Less Than Smoke

It’s hard to quantify psychological abuse. For years, I felt sure it wasn’t real. I didn’t believe in things like emotional intelligence, the critical inner voice, generalized anxiety, ego depletion, and how these can lead to high-risk behaviors and addictions. I also didn’t believe you could inherit any of it down through the generations. But I believe now.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been more persuaded by my mother’s idea that with enough willpower, you can overcome anything and that if you seek help, if you identify yourself as being weak, troubled, or different, you will be put on a list. Then you’ll never know whether you failed in life because you weren’t good enough or because you voluntarily admitted it and people decided they wanted nothing to do with you. Admittedly, young people don’t worry about things like this anymore. Now it seems everyone has their own pet defect or preferred victim category.

My mom was a brilliant, gifted artist and a very good person, but part of her lived in perpetual fear that I wasn’t clever enough, tough enough, industrious enough, and that I’d let people push me around for the rest of my life. She wanted me to be like Michael Corleone but worried that I was more like Fredo. And I was ashamed when I tried hard to be the former but more often embodied the latter. Little did I realize that we’re all Fredo.

In Blue Nights, when I read Joan Didion’s famous advice to herself, “Do not whine. . . . Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone,” I felt validated. It became my mantra, my personal statement. Here was one of my favorite writers, someone I’d actually had the benefit of briefly meeting when she came to read at the University of Missouri, articulating exactly how I felt—a relief because I could never find the words. I wanted to be a creative artist and therefore ostensibly privileged subjectivity and emotional authenticity, but I couldn’t express what really mattered. I couldn’t admit that what I really wanted was to be numb inside.

Instead, I escaped into work. When I wasn’t working to exhaustion, I drank. No one was going to criticize me for that as long as I kept my mouth shut and didn’t cause trouble. And Didion’s writing proved that someone better than me felt the same. Granted, she was being a little ironic when she wrote those lines, but I never wanted to think in that direction. I wanted something I could point to and say, in the voice of my mother, “See? I’m fine. Now get off my porch.”

Millennials and Gen-Zs would find these attitudes strange. They probably don’t realize that many Boomers (my parents’ generation—I am Gen-X) came of age in the late 1950s, which was when their social attitudes and cultural values solidified. My parents, for example, despised the hippies as being too lazy, entitled, and self-indulgent to accomplish anything of substance. I have a feeling I would have despised the hippies, too.

Every generation thinks the next is too soft and entitled. They haven’t gone through what we’ve gone through and their immaturity puts us off. But they have their own struggles, things we will never intimately experience and therefore won’t really understand. And, just as with our generation, some of them won’t survive for long—at least not long enough to “make it,” which is to say, become the sort of peak consumers our parents unthinkingly brought us up to be.

Still, I wonder what my parents and their contemporaries accomplished with all that willpower, paranoia, workaholism, and despair. They and their Boomer friends died (and are dying) anyway. No one remembers their names. My mother died and maybe less than ten people remember her. She worked harder than anyone I’ve ever met. When I’m gone, it will be as though she never existed. As Eric Maria Remarque asked in All Quiet on the Western Front, “What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?”

What use is it that my parents didn’t talk about how they were mistreated and abused as children? What use is it that I was warned not to speak of my own psychological problems and what my parents passed on to me? Why all the quiet desperation, drinking, fear, and resentment? What will be the use of everything we thought and did and felt in a particular decade of our lives if all it meant was that we had to keep our mouths shut and spend more time alone? All the things that seemed to matter so much, all the things we had to keep hidden to avoid being put on a list, will be less than smoke. Soon we will be, too.

I think we should say how we feel now, while we can.

Feudalism of the Soul

You will never escape yourself.

I could write a long story about my unavailable father, how he did about three things with me as a kid and those only after knock-down drag-out fights with my mother, how he complained to her constantly about his own comforts and inconveniences while she was in hospice, and after her horrible lingering cancer death, how shameful he became, indulging in emotional abusiveness to a degree far beyond the excuse of grieving. Much of it was directed at me. And I suspect he hasn’t stopped being an asshole; though, we haven’t spoken in years. He found his true calling late in life.

