

Osvaldo Oyola tells me why I should like the Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil more.

Kailyn Kent on service and Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel.

Michael A. Johnson on Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, Almodavar’s All About My Mother, and weeping at comics.

Me on fantasy dragons and real romance in Laura Kinsale’s For My Lady’s Heart.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about:

— students who do sex work, and how they’re not all the same.

— Ms. Marvel and the tradition of superhero assimilation fantasies.

At the Dissolve I wrote about the vile misogynist pile of crap that is How To Be a Man.

At Salon I had a list of songs for the coming nuclear apocalypse.

At Splice Today:

— I argue that sexuality can sometimes be a choice.

— I sneered at Jonathan Chait for kicking his less fortunate colleagues.

The study guide I worked on for Rick Riordan’s Lost Hero is online at Shmoop.
 
Other Links

Ta-Nehisi Coates is skeptical of liberal outrage at Paul Ryan.

Alyssa Rosenberg kicks off her blog at the Washington Post with a statement of purpose re: writing about pop culture.

Tucker Stone lists the 25 best albums of 2013.

Standardized tests are an off-shoot of eugenics.

Julia Carrie Wong on journalists mining the twitter accounts of Women of Color.
 

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Real Romance

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802147In Laura Kinsale’s medieval romance novel “For My Lady’s Heart,” there’s one scene where the heroic knight Ruck is guiding the noble lady Melanthe through the north of England, an area, he explains, which he has visited before while hunting dragons. Melanthe is doubtful that dragons exist in that part of the world, but Ruck insists he has killed one. Melanthe still demures…perhaps, she suggests, he merely encountered a large basilisk. He assures her that it must have been a dragon,and after a rousing tale of his battle, he offers to show her its bones, which are located in a church close by. And sure enough he does:

She saw it immediately. The skull lay in the shaft of light from the door, enthroned upon a wide bench below the crude altar. It was huge, and nothing like a basilisk’s eagle head. Just as he had said, a long and pointed snout, with great eye and nostril hollows and vicious teeth like no living creature she had ever seen. Remains of its spine lay scattered in a rough line down the bench. A fan of thinner bones, like an enormous hand or a wing, was assembled carefully on a nearby talble.

“It is a dragon.” Melanthe strode into the church, stripping off her gloves, leaving the knight leaning upon the door to hold it open. She bent over the skull.

And, bending over, she discovers that the skull is not a real skull; it’s made of stone. The dragon isn’t a dragon after all, and Ruck certainly didn’t kill it. He was lying…or, as he says, simply telling “A tale, my lady, that I made for your pleasure.”

The twist here is that the reader doesn’t necessarily know that it’s just a tale any more than Melanthe does. It’s true that up to this point in the novel, there haven’t been any fantasy elements — Kinsale’s medieval milieu includes a lot of talk of witchcraft and enchantment, but (at least until we reach the dragon) it’s all explained naturalistically. But this is a novel, not a history, and Ruck is a very honest, straightforward character — certainly as I read, I felt, with Melanthe, that maybe, possibly, he really had killed a dragon. Maybe there were more things, not necessarily in heaven and earth, but in this book than I’d initially thought. It would be fun to suddenly have a fantasy dragon make a walk-on in the middle of a romance novel. It could happen, couldn’t it?

That tease — the delighted possibility that the fantastic might be real, and the concomitant delight/reversal/disappointment that is isn’t — is a kind of magical, virtuoso acknowledgement, or demonstration, of the links and disjunctions between the genres of fantasy and romance. Romance is often sneered at for its lack of realism; for the way that, when “My lady wished a firedrake,” as Ruck says, a firedrake, and/or a perfectly noble man, is provided. Yet, if romances are about wish fulfillment, historicals like this one are also about period detail — the machinations of the Italian court, the intricacies of Ruck’s armor, even the lapse into a readable but still well-researched form of Middle English. Reality in fiction (and perhaps elsewhere?) is a negotiation; a matter of tropes and trust. Which is why Melanthe is not, in fact, delighted with Ruck’s tale. Instead, she becomes enraged, telling him coldly, “If I find thee in a lie to me again, knight, thou will rue it to thy early death.”

