Keith Moon would have turned sixty-eight on August 23rd of this year — a slightly mind-boggling thought, if only because it’s so difficult to picture him as an elderly person.1 But I wish that I could imagine such a thing, because few people that I have never met hold such a place of affection in my heart. What is it about Keith Moon that can inspire such feelings of warmth, delight and sorrow in me, more than thirty-five years after his death? What is it about his extraordinary musical personality that strikes me as so compelling and charismatic? In honor of Keith’s birthday, I’d like to beg your indulgence and spend a little time ruminating over these questions here.
I can distinctly remember the first time that I became aware of Keith Moon’s existence. It was the summer of 1978, and I was nine years old, sitting in the living room of my family home in Cardiff, Wales, watching Top of the Pops on the BBC. In the age of the Internet, it can be shocking to recall just how limited the media outlets for rock music once were, particularly in Britain. But the Thursday night screening of Top of the Pops provided fans with what was at the time a very rare opportunity to see their heroes in action — perhaps the only such opportunity for a younger viewer like myself who was unlikely to see a live show. Indeed, for much of my childhood and into my early teens, watching Top of the Pops was a required weekly ritual, as well as the fodder for intense schoolyard analyses the following day. So it was that on this particular July evening I happened to catch one of the first British broadcasts of the promotional film for “Who Are You?”
I was not then an admirer of The Who — the most popular album at my junior school that year was the soundtrack to Grease — and even today I don’t rate “Who Are You?” as much more than a late reach for past glories: “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” again, only not as good. But that night in 1978 was the first time that Keith Moon surprised me into laughter. His round face framed by large earphones ludicrously secured to his head with industrial tape, Keith played with a dynamic kineticism quite unlike anything that I had seen before. Other drummers, even the least sedate, tended to stay in one place in their seats, whatever their arms and legs might be doing; this makes good sense from the point of view of technique, since ideally one wants to keep all parts of the drum set within reach at any given moment. However, Keith’s style seemed to require movement throughout his entire body, with abrupt lurchings off in one direction across his massive kit, and then hurried rolls back the opposite way, all the while striking out in every direction like a monkey in a gnat swarm. He didn’t hit his cymbals so much as pounce on them, roaring. With his puffed cheeks and bulging eyes he might have been trying out for the part of the villain in a children’s pantomime — one of those melodramatic performances intended to evoke giggles rather than fear — and I think it probably was to his facial expressions that my nine-year-old self most strongly responded, rather than his percussive prowess. I have since watched this clip many times and have seen and heard a great deal more in it than I was capable of discerning initially. But my childhood intuition that this funny, crazy drummer played an essential role in distinguishing his band from the competition has only been re-confirmed.
The song begins by creating an atmosphere of sonic suspense. Townshend’s jittery licks flicker across a stuttering synthesizer sequence, setting the stage for a gentle but insistent chorus of high harmonized voices that repeatedly pose the question of the title over the nervous chatter and splash of Keith’s hi-hat. The combination establishes a mood of anticipation, whetting our appetite for the inevitable entrance of the band at full bore. But in Jeff Stein’s film, we can see that Keith’s hi-hat has not been placed, as in a traditional set-up, tucked inside the main structure of his drum-kit, but away beyond a flank of tom-toms. This unusual placement reflects Keith’s relatively infrequent use of what is, for most drummers, a central element of the rhythmic arsenal, and serves as a neat reminder of just how idiosyncratic his approach was. But Keith’s set-up also has the effect of requiring him to lean out over his instrument towards the camera and the other musicians; from his first appearance in the clip, then, we know that this is a drummer who will refuse to disappear behind his drums. No mere timekeeper, his presence contributes as much to the theatrical, visual appeal of the band as to the overall sound. In fact, as he glances back and forth at his bandmates, Keith seems to be vying as much for their attention as for the gaze of the camera. The impression that Keith is reflexively performing for his fellow performers is confirmed as the film progresses through sequences in which we watch him mugg and gurn in an effort to amuse a cranky Pete Townshend, and a typically taciturn John Entwistle, while ostensibly recording handclaps and backing vocals.
Keith’s comic antics work, of course; neither Townshend nor Entwistle can keep a smile off their faces for long around him. But behind the laughter, Keith’s troubles had become a source of desperate anguish for those who loved him, and the extent of his problems would soon be obvious to the rest of the world as well. For the “Who Are You?” film depicts the last occasion that Keith Moon entered a recording studio with his bandmates. He would play only once more with The Who, on May 25, 1978, on a soundstage at Shepperton, in a sub-par performance recorded for the movie, The Kids Are Alright. He died a little more than three months later — only a few weeks after I saw him on television for the first time — as a result of what was probably an accidental overdose of the barbiturate Heminevrin (a medication that he had been legally prescribed as an adjunct to treatment for chronic alcoholism). With the benefit of this hindsight, Keith’s performance in the “Who Are You?” film is inevitably as poignant as it is captivating: impossible to watch without an awareness that the end is near.2
The band had opted to re-record the song for the film-shoot rather than merely mime, and while this decision unquestionably adds to the interest of the clip, Keith’s drumming is far from flawless. In the context of his looming fate, these audible errors inevitably resonate with ominous significance. For example, the middle section of the song contains a kind of mini-crescendo, culminating as Roger Daltrey cuts loose with his best Acton Town blues-howl: “Whoooooo are yoo-oo-oo!” This false musical climax is then followed by a slightly unexpected shift into another quiet instrumental passage. But if you listen to the film sound track carefully, you can hear Keith momentarily forget this pianissimo-fortissimo-pianissimo structure, instead taking off immediately after Roger’s bellow with the snare and bass drum rhythm that actually drives the final section of the song. He stops abruptly, realizing his error, to re-trench sheepishly behind a wash of cymbals. (Some might consider it fanciful to suggest that cymbals can convey embarrassment; nevertheless, that is what I hear. Even Keith’s mistakes as a drummer can be powerfully emotionally expressive.)
Indeed, it is painfully apparent by comparison with earlier footage and recordings that in musical terms, at least, the drummer in the “Who Are You” clip is only doing a passable impression of himself: Keith Moon playing “Keith Moon.” I don’t evoke this mimetic paradox simply to be clever; as it turns out, the idea that Keith’s personal identity became a horribly demanding role — one that exhausted and ultimately consumed its creator — is actually a recurrent theme in the posthumous mythology that has grown up around him.3 Less commonly noted, however, is the fact that this symbolic concept or role of “Keith Moon” has now managed to detach itself almost entirely from the creative category of “musician,” instead coming to denote a whole lifestyle based on endless, reckless hedonism: an anarchic, destructive, and yet apparently insatiable capacity for sensual pleasure and alcohol-fuelled excess. It seems to me central to an understanding of the man’s misfortune to note the extent to which this idea of “Keith Moon, the craziest guy in rock” splits off from and ultimately obscures the notion of “Keith Moon, drummer.” I’d go so far as to suggest that Keith’s spectacular percussive gift remains under-appreciated in some quarters as a consequence of this symbolic division. That’s why I want to celebrate Moon the Musician today, and not Moon the Cartoon-Loon, wrecker of hotel rooms and serial smasher of television sets.
Keith Moon was both the youngest member of The Who and the last to join, at the age of seventeen, in 1964. Daltrey, Entwistle, and Townshend had all known one another since high-school, and had already been playing together for more than a year under the name of The Who (and The High Numbers), with more than one different musician in the drum seat. Keith would joke later that his status as drummer was never made official: “I’ve just been sitting in for the last fifteen years,” he deadpans in The Kids Are Alright. “They never actually asked me to join the group. I knew it by instinct.” Like all good jokes, this one is illuminating at both a conscious and unconscious level. On the one hand, Keith’s place in The Who is presented as entirely natural, a fit so self-evidently perfect that it did not even require articulation: instinctively correct. This perspective accords with the majority verdict of rock historians everywhere, most succinctly summed up by Tony Fletcher in his statement that the “band … never gelled before it found [Keith, and] never gelled again after it lost him.” On the other hand, the joke emphasizes Keith’s sense of himself as not quite “part-of,” as standing a little outside of a previously established fellowship. The self-deprecatory claim to be merely “sitting in,” while painting his position as far more precarious than it actually was, hints at a deeper sense of insecurity.
Still, even if Keith was never officially invited to become The Who’s permanent drummer, in the years since his death his bandmates have openly allowed that he brought something essential to the mix (although these acknowledgements would come only after a lengthy period of denial, the sheer extent of which may indicate just how painful Keith’s loss was, particularly to the group’s leader, Pete Townshend). In one of the most generous of these statements, Roger Daltrey has remarked that, whatever they may have called themselves at different times, “The ‘Oo were not really The ‘Oo” before Moon’s arrival.4 I’m tempted to go further; in my opinion, for at least the first year of their career, the most innovative, ear-catchingly distinctive element of The Who’s sound is to be found in Keith Moon’s contribution. At the outset, The Who is a band driven from the drum seat.
