The Killer is Disturbing and Excellent

Michael Caine once said he thought Tom Cruise was an excellent actor but wouldn’t be acknowledged for this until Cruise got older and stopped appearing in teen heartthrob roles.  Caine was pointing out how Hollywood tends to appreciate actors for looks first and artistry second—part of a self-deprecating explanation for why Caine was considered a “great actor” early on.  Whether or not this is true, Michael Caine certainly belongs to what we sometimes think of as an earlier, classier generation of actors, many of whom were English and seemed to be good as well as good looking.

It’s not hard to think of Michael Fassbender in that category, an Irish-German trained in England, capable of a decent Macbeth as well as many supporting roles in sci-fi films.  And even if Fassbender couldn’t be more different than Cruise in terms of affect and culture, he still gets a lot of Cruise-ish work.  David Fincher’s The Killer is a recent example.  We can easily imagine Cruise’s “Vincent” from Collateral as the nameless hitman in The Killer; though, Fassbender’s voiceover is more like Ed Norton in Flight Club (also a Fincher movie) and less in the Heat–Collateral tradition of Michael Mann’s stylized noir.

Fincher loves to generate dramatic tension by starting off in an undramatic way, even in a thriller about an international assassin.  Routine and mundanity is a Fincher signature and he does this better than anyone, which The Spectator’s Alexander Larman points out, calling The Killer “a black-comic masterpiece” on par with Fight Club: “If you found Fight Club and Gone Girl funny, you’re going to love the similarly bleak tone here.”  Maybe it’s bleak.  It’s certainly laced with black humor, but it also shows us something slightly new, diverging from the formulaic morality play that hitman films usually seem destined to become.

Larman mentions “Early hype suggested that The Killer would follow the exploits of Fassbender’s anonymous assassin as he (inconveniently) develops a conscience, presumably setting up an existential quandary,” which sounds straight out of assassin-film Central Casting.  Thankfully, this is not what The Killer did.  Fassbender’s character never develops a conventionally moralistic conscience.  Nor are we encouraged to see him as a product of his environment, a beleaguered anti-hero merely playing out the hand he was dealt by circumstances and fate.  Rather, he tries, with varying degrees of success, to adhere to his personal philosophy: “Anticipate; don’t improvise.”  His highest value is not redemption in the eyes of the audience but job efficiency, which is what makes The Killer different and interesting.

Contrast this with Jessica Chastain’s character in Ava, another international assassin film, released in 2020 and directed by Tate Taylor, who, for all his ostensible qualities as a director, is evidently no David Fincher.  Ava is an assassin struggling with addiction, tormented by family drama, and for some reason never fully explained, roundly hated by one of her handlers to the point of him trying to eliminate her.  It’s a movie doused in conventional morality and reeking with guilt as the protagonist meanders through the emotional wasteland of her career between unpleasant family visits and AA meetings.  Essentially, Ava is a movie trying to get us on the main character’s side, trying to motivate us to put an arm around her and say, yes, you kill people for a living, but you really shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.  That is also very funny and absurd, but unintentionally so.

                 Ava: guilt, self-loathing, and family melodrama.

The Killer is different.  It’s a movie that takes its ethos not from soppy Hollywood morality but from the mission statement of an Amazon fulfillment warehouse: efficiency is job one.  It’s bleak because we’ve come to find that perspective vaguely horrifying in an era of technocratic, anti-life post-industrial culture, where STEM has bludgeoned the humanities into Peking opera irrelevance and artificial intelligence has grown increasingly monstrous in service of profit.  It’s an echo of Black Mirror’s “Metalhead,” where a woman robbing such a warehouse gets hunted down by a killer robot that goes far beyond the bounds of anything resembling fairness or reason.  Human concerns like restorative justice, punishment fitting the crime, and personal honor have no place in this brave, new Gradgrind-ish corporate utilitarianism—which may not be that new after all (thank you, Charles Dickens).

Fassbender’s character embodies this, subscribes to it, aspires only to peak efficiency. He explains, “If I’m effective, it’s because of one simple fact.  I . . . don’t . . . give . . . a . . . fuck.”  He isn’t hung up on the usual human concerns.  “Luck isn’t real,” he says.  “Nor is karma, or sadly, justice.  As much as I’d like to pretend these concepts exist.”  There’s only job performance and production standards, which he pursues with the exactitude and precision of a killer robot, even when an unforeseen twist forces him to turn against his employer.

Ava turns against her employer because she feels like she’s bad and wants to be good.  The Killer’s narrator does it because that’s the best practice indicated in the job manual.  The former is a clichéd, forgettable film we’ve seen a hundred times.  The latter is an interesting, disturbing comment on an emergent aspect of our cultural mindset.  And that is why The Killer may haunt us long after we’ve moved on to other, far less insightful, entertainment.

Writing Through Dead Ends Should Not Feel Like Torture

It’s interesting. I’ve been at a standstill with the novel because I felt I had to write about a certain character but found her boring and didn’t really want to. Today, I simply left her alone and continued the story, which brought the words forth again.

The lesson I take away from this is: write only what pleases you in a first draft—maybe in any draft. That is your story. What you think you should write, in terms of an entire story or part of one, comes from a different place, more from your head than your heart. And you should always write from your heart. Too much thinking is creative death. Too much feeling, while also a problem, can at least be revised into something.