Melanthe’s freak out seems like caprice. But it’s actually part of the romance plot. “There is but one person on the earth that I trust, and that is thee,” she tells Ruck, by way of explaining why his dragon fiction upset her. Melanthie herself, having married into an important Italian house, with all the backstabbing and intrigue that that (stereotypically) implies, has been trained to lie constantly, to stifle all her natural impulses and do the opposite of what she feels. “I have some talents in common with base liars and cowards,” she tells Ruck bitterly.

The lying, at least, is something she has in common with Kinsale, the author of the story, as well. At one point Melanthe tells Ruck that she is always lying, and that’s the truth — everything she says is fiction. For that matter, even Ruck’s honesty is a fiction — except, perhaps, when he makes up that story about the dragon. The fiction really is a fiction; dragons, in the book and outside the book, aren’t real.

Kinsale’s narrative, for the most part, is organized to demonstrate the virtue of Ruck’s straightforward honesty in opposition to the treachery and deceit of the manipulative dusky southerners. But that binary of good-truth/evil-lies has many caveats and winks. Ruck passes Melanthe off as his “wench” at one point in order to protect her from kidnapping — or is it instead, extra-diegetically, so that she can play at being his to do with as he will, just as, through much of the rest of the novel, she is his lady, and he must do her bidding? It’s the pretense of being his lover that precipitates their first actual intercourse, immediately preceded by their private commitment of marriage before God and each other in the darkened bed-chamber. True love comes through a lie…or, if you want to take it back a step, the fiction of true love is delivered through the play-acting characters realizing that the fiction they are acting is the truth.

The declaration and marriage come somewhat early on in the book; there are many contrivances, most of them unlikely, before you get to the also-not-especially-likely happy-ever-after. But to complain about the improbability seems as churlish as Melanthe getting upset that her knight has told her a story. For that matter, even Melanthe has to admit that the Ruck’s fiction “was somewhat agreeable.” What romance writers and romance readers know, perhaps, is that it’s not so much whether the dragon’s tale is true, as whether it is told with love.

What do Are You my Mother? and All About My Mother have in common?

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A weepy blog post composed of questions:

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•One of the most interesting discussions that took place at the ICAF conference I attended a few years ago in White River Junction concerned the question of readers’ emotional responses to comics. I forget who exactly was involved in the discussion but I remember distinctly that there was somewhat of a consensus on the notion that comics are not a spontaneous or passionate medium. One reads comics analytically, obsessively, but not immersively. One rereads comics over and over, and might form intense emotional responses to the stories and characters, but not in the same spontaneous and overwhelming way we might experience when reading novels or watching films. Comics scholars in that room seemed to agree that, generally speaking, it is not common to weep in response to a comic or graphic novel. I mostly agree, although I hope to be proven wrong. The question has been asked many times before, but I ask it again: which comics have made you weep?
 

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•I wept a few times while reading Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? It’s hard to understand why her autobiographical comic moved me to such a great degree when I don’t identify with the author’s alienated relationship to her mother and, more to the point, I find metafictional writing intellectually interesting but not moving in any kind of spontaneous weepy kind of way. So, I’d like to understand, why did Are You My Mother? make me weep (on an airplane, in front of strangers, no less)!? I don’t have an answer to my question but I do have more questions.
 

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•As a gay man, I often find naturalizing maternal/paternal narratives, especially those that involve legacy or inherited guilt/pride/whatever to be silly and alienating; it’s a culture I was violently excluded from, being from a born-again Christian family. At the same time, like anyone, I have inherited various legacies from my family and am as vulnerable as the next person to stories about generational transmission (guilt, abuse, pride, shame, etc.). Usually such stories are intellectually interesting but not moving enough to bring me to tears. My critical capacities shut the schmaltzy response down before it can materialize. I find Wes Anderson films utterly intolerable, even though I admire his artistry, to give you one complicated example. So, the only way I can understand my response to Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? is by comparing it to the very similar emotional response I experienced while watching Almodovar’s All About My Mother. Is it a coincidence that both works are about mothers? Or that both works are intensely metafictional and citational? Am I just being disingenuous about my mommy issues?
 

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•It’s a question I could not get away with asking in a scholarly article, but one worth asking nonetheless: do mothers and metafiction have something to do with one another? Is there something maternal about metafictional structures? Is there something metafictional about the way we relate to our mothers?
 

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•Both Almodovar and Bechdel are interested in acting. Bechdel’s mother is an actress who, at times, plays a mother. Almodovar’s mothers are always actresses who usually play bad mothers. What is it about the mother-as-actress figure that moves me to tears? I suspect it has something to do with Freud’s fort-da, that the mother is somehow both unavailable and eternally available as a representation. Does the fact that mothers can be played by actresses disturb our understanding of motherhood as somehow natural?
 