Consider, for example, the first single, “I Can’t Explain.”
As many have observed, the basic riff owes a good deal to prior records by The Kinks, although the lyric is pure Townshend: a teenage boy, “dizzy in the head,” struggles to describe surging, narcotically powerful emotions that he cannot precisely name or articulate. The rapid mood-swings of this archetypal Mod-figure convey a kind of adolescent urgency to which the stabbing chords and upbeat tempo of the song are entirely suited. But in other ways the music and lyric are less than obviously matched. For while the singer cannot distinguish love from confusion, telling us that he feels “good,” “sad,” “blue” and “mad” all at once, the music is much less emotionally complex. It’s a blast of exuberance that ultimately transcends the theme of frustrated adolescent desire to express sheer, light-hearted joy.
This feeling of exuberant joy owes more to Keith’s drum part than any other single element of the track. Tony Fletcher writes that “I Can’t Explain” “would only have been a great song without Keith Moon’s input, never a great record,” an observation I would extend to cover almost everything The Who put on an acetate in this very early period.5 The importance of Keith’s contribution is more apparent if we first consider the song in its immediate musical context of mid-60s British pop. I am hard-pressed to think of any prior recording from that era that leads so prominently from the back. The song is predominantly in 4/4 time, but the basic “1-and / 2-and /3-and /4-and” rhythm is established and sustained throughout not by the drums, but by the guitar. “I Can’t Explain” thus reverses the conventional arrangement of most beat-driven pop of the era; rather than stringed instruments and vocals playing relatively intricate lines around and on top of a simple rhythmic back-drop created by, say, a bass guitar and snare drum, we have a series of ever-changing and intricate drum-fills playing around and behind the rhythmic spaces delimited by the guitar and vocals. Moreover, when the time signature of “I Can’t Explain” alters slightly at the end of the second and third verses, the steady 4/4 giving way to three heavy beats played by the band in unison to emphasize the vocal (“I know what it means,but…”) it is the drums that step forward into the pause created by this overall rhythmic shift, with a double burst of three sixteenth-notes on the snare, announcing the transition from verse to chorus. Such moments in which a drummer steps forward at the end of a bar or phrase are, of course, common enough in many great early rock songs — one might think of the rapid-fire triplets that end each verse on Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” for instance. But D. J. Fontana brings “Jailhouse Rock” to a startling dead-stop at those moments, while the effect of Keith’s little break is more like that of an intake of breath — a percussive gasp for air that precipitates not a sudden stop but rather a series of even more complicated drum rolls played on the entire kit.
The distinctive elements of Keith’s drumming — most particularly his use of the instrument as a vehicle for emotional expression and musical punctuation rather than as a pace-setting and time-keeping device — are more apparent in an early live performance of this song on the TV show Shindig than they are on the original studio recording.
In the studio we find him tapping with relative restraint on the hi-hat, playing the basic four-four rhythm at double-speed. On the Shindig performance, by contrast, Keith’s hi-hat is relatively inaudible (and played almost entirely with his foot — he rarely if ever strikes it with a stick). In place of it’s insistent tick-tick-ticking, he adds an almost constant wash of sound from a ride cymbal. He would increasingly adopt this distinctive style in live performances, producing a continuous wave of noise with his cymbals from out of which the toms, bass drum and snare burst forth explosively.
Something else we can observe in this Shindig appearance is the way Keith draws the gaze of the camera, even in the relatively short space of this song. Most early TV appearances of pop-groups display a fixation upon the singer as the primary point of visual interest, with only occasional cutaways to other musicians (particularly when they sing a backing vocal). Drummers, notoriously, rarely catch the focus for long. This performance starts out as if governed by a similar directorial policy. The first close-up is of Roger, desperately struggling to project the image of Shepherd’s Bush hardnut while actually conveying all kinds of self-consciousness and anxiety in his stiff, awkward body language. The second close-up is of John, singing accompaniment. The camera cuts back to Roger again, and then finds Keith, momentarily. We revert to brief shots of Roger and John, but then the camera switches back to Keith almost if in a double-take: “wait a second, what about this guy!” (Meanwhile, poor old Pete still hasn’t received a look-in.) This time the shot lingers over Keith for slightly longer before cutting away, and when it returns to him for a third close-up, as the song cycles into the first iteration of its chorus, it’s clear that he has won the battle for attention. From this point on, he gets at least as many close-ups as the front man, and even when the camera pulls away on the final chords for a shot of the whole band, it’s Keith who catches the eye, twirling his stick and pointing at us from the side of the frame.
It probably doesn’t hurt that at this stage of the game he is by far the cutest member of the band, with his boyish features, wide, doll-like eyes and jet-black hair. His uber-stylish mod sweater with the target design and his animated facial expressions also contribute to his overall appeal. But he also displays another kind of seductive charisma, here: the charisma of his unique musical style.6 He approaches his instrument with such casual, loose-wristed abandon, his sticks whirling and turning like batons in the hands of an ambidextrous orchestral conductor as he improvises his rolls around the metronomic rhythm-pattern established by Townshend’s guitar. You need look no further than this clip for a definition of sprezzatura; it’s an effortless genius, spellbinding precisely because it seems so unlabored. (There have been and continue to be many theatrically expressive and talented drummers, of course. Stewart Copeland has a cat-like, delicately pouncing violence to his cymbal-strokes; Tony “Thunder” Smith can project an innocent glee while playing like a demon; Terry Bozzio can ham it up while hammering it out. But still, I’ve never seen anyone, before or since, who moves at the kit quite like Keith Moon.) No wonder that once the Shindig camera-crew notices him they are compelled to return to him, even during the guitar-breaks.
But importantly, Keith is selling the song here every bit as much as he is selling himself. To elaborate on that observation of Tony Fletcher’s, it’s not just that Keith’s performance makes the song great; it’s that he plays this competent but slightly derivative pop-song as if it’s great — as if playing drums behind Pete’s riff were not merely an act of musical accompaniment, but one of the most exciting thrills imaginable — and in the process he goes a good way towards winning us all over to his own belief in the material.
On this and other primal recordings (such as second single, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,”), Daltrey, Entwistle, and Townshend sometimes sound as if they are struggling to keep up with the button-faced little dervish who had unexpectedly answered their cattle call and then quite literally beaten the available competition into submission. But by the release of third single, “My Generation,” the band has started to figure out how to make more measured use of its strengths. Townshend fully embraces the role of time-keeper, with his brazenly simple two chord riff, around which Keith’s bass drum and snare thump and pop like fireworks — while the main instrumental break is carried (unusually and famously) by John Entwistle’s teeth-rattling bass guitar.7 Townshend’s willingness to keep the beat and allow his astonishing rhythm section — and particularly his drummer — to play more expressively proved to be the key that released The Who’s signature sound, allowing the band to stand out from the crowd of guitar-fronted groups that had formed in the wake of The Beatles’ success. Keith continues to play the part of a lead instrumentalist in later singles such as “Happy Jack” and “I Can See For Miles,” while the stringed instruments essentially keep time; and even as Townshend grew in confidence and technique as a songwriter, he would continue to leave room for Keith to break out in many of his most important compositions. Songs like Tommy’s “The Amazing Journey” and Quadrophenia’s “The Real Me,” for example, are fundamentally built around the concept of the thunderous, heart-quickening drum fill.
Within the basic parameters of the late 20th century pop group, such a close alliance between a guitarist and a drummer might be considered relatively unusual. But the complementary nature of Moon and Townshend’s personalities is clear, even in offstage interviews. Thrust by his ambition into the position of spokesperson for the idea that pop music could be “art,” Townshend, by his own admission, can sound glib and pretentious when interviewed alone; but with Moon at his side, he became half of the funniest comedy duo in the history of British rock & roll, a kind of musical Rik Mayall to Moon’s madcap Adrian Edmundson (the Russell Harty interview segments interspersed through The Kids Are Alright provide the best instance of this double-act to have survived). But obviously it was as a musical collaboration that the bond between the two men expressed itself most strongly. In fact, I’m inclined to regard the relationship between Pete and Keith as one of the great musical love affairs of the era — right up there with the romance between Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards — even though Keith never shared a writing credit.