My father, in short, was an emotionally stunted, highly manipulative, self-obsessed, cruel, dishonorable man, who liked to pretend otherwise—sometimes to himself, but always to non-family. He liked to lie. Still, I knew him and I’ve been on guard for most of my adult life because of it. I didn’t want to become like him. I worried that, because he was my father, I was somehow destined to devolve into an approximation of him in an Appointment in Samarra sense—that no matter how hard I ran in the other direction, I was just running headlong towards some kind of genetic destiny.

Like he said to me once about not wanting to be Catholic: I said, “I have a list of problems with Catholicism and, honestly, I don’t consider myself a Catholic at all. I’m not one.” He laughed at me and said, “You got baptized and were raised Catholic. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll always be a Catholic.” That made me angry. But that’s all he wanted.

He made a big noise about being Catholic my whole childhood. And then, when it suited him, he gleefully helped an unimpressive, desperate woman at the back end of unkind middle age into a state of abject adultery, which I believe is a grave, mortal sin according to the church. But whatever. It’s just one example of many. He didn’t actually take Catholicism seriously all those years. Acting righteous and upright just fit his brand.

But this isn’t really about my father. It’s about the myth that we become our parents, usually in the most disagreeable ways. There’s supposed to be a moment of clarity, perhaps sometime in our late 30s, where we pause and declare, horrified, that I’ve become my mother! Cute, but no, you haven’t unless you made a conscious effort to make her same bad choices. Even then, you wouldn’t really be her in any meaningful way. You will never escape yourself.

Certainly, character is influenced by upbringing. But such influence can only be one developmental consideration among many. You are you. Celebrate that. You are an individual, and neither facile social constructivism nor the ancient mythology of blood can take your individuality away. Those are nice ideas to play with. Maybe they make good stories or seeds of stories. But you are not without unique agency. When you look in the mirror, one person looks back, not your ancestors, not your parents, not your extended family. Just you. And you are more than the sum of those parts. Of course, that perspective implies a certain degree of responsibility on your part.

People love to flirt with powerlessness. It’s freeing to feel like you can’t make a mistake (because you can’t make a real decision when everything about you is already fixed). You’re a known quantity. You’re traveling on rails. So relax. You don’t have to change. Growth is a myth. Ethics? Don’t make me laugh. Self-initiation into a better way of life? Don’t kid yourself. Just make the same lousy choices you’ve always made because that’s what your parents and maybe grandparents did. It’s fate, baby!

This train of thought gets applied to the good things, too. But it’s just as ill-conceived. Maybe grandma was a saint (unlikely, but let’s say). How’s that working out for you today? If you consider yourself something of a genetic reincarnation of her, you might feel very superior to your fellow dirt ape. But if you still happen to be standing in front of the mirror, you may want to ask your reflection what happened. Isn’t grandma a direct ancestor in your bloodline? Between us, your halo’s missing and your pumpkin bread leaves something to be desired.

Was Uncle Bob a pedophile? Are you having tendencies? No? Did Aunt Phoebe run a dance company for the blind for 30 years all by herself? Nice! Then why is it that you can barely hold down a crummy office job and you’re afraid of your manager? Aunt Phoebe and 100 blind soldiers of the Nutcracker shake their heads at you from ballerina Valhalla.

These old myths seem like rationalizations for economic injustices at best, for path dependencies in coercive cultures, for systemic brutality, for the angst of staying where you are, staying who you are, maintaining the microcosmic and macrocismic status quo, and never risking change.

If things “run in the blood,” what use are you if you discover your ancestors were awful? You’re good as a slave, maybe. You’re good as a consumer, as an addict, as a drinker and a fiend. Just like dad.

Feudalism, for all its romance, is actually fucking brutal—on the mind, on the self-conception, as well as on the body, on generation after generation. And in many ways, feudalism is alive and well today in the myths of the old world that we’ve unthinkingly inherited.

Assistant chief Starlink engineer when ordered to fall on his sword.

In the 1980s, we learned about the zaibatsu system, which seemed a whole lot more Tokugawa than Datsun. In the 1990s, we had the rise of multinational tech conglomerates, which we don’t have to say much about along these lines, since they’re now up in our orifices 24/7.

Those were the easy feudalisms. But there’s a deeper, more spiritual vassalage at work: call it feudalism of the soul. And it says the liege lord is there by virtue of divine right. You are here by the providence of that same organizing principle. And if your life is nasty, brutish, and short, well, it’s just who you are.

But it really isn’t. You still get to choose.