There’s so much pressure on writers (and actually on all artists, maybe on everybody) to be good boys and girls, to write what should be written, to say what should be said. Don’t listen to what you should do. Don’t be good. Be a first-draft hedonist.

Hollywood’s Burning? Let it.

The actor eyed me with a chilled-out glare in the lounge of a restaurant on La Cienega. “I’m not looking for a dude,” the actor said. “And even if I was, you’re not him.” In the jovial language of men I suggested that if he didn’t comply I would try to make sure he wouldn’t get the part. There was so little hesitancy that the moment became even more unsettling than I had initially made it. The actor simply sighed, “Let’s roll.” I couldn’t tell if the indifference was real or faked. He was planning a career. This was a necessary step. It was just another character he was playing in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza that night.

— Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

In the eighties, we had the Cold War.  I was in high school.  Alexandra, my perpetually sullen, perpetually goth lunch companion—rebel enough to be seen eating with me five days a week but not rebel enough to date me—liked to dwell on the prospect of imminent nuclear armageddon.  It’s what she talked about more than anything else.

There was something cleansing about it for her, imagining what would happen nationally, locally, and biologically as nuclear winter enveloped the globe and fallout slowly poisoned everything.  Alexandra might have been unhappy, might have had eggplant-purple hair and a certain amount of fishnet on her at all times, but she also had a great imagination and a gift for describing the creeping symptoms of radiation sickness.

She could quote made-up facts and bullshit statistics on the inevitability of the Soviets nuking us within five years.  She did so loudly in our American Government class when the hicks on the football team said anything remotely respectful or patriotic about the country.  Alexandra loved the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis’ faces melt off and, of course, she’d tell everyone this was bound to happen, since we lived in San Diego and there was a major Naval base and training center there.  Boom.  And our faces would just melt off.  You think the Russians care?  They’re targeting our subs.  They don’t care about your stupid family.

I went along with it everyday at lunch because of course I did.  It was self-consciously morbid meets hypersensive and lonely at 12:30 on the bleachers of the upper field.  And it was a time before the internet, before smart phones, and before elaborate plagiarism software that can almost pass the Turing test.  We seemed to bullshit each other more and draw less prepackaged bullshit from the inexhaustible media sewage-flow we enjoy today.  And the bullshit wasn’t so monetized.

It was a time when zombies were starting to move out of niche horror and into the mainstream as a purgative for middle-class anxiety.  It was the era of The Terminator, Rambo, and Rocky IV.  Sensitivity was not an issue.  Feeling victorious was.  Dolph Lundgren was supposed to catch a beating by Sylvester Stallone like the Soviet Union was supposed to eventually catch a beating from the west; though, it’s worth noting that Lundgren actually put Stallone into real-life intensive care as a result of his in-scene punches.

We all felt, at least from our teenage high school perspective, that the USSR was mostly genocidal scientists, hulking super-soldiers, and spies.  Those were the movies we saw.  If we thought critically about them, it was about how the films were put together, whether they were unbelievable or dumb or boring.  We never said, you know, I think the Russians might not all be evil, sadistic, and obsessed with world domination.  Why are we constantly being shown this?  Dolph Lundgren was born in Stockholm, dude.

This was because the movie industry existed behind its own iron curtain.  Or maybe a better metaphor would be Macbeth’s Birnam Wood.  One moment you’re looking in the arts section of the paper for when Red Dawn is playing at Cinema 21 in the mall.  Then you’re coordinating with your friends (or in my case, just getting in the car and going by myself).  Then you’re sitting in the dark, eating your bucket of oversalted popcorn, waiting for the movie to start.  And then, all of a sudden, Birnam’s come to Dunsinane and Colorado is being occupied by a commie invasion force: In our time, no foreign army has ever occupied American soil.  Until now.  God bless the USA.  It could happen right here.

You didn’t know how they came up with such a propagandistic idea or really anything about how movies are born, live, and die.  You didn’t know much about Red Dawn other than the poster outside made it look like some kind of action film and maybe someone you know saw a trailer of Patrick Swayze holding an assault rifle and screaming about wolverines.  It was six years before IMDB.  All you had was Siskel and Ebert’s At the Movies or selected reviews in the paper.

You definitely didn’t know Hollywood was, is, and always would be terrified of being on the wrong side or maybe terrified of being unpopular or maybe just terrified of losing money.  And in 1984, that meant the Soviets had to be evil, ruthless, baby-eating devils.  They’d replaced the evil, ruthless, baby-eating Nazis dispatched from central casting since the end of WWII.  Though rooting out Nazis and crypto-Nazis would make a comeback in 2016, we didn’t notice any of this in the 1980s the way we do now.

Alexandra, for example, had no idea that her fears and desires, a good part of her teenage pain,  even her style of speech and choice of wardrobe were mediated almost completely by Ally Sheedy’s image in The Breakfast Club and a growing fascination with Robert Smith’s depressed-electrocuted-kabuki look in The Cure’s post-1982 goth phase.  At lunch, we didn’t talk about the subtle influence of pop-culture or the movie industry because its machinery was invisible to us.  We talked about our faces melting and whether we’d resort to cannibalism to prolong our lives after 90% of the country turned to irradiated ash.