Their creative intimacy is already apparent in live footage from the earliest days of the band; for example, at the 1965 National Jazz and Blues Festival in Reading, musical transitions and changes of volume and tempo are usually presaged by an exchange of glances between Pete and Keith. But by the time of the Isle of Wight show in 1970, the two men can barely take their eyes off each other. During the more exploratory stretches of improvisatory jamming they are clearly exchanging visual as well as aural cues in order to regulate the rise and fall of the musical dynamic. Their gazes regularly interlock, and often Pete will step right up to the drumset, as if playing to Keith alone. Still more often, you can see him playing with his head turned over his shoulder, away from the crowd, as if to keep his manic collaborator always in the corner of his eye. Aside from occasional attempts to engage Entwistle by making him laugh, Moon generally returns Townshend’s look; and when Pete’s focus is elsewhere (as, for example, when Townshend attempts to talk to the audience between songs) Keith constantly interrupts him with a stream of comments and rude noises. It would be easy to interpret these interjections as a symptom of Keith’s relentless need for the spotlight, but often it strikes me that he’s trying to get Pete’s attention at least as much as that of the audience — rather in the manner of a boisterous younger sibling seeking the approval of an adored older brother.
The members of The Who have often stated that they considered themselves better as a live-act than a studio band, and the onstage rapport between Pete and Keith — almost impossible to recreate in studio conditions — may well be part of the reason this assessment carries some weight. Certainly, it would be easy to point to many terrific live performances by the band that foreground the dynamic between Pete and Keith, and which also leave the studio recordings of those same tracks in the dust: the electrifying version of “My Generation” at the Monterey Pop Festival, for example, or the almost religiously enthusiastic rendition of “A Quick One” from the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. But I think the quintessential clip — perhaps the first one I would show to someone if attempting to win them over to Keith’s playing — is the performance of “I Don’t Even Know Myself” from the Isle of Wight concert.
I should admit upfront that as a musical composition, this song isn’t actually that strong. The riff is almost echt-Townshend — too close to things we’ve heard him do before (the chords are very similar to those of “The Seeker”). The lyric, too, is a bit of an exercise in Pete’s default mode of bitter alienation. Some of the lines slide from the lazily composed into the downright ludicrous (“C’mon all of you big boys/ C’mon all of you elves!”). But none of these flaws matter to Keith. It’s another classic from the pen of Pete Townshend, as far as he is concerned, and at this show he plays it with the same enthusiasm that he would bring later to such sublimely perfect songs as, say, “Bargain” or “The Punk and the Godfather.”
It’s apparent that he can barely contain himself during the introduction, which involves a relatively quiet interplay between Townshend’s guitar and Daltrey’s harmonica; he sits and grins and spins his sticks like a majorette before leaning back on his stool (it’s more of a seated-limbo movement, actually — an inch further and he’d fall right off his perch), and then swoops forward to cut loose at full power as soon as the occasion permits. The first verse comes crashing to an end on a series of left-to-right drum rolls, each one of which he ends by pulling a face at John Entwistle from behind his crash cymbal, like a child playing peek-a-boo. The song then enters a quiet passage that he augments with an erratic clip-cloppity pattern on a woodblock, looking for all the world like a mad scientist gloating over his latest discovery. The song repeats this structural pattern (loud verse, quiet chorus) and Keith repeats his moves: making silly faces at John, rocking dangerously, and then gleefully tapping his wood block while shaking his head and rolling his eyes like Animal from The Muppets. (If any single rock-drummer served as an inspiration for Animal, it surely has to have been Keith?) And then we reach the instrumental break. Briefly locking eyes with Pete to take his cue, Keith’s excitement now knows no bounds. Now he can really make a noise.
The camera angle shifts so that we are positioned behind Keith and so have an interesting perspective on his technique here — if technique is even the correct word. You can see, among other things, how often his right arm flails across his body to strike repeatedly at two cymbals that are positioned on opposite sides of the kit. (The first time I showed this clip to a drummer friend of mine he laughed out loud at this; he found it at once breathtakingly audacious and wildly counter-intuitive. “I’d never even think to just bash away at my cymbals like that,” he said, “but if I were going to do it, I wouldn’t set them up that way. It’s sheer madness!”) Against this near constant metallic crashing, he then sets up a rapid, falling pattern of double stroke rolls with his feet (he’s playing with two bass drums, which allows him to thump out multiple low “notes” far more rapidly than a single bass drum set-up will permit). The overall result is just inches away from chaos, a dance with disaster, the sound of a Premier drum-kit falling down a moving staircase, but somehow managing to do so in time. And then, as the break comes to an end, and the entire band pauses momentarily, Keith cannot stay in his seat. He jumps to his feet, waving his right arm in the air in a triumphant salute … and accidently tosses away his drumstick. (The precise moment occurs at about three minutes and twenty seconds into the song, if you want to check it out, and is clearly unintentional — though, of course, Keith was prone to throwing his sticks around deliberately at times, too.). The stick arcs and drops somewhere behind the kit but almost before it has even hit the stage floor, Keith passes his other stick from his left hand to his right, and (still standing) strikes his right hand cymbal — quite literally without missing a beat. He obviously has plenty of other sticks stashed nearby in case of this eventuality, and has a new one in his left hand before he has even sat down.
No one else in the band even notices.
I once showed this clip to another friend, who happens to be in a 12-step program. We paused to rewind the “stick toss” incident a couple of times, both of us marveling at the combination of ebullient genius and unforced error, not to mention the smooth rapidity with which Keith recovers from his mistake, his obvious preparedness for it, and the blissful obliviousness of the rest of the band to this entire mini-drama. “Now that,” said my friend, “is functional alcoholism!”
It was not intended as a patronizing or reductive observation; he spoke in admiring, even wistful tones. But I winced a little, nonetheless. Because yes, of course, Keith is clearly pretty loaded — probably on more than one substance — during this performance.8 And to acknowledge this fact is, among other things, to acknowledge that my desire to discuss Keith’s musicianship without becoming distracted by his legendary hedonistic persona is finally impossible. The reason that this performance is so exciting is because it feels like it is teetering on the edge of chaos; but it feels that way precisely because it is teetering on the edge of chaos, just as Keith himself is teetering drunkenly on the edge of his stool. He doesn’t fall off, here. But there were nights when he did — perhaps most legendarily at the Cow Palace in 1973, when he passed out twice, and found himself replaced on the second occasion by a nineteen-year-old named Scot Halpin, pulled almost at random from of the audience by promoter Bill Graham (and that is surely as Punk Rock as it gets). So if it is true, as I believe, that the wild legend of “Moon the Loon” has tended to overshadow the critical reputation of Moon the musical genius … well, Keith himself must bear the greatest burden of responsibility for that fact.
My point is not simply that Keith was a genuinely wild and crazy guy, after all, but — more sadly — that Keith himself seems to have valued his lunatic status more highly than his percussive abilities. How else can we explain the fact that on his only solo album, the critically reviled Two Sides of the Moon, he does not even play the instrument that propelled him to international fame and success, choosing instead to croon ballads in an atmosphere of soused self-indulgence like a bad karaoke wannabe? Indeed, Two Sides of the Moon is so inexplicably and unnecessarily unlistenable that it raises the question of whether Keith radically misunderstood the nature of his own gifts.
Alternatively, our general comprehension of the kinds of neuroses that drive addictive behavior may leave us better positioned to recognize something less obviously apparent at the time: the possibility that Keith’s investment in the role of “Moon the Loon” was rooted in more profound problems of self-esteem. If so, then the lesson of Two Sides of the Moon is not that Keith really wanted to be a lounge singer, but that being who he actually was — one of the most exciting, innovative, and original drummers in the rock and roll pantheon — was not enough for him. His inability to take lasting comfort in the prodigious talent for which others so freely adored him may now strike us as the most painful aspect of his tragedy. Although capable of winning the love and affection of thousands of fans, the all-too-familiar kernel of his story may simply be that he did not like himself very much.
I don’t wish to conclude with these perhaps too-pat psychologistic claims, however. Suffice it to say that, like all of us, Keith clearly knew, and caused, his share of pain. But in the distillation of the life that we now have left — in the body of recorded work — the dominant mood is anything but tragic. As the critic James Wood has written in a wonderful tribute to Keith’s musicianship:
it could be said, without much exaggeration, that nearly all the fun stuff in drumming takes place in those two empty beats between the end of a phrase and the start of another … [and] whatever their stylistic differences, the modest and the sophisticated drummer share an understanding that there is a proper space for keeping the beat and a much smaller space for departing from it, like a time-out area in a classroom. Keith Moon ripped all this up. There is no time-out in his drumming because there is no time-in. It is all fun stuff.9
In other words, if Keith wanted (absurdly, against all logic) to “have a good time all the time,” then he managed to express that desire not merely in the antics of his daily life, but in the very substance of his art. Of course, “have a good time all this time” is perhaps not the most sensible life-plan, since it is impossible to realize. It represents a child-like impulse, at best, and a childish one at worst. But few professions have been more dedicated to trying to pull off this impossible project than that of the rock-star. And maybe that, as much as anything else, is why Keith will always remain a contender for the title of “Rock’s Greatest Drummer” — because his unique style in some sense embodies the central hedonistic edict of the musical culture from which it emerges. Outside of a pop-song, we know, no one can have a good time all the time. But inside one … that is when it really can be all fun stuff, all the time. I will always love Keith Moon’s drumming for suggesting this possibility.