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•There may be a narratological term for this, and please let me know if there is, but one of the aspects of Bechdel’s and Almodovar’s metafiction I find deeply moving is the deliberate layering effects. Actresses play mothers; mothers play actresses; men play women; women play women. The play within the play is only the beginning. For Almodovar, All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire become the grounds for a series of fictional layers (fiction providing the grounds for further fictions), while for Bechdel, it is the works of Virginia Woolf and Donald Winicott, among others, that serve a similar purpose. All of these layers of fiction bring attention to the melancholic unavailability and tragic loss of some kind of original femininity/maternity. The fictional copy brings attention to the fact that the original is not, and has never been, available. Children cope with the unavailability of their mothers (be it a psychological or simply situational unavailability) through increasingly complex layers of transitional objects, all of which enable the child to grasp the reality of absence while also providing comfort in the form of a substitution. These layers are essentially fictions, and I think this might be where we can find a tie-in between metafiction and mother-child object relations. We are all moved by stories that engage mother-child object relations (unless we are psychotics) but why is it that I find myself weeping most weepily in response to stories that construe mother-child object relations in metafictional terms?

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On Service in The Grand Budapest Hotel

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Forgive me for thinking that all of Wes Anderson’s movies are about aristocrats.  His characters seem rather taken care of, living in manicured homes, and setting forth on boyish adventures that each new film believes in a little bit more than the last. Yet his stories don’t really talk about class, or the tension between classes. It’s a diagetic abandon I’ve loved, perhaps indulgently.  No one scurries about trying to hang the mirror just right, before the lord of the house enters. His heroes are inventive and not a little cultured, implying that they may have decorated the house themselves- or maybe that they are really just a extensions of the interior design.

Anderson’s most recent film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is the first that permits the alternative, and chances a glimpse of a world outside the parlor rooms. More remarkably, it centers on the exploits of two characters responsible for the upkeep of a luxury hotel in Eastern Europe, threatened by a sort of World War II. Which means that the film is partly about service, and the workers who construct the clean, rosy fetishes that have become synonymous with Wes Anderson, but have remained backgrounded or backstage in his previous films.

The Grand Budapest is an explicitly contemporary fantasy, commenting more about our nostalgizing of pre-War (and wartime) Europe than those periods themselves. It stars an impetuous hotel concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and “his lobby boy,” Zero, (Tony Revolori) who resist the tides of modernization through the enforcement of an almost chivalric code of service and taste, and fundamentally, nostalgia too.  Their reluctant admission– that the Anderson dream is a façade, is played for nostalgia but comes off as restive, a sensation only compounded by the film’s enervating slew of deaths and dismemberments. Still, M. Gustave and Zero nobly go down with their ship, and Anderson’s vision of human decency in tow. Yet while Grand Budapest romanticizes service, the film is subliminally contemptuous of the reality of service– and service workers– in America today.  Sure, the film is set in a make-believe country, bordering other make-believe countries, threatened by make-believe Nazis. On paper, it has no responsibility to representing contemporary maids, bakers, valets and servers.  But then where does M. Gustav’s  bilious, racist slandering of immigrant workers come from? Why is it excused? Why does it serve as an opportunity for him and Zero, a supposed immigrant, to connect? And why does the silhouette of Mexico float around the movie screen, imprinted as a birthmark on the heroine’s face?
 
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Many will find connecting these two things far fetched, and I do not mean to reduce Grand Budapest to a reading about labor relations. Neither is this an attack on Wes Anderson: this is coming from the girl who spent the last term of high school dressing up as Margo Tenenbaum (at least, as much as I could manage, only having one off-brand polo dress.) Grand Budapest progressively casts a non-white protagonist, and lightly subverts the conventions of white-hero and colored-sidekick in a humorous way. Zero comes up with the majority of the plans. He drives the sled and motorcycle, while M. Gustave babbles on behind him. It’s a little like Wooster and Jeeves if they were both butlers. Or perhaps more awkwardly, Crusoe and Friday. Grand Budapest hotel is a grown-up boy’s adventure story after all, and both Friday and Zero are named for the circumstances of their arrival in ‘society,’ whether rescued on a Friday or coming with zero experiences, money and connections. Both Friday and Zero also escape death in their native communities, cannibalism and a firing squad respectively. It’s worth noting that the terms of their escape are both sensational, rather stereotyped threats from their communities. Friday is an indigenous American, so of course he risks being eaten by other Indians. Zero is Middle Eastern, so according to adventure story logic, its no shocker that his entire family was killed in a war.