The Writing Expedition Omnibus Podcast Ep. 6: Bird Apocalypse Edition

The Writing Expedition Omnibus Podcast Ep. 6: Bird Apocalypse Edition (←link).

Wherein I observe that an extra writing hour does not automatically mean extra writing.

Learning to Write Fiction

Things to do. Books to read.

Vincent Price holding cats is better than a stock photo of someone trying to write.

Garbage

I’m still learning. I hope you are, too. If you’re struggling with wanting to write a story but feeling intimidated by it, you might start by attempting a three-page short short (about 1050 words) as poorly as possible. Make it the worst story you’ve ever written and see what happens.

Quit trying to be interesting and brilliant. That’s your ego at work, the same thing that subverts your writing process in lots of other ways. Let it go. Write trash. Don’t be afraid of making garbage. Just pay attention while you’re doing it. You’ll learn a lot that way. More importantly, you’ll have a moment in which you’re creating without anxiety, without the need for permission, which is a rare and wonderful experience. Such moments are our greatest teachers.

This is part of the considerable inner work of being a creative writer. The publishing industry doesn’t have blogs that talk about this because you can’t monetize inner work. Even writers, so adept with words and images, can’t explain it, aren’t sure it’s real, and wonder whether they’re simply distracted when they have creative inner experiences. They aren’t. The inner work is ubiquitous and undeniable. They’re merely trying to contend with self-doubt which comes from living a society that calls everything other than monetized productivity stupid and delusional.

You do your best creative work not through trying to impress your ego, which is worried about how acceptable you seem and about whether you’re going to survive, but through dropping those aspirations and getting to the unadulterated creative impulse that first called to you. For a fiction writer, the way to a powerful creative state is not by going up into the light of concepts, ideas, and social approbation, but by going down into the darkness of urges, emotions, and impulses. You can civilize your writing later, in revision. For now, be a savage. And write garbage first.

Books You Don’t Have to Read

Of course, there are books you could be reading. Think of this as part of the “outer work.” What books are these? Only you can say, because your work, your artistic project and path belong to you—not to some voice on the internet preaching about life hacks and best practices (which is what most writing advice amounts to). All of that is, as Ecclesiastes might say, vanity. Or is, as we might say, marketing. But here are some suggestions nonetheless.

Get a library card and read a lot of what you want to write. No one writes without influences. So locate your influences. Originality exists, but fixating on it, such that the idea of “finding your voice” becomes a restrictive, overly romantic obsession, is another obstacle. Instead, saturate yourself with anything you like and be honest with yourself about it. It could be trashy (get away from literary status anxiety—read what you want to read, anything that speaks to you). It could be classic literature (works in translation count, too). It could also be the latest socially acceptable novel being pushed by Penguin Random House. It absolutely does not matter. Just immerse yourself in whatever stimulates your imagination. And read vigorously.

Creative writing programs and English departments have a problem with this. They’re in the business of stratifying, articulating, and hierarchizing products of the imagination. So there will be an implicit bias there, usually coming from the careers, anxieties, and assumptions of the professors. But repeat after me: “I will read what draws me, what stimulates my imagination, not what I am being implicitly or explicitly told is marketable and therefore preferable.”

I’m not bashing art school. I believe in creative writing programs the way I believe in The New York Post. It’s entertaining, often darkly absurd, and provides material for lively conversation. MFA programs rarely amount to more than an interesting form of literary journalism—talking about writing and talking about talking about writing. You can learn a lot from all that talk. I believe the arts and humanities do matter and do offer a valuable education, in spite of what the misguided STEM fetishists may think. But the MFA industrial complex is not where you discover the inner imperative that makes you want to create. That comes from experiencing art and then attempting to create it. All the talk (and discursive essay writing) in the world can’t make you an artist. Only art can.

I rarely enjoy reading lists created by actual journalists, even by the journalists I like and think are smart. What journalists consider new, important, and a “must read” (I hate that clichéd expression) is never important to me, since I’m the one that matters in this process. Remember: my project is to go down into the darkness of my inner self and find that raw, creative impulse. News publications focus on social tensions, explanations of current events, cultural trends, laws, politics and, when talking about art, how it relates to those things. Good journalism is essential for a free, capable, concerted citizenry, but it does not understand art. Some journalists are artists, but many more have no concept of art or how to think about it.