But Hollywood was constantly whispering.  It was obsessed with us.  It wanted our attention.  It wanted to hold our hand through our nightmares.  It wanted to be the object of our desires, the interpreter of our dreams, the focus of our worship.  Above all, it wanted us to love it more than anything or anyone else.  And it was willing to make certain demands.  Like a lingering house demon in some proto-Ugric folktale, it started off only wanting to help churn the butter.  But we couldn’t give it enough affection.  And so it killed little Vanya in the shed out of spite.  That was almost four decades ago.  It’s been mutating in the dark ever since.

The movie industry—at least since the eighties but probably since the rise of talkies—has always been a cruel, neurotic presence, glorifying consumerism, ridiculing the life of the mind, punishing promiscuousness while transforming our sisters and daughters into horror fetish objects, and holding up the impedimenta of suburban life as the ultimate in personal achievement.  Feminism never made a dent.  Early diversity and inclusion efforts gave us lame racial tokenism for 30 years before metastasizing into the story-wrecking virtue signaling we have today.  And the vague materialism of Alex P. Keaton stayed with us, though whispered by ever-stealthier avatars in ever more camouflaged forms.

TV started as a way to sell Buicks but has become a way to sell a certain range of political opinions.  Money is still the point.  At the beginning of our new, not so roaring 2020s, 39 years had gone by since Red Dawn suggested Russian paratroopers could occupy the mall where Cinema 21 used to tell us how to think and feel.  We got where we are today by lingering at a three-way crossroads: Donald Trump unrest, a weaponized bat virus from China, and a highly publicized moment of police brutality in Minnesota.  Then everything started to burn.  And so did the propaganda machine.

The mall had already died.  Cinema 21 was already disrecognized space.  Someone threw a brick through the Overton Window and certain conversations became impossible in public.  So Hollywood had to change once again to stay on the right side of profitability.  But the new woke lip service is already falling apart along with revenue and, possibly, the entire streaming model, which Steven Soderbergh has rightly called “the crypto of the entertainment business.”  Watch the wreck catch fire and sink.  It’s already well underway.

Now the most important audience demographics are the investors in corporate streaming and, ironically, the Communist Party of China.  With this in mind, said corporations would love to utterly replace creative labor with AI, which isn’t going to make shitty Hollywood writing any better.  Said creatives are striking, which also isn’t going to make shitty Hollywood writing any better.  Ted Hope, “a producer on over 70 films, studio exec on over 60, [who] launched Amazon’s foray into feature film production,” argues in “The Coming Cinema Apocalypse (is Here)” that we’re completely controlled by “surveillance capitalism” and “AI is a real threat to all film people’s jobs.”  And he should know.  Beijing certainly does.

Current Hollywood remains a vile changeling, still willing to say anything, fixated on being cool enough to keep getting paid above all else.  It’s Dorothy Thompson’s “Mr. B” from her acidly satirical 1941 essay, “Who Goes Nazi?”:

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, he fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

Whatever pattern is successful, whatever needs to be said, whatever constitutes a growth mindset—no matter how moronic or destructive—is what Hollywood will voice and therefore transmit as cultural propaganda.  The problem is that attitudes (and economics) are transforming faster than the movie industry can effectively track.  As the medium and message of the movies becomes ever more ephemeral, abstract, supercilious, and politically homogenous, the industry is beginning to seem more volatile than Chinese Ethereum.

So is Hollywood burning?  Yes.  Should it?  Certainly.  At least in its present state.  As Vecna puts it in the season four finale of Stranger Things, “There is nothing—nothing you can do to stop it now.  Hawkins will fall, then the rest of this senseless, broken world . . . and I will remake this world into something beautiful.”  It’s the clichéd mission statement of every two-bit canned Hollywood warlord, commie, evil wizard, and garden variety baby-eater since movies began.  Burn it down so we can rebuild.  It’s Ming the Merciless for modern audiences.  And unfortunately it’s the most optimistic sentiment available to us at the moment.

Given Russia’s war with Ukraine, we might still get nuked, rendering such criticism as relevant as brass sconces on the Titanic.  But I don’t think most teens these days are as afraid of nuclear war.  It’s not as real to them as it was to us because the messaging, the propaganda, is different.  Gen-Z, in particular, doesn’t seem to be very worried about foreign paratroopers landing at the capitol building.  What’s a “capitol building”?  They haven’t gone outside in six months.

If Alexandra and I were having lunch on the bleachers in 2023, she wouldn’t be draped in black and I wouldn’t be tolerating her in silent desperation.  We’d be sitting quietly, passively, barely aware of each other, tapping on our phones, waiting for the next reboot of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, written by a computer to avoid offending anyone about anything (so as to maximize global streaming revenue, even from certain high-population totalitarian regimes).

We wouldn’t be feeling upset because we wouldn’t be feeling very much at all.  But I’m too old-fashioned for that.  Give me some face melting and a story that doesn’t require me to hate myself.  I’ll take corny Rocky Balboa or the Terminator.  At least those stories were vaguely more real than the spineless, self-consuming, fake puritanism we have now.

On Going to Parties

Don’t.

Hear me out.  I know: parties are an opportunity to hook up and possibly get drunk or high in a situation where you can feel less alone.  In some cases, going also fulfills a social duty.  At least one person wants or needs you to be there.  Or you feel obligated to make an appearance because if you don’t there will be social or professional consequences.  Maybe that’s where the deals are being made.  Or you go because all your friends (the people you see regularly when you’re not at parties) will be there and you’re afraid you will seem alien and awkward and will become a target for gossip if you stay home.  Or you go because you’re secretly bored or depressed, which worries you and makes you think a party will be good medicine.  Note: it never is.