Still, this information is revealed as a twist, rather than initial background. For the first half the movie, Zero is addressed as “a bloody immigrant.”  The exchange that reveals Zero’s true history is greatly disappointing, and beneath a director whose humanity locked step with dead-pan humor and whimsy throughout his entire career. After Zero assists M. Gustave break out of prison, they reunite, but Zero has forgotten to bring M. Gustave’s signature eau de toilette. As it appears in the script:

M GUSTAVE

(escalating)

“Precisely. I suppose this is to be expected back in Aq Salim al-Jabat where one’s prized possessions are a stack of filthy carpets and a starving goat, and one sleeps behind a tent-flap and survives on wild dates and scarabs – but it’s not how I trained you. What on God’s earth possessed you to leave the homeland where you very obviously belong and travel unspeakable distances to become a penniless immigrant in a refined, highly cultivated society that, quite frankly, could’ve gotten along very well without you?”

 

ZERO

(shrugs)

The war.

 

M GUSTAVE

(pause)

Say again?

 

Zero speaks softly and struggles deliberately to hold back his emotions as he says, staring at the ground:

 

ZERO

Well, you see, my father was murdered, and the rest of my family were executed by firing squad. Our village was burned to the ground. Those who managed to survive were forced to flee. I left—because of the war.

 

M GUSTAVE

(back peddling)

Ah, I see. So you’re actually really more of a refugee, in that sense.

 

ZERO

(reserved)

Truly.

 

M GUSTAVE

(ashamed)

Well, I suppose I’d better take back everything I just said. What a bloody idiot I am. Pathetic fool. Goddamn selfish bastard. This is disgraceful – and it’s beneath the standards of the Grand Budapest.

While M Gustave tearfully apologizes for wrongly categorizing Zero, his vitriol against immigrant workers is left unaddressed. It is an ugly statement, yet decked out in the same fanciful loquaciousness as about every other piece of dialogue. Neither does Zero rebut it. The script elsewhere makes plain that M Gustave and Zero share the same values and allegiance to the Grand Budapest, and that their status as service workers is synonymous with their understanding of basic human decency. After this exchange, Zero declares them brothers, which does little to slow the swirling currents of family, class and citizenship going on in this conversation. M Gustave, the rogueish, valiant dandy and Zero’s hero, despises Middle Eastern people for their poverty, indulging in a slew of anciently racist imagery. He wrongly believes that a society of decadence can exist without foreign laborers. As long as Zero conforms to the current-day cliche, that the Middle East is a viper’s nest of ethnic violence, he is excused, because it is M. Gustave and Europe’s responsibility to watch over and deliver him. Anderson explicitly and unreflectively reveals a post-9/11 id, and perhaps demonstrates that his imperialistic leanings go a little deeper than the Scalamandre brand wallpaper.
 

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One could reply that Grand Budapest is about as political as little boys playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’—then again, that’s exactly the point. The mission to keep up The Grand Budapest Hotel is cast as quixotic. The backdrops, speeding trains and establishing shots are deliciously faked. The actors speak in stilted, deadpan stage-talk, in their native, incongruous accents. Zero is played by an actor of Guatemalan descent, and grows up into F. Murray Abraham. Little effort was made to match the two, and while Abraham is actually of Syrian/Italian descent, it sort of looks like Zero transforms into a Jewish grandfather by 1965.
 
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Even the film is nested in time—the story is framed as a contemporary girl reading a book written in the eighties by an author who interviewed Zero in the sixties about events that happened in the thirties.  The film is an American fantasy of Europe, and America’s own fixation of Europe ‘having been lost forever’ in World War II. So, treading back to M. Gustave’s speech above, it’s not unfair to read contemporary immigrant workers into the meaning of the story. A contemporary film, speaking through the limitations of an anachronistic character, ventures to say something quite disgusting and untrue about immigrants. Whether this outburst is being used to ‘deepen’ or ‘complicate’ M. Gustave, or actually expresses a frustration with real immigrants, the film doesn’t do much to criticize M. Gustave’s opinions. He seems tasteful if snobbish, broad-minded if eccentric, in about every other circumstance. It’s as if the film casts his perfume-dependence as a greater weakness than his prejudice against other human beings, including Zero.