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I am grateful to Noah Berlatsky, Anthony DeCurtis and Loren Kajikawa for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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1. This could just be a sign of my own creative limitation, but many people who knew Keith personally have also reflected on the difficulty of imagining him growing old.
2. What for fans is merely poignant must remain painful for those who knew Keith well; and watching the bright-eyed percussive wunderkind of the 1960s transform into the bloated melancholy clown of the later 1970s was surely horrifying, up close. Tony Fletcher captures the anguish of several of Keith’s friends in his highly recommended biography, Moon (HarperCollins, 2000).
3. Consider, for example, John Entwistle, cited in Fletcher, 501: “Of course he was a good actor … he’d been acting at being Keith Moon all those fucking years.” Also worth mentioning is Keith’s own oft-cited description of himself (even as his skills began to slide) as “the best Keith-Moon-type drummer in the world.”
4. In contrast to Roger’s frequent expressions of warmth, Pete is often inexplicably harsh about Keith in interviews, even in recent years. For example, in a 2011 documentary about the making of Quadrophenia, he opines that he didn’t think Keith was actually a very good drummer. I’m inclined to see this tendency charitably, as a sign of Townshend’s residual grief manifesting as anger — but sometimes his unpleasantness about his former collaborator can be quite shocking.
6. In an early draft of this essay, I wrote “the charisma of musical technique” before deciding that “technique” was not quite the word I wanted. I don’t want to get into a long discussion here about Keith’s technical limitations — you can check out the comments below any number of YouTube videos to find people insisting upon them — but I should perhaps say that I am fully willing to concede the point that Keith is not a “technically accomplished” drummer in the way that phrase is usually employed by practicing musicians. But this fact, for me, only makes his drumming more interesting. One of the most remarkable things about Keith Moon is that he can achieve so much, viscerally and emotively, while making mistakes that most drummers strive to eliminate. In any number of recordings you can hear him accidentally clicking his sticks together or striking his rims in the middle of a roll. Sometimes you can hear him losing “the beat” altogether — even in the midst of a performance that somehow remains utterly dazzling. (Check out the isolated drum track from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnVjpymrbIY for an example: the awkward stumble at 1.18 and the ridiculously brilliant bass drum flams between 2.06 and 2.16 are all part of the same package.) Although instinctively capable of generating rhythms of sometimes startling complexity, the appeal of Keith’s playing goes well beyond “technique,” and it’s that something beyond that I’m striving to catch at, here. What he lacked in technique, he made up for in style.
7. The stop-start structure of the song means that these rapid thumps leap out of silence and onto the ear like an insistent but irregular heartbeat; Keith’s bass drum pumps “My Generation” with an aggressive vigor that both mirrors and counterpoints the quality of adolescent confusion conveyed by the stuttered vocal. Again, this represents a boldly original utilization of part of the kit that is more often relegated to the elementary metronomic function of marking the first and third beat in a conventional four-four time signature.
8. Townshend says somewhere — perhaps on the DVD extras that accompany the most recent release of this concert — that he was a bit worried before the show about Keith’s condition, although I’m presently unable to locate the exact source.
9. James Wood, The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (Picador, 2012), 6. I’d written most of this essay before discovering Wood’s piece, or else I would probably have cited it more often; as it is I recommend it, along with Tony Fletcher’s book, to any serious enthusiast of Moon’s work.
The previous contributions to our roundtable have raised important questions about Thierry Groensteen’s approach to page layout in Comics and Narration. While a rich array of images in Adrielle Mitchell’s post encouraged us to consider how frame irregularities produce meaning, Roy Cook set the stage for an important conversation about the values comics readers attribute to different panel arrangements. Roy’s post really got me thinking about the way Groensteen privileges the layout pattern of the “waffle-iron” by identifying stability, simplicity, and transparency as fundamental attributes of the orthogonal shapes. Groensteen further conceptualizes the grid in the narrative rhythm of comics as the “basic beat” against which the visual and verbal elements of comics can improvise.
From this perspective, it’s not difficult to see how one might characterize the grid as “regular” or “neutral” or “invisible,” but I remain troubled by the relative nature of these terms, who defines them and in what context. To complicate the issue, my first instinct was to seek out comics that delight in the wildly experimental layouts that Groensteen might find “more sophisticated (or more hysterical),” but Adrielle’s post provides several excellent examples already. So I thought I would ask instead about comics that use the grid, but in unexpected ways: how do comics adapt the basic panel layout in order to stray from what Roy described as Groensteen’s “waffle-iron way of truth”? When is a grid not just a grid?
I wonder, for example, how a comic like “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” fits into our understanding of frame regularity and rhythm. Though we may be inclined to make assumptions about its uniformity at first glance, R. Crumb has not simply drawn 48 identical copies of the same man in the squares of this four-page comic about the different Harvey Pekars listed in the phonebook.
The text varies and so too do the hand-drawn panels that reveal each frame’s scratchy imperfections. The careful reader’s eye becomes attune to the nuances of Harvey’s expression and posture. It is a “basic layout pattern” and yet it has “irregularity as a common feature” (43) — a fitting contradiction for a story about Harvey Pekar’s search for his own unique identity. It seems to me that a comic like this one actually exposes the illusion of neutrality by calling attention to the grid’s own constructedness.
Another example that comes to mind for me is a two-page spread from Percy Carey’s graphic novel memoir Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm with art by Ron Wimberly. During Carey’s time in prison on a drug conviction, Wimberly uses the bars of the jail cell to structure the layout of the page, building barriers between us and the detained bodies, the narrative boxes, and the armed guards
Groensteen describes the thick borders that Chris Ware uses in Jimmy Corrigan as having “an almost carceral appearance” (48) and given the emotional constrictions of multiple generations of the Corrigan family, Ware’s panel choices aid in the production of that meaning. Alternatively, Sentences is a comic that has an unpredictably fluid design with layered panels and splash pages to convey the early days of hip-hop and Carey’s experience with music, drugs, and violence during the 1990s. The waffle-iron pattern is not the norm by any means; when the grid above appears, it actually disrupts a narrative rhythm that the writer and artist have already established. The uniformity of the panels might also be said to reflect the carceral lens that would continue to follow Carey after being released from prison.
Is this frame neutral or invisible? How might the perspectives of these two comics help us to reconsider the notion of the “basic panel layout” in other comics?
Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage is structured as, and by, a romance. The novel starts off with a description of the relationship between freed slave, thief and wastrel, Rutherford Calhoun, and the prim schoolteacher Isadora Bailey. Calhoun and Bailey are in love with each other, but he’s not willing to be tied down; she forces the issue by offering his creditor, Papa Zeringue, to pay his debts if he’ll marry her. Zeringue determines to force Calhoun to do just that, but he slides out of the ring or the noose or whatever metaphor you wish by sneaking aboard an illegal slave ship bound for Africa. Adventures and hijinks ensue…but in the end his travails and misfortunes bring him back around to Isadora, and the book ends, as romances should, with a marriage and happiness.
Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s Please Remember This isn’t really structured as, or by, a romance. There is a romance in it — between coffee-shop owner Tess Lanier and historical excavator Ned Ravenal. That romance, though, doesn’t really get started until something like 2/3 of the way through the book. The bulk of the earlier part of the novel, and the main thrust of the plot, is about Tess’ relationship with her dead mother, the brilliant author Nina Lane, who killed herself several months after Tess was born. The novel meanders through it’s small as life, non-adventurous plot, letting Tess figure out that she doesn’t have to be Nina, and doesn’t have to not be Nina, before getting her to a place where she can take up the rest of her life — which, almost as an afterthought, involves Ned.
Both of these books in broad terms fit into Pamela Regis’ eight essential elements in “Natural History of the Romance Novel,” but Johnson’s book is much more insistent about it — the action in the novel all derives from the development of the romance, whereas for Seidel the bulk of the novel’s structure and themes would be little changed if Tess had just recommitted herself to her coffee shop at the end, rather than finding a man immediately. Yet, “Middle Passage” is generally considered a work of literary fiction, while “Please Remember This” was marketed as a romance novel. What’s with that?