There are other reasons, of course.  But these seem to be the most common ones.  And sometimes these reasons are good, which is to say, not anxiety-provoking or depressing or otherwise liable to leave you with an emotional scar and a bad memory.  But think about the parties you’ve attended.  I mean, the ones you can remember.  How many of them can you look back on and say “That was a good time” without certain regrets, without a flash of pain, like running your tongue over a sore tooth?

Maybe you’re an extrovert and you don’t agree with this at all. Maybe you like to say “I love parties!” the way you say “I love shopping!” or “I love parades!” or “I love concerts and riding the big roller coaster and telling jokes to the whole room!”  Sure.  You have an amazing life, oh thou Paragon of Well-Adjusted Exuberance and Charm.  But even extroverts get the blues and, for the rest of us, it’s not that simple.

Even if you rate on the manic end of the social spectrum and regard filling the air with words as one of the best things in life, you’re not immune to darkness.  In fact, I suspect the loudest, most visible attention magnets are sometimes the most sensitive.  They feel, somewhere, perhaps inexpressibly, that there are things slithering down there in the dark.  They’ll do anything to remain on the surface where life is bright and cheerful.  And who can blame them, even if a certain obnoxiousness and studied insensitivity is part of their armor?  As an unfortunate ex-girlfriend of mine used to say, “I like to keep it easy and breezy.”  Still, just because you turn up the television when you’re by yourself doesn’t make the madness disappear.  It will be there no matter what you do.  But, by all means, turn it up to eleven and pour yourself a stiff one.

On the technique of avoiding parties, there is ultimately little to be said.  Just stay home and read a book.  A book won’t stab you in the back at 2:00 AM by seducing your best friend.  A book won’t demand you perform the Esoteric Rites of the Porcelain God in someone’s weird guest bathroom while people continuously pound on the door.  A book won’t have you riding a bicycle for a month until your arraignment.  A book won’t gift you with questions you can ask yourself for the next 20 years.

Why?

Why did I go?

Why did I drink?

Why did I say or not say that?

Why couldn’t I have foreseen what would happen?

Why the aftermath, the fallout, the inability to ever speak with so-and-so again?

Why the difficult conversation the next day?  We were drunk.  It’s not you.  I’m just not looking for a relationship or anything at the moment.  It was just . . . a party.  You know?

Chapters 14 – 17 would have treated you better.  There are no repercussions that follow reading, having a cup of tea, and going to bed.  You’ll wake up the next day feeling better.  You will be blissfully unaware of the catty gossip, the betrayals, the bad decisions, the inside of the drunk tank.  You will have all your teeth.  Your brain cell count will hold relatively steady.

This is not to say you should become Fernando Pessoa and spend all your time staring at raindrops and probing the dark vicissitudes of your soul—though that wouldn’t necessarily be a waste of time.  Surely, it would be better than listening to Bob tell a joke about his cousin’s lawnmower.  Drink!  Or nodding while someone bitches about a politician.  Drink!  Or smiling at a not-unattractive person who might, after a certain amount of tequila, decide you are also not-unattractive.  Drink!

Drink!  Drink!  Drink!  Drink!  Drink!  So you don’t have to see.  So you don’t have to know.  So you don’t have to feel.  Because otherwise, even if you suspect your brain cell count may be in precipitous decline, you will understand that parties are a fool’s game.

“I was in a uniform, a costume, pretending to be the boyfriend, taking a year’s worth of classes I had no interest in, disguising myself: I was an actor and none of this was real.” — Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards

We Fear AI Because We Don’t Understand Ourselves

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.
— Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.7

Worrying about the destructive power of artificial intelligence suggests that, for all our technical ability, we remain ignorant about our own nature.  In a time of unmitigated anxiety and safetyism, we define ourselves neither by technology nor by humanism, failing to see that these are not mutually exclusive modes of expression.  Our creations may be an expression of our essential humanity, but when we look at AI, we do not see ourselves.  We see catastrophe.

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky bluntly summarized the current state of AI, noting “these systems are designed in such a way that, in principle, they can tell us nothing about language, about learning, about intelligence, about thought.  There’s a lot of sophisticated programming.  But basically what it comes down to is sophisticated, high-tech plagiarism.”  In other words, all AI can offer us are intricate repetitions of what we’ve already thought, said, and made.  This terrifies us because we do not understand it.

We no longer entertain the Vitruvian holism that seeks universals through human proportion.  In this view, artificial intelligence would, at best, be a filing system for our data, a fundamentally human metric.  But we no longer believe that by knowing ourselves, we can understand the constituent components of the universe around us.  We no longer put our faith in a philosophical cosmos defined by persistent human qualities and meanings.

Theories of postmodern fragmentation have instead convinced us that eternal, humanistic narratives are a lie and that we exist in an atomized power struggle of materialism and self-serving language.  So it’s ironic that Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation was supposedly an inspiration for one of our most disturbing cautionary tales about AI—the Matrix movies, since they were ultimately about finding meaning in grand narratives, something postmodern thinkers reject as a artifact of power-seeking rhetoric.