This only becomes more problematic, as plenty of critics have noticed that M. Gustave is a transparent stand-in for Wes Anderson himself, taking “extra special care of every little-bit” of his story worlds. I am not accusing Wes Anderson of racism, only this strange and forgivable slip.  The issue is that the slip opens up a new line of inquiry. Why are almost all the hotel staff male and white? Why are there so few maids to be seen? Why is the one maid untrustworthy, (played by my favorite, Lea Seydoux?) Was light chauvinism part of the nostalgia? The humor? Grand Budapest is a peculiar fantasy of the authority of service. M. Gustave knows everyone and everything about the hotel. He’s a connoisseur of wine, food, perfume, art, partly for his own amusement, mostly because he can better assist his guests. Once the caper begins, M Gustave can pull favors from about anyone, in places high and low, because of the impression he left as an impeccable helper. He befriended a lonely little boy that grows up into an influential police chief. In prison, he wheels around a gruel cart with a wink and a smile, he wins access into an escape plan.  He and Zero are rescued by a league of extraordinary concierges (all white men, except for ‘Dino,’ an Indian man in an orange turban.) His Bernie-esque companionship to an aged women (one of many he carries on with,) gains him a huge fortune, a masterpiece, and the hotel itself. When he is killed by a ‘Nazi’ firing squad off camera, Zero inherits the hotel in his stead. M. Gustave willed all of his possesions to Zero in exchange for his steadfast service to him.

Service is a tangled conundrum. The people who come to know our things best are often those who do not own them. The people at Tri-Valley Cobbler understand my shoes better than I do, and when I worked in a wine store, we knew more about the expensive bottles than most people who bought them.  A maid perceives the corners of a house that its inhabitants are blind to, and a cook fathoms the interlocking steps and ingredients of a recipe. A complex economic chain separates authority from possession and enjoyment. M. Gustave instructs Zero “A lobby boy is completely invisible, yet always in sight.” Hospitality is sometimes a performance of equal parts competence, flair and subordination, but many times it is simply inconspicuous.  Luxury hotels have greater disposal to hide its staff—maids and waiters ride separate elevators, and their uniforms look more like costumes. They are disguised so as not to suggest their independence of the hotel, and its setting.

Grand Budapest solves the issue of inheritance—both M. Gustave and Zero inherit the hotel, uniting authority, possession and recognition in two fell swoops, the rightful kings restored. Much later, Communism threatens to nationalize the hotel, and Zero trades his fortune for it. Then the hotel goes bust and he presumably dies. So rather than grant the worker a life separate from the institution, M. Gustave and Zero meld themselves into it. For M. Gustave, he merges out of love of a lost era. For Zero, he holds on out of love for his deceased wife Agatha (Saoirse Ronan).

Which returns us to the giant Mexican birthmark. The birth-mark is specifically a ‘port-wine stain,’ a large, irregular mark on the face whose name Wes Anderson would love. Agatha is a kind, quiet and hardworking “pastry-girl.” She exists as sophisticated eye candy, biking with a heavy load of pastry boxes in slow motion, smiling wisely at her fiancé and M. Gustave’s banter. She also speaks with a cute Irish brogue, but she’s barely given anything to say. Agatha falls short of about every other female character in Wes Anderson’s films, but shines compared to the other women here: a trio of insipid fat villainesses, a beleaguered peasant, the treacherous lady’s maid and the numerous elderly ladies M. Gustave companions as part of his impeccable service.  Zero always narrates over her scenes. Unlike Margo or Mrs. Fox, she can’t see through the boyish adventuring. She just gazes adoringly at Zero, at M. Gustave, at the camera, while the men joke-fight about flirting with her.  (It’s like Wes Anderson forgot how to see through himself.) The most characteristic thing about Agatha is her Mexican shaped birthmark.