Part of the answer is right there in that last bit; Seidel is a romance novelist and marketed as such, so her book is considered a romance. Johnson writes literary fiction, so his book is literary fiction. In genre, form is less important than commercial labels.
There’s some more to it than that, though, I think. Middle Passage presents itself as literary fiction in a number of ways — most insistently in its prose. Seidel’s prose style is accomplished, precise, and frequently delightful; “It was part rock festival, part Star Trek convention, and part plain old down-home country fair without the baby pigs and homemade jam” is an imaginative and funny first line. It’s significantly less performative than Johnson’s opening, though:
Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. In my case, it was a spirited Boston schoolteacher named Isadora Bailey who led me to become a cook aboard the Republic. Both Isadora and my creditors, I should add, who entered into a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme so cunning that my only choices were prison, a brief stay in the stony oubliette of the Spanish Calabozo (or a long one at the bottom of the Mississippi), or marriage, which was, for a man of my temperament, worse than imprisonment — especially if you knew Isadora.
It’s not coincidental here that the virtuosity here, the hyperbolic/mock-hyperbolic irony, is achieved through riffing on misogynist tropes. Isadora becomes a disaster, a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme — she’s a placid nonentity on which to embroider flights of cheerfully rhetorical antipathy. That is more or less the case throughout the novel, in which Isadora serves mostly as a plot device. We don’t see into her head, and while our protagonist/narrator Rutherford says he loves her, we get much less of a sense of his relationship with her than of his attraction/repulsion to the Bly-like Captain Falcon, or the Allmuseri tribe members who have been captured and enslaved on ship. The romance with Isidora is the impetus and the structure of the book, but Isidora herself is mostly a trope — a stand-in for the world of home from which you set sail and then return (Johnson explicitly compares her to Penelope.) Even her body becomes subordinate to the plot and Rutherford’s attitude towards her; she loses 50 pounds while he’s away at sea, physically demonstrating her transition from disaster to desirable in Rutherford’s eyes, though how she feels about the change is never either mentioned or considered. The book’s literariness, it’s (multiple, deliberate) textual links to the Odyssey, Moby Dick, Joseph Conrad, are based on repressing or displacing the romance plot that guides it in general, Isadora’s consciousness in particular.
In this regard, it seems important that Rutherford’s main internal conflict involves his feelings for his brother, and especially for his father, a slave who escaped and left his sons behind him. Rutherford has always bitterly resented being abandoned, but after a traumatic encounter with a kidnapped, delightfully Lovecraftian African God, he understands that his dad never came back to visit because he was killed by patrollers almost as soon as he tried to escape. The recognition that his father didn’t abandon his responsibilities, but was murdered out of them, allows Rutherford to accept responsibility himself (after a good deal more trauma.) Which is nice for him, but leaves another question unanswered, and almost unasked — viz., even if he barely knew his mother (she died when he was 3), why doesn’t he, or the book, seem to care about her at all?
You could ask the inverse question of Please Remember This. Tess is tied in knots about her mother, the brilliant, erratic Nina Lane — where Rutherford can’t settle down (it’s implied) because of his father’s shiftlessness, Tess is too settled as a reaction to her mother’s eccentricity. And where Rutherford doesn’t seem to care about his mother, Tess is similarly disconnected from, and uninterested in, her father. Early on, we learn that the man she thought was her dad, wasn’t; Nina had conceived Tess not with her then-boyfriend, Duke Nelson, but (maybe? possibly?) with some passing-through hipster artist dude, who Tess never even bothers to try to track down. Instead, rather than looking for fathers, Seidel multiplies mothers, focusing on Nina Lane’s relationship with her own mother, Violet, who raised Tess, and with one of Nina’s friends, Sierra, who cared for Tess for the first couple of months of her life,and wanted to keep her.
In Middle Passage, Johnson suggests that the Lovecraftian African God may control multiple worlds and multiple realities, and Rutherford imagines himself as the captain and the captain as him, the hold crammed with “white chattel” — a vision of racial poles reversed, but also of Oedipal substitution, with Falcon serving as a sinister father figure, the twisted European forebearer (Conrad? Lovecraft? Melville?) in whose stunted footsteps Johnson ironically but inevitably treads. In Please Remember This, on the other hand, narratives are composed not of alternate fathers, but of alternate mothers. Tess sees herself, or her possible selves, in the mother/daughter relationship in Nina’s last, unfinished novel; in the actual relationship between Nina and her mother, Violet; in the possible self Tess could have been if Nina’s mother had raised her:
And what would being raised by Sierra have given Tess?
She might not be as independent as she was now. She might not be as observant or as serene. She might not have been allowed to develop her own style and her own voice.
But she might have had the capacity to love Ned Ravenal as he deserved. And that would have been good.
“We might have done all right together,” Tess heard herself say to Sierra. “We might have done all right.”
The phrase, “Tess heard herself say” is a good example of Seidel’s subtlety. Tess is imagining herself as someone else, and then she speaks as someone else, as if the other she might have been is talking through her. It’s a quiet nod, too, to reader, and author, identification — we, after all, are both identified with Tess, and hearing her speak. The novel becomes a way to imagine other mothers, other lives, and to think how we might have been someone else, and done something else, and loved someone else. Though for Tess, in the end, imagining that someone else she could be allows her to love as she thought only that someone else could.
The reason that Seidel’s book is romance, then, is because it cares about dead mothers; Johnson’s is literary fiction because it cares about dead fathers. And that’s also, perhaps, why Johnson’s feels more formulaic — more wedded to both the romance narrative and, contradictorily, to the performance of genius that signals literary fiction. Supplanting the father is an old story, in which the new boss is always already the old boss and vice versa — like Isadora or Penelope, you unwind the thread each night only to rewind it the next morning, waiting for the guy to return. Mothers, though, in Seidel’s vision at least, don’t replace each other, or duplicate each other, but multiply possibilities. Different loves are different, which is how a novel which isn’t a romance can be a romance, too.
This is a slightly revised version of a post that originally published on The Middle Spaces.
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The recent #FireRickRemender controversy on Twitter and Tumblr brought to mind a topic that I have given some thought to in the past, but that mostly exists in the form of an evolving question that I do not quite have an answer to yet, nor that I can make any confident assertions about. In fact, even as I write this I am trying to think through the best way to articulate the question itself based on some general observations.
For those who are not familiar with the Captain America #22 controversy, I recommend you read this piece. I think it covers it well, but the short version is Sam Wilson—Falcon—has drunken sex with Jet Black Zola who at the beginning of the current series was just a little girl of undetermined age, but since has spent 10 or more years in another dimension where time moves faster. By her own admission, she is at least 23 years old when her sexual encounter with Falcon takes place—beyond the age of consent in most places that I know of.
There are fans who feel that the ambiguity of her age and the involvement of alcohol in the hook-up suggest the possibility of statutory rape. In addition, Sam Wilson was drunk enough to not remember having sex at all, which means that he must have been clearly drunk enough that no one should be having sex with him if they care about clearly delineated consent. In other words, it is a problematic scene all the way around. (You can read the whole scene here and decide for yourself).
Still, it is not so problematic that I think the writer, Rick Remender should be fired (though I am not a fan of his work and will admit to having a dislike for the guy ever since his “hobo-piss” comment in regards to the reaction to the also controversial Havok “m-word” speech in Uncanny Avengers). The fact is that the age ambiguity—fostered in no small part in these particular issues by John Romita, Jr’s inability to draw children and young adults very well (his art has gotten decidedly worse since the 1980s)—has a long history in Marvel Comics.1
So here is the real question that arises for me from this kerfuffle: It is not about whether Rick Remender should be fired, but instead: How does the flow of time in superhero comics, with its sliding timescales, disproportionate aging, and alternate dimensions confuse and complicate issues of sex and consent in those long-running serials?
Here the thing: There is a pattern in superhero comics of young female characters disproportionately aging so as to make them sexually available for the adult male characters (and ostensibly for their straight male readers). Of course, the nebulous nature of the passage of time in serialized superhero comic books makes any exact determinations impossible, but there are certainly a few examples of transformations that allow for otherwise pre-teen or teen girls to suddenly be the age of consent.
The most obvious example I can think of is Illyana Rasputin, aka Magik, of the New Mutants and later the X-Men. When she is kidnapped by Belasco, not only does he want to make her his bride, but as soon as she starts to get a little older she is depicted in her Darkchilde form mostly naked with a more developed body, little short shorts and a crop top, and with a come-hither look. When it comes to Ilyana, her arc from seven year old girl to New Mutant to X-Man is one that makes the subtext of uncontrollable dark magic and the dangers of female sexuality quite explicit. The whole Belasco’s bride thing makes it text, not sub-text. The way she is depicted now, after having reverted to her original age and then returned to her young adult form again, (dying and then returning), reinforces the possibilities opened up by her aging. She falls safely into the male gaze, from a position of taboo anticipation for her eventual desirability.