There is a scene in The Matrix: Reloaded where Neo confronts the Architect, the AI that originally coded the Matrix and now serves as its monitoring program and curator.  While the first movie followed a fairly predictable “rebellion against authority” plot cliché (cf. Spartacus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Empire Strikes Back, 1984, The People vs. Larry Flynt, most of Game of Thrones, and many others), Neo’s conversation with the Architect in Reloaded offers a twist.  Neo considers himself a rebel leader, but the Architect reveals he’s just an embedded safety feature designed to reboot the system when it becomes unstable.  Moreover, there have been at least five previous iterations of Neo who’ve performed the same function.

This is very funny.  The grand revelation at the heart of the Matrix trilogy is the first thing you encounter when you manage to fight your way through all the chatbots and voicemail scripts to the flunky at an IT help desk: have you tried turning it off and on again?  The entire sci-fi epic is based on tech support for dummies.  When your computer doesn’t work, you become Neo, a hero in your own eyes perhaps, but really just a recurring function anticipated by the company’s customer relationship management protocols.  It’s the Wachowskis pranking the world with a Dilbert punchline.

And yet, Reloaded still manages to reach for something a little more profound than the Sunday comics.  It looks like the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence colliding with transactional analysis.  In his discussion of mindfulness meditation, Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn writes:

Notice, too, that the self is impermanent.  Whatever you try to hold on to that has to do with yourself eludes you.  It can’t be held because it is constantly changing, decaying, and being reconstructed again, always slightly differently, depending on the circumstances of the moment.  This makes the sense of self what is called in chaos theory a “strange attractor,” a pattern which embodies order, yet is also unpredictably disordered.  It never repeats itself.  Whenever you look, it is slightly different. . . . Since we are folded into the universe and participate in its unfolding, it will defer in the face of too much self-centered, self-indulgent, self-critical, self-insecure, self-anxious activity on our part, and arrange for the dream world of our self-oriented thinking to look and feel only too real.

This is an articulation of anitya or “impermanence.”  According to the Encyclopedia of Buddhism, “Anitya expresses the concept that all compounded phenomena (all things and experiences) arise due to causes and conditions and are subject to change, decline, and cessation.  Hence, all phenomena are unstable, unreliable, and constantly changing”—just like the Matrix when it needs a reboot.

Amid that continuous change, though, there are also recurring types in recurring situations, like Neo as “the One,” the other so-called rebels ignorantly convinced that they’re fighting the system, the more overt agents of the simulation, and even the Architect itself—all bodhisattvas and asuras coded into the Matrix’s wheel of Samsara and integral to its revolutions.

In this sense, all that is or will be experienced has happened before.  All of these entities have come into being and played their parts again and again.  And they will continue to recur as they tell the same stories and act in the same situations with the same people, not unlike characters in a video game.

Moreover, the Buddhist perspective is not at odds with psychologistic interpretations.  In his 1964 text on transactional analysis and one of the first pop-psychology books, The Games People Play, Eric Berne describes such recurrence-amid-impermanence in terms of social programming.  He writes:

Social programming results in traditional ritualistic or semi-ritualistic interchanges. . . . As people become better acquainted, more and more individual programming creeps in, so that “incidents” begin to occur. These incidents superficially appear to be adventitious, and may be so described by the parties concerned, but careful scrutiny reveals that they tend to follow definite patterns which are amenable to sorting and classification, and that the sequence is circumscribed by unspoken rules and regulations. . . . Such sequences, which in contrast to pastimes are based more on individual than on social programming, may be called games.  Family life and married life, as well as life in organizations of various kinds, may year after year be based on variations of the same game.

It’s interesting that the language of computer science and that of psychoanalysis often overlaps.  In terms of programming architecture (the Architect’s world), a “routine” is “a section of a program that performs a particular task.”  It is essentially a pre-set pattern or sequence of operations, not unlike karmic rebirths on the wheel of Samsara or Berne’s “games”: “A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome.”  The games people play arise again and again with certain repeated personality types in certain repeated situations.

With this in mind, the question becomes: if artificial intelligence is a narrative extension (or mirror) of us and we transactionally construct ourselves in the same ways over and over, then what could there possibly be to fear?  In this grand act of plagiarism, what is being recapitulated if not human experience and identity?  And if that is the case, the potential catastrophe lies not with our creations but with our inability to know ourselves, to understand that our technology and our human nature are really one in the same.

Ignis Fatuus

A story about ghosts and possums.

I saw my nephew, Ricky, in the Amvets parking lot on a freezing Saturday in December with a centimeter of slick ice on the blacktop and a fair amount of booze in my veins.  My three friends, Burt, Leo, and Klaus, came out with me to the car, since I was their ride.  Bar time was now midnight at Amvets because the owner lacked joie de vivre.

I recognized Ricky immediately.  He was sitting on the hood of my Tercel.  When we got close, he pulled a gun out of his parka.

“Ima stick you up.”

Burt said, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Leo said, “You better get us all in one shot, kid, or you’re in some shit.”

And my friend, Klaus, the only one I could ever stand in the late hours after we’d all been kicked out of Amvets, said, “You’re definitely in some shit.  That’s a pellet gun.”

“This ain’t no pellet gun, dawg.  You wanna test me?”  Ricky held it up so we could see it in the moonlight.  Then he pointed it at each of us.

“Hi, Ricky.”

“Uncle Dave?”

I nodded, wobbly on the ice.