The birthmark makes sense on a comic, absurd level. Mexico is an easily identifiable and perfectly random country to appear on her face. Its gentle curve is aesthetic as well, drawing attention to her rosy cheeks and lips. Other countries would have looked like a random blotch—but why a country in the first place? Especially since all the other countries are imaginary. It resonates strongly inside a film about war and lost statehood, whether Lutz, Zebrowka, or the Grand Budapest itself, even when the nations are imaginary, and the fascist forces oh so vague. And why a birthmark? My guess is that birthmarks are simply nostalgic, being pre-laser removal and all, but they do dredge up associations.  In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, the hero Alymer kills his wife in an attempt to remove her birthmark, convinced it is infernally possessed, and in cahoots with her hidden, feminine darkness.  According to folklore, birthmarks are caused by the unsatisfied wishes of a pregnant mother, or past-life traumas. They are the inherited psychic turmoil of generations past, suppressed before and now spilling forth like a stain, or a brand. In this case, in the shape of Mexico —in a film by an obscurely Texan director.

When you glance onscreen and see Zero, do you see a Central American or a Middle Eastern man? Hero or sidekick? Immigrant or refuge, with all the modern connotations of those terms? The answer always seems to be an intermixture. In a film about service, Anderson obscures service’s troubling anonymity and its powerlessness with, well, le air de panache. He repaints it as a thing that young white boys do, a sort of elaborate game and secret society, and then ignores and kicks dirt on the people who work service jobs because they need to. Not all fantasies require this. Fairy tales do rather well with balancing vulnerable protagonists with valiant quests. But fairy tales are about girls, and this is a boy’s adventure story, where our hero must swagger from the start, and his challenge is more mischievous than difficult. Anderson lets us see the man behind the curtain, M. Gustave, master of the dream world. Do not worry—its not like there’s some underclass or anything, pasting up the wallpaper, building the submarine, and making all of those perfect animal costumes. M. Gustave and his crew of youths handle it themselves.

And this is the fantasy behind the class and luxury of Wes Anderson’s world,  which refuses to connect with stories about class and luxury in our own. It’s usually not a problem. A movie shouldn’t be anything it isn’t. The difference is that here, the ghost of what Anderson doesn’t mention insists on itself, and starts beating like a heart under the floorboards, a part of his creation. Anderson ignores it, muffles it, then shrieks at it, and finally, it materializes upon the face of the film.

Sympathy for “Sympathy for the Devil”

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Baudelaire may have said that “The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist,” but I think it is just the opposite. The finest trick humanity ever played was persuading itself that the devil was real.

Back in January, Noah Berlatsky posted a list of 18 songs about the devil over on Salon.com. After looking through the list I thought there were some overlooked gems. The most egregious was perhaps obvious, but as far as I’m concerned also the most worthy of inclusion: The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” I immediately tweeted at Noah (and I probably wasn’t the only one) about his oversight and we had the following exchange:

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Now I can’t speak to why the allusion to the Kennedy killings is so objectionable to Noah (though I am sure he will come by the comments here and enlighten us—at least, I hope he will), but it did make me spend some time thinking about the song some more and what makes it so great.

It is probably deserves mentioning—as I did in my first tweet—I am no huge fan of the Stones. Generally speaking, I can take them or leave them. They have some great songs, no doubt, but I am not enamored of their white-boy blues-man pose, and find Keith Richards to be about as obnoxious a figure in rock n’ roll as there is (his comments on hip hop being particularly irksome). In the old Beatles or Stones binary, I am a Beatles guy. Despite this, I do have something of an obsession with “Sympathy for the Devil” and make it a point of collecting various covers of it. I love the live version by Jane’s Addiction (it takes Perry a while to warm up, but when he does his screech is haunting) and I even own Laibach’s Sympathy for the Devil EP on vinyl, which is nothing but really bizarre covers of the song. Heck, one of my first bands back in college, The Milk Lizards, used to do the song at our shows, so I’ve even sung it a bunch.

From the first lyric, the song does a great job operating in this tension between the personified and the historical. He personifies evil through his voicing of Lucifer, but as the examples of his evil deeds accumulate it becomes clear that every single one of his examples are evils for which human beings, not fallen angels, are responsible. Jesus Christ’s “moment of doubt and pain,” whether it is a reference to Gethsemane or his cry on cross, is his most human. The backing “whooo-whoo” gives the song the feel of a ritualistic chant while questioning the assertions of the singer. Who? Who? Who really is responsible for the events he lists? Who is the devil and what purpose does the idea of a devil even serve? Isn’t he just a convenient excuse for humanity’s corruption, short-sightedness, greed, selfishness and capricious penchant for violence?  Doesn’t belief in the devil and his evil implicitly legitimize a network of institutions that put God at their head in opposition to this evil, but actually perpetuate the wars, massacres and murders being enumerated in the song’s lyrics—“kings and queens who fought for 10 decades for the gods they made”?