There seems to be a very gendered distinction in how characters are aged in superhero comics. While young Franklin Richards, for example, is temporarily aged in the 1990 “Days of Future Present” crossover event and later as a member of the ill-considered Fantastic Force, he is not depicted as hypersexualized in order to make him seem older and more mature. (He has battle armor he pulls from a pocket dimension for that).
Pre-teen and teen girls like Illyana, on the other hand, come pre-sexualized in the hypersexualized world of superhero comics. A young female character’s maturation seems to most often (if not always) be connected to her sexual availability.
The potentially problematic aging is not always immediate, however. For a character like Kitty Pryde, aging is simply disproportionate to the adult characters, allowing her to eventually “catch up” to the others, while they remain just about the same age. Kitty was introduced to X-Men as 13½ years old. Over the course of 34 years since her published introduction, she has been allowed to age about 10 years, while the other X-Men have not really aged much at all. I made the joke to someone on Twitter not long ago that aging in Marvel Comics allows for eventually every child character to be old enough to have consensual sex while the adult characters remain young enough to have it with them. Except, I guess it is really not all that much of a joke. It’s creepy.
Joss Whedon on his run of Astonishing X-Men wrote a great scene in which Kitty and Peter (aka Colossus) have had sex, and Wolverin acknowledges both the act and the attendant temporal discontinuities. The problem of pedophelia is avoided, since the beginning of the series makes a point of stating that Kitty is returning after a long absence. This indeterminate amount of time is elastic enough to absorb any qualms about Kitty’s youth in relation to Peter who always seemed old for his age. Suddenly, the distance between them seems not so great—certainly less than the nearly seven years when their romance began. For many readers drawn back to X-Men by Whedon’s run after a long absence, that elasticity of time is an especially important way to make the distinction between the Kitty of now and the Kitty of the simultaneously distant and not-too-distant past. Wolverine may quip “’bout time,” but really when else might their having sex really worked in terms of their ages?
Another example of the weirdness of how time passes in the Marvel Universe is Julie Power, formerly of Power Pack. I have not read the issues of Runaways or Avengers Academy that she most recently appears in, but just from what I have read online and the panels I have found by doing a little searching, she has gone from a little 10-year-old girl to a sexually active 17-year old (or so) who wears a halter-top and is posed in erotic ways.
To be clear, it is not that I think aging characters is a problem or that the depiction of sexuality is necessarily a problem—I wish aging were done more often. Rather, I think it is problematic how young female characters are aged especially in relation to male characters.
Another important example is Kate Bishop of the Young Avengers and Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye series. While she first appeared in comics on the verge of being 18 and the most recent Young Avengers series had her turning 21 (so she aged about 3 years in about 9 years real-world time), she not only moved from technically being a minor to being legal adult (whatever that means). Clint, however, has basically stayed the same age in that time (early 30s maybe?) What makes this such a great example is not the sexual component to their relationship, but that writer Matt Fraction had to explicitly address its possibility on his blog.
He wrote:
But i’ll say this: they’re not gonna fuck. [Kate] doesn’t want to fuck him and he doesn’t want to fuck her. It’s not going to happen. They never daydream about it. They don’t wonder about it. They won’t idly pass the time thinking what if. There is nothing sexual in their relationship. Flirtatious? At times. Sexy, even? To a point, maaaybe? I don’t even want to play with will they or won’t they. Because they won’t. So I’ll say, again, unequivocally, as long as I’m on this book, it’s not in the cards even remotely for either of them. I am interested in a love between these two that has nothing to do with sex or physical/sexual attraction. The dog won’t die and they won’t fuck. The end.
Here’s the thing though, despite Fraction’s protests, the Hawkeye title plays with a lot of sexual tension between them. Sure, Hawkeye claims to not want to sleep with her, and she addresses it as creepy, but there is a lot of subtext that this article over at Comic Vine does a great job of illustrating. But even if that weren’t the case, the fact that Fraction felt the need to address it means that Kate reaching the age of legal consent immediately put her character within the realm of possibility for that to happen because unfortunately it seems like that is how disproportionate gendered aging in Marvel Comics seems to work. Let’s put it this way, while I believe Fraction when he claims “they won’t fuck,” I would not be in the least bit surprised if some other writer down the line makes it happen. She is certainly depicted as sexually active in Young Avengers. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, I just don’t trust comics to not make the leap from her doing the deed with similarly (though statically) aged Noh-Varr in his spaceship and doing it with Hawkeye or Iron Fist.
Speaking of Young Avengers, another example of disproportionate aging is Cassie Lang, aka Stature (a superhero name that might even be worse than Iron Patriot). Before she showed up in Young Avengers I am pretty sure she was last depicted as a sickly girl of about 9 years of age. I remember her from Avengers #223 (1982) which featured a great team-up of Ant-Man (her dad) and Hawkeye. But after being a kid for many years, she returned as a teenager of about 16 years old in 2005—ready to start a romance with Iron Lad (a young version of Kang) and later the young version of Vision built around Iron Lad’s brain patterns (it’s complicated). In Cassie’s case, however, despite the romance plot, there is no case of overt-sexualization. The gradual introduction of an older Cassie Lang avoids the discomfort of the suddenly sexually available character. Maybe she appeared in other books in-between at that younger age or an intermediate age, I don’t know. The thing I do know is that while she was closing in on 18 (until she was killed by Dr. Doom), her dad and other Avengers stayed the same age.
I am not sure what this all means, except as another broad example of problematic depictions of women in superhero comics. The phenomenon seems to suggest that, when it comes to girls and women in superhero comics, age and maturity are overwhelmingly associated with sexual availability, and that is troubling. Disproportionate aging happens all over the genre—for example see Hal Jordan’s whitening hair in post-Crisis Green Lantern while Batman and Wonder Woman stayed about the same—but it seems that when it comes to young women, this pattern takes on a creepy and even potentially predatory cast. As such, I am not surprised that some folks took issue with the Falcon and Jet Black Zola sex scene. At first glance, it seemed like the edges of the veneer of consent and the social mores around sex and age that superhero comics frequently rub up against were being pierced through to reveal the bare truth about the role of women in superhero comics as foremost sexualized objects, whether they are little Cassie Lang, or even Aunt May.
____ 1. It could also be an issue in DC and other superhero comics, but as I am not as familiar with them I don’t feel comfortable making that claim. However, as if to supplement my exploration of this topic, on the same day that this piece was originally posted, Bleeding Cool posted an article revealing a plot-line in DC Comics’ Batman Beyond comic involving Barbara Gordon’s (aka Batgirl) miscarriage following being impregnated by Bruce Wayne (aka Batman), so I am by no means trying to let DC off the hook.
I spent my adolescence in Midlothian, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond, and graduated high school in 1992. At the time, I would have told you that my life was boring and lonely. Looking back now, with adult eyes, I think I likely misunderstood the situation. I was in fact, very busy, and on the whole I did things that I enjoyed. And while I was never what anyone would call popular, I had several friends — good friends, lasting friends — so much so that two decades later I am still close to some of them, though we live thousands of miles apart and see each other rarely. The problem was not that I was bored or lonely. The problem was that I was alienated.
I felt unnatural, out of place, lost, confused, disoriented, like a stranger who didn’t quite speak the language, like I was always, somehow, in the wrong before I even had a chance to act. Others treated me that way as well. They looked on me with suspicion, sometimes hatred, occasionally disgust. I felt oppressed, not only by the suffocating atmosphere of conformity, but by the very normalcy of the people around me.
And I wasn’t the only one. I was practically surrounded with other weirdos, other kids who felt trapped, and resentful, and sad. One of those other weirdos was Richard Kelly.
I didn’t know Kelly, and I don’t remember meeting him, seeing him, or hearing stories about him. But when I saw his film Donnie Darko, the sense of familiarity was unnerving and uncanny, like my internal experience was being projected onto the screen.1 It was only later that I learned why Donnie’s Middlesex so closely resembled my Midlothian; it was Kelly’s Midlothian as well.
I had a similar feeling, slightly diluted, watching Stephen Chbosky’s film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower.2 The resonances are less intimate and more generic — in Darko, Drew Barrymore’s character, Donnie’s English teacher, is obviously modeled on my eleventh grade English teacher; whereas in Wallflower, the points of contact are more about The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Smiths — but the sense of connection is real nonetheless.
Both these movies are about alienated youths. Both are set in the suburbs of mid-sized Eastern cities, Richmond in Darko and Pittsburgh in Wallflower. One takes place in the late 80s, the other in the early 90s. And both are, in a weird way, almost (if not quite) superhero stories.