“Hey I remember when you had that piñata for your birthday,” Klaus said.  “What was that, like five years ago?  How’s your mom?”

“Don’t say shit about my mom.”

“Come on, man.  I also know your dad.  Kevin, right?  I know your whole family.”

Ricky glared and turned the pellet gun on Klaus.

Leo yawned.  “Why don’t you just put that thing away?  You might kill a bird.”

Everyone but the stick-up kid thought it was funny.

“You wanna flex on me, motherfucker?”

“Who is this guy?” Burt said.  “And why is he talking like that?”

“It’s the rap music.”  Leo fished keys out of side pocket of my jacket before I could object.  He had long fingers and had once made a living as a pickpocket.  The more he drank, the more graceful and charming he got with bartenders and waitresses and the more likely he was to rob them.  In a way, I envied that about him.  Even his problems were smooth.

“It’s the Internet,” Klaus said.

“Video games.”  Burt leaned against the car and crossed his arms.

Leo nodded.  “Yeah.  And the social media.”

“That’s clearly a pellet gun,” I said.

“Uncle Dave, I didn’t even know this was your car.”

“It’s okay, Ricky.  Get in.  We’ll drive you home.”

That evening in Amvets, I’d been hugged by a woman named Celestina, who’d been after me since high school.  Now that we were both old and divorced and only associated with our respective groups of friends, she must have concluded the time was right for a full-body embrace.

The time was not.  She’d been sitting on the barstool next to me, ignoring her two friends the same way I’d been ignoring Burt, Leo, and Klaus.  Then, without warning, she put down her empty glass, slid half off her stool, leaned in, and hugged me.  Celestina was a wide woman, stronger than she looked.  When she hugged me, I had to stand up.  She whispered something in my ear, but I couldn’t make out what she said over the music.

Someone had played Waylon Jennings’ Never Could Toe the Mark in the jukebox and it was loud, louder than anything I’d ever heard played in Amvets.  You rarely heard country blasting out of the ceiling.  But time and space had distorted while steady pressure was being applied to my body by the woman who’d sat behind me in Civics decades before.

I knew I’d see her around town.  Hauberk, Missouri, was on the small side and you ran into the same people about once or twice a month.  Celestina and I were destined to encounter each other again in line at the bank or next to each other at a stoplight on Lagniappe Way, or drifting through the produce section of Harveys.  Then we’d both have to smile and nod hello and think of her hugging me off my stool.

We’d all squeezed into the Tercel when she came out, waving at us across the parking lot.  She almost slipped on the ice in her big, puffy, white jacket.

“Who’s the old lady?” asked Ricky.

“Christmas,” said Burt.  “No, Christina.”

“No,” Leo pumped the gas as the engine sputtered.  “Celestina.  Like the stars.”

“You’re gonna flood it,” I said.  “You don’t need to do that.  Just relax.  It’ll go.”

“She’s coming over here,” Klaus said.

“Bitch be crazy.”  Ricky took out his pellet gun.  “Ima blast her.”

I put my hand on the gun and guided it down.  “Don’t do that.  She nice.  She’s just got a drinking problem like everybody else.”

“Oh shit,” Ricky said.  “I’m not sure, but I think she works at Hoover.  I think she’s the nurse.”

“You’d know if you ever went to class,” Klaus said.

The engine turned over and the vents started to blast hot air.  Leo rolled down the window and smiled at Celestina.  “How’s it going?” he said.

“Hello,”  She leaned over and peered past Leo into the car.  It took her a moment to place me in the backseat.  “Dave, I think you, um, left your wallet at the bar.”

I smiled and nodded even though I could feel my wallet in my back pocket.

Celestina straightened up and held it out to Leo, her breath hanging around her like a halo in the moonlight.

“Well, thank you kindly.”  Leo handed it back to my nephew without looking away and Ricky immediately removed the bills, folding them into his jacket pocket.

“Say,” Leo said, “you wouldn’t be interested in a nightcap over at David’s house, would you?”

You sonofabitch, I thought.  You absolute, pristine, solid-state sonofabitch.

She focused on Leo as if she were noticing him for the first time.  Then her eyes came to rest on Ricky sitting between me and Klaus.  “No, but thank you.  I think I should go home.  I have to work tomorrow.”  She tilted like she was about to pass out.

“Oh, that’s a shame.”  Leo gave her his minty smile.  “Don’t be a stranger, Celestina.”

She smiled back, glassy but very happy, showing teeth, and hugged herself, trying not to shiver in spite of the enormous jacket.

Burt leaned across Leo and said, “You better get inside.  It’s cold out here.”

“Yeah,” she said, swaying a little but still smiling.  “Good-night to you all.  Good-night, Dave!”

Burt waved and said good-night, but we pulled away before she could hear.  I looked back and saw her standing in the parking lot, still hugging herself, staring at the car.

When we hit the street, I dropped my hand on Leo’s shoulder and he flinched.  “Why are you turning my nephew into a fucking criminal?”

“You mean the kid with the gun?”

“I’m sitting right here,” Ricky said.

Burt turned around in the passenger seat and coughed out a nicotine booze cloud.  “It’s a good thing you are.  Good thing you ran into us instead of some cop or a peckerwood with a hog leg.”

Ricky ignored him.  He held the wallet open and squinted at it like an old man who’d lost his spectacles.  “Terry . . . Ig-nat-ee-us.”