Tiresome Theory and Craft Books

Remember to keep the “you should be reading this right now” lists in perspective. That includes the lists I’m offering you here. You shouldn’t necessarily be reading any of these things right now (or ever). But I recognize that in our culture of life hacks and best practices, we will inevitably go seeking authoritative methods. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’ve read these books, too. Besides, there are so many awful ones in the Self Help for Writers category. The following craft books are less awful than most, in my opinion.

Gentle Writing Advice: How to Be a Writer Without Destroying Yourself, Chuck Wendig. Wendig is smart and he cares about writers. In spite of the title, he’s not engaging in nauseating Julia Cameron hand holding. He’s not doing a ridiculous “tough love for writers” Robert McKee performance, either. Wendig’s in-between those extremes. His advice is sane and even-tempered. But he likes to be cute and thinks he’s funny. That can be aggravating if you don’t share his sense of humor. It doesn’t bother me and I actually find myself smiling a lot, especially when I read his footnotes.
Writing Fiction: a Guide to Narrative Craft, Janet Burroway. Useful, neutral advice. By “neutral” I mean what I meant with Wendig’s book, but also that Burroway never seems to be lying, boasting, or to have an agenda other than describing a range of technical options. Her example stories are great (at least in the third edition, which is the one I have) and she uses them like a gifted creative writing instructor to demonstrate what she’s talking about. Her writing exercises are not boring and I’ve relied on a number of them in my own teaching.
Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, Madison Smartt Bell. Read this after Burroway. Think of it as the intermediate sequel to her book. In my opinion, Bell is a good fiction writer and much of what he says here comes from his firsthand experience. I return to this book more than any others.
The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts, David Lodge. His excerpted examples are wonderful and he uses them to good effect in his discussions. His opinions are solid and not beholden to any particular school, voice, or movement.

Read these four books and you will have a bellyful of exercises and theories about fiction writing, more theories than you ever wanted. But you might also come away with a new repertoire of examples and references, which can be helpful.

I used to recommend McKee’s Story to people, but honestly you can get what’s good in his book from the four books I list above and skip his absolutist bluster. I also don’t recommend John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, not because it isn’t good, but because it’s very closely aligned to a particular fiction writing aesthetic. And I think taking that as a guide can create counterproductive stylization in beginning writers.

Fiction

Saturating yourself with fiction you like is far more important than looking at craft books. Here are some things I’m reading now, which may change at any time. I follow my creative impulses above all else (i.e. I read permissively, not like a scholar). If you don’t know where to start or what to read, you could start with these (why not?), but you should quickly diverge from this. The value of starting here is as much based on not liking these books as it is on liking them. Find out what speaks to you. You can do this by starting anywhere with any reading. Starting’s the thing. Read multiple books at once if you feel that’s the way to go. Or look at them one at a time. There are no rules.

Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi. Not sure what I think about this novel yet, but the voice intrigues me.
Murder Most Serene, Gabrielle Wittkop. This writer has no fear. If you read her novel, The Necrophiliac, you know what I mean.
The Collected Stories, Mavis Gallant. I’m just getting into Gallant, but I already feel she has things to teach me.
The Savage Spear of the Unicorn, Delicious Tacos. You may find this one extremely offensive and valuable in that respect.

This list is idiosyncratic. How could it be otherwise? If you don’t like the look of these, compile your own list. The point is to involve yourself with fiction that stimulates you. There is no time to waste.

Final Thought

The world doesn’t need more artists. It also doesn’t need more people trying to prove their worth to mom and dad. It also doesn’t need more kids in law school, STEM worshippers, venture capitalists, or any other thing. The world needs more introspection and individuality. The rest follows. My way should not, actually cannot, be your way. And that is a beautiful thing. Find your way.

Martial Arts: Just Start

Something few people know about me is that I’ve practiced martial arts, in one form or another, since 1983. I’ve trained through ups and downs, in sickness and in health, traveling, on my own or in a dojo, in various countries, with weapons and open hands, in good shape and sick, healthy and injured, and with people from every ethnicity, creed, culture, and economic standing, good, bad, and ugly. I don’t talk or write about it very often because, honestly, what’s there to say? Still, this time, I might have something.