Some Sort of Superhero
Donnie’s heroism begins in a very small way. Gretchen, the new girl at school, is being harassed by the local bullies and Donnie happens by.
“Do you want to walk me home?” she asks.
“Sure.”
It’s the beginning of a friendship, a romance. He asks why she moved to Middlesex, and she tells him that her stepdad tried to kill her mom, stabbing her repeatedly. Now they have a restraining order and had to change their names. Her stepfather has “emotional problems,” she tells him with a kind of resentful scorn.
“Oh, I have those, too,” Donnie replies, too eagerly.
Donnie suffers hallucinations, which turn out to be premonitions. He has an imaginary friend, Frank, “a six foot tall bunny rabbit” with a skull for a face, who Donnie sometimes sees when he looks in the mirror. Frank tells Donnie that the world will end on Halloween. Frank also tells Donnie to vandalize his school, leads him to find and take a handgun, and has him set fire to the house of a cloying inspirational speaker. (When firefighters arrive at the house they discover “a kiddie porn dungeon”; the guru is arrested, and Donnie escapes.) Later, on Halloween, Donnie saves a senile old woman from some hooligans who break into her house, but Gretchen dies as a result. Then, by arranging himself to be pulled into a time vortex — he sacrifices himself and saves the world.
“Donnie Darko?” Gretchen says, incredulously. “What the hell kind of name is that? It’s like some sort of superhero or something.”
Donnie smirks. “What makes you think I’m not?”
Psychos Together
Less bleak, and more solidly realistic, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a sweet movie, even a bit sentimental. It’s as much about friendship as loneliness, as much about belonging as alienation.
Charlie is a freshman, friendless, “the weird kid who spent time in the hospital.” He’s shy, he’s lonely, he’s bullied. He thinks that “high school is even worse than middle school,” until he makes friends with a pair of seniors, Sam and her stepbrother Patrick, and they bring him into their circle. “Welcome to the island of misfit toys,” Sam says.
After that, Charlie spends the rest of the year hanging out, suffering through a bad-idea-from-the-start first romance, taking drugs, reading A Separate Peace and A Catcher in the Rye, helping Sam study for her SATs, going to Rocky Horror, and basically doing normal high school stuff — normal, anyway, for weird kids in the early 90s. Of course Charlie isn’t really a normal kid. His best friend killed himself a few months earlier, and since then he’s been seeing things, hearing things, and always just about two steps away from a breakdown. Most of the year he keeps it under control. His friends help to keep him sane.
But then one day in the cafeteria —
A jock trips Patrick, and another calls him a “faggot,” and soon there is a fight. Kids gather around to watch, in the appalling way they do. What we know, but they don’t, is that one of these jocks is Patrick’s lover.
Three football players pull Patrick off their friend. Two hold his arms, and a third punches him again and again. Charlie is rushing toward the fight when everything slows down, becomes distorted, and goes black. A moment later, all the kids are staring at him and everyone is quiet. The bullies lay on the ground, obviously hurt. Charlie looks down and sees that his knuckles are almost black with bruises. The other kids look at him with a kind of amazed horror.
“I can’t really remember what I did,” he confesses later.
“Do you want me to tell you?” Sam asks. “You saved my brother. That’s what you did.”
But Charlie doesn’t feel like a hero. He feels like a monster, a freak. “So you’re not scared of me?” he asks, nervously.
Sam looks at him then with a combination of pity and gratitude. She looks at him with love. “C’mon,” she says. “Let’s go be psychos together.”
Tear Us Apart
Alienation and friendship, the heroic and the monstrous — these things are tied together. Love is most precious precisely where alienation is most acute. And sometimes, perhaps, our friends are just those people who can see what is heroic about the parts of ourselves that are most monstrous.
Also, for both Donnie and Charlie, it is love for their friends that inspires their heroism. Charlie spends most of a year being bullied by older, meaner kids, but he only hulks out when he sees his friend is being hurt. Donnie deeply hates the place he lives and the people around him. He wants, at least subconsciously, to destroy it all — to “burn it to the ground.” In the end, he is the hero, the savior — but he might not have been.
Donnie is also identified, earlier in the film, with the adolescent vandals in Graham Greene’s story “The Destructors,” which his English class is reading. In the story, young men break into a house and destroy it, in part by flooding it with water. Donnie, then, in a kind of psychotic sleepwalking trance, breaks into the school and opens up a water main, then attacks a statue of the mascot with an axe. Discussing the Greene story in class, Donnie is asked why he thinks the boys trashed the house. “Destruction is a form of creation,” he quotes (with echoes of Bakunin).3 “They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change things.” Donnie can sympathize. Throughout the movie he is at odds with various types of authority — teachers and principals, parents, his therapist, the creepy pop-psych-Christian motivational speaker — as well as school bullies, his sisters, and sometimes even his friends. His whole suburban, Republican, private school, country club, psych med world is suffocating and oppressive — and yet he acts to save it.
Donnie can only be reconciled to this world through his death. But that is a choice, which he could make or refuse. He can save it if he chooses, and life will continue much as it was, but without him. Or he could end it all, simply by doing nothing.
I think that Donnie embraces his role, not (or not just) as an elaborate form of suicide, and not to save the world in a metaphysical sense, and surely not to save the world in the narrow social sense in which he inhabits it, and probably not even to save his family — but to save Gretchen. It is not until she is killed that he races toward the wormhole and when he reaches it, and finds himself in bed, weeks earlier, waiting for the mysterious accident — a jet engine that crashes into his room — to kill him. He offers a victorious laugh. Donnie Darko does not die for our sins; he is not trying to save the world. He dies for the love of one girl, which is more heroic in its way. He trades his life for hers. “Love will tear us apart” plays in the background.
Tunnel Songs
In Darko, the soundtrack is almost a kind of narration. Echo and the Bunnymen and The Church weave together themes of fatalism and free will (“Leads you here despite your destination”; “Fate/Up against your will”), while Gary Jules and Micheal Andrews (with their cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World”) also incorporate those feelings of banal desperation:
“All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
…
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher, tell me, what’s my lesson?
Look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had”
All three of these songs — given their desolate tone (“loveless fascination,” “So cruelly you kissed me”), their nocturnal imagery (“the killing moon,” “under the milky way”) , and even the name of the band Echo and the Bunnymen — seem like they could have been written for the film. I suspect that is because Richard Kelly managed to convey cinematographically the sullen, gloomy mood of 80s New Wave, and to remember the way such music does — or at least did — serve as the soundtrack for the lives of a certain type of adolescent, touching their deepest feelings, echoing their secret thoughts.
Music is a plot point in Wallflower. Charlie listens to The Smiths’ lullaby/suicide note “Asleep” almost endlessly, and puts it (twice) on a mix-tape for Patrick. It conveys a sense of depressed, lonely surrender (“Deep in the cell of my heart, I really want to go”), followed by the dream of “another world. . . a better world.” The song reflects the duality of alienation and rebellion, as does another featured prominently in the film — David Bowie’s “Heroes.” The three friends — Charlie, Patrick, and Sam — listen to “Heroes” while they drive through a tunnel, late at night. Sam stands up in the back of the truck, arms out, the wind in her face. It feels like flying. It feels, as Charlie puts it, “infinite.”
Later, after his breakdown, Charlie receives a note from Sam. “I know you will come flying out of the tunnel,” she writes, “and feel free.”
Both of these songs — “Heroes” and “Asleep” — find a kind of victory in defeat, but the emphasis is reversed. Where Morrissey is resigned, Bowie is defiant:
“Though nothing will drive them away
We can beat them, just for one day
We can be Heroes, just for one day”
Dangerous Gifts
It’s no secret that superhero stories are often a kind of adolescent fantasy: the weak become strong; the outcasts, triumphant. But they are only fantasies, and in the real world the pressures of adolescence are less likely to result in mutant superpowers, and more likely to produce psychosis. It may be that the kind of psychosis we see in Donnie Darko and Perks of Being a Wallflower is just a hypertrophied cinematic portrayal of normal adolescent alienation, that to represent the depth and the gloom of the feeling, we need to connect it to madness and violence, which do, after all, often feel so closely related. If so, then these movies are a darker, more fearsome reflection of the superhero fantasy. Our adolescent selves may long to be like Spiderman or the X-men, but we feel like Donnie and Charlie. In fact, we long for the former because of the latter. The fantasy is a response to the fear.