“Igneous?” asked Burt.  “Like the rock?  That’s a weird one.”

“Gimmie that.”  Klaus snatched the wallet and angled it toward the window.  “Ignatius.  Terrence Ignatius.  Any of you guys know a Terry Ignatius?”

“Never heard of him,” Leo said.  “Let me concentrate.  I get another DUI and it’s over.”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of dude who’d have multiple DUIs,” I said.  “Then again, you don’t strike me as the kind of dude who’d encourage somebody’s nephew to steal money out of a stranger’s wallet.”

This made everyone laugh, even Ricky.

“I am that dude,” Leo said to the windshield.

“He’s not a stranger.”  Klaus snapped the wallet shut.  “He’s Terry Ignatius.  We know him.  He’s our buddy, Terry.  Good guy.”

“You guys’r fuckin’ strange,” said Ricky.

Burt sighed.  “You don’t know the half of it.”

Leo dropped me off and they continued on in my car.  He said he’d bring it back in the morning, but I knew he wouldn’t.  The night was young and there were other cars to drive before bed.  It would take me two or three days and that many bus rides to get the Tercel back but, like Leo, I couldn’t get another DUI.  Unlike Leo, I didn’t talk about it to Burt and Klaus.  Each of us had our things, our lingering problems, our punishments and payments, times when we’d made wrong turns or said wrong things or spent money or didn’t spend money or got in cars with the wrong people or made promises when we should have kept quiet.  Leo had his own car, but he never drove it.

I walked up the outside steps to my tiny apartment, stopped to listen at the Porres’ door to see if Martin Porres was beating his wife—their customary family activity on Saturday night.  But it was all silent.  Was that good sign or was it bad?  I decided to believe it was good and not think about it.  Because who the hell was I?

Usually, when he was ranting and slamming doors and she was calling him a cocksucker and their two kids were crying and the dog was howling, I’d knock and one of them would answer, usually her, and say what do you want.  I’d say excuse me but can you keep it down?  She’d wipe her eyes and look at me more closely and say oh it’s you.  And I’d say yeah, from upstairs.  And then she’d say sorry and shut the door.  We did that every weekend.  It added continuity to our lives.  But tonight, nothing.

My apartment was spare, save a few pieces of yard sale furniture.  A Formica table with two rattan chairs, a diseased-looking velour Barcalounger with a rip down the seat, a mini-fridge and a two-burner stove, a twin mattress on the floor of my little bedroom with a cardboard box as a bureau-nightstand.  I didn’t have a lot of clothes, either.  My most valuable possession was the Tercel.  I wasn’t some kind of ascetic, but I’d had reversals since the divorce.  Money was infrequent.  I was currently between jobs and had sold or pawned most of my things.  I opened all the windows and sat at the table in the dark.  I had an almost-full bottle of wine and, though my head was pounding and I felt unsettled by the Porres’ silence, I poured some in a coffee mug and started to drink.

Air had gotten into the bottle and I hadn’t touched it in about a week.  So the wine already tasted like vinegar, but whatever.  I turned on the radio, found the old person’s jazz station.  Thankfully they weren’t playing Kenny G or fucking Manhattan Transfer.  I turned Ugetsu up as loud as the little speaker would go without buzzing.  It was Saturday night.  If the Porreses weren’t screaming, I wanted to do my part.

That was one thing—the frozen wind coming in, lifting the dusty lace curtains.  Sometimes a car hissed along the street.  Apart from such infrequent movement, there’s a certain stillness after bar time, when all the drug freaks and booze mutants have either passed out, holed up somewhere, or are making their way home as quietly and inconspicuously as possums on a moonless night.  Because, at such a time, every possum knows the same universal truth.  When all your friends have left, there’s only one way to get your car back to the driveway: side streets, frontage roads, alleys, and the occasional cornfield turnrow.  At least, that’s the Missouri version.

When you do get home, you open all the windows and put on some music.  You give thanks.  You drink whatever awful remainder’s lurking in the back of the cupboard.  And you try not to dwell on the foolishness you’ve seen earlier in the evening or that you’re bound to participate in later in the night.  This constitutes a good time, all things considered.  If the night ends there, you’re safe.  You’re lucky.  The things you don’t remember don’t have to be remembered.  And you can’t be held accountable for things you haven’t done.

Tomorrow will happen in the fullness of time and you will not need to contact an attorney or make a court appearance in ten days.  But if the night doesn’t end there, be advised that whatever happens between the hours of 2 and 5 AM may negate all your previous good luck.  They call midnight the witching hour, but they call 3 AM the devil’s hour.  And they call it that for a reason.

But a ghost or an ignis fatuus can appear earlier than that: I saw her puffy white jacket at a distance hovering over the dark snow like a will-o’-the-wisp.  And I thought, what are the chances?  In a small town like Hauberk, the chances are already decent and in the devil’s hour they might even be fair-to-good that you will see some degenerate you left at the bar wandering down your street.  Maybe drawn by the hard bop tumbling out your windows.  Maybe just following the serendipitous magnetism that the devil’s hour exerts over all creatures of the night.  Celestina’s jacket reminded me of a large segmented marshmallow.  The night wouldn’t be over for me until dawn.  Apparently, it wasn’t over for her, either.

I moved to the Barcalounger by the window and watched until she was half a block away.  Then she noticed me.