The idea of making gods is actually quite important to the theme of the song, because while the song claims the name we should be guessing is “Lucifer,” its speaker doesn’t say “I am Lucifer” or “My name is Lucifer,” but rather “Call me Lucifer.”  In other words, the name we guess should be our own, but we made up Lucifer instead. Isn’t that the puzzle mentioned in song’s refrain? The inability to turn our gaze upon ourselves, our own institutions for the pain and evil in the world?

Sure, that “our” might be problematic. What do I have to do with “the Blitzkrieg rage” or the overturning of Czars (a thing that I’d argue needed to happen, but nevertheless led to decades more corruption and suffering)?  But at the same time, the “I” in the song is metaphorical. It is any “I” informed by ideology or bound by duty to do things like driving a tank into France or going into the Ambassador Hotel to put a few bullets in Bobby Kennedy’s head and back.

Which brings me back to Noah’s objection, which still strikes me as too literal-minded. Our discussion about that one line—“I shouted out, ‘Who Killed the Kennedys?” When after all, it was you and me”—made me think of Ladybird Johnson’s journal entry on the assassination of JFK, and her report on Jackie Kennedy’s response when asked if she wanted to change out of her “dress…stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood – her husband’s blood.”  Jackie replied “with almost an element of fierceness – if a person that gentle, that dignified, can be said to have such a quality – she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’” Who was this “them” she referring to? Based on the timeline of the day of the assassination this was after Oswald had already been captured, so the use of the plural is weird. I am not trying to plead a case for Kennedy assassination conspiracies, because as fishy as everything surrounding it may be, the ability for 50 years to pass without even one conspirator coming forth or someone in the know providing evidence makes it increasingly likely that Oswald did act alone—no secret can be kept that well for that long. No, I just mean that her accusation resonates with the Stones’ lyric, even if the anguish of the recently widowed undermines the ability to interpret the specificity of her statement in any kind of definitive manner.

Regardless what she might have meant or not meant, I think of Jackie’s exclamation as referring to everyone. You and me. The fact that Jackie probably bought the whole Cold War ideological narrative just reinforces this notion, since she probably felt she lost her husband due to his efforts to protect the little people from the big bad Russians, Cubans and Communists. In other words, “they” were the American people. Who else would feel guilty? Not his actual assassins. Why would they care? Why wouldn’t they feel glee to see Kennedy’s blood on her dress?

I am not making the claim that Jagger and Richards were making a reference to this in their song, but rather the notion that there are broader implication for political assassinations already present in terms of the systems of belief that support those kinds of actions and their global consequences. The whole “Camelot” pretension is bullshit. Americans were outraged at their leader being killed as their leaders worked to kill others. “We” put them there to do that. Evil is what men do. If Malcolm X was right that Kennedy’s killing was “chickens coming home to roost,” then “Sympathy for the Devil” with its Afro-Latin sounds was an attempt to sacrifice one of those chickens and cast some protective blessing or ritualistic warning through pop music.

And sonically, the song delivers just that. It’s fantastic. It feels kind of raw and loose. Not only the ragged “Who-Who” chant, but the halting jagged pecking guitar solo and Jagger’s many affected exclamations of “yeah” introduced with their uncertain “um.” Along with his grunts and cries, it gives the song an uneasiness. The song is frenetic. It builds to a desperate feel without actually getting any faster, cohering around the piano chord changes and the bubbling bass. And yes, the choice of the conga drums, shakers, and the samba rhythm give it that kind of worrisome “voo-doo” feel. I think it was meant to sound primitive and dark to white ears in 1968, but I give it a conditional pass because it works. Jagger sings with a fantastic coaxing menace that matches, if not surpasses, any other performance of the role of the devil—barely contained, but somehow civilized, in way that tanks and kings are signs of civilization. “Sympathy for the Devil” gives us the realest and most affecting devil in pop music, but giving us something to really be scared of—ourselves.

And thus, that’s why if you meet the devil you should “have some courtesy, some sympathy and some taste some taste / Use all your well-learned politesse” because you are meeting the devil every day, and a little sympathy, compassion and politeness can go a long way avoiding the kind of denial of humanity, lack of empathy, that perpetuates evil and makes us all potential devils.