Darko and Wallflower pull this transference back in the other direction. Here the outcast is the hero; the weakling and the freak really do save the day. Charlie does it, in part, by incorporating the fantasy into his reality (“Don’t dream it, be it”); he addresses his journal to an imaginary friend. Donnie does so by fully entering the fantasy. He follows the rabbit; he goes through the looking glass. What he finds, as a result, is more real than his wealthy suburb and his private school — at least it is more real to him.
The metaphysics of Donnie Darko are complex. It is not simply a time-travel story. Instead, as explained (or at least theorized) by a book Donnie’s teacher loans him, The Philosophy of Time Travel, most of the story occurs in a “Tangent Universe,” which has spun off from the normal universe. It is, as the book puts it, “highly unstable,” and when it inevitably collapses, rejoining the standard time stream, it risks “destroying all existence.” Though the mechanics aren’t entirely clear, this catastrophe can be averted, through the intervention of a figure called “The Living Receiver”:
“The Living Receiver is often blessed with Fourth Dimensional Powers. These include increased strength, telekinesis, mindcontrol, and the ability to conjure fire and water. . . . The Living Receiver is often tormented by terrifying dreams, visions, and auditory hallucinations during his time within the Tangent Universe.”
Donnie easily recognizes himself in this description, and he does in the end take on this role and save the world. He dies, the Tangent collapses, and the events of the previous month are erased. The world does end, but only this other world, which no one recalls. Or, put another way: The world does end, but only for Donnie. He is a sacrifice, and no one knows it. The clock turns back. Gretchen has never met him. But some of those he saved suffer nightmares, visions. Is it guilt for his death? Or has his alienation somehow spread out, touching the community as a whole?
Secret Identities
Like superheros, all adolescents lead double lives. It is almost as though they inhabit two only partly overlapping worlds. There is the world of their parents, and school, and church, debate club and organized sports. And then there is the world of their friends, with drugs, and swearing, and cutting class, staying out all night, loud music, teen drama, bullying, and fights. It’s the second world, from the kids’ perspective, that is the real world. That is the world where things happen, where it matters. Sometimes those worlds are at war. And sometimes the first is just a prison to contain the second. But sometimes the first is a mask that the second wears, not to protect itself, but for the benefit of the adults it fools. It provides an illusion that our children are safe, sane, and happy — and when the illusion fails, we ask ourselves sadly what is wrong with them. Donnie’s therapist tells his parents: “Donnie’s aggressive behavior — his increased detachment from reality — seems to stem from his inability to cope with the forces in the world that he believes to be threatening.”
But maybe there’s nothing wrong with these kids, or nothing special. Maybe it’s just the world we’ve given them.
Toward the end of Wallflower, Charlie has a more serious break. He remembers his aunt, his “favorite person in the world” abusing him as a child, and it is tied, in his mind to her death in a car accident a short while later. He blames himself: “I killed Aunt Hellen, didn’t I? . . . What if I wanted her to die. . . ?”
When he wakes up, he is in the hospital. He tells his psychiatrist: “There’s so much pain, and I don’t know how to not notice it. . . . It’s everyone. It never stops. Do you understand?”
She might, she might not. What she tells him is, “We can’t change where we come from but we can choose where we go from there.”
It’s a happy ending. Which is to say, it’s a good start.
_____________
1. I am writing specifically about the director’s cut: Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut, written and directed by Richard Kelly (Newmarket, 2004). The basic argument would still apply to the theatrical release, but some details I mention might be different.
2. Here I am writing about the film, not the book (which I haven’t read). The Perks of Being a Wallflower, written and directed by Stephen Chbosky (Summit Entertainment, 2012).
3. “. . . destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.” Graham Greene, “The Destructors,” Complete Short Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 2005) 10.
“But given the history of abuse by governments, it’s right to ask questions about surveillance — particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives.” That’s a quote from Obama’s news conference last week, in which he defended the NSA’s data collection program.
From the way Obama phrased that, it’s not clear which governments he’s talking about specifically. Who are these governments who have abused information gathering, anyway? What did they do with it?
Well, here’s one abuse of government information gathering I’ve been reading about recently. Not so long ago, U.S. intelligence made lists of civilians, including men, women, and children, to be executed without trial.
This was back in 1965 during the Cold War, just as the U.S. was ratcheting up its involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. At that time, Indonesia was ruled by Sukarno, an anti-colonialist and anti-Westerner with close ties to the the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI. He was something of a Qaddafi figure, though without quite Qaddafi’s record of support for terrorism and general butchery. Sukarno was an authoritarian ruler, with all that that implies, but certainly no worse of one than the authoritarian rulers of many countries to whom we funneled, and still funnel, money and arms.
On September 30, 1965, there was an abortive coup attempt in Indonesia, and several high-ranking generals were killed. The coup seemed to be linked to the Communist Party. Anti-Commuists in the military, led by one Suharto, used this as an opportunity to seize control, unleashing a flood of anti-Communist propaganda. They also unleashed a bloodbath. Across the country, Communists, or people associated with Communists, or people accused of being Communists, were rounded up and slaughtered — often by virulently anti-Communist Muslim youth groups. An anonymous description of the violence in Robert Cribb’s The Indonesian Killings: 1965-1966 describes village chiefs, children, and members of teacher’s unions being mutilated, tortured, and killed, their bodies dumped in rivers or shallow pits, and banana trees planted on their graves. Here’s one typical account:
A young boy…was arrested by Ansor [members of the Muslim youth group.] He was then tied to a jeep and dragged behind it until he was dead. Both his parents committed suicide.
Nobody knows how many people died in the carnage, exactly, but scholarly estimates range between 300,000 and 1 million.
So what was the U.S. doing while this was going on? Mostly cheering from the sidelines. Again, this was the Cold War, and these were Communists being killed, at least in theory. The U.S. had long hoped that anti-Communist forces would triumph in Indonesia. Officials had contacts with Suharto, and basically wished him the best.
The U.S. did more than just wish him well, though. Twenty-five years after the massacre, reporter Kathy Kadane reported in a May 21, 1990 Washington Post story that she had gotten a number of State Department officials to speak on the record about their involvement. They said that they had provided lists of Communists to the Indonesians, presumably so that Suharto could better hunt them down. The lists included members of women’s groups and youth groups. Kadane quoted former U.S. Embassy official Robert J. Martens justifying his decision to turn over the lists to Suharto.
“It really was a big help to the army…. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”
In this case, striking hard at a decisive moment meant, apparently, helping thugs track down school teachers so they could chop off their breasts before decapitating them.
After Kane published her piece, U.S. intelligence officials pushed back, arguing that Martens had been acting on his own, without official agency direction, and that the names hadn’t been all that helpful to the Indonesians anyway (in direct contradiction to Martens’ statement above). Ultimately, there’s no way to know exactly what happened, in large part because the Indonesian genocide was so successful —opposition was broken, Suharto moved into power, and Indonesians who knew what was good for them kept quiet about the killings, or else. Kane’s article came out decades after the genocide, and decades after that, scholars still have sparse details about every aspect of the killings, even though Suharto finally was forced from power in 1998.
Still, one thing seems clear — the U.S. had intelligence, and that intelligence was used (with whatever efficacy, and officially or by one dude) to help a bunch of authoritarian thugs commit genocide. Even after the story blew up on him, Martens was still insisting that aiding the military was the right thing to do. ‘If we had any purpose in the world except to be bureaucrats,” he told a New York Times reporter, “that was the sort of thing I felt we ought to be doing.” Shades of Oliver North.
The point, for our present purposes, is pretty straightforward. If spies have information, they will use it in pursuit of their “mission,” whether it’s fighting Communism or fighting terrorism. And if they trample on some civil liberties, or kill a few innocent kids — well, they’re not going to worry about it all that much. Indonesia was a long time ago and a long way away. But 500,000 dead is a whole lot of bodies to contemplate with equanimity. Our spies did though, and I don’t think they’ve changed all that much. I doubt the current NSA program will end up abetting genocide. But the fact that our government has this particular history of abuse seems like a pretty good reason not to trust them at all when they promise that the information they gather will not be used for harm.
The most obvious example I can think of is Illyana Rasputin, aka Magik, of the New Mutants and later the X-Men. When she is kidnapped by Belasco, not only does he want to make her his bride, but as soon as she starts to get a little older she is depicted in her Darkchilde form mostly naked with a more developed body, little short shorts and a crop top, and with a come-hither look. When it comes to Ilyana, her arc from seven year old girl to New Mutant to X-Man is one that makes the subtext of uncontrollable dark magic and the dangers of female sexuality quite explicit. The whole Belasco’s bride thing makes it text, not sub-text. The way she is depicted now, after having reverted to her original age and then returned to her young adult form again, (dying and then returning), reinforces the possibilities opened up by her aging. She falls safely into the male gaze, from a position of taboo anticipation for her eventual desirability.