“Hey!”  She waved, swaying in the snow, her eyes half shut.  “Hey, you live here?”

“A lot of the time.”

“I can’t find my car.”

“Amvets is ten blocks back the way you came.”

“What?”  Celestina looked around.  Did she still think she was in the parking lot?  Her black hair had gotten stringy and stiff in the cold.  The way she swayed, I thought she might fall.

“You better come up.”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Dave.”

“You better.  Then we can find your car.”

She processed the thought, then nodded.  “Okay,” she said.  “I like you, Dave.  You’re a good . . . ”

“No, I’m not a good.  I’ll be right down.”

Celestina was bigger than me.  When she slipped on the narrow stairs, one arm hooked around my neck, we both nearly fell backwards.  It made her laugh.  I couldn’t tell if it was because she was drunk or embarrassed or a bit of both.  But I couldn’t pass judgement.  I thought of how many times I’d come home from Amvets and slipped on those concrete stairs.  To be honest, I’d done much worse.

I let her down in the Barcalounger then hung her enormous white jacket up on the back of the door. I pulled one of my wobbly rattan kitchen chairs across from her and offered her my cup of wine, but she waved it off.

“I had a dream about you,” she said, her head nodding forward.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, a really great dream. It was beautiful.”

“What was it?”

“We were walking through a field of sunflowers.” Her head dipped again if she were going to topple forward out of the chair. “They were huge.”

“I’ve never had a dream like that, but it sounds nice.”

“It was nice. We were holding hands.”

I leaned forward and held my hand out. She took it in her big puffy grip. I thought I could at least keep her from falling out of the chair that way. She had a nice hand, warm and enveloping in spite of the cold wind coming in the open window beside us and the snowy blocks she’d walked.

I turned down the radio and we sat there for a while, listening to Sister Sadie, my left hand holding Celestina’s right, her nodding then gripping my hand harder to steady herself, me staring at the discolored circle over the door where the clock used to be.  I’d even pawned the clock.  Got $15 for it.

Eventually, she grew quiet and still, passed out.  Maybe she was dreaming about sunflowers.  Then I had to let go of her hand because Leo knocked.  I knew it was him.  I’d have known even if I hadn’t been expecting him.  He had that soft, tentative knock—just like the way he’d smile and say something kind while picking a waiter’s pocket and ordering the souffle. Behind him came Burt and Klaus. They were holding cups of coffee.  Everyone looked sober.

“Shit,” Burt said, closing both windows. “What’re you trying to do, get pneumonia?”

“That’s right,” I said. “You got me.”

Leo raised an eyebrow at Celestina and grinned. “So you and her, huh?”

“No. You wouldn’t believe it.  She was just walking down the street.”

“This street?” Klaus said it flat with the straight face that meant he was joking.

“I was sitting here and she kind of floated down the sidewalk.”

“I can see her doing that, floating,” Leo said.

“What happened to my nephew?”

“Took him home,” Burt said. “You know, he’s kind of a shit. He’s on a bad path. He better straighten up and fly right.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well,” said Leo, “it’s getting about that time.”

I nodded, put the cup of rancid chianti on the floor next to Celestina. Then I went into the bedroom closet and got the bolt cutter, a mini crowbar, an old sawed-off Ruger over-and-under, a box of buckshot, the HK 9mm that looked like it had been burned in a fire but still worked, and a hardware store machete. I wrapped it all in a pillowcase.

On our way to the door, we stopped and looked at Celestina, now snoring loudly, her head lolled to the side. Burt said hold on, got my bedspread, and covered her with it, tucking it under her chin. Then the four of us went out and crept softly down the stairs.  A car I’d never seen was idling on the street.  We got in and put our seatbelts on.  Burt and Klaus sipped their coffee.  Leo pulled away from the curb and we glided into the dark.

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be.  I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing.  I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness.  And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep.  I’m not proud of such feelings.  But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care.  It’s a hard world, Fluffy.  Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago.  Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke.  At least someone still gets to enjoy it.  But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine.  I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat.  I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance.  Some writers really need to start drinking again.  They’re not able to produce unless they do.  Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.”  That’s it.  Light up.  Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take.  There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class.  We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles).  Of course, he had tenure.  So he went on leave.  Now it was almost Christmas.  And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement.  Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard.  This is known.  We were all trying to keep it together.  Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees.  There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester.  Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive.  But whiskey in Montana?  Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy.  She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant.  I always ran into it because it was covered in snow.  Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have.  So I barked my shins on it regularly.  But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot.  Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember.  I’d walk over and stand next to her.  We wouldn’t talk much.  The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift.  Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school.  This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness.  No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift.  But nobody knew anything.  If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30.  But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening.  We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant.  We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments.  And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda.  Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life.  This was not real life.  This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take.  A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art.  And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment.  I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print.  I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous.  But she couldn’t write.  Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten).  But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors.  Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages.  I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.”  Take that.  Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah.  Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea.  After the program, we lost touch.  I know Lauren didn’t publish another book.  She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot.  And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything.  In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do.  If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things.  Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate.  I don’t blame her.  I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing.  I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved.  But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers.  The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken.  You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador.  The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers.  I hope so.  Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in.  At least I’m still working.  I hope Andrea is, too.  Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days.  And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience.  Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some.  But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”