Growing up, I studied Tang Soo Do karate in the Moo Duk Kwan with a legendary master, where I trained with members of the local SWAT team, off-duty Marines, and a wide variety of people from all over the world. I honor that tradition, but I have also studied Choi Li Fut, Shotokan, Vo Lam Kung Fu, Chin Na, Taijutsu, and western boxing.

Throughout all these years, I’ve had times when I felt I was very proficient and other times when I felt ashamed of my inadequacies. I also learned to set all those feelings aside. As “Dai E Zenji’s Vow for Awakening” puts it, “My only prayer is to be firm in my determination to pursue the study of truth, so that I may not feel weary however long I have to apply myself to it . . . to be free from illnesses and to drive out both depressed feelings and lightheartedness.”

Feeling good about yourself can be wonderful. And feeling bad about yourself can be horrible. But ultimately these are fleeting states of mind, conditions equivalent to each other, and not that different from illnesses. They distract you from what’s really going on within you and beyond you. Accepting this is the substance of mindfulness and is integral to martial arts and to Zen, which is something I also study, among other things.

To be honest, I am not a great martial artist and never have been. At best, I’m mediocre, especially relative to some of the highly gifted athletes from whom I’ve had the benefit of learning. If my mediocrity were relevant to anything, it might bother me. All that’s relevant is that I continue to practice, day in, day out, because there is only one person on my path: me. The path (the training) is endless. There is nothing to accomplish and there is always more to learn. There is no trophy that means anything, no organizational belt rank that ultimately signifies a definitive stopping point. I’ll never “get it done” or “have it handled.”

Rather, martial arts training is a way of life, a stance toward every moment, such that body and mind are brought together as fully as possible in the here and now. The body and mind are constantly changing. So this training demands continual focus and dedication. Hence, the “do,” the Way. But none of it is remarkable. As Jack Kornfield writes, in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry:

Enlightenment flowers not as an ideal, but in the miraculous reality of our human form, with its pleasures and pains. No master can escape this truth, nor does enlightenment make the vulnerability of our body go away. The Buddha had illnesses and backaches. Sages like Ramana Maharshi, Karmapa, and Suzuki Roshi died of cancer in spite of their holy understanding. Their example shows we must find awakening in sickness and in health, in pleasure and in pain, in this human body as it is.

There is no escaping the fact of our mortality, of our finitude. But practicing martial arts isn’t about escaping. This is why, when I see overheated, arrogant MMA fighters putting down traditional martial arts, I wonder about values and physical limitations. One day, these MMA practitioners, as great as they may be, will get old and will no longer be able to dish out the same beatings to others (and to themselves). What then? Does the training stop? Is it time to hang up the gloves and get a soft serve on the way to the orthopedic specialist? When age and injuries have broken your body, is that when the introspection can start? In my opinion, that would be a very limited way of practicing.

A teacher of mine recently described karate as a form of “moving prayer.” I like that a lot. Prayer is about hope. It’s about putting your best intentions into words and giving them a more tangible form. If you believe in a higher power, it’s about affirming that connection and is therefore an act of faith made with your body and mind.

So I thought I’d write this (very different) piece just to say one thing: no matter who you are, no matter your body type or physical limitations, age, gender, ethnicity, or financial status, you can start studying martial arts—even if it’s at a corny storefront dojo in the mall or in your basement with a YouTube video. Start from where you are. You don’t have to be great. Set aside your egotistical perfectionism (something we all have to a degree) and just start.

I write this in memory of a fantastic martial artist and Tang Soo Do instructor, Master Lloyd Francis, who had a formative influence on me when I was very young.

The Adderall Diaries Revisited

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time alone. I was an underachiever and a social outcast, who lived primarily through his imagination, and I read constantly and widely. I’d impersonate my father in order to call myself in sick—my father rarely ever knew or cared when I was sick, but the school secretary had a different impression—then head down to the public library’s central branch to read all day. I learned more that way, mostly about arts and humanities subjects, than I ever did in my depressing cliquey high school.

One of the books I encountered was Dali / Miro: Masters of Surrealism. It was a good read and I thought Dali was weird and cool. Like a lot of teenagers just learning about art, I thought you had to be weird and cool to be an artist. And when I read the book, the idea that artists were different made sense to me on a higher level. They were a unique species.

Both of my parents were serious artists (my father a writer, my mother a painter and sculptor) and they were definitely not weird and cool. They were just mom and dad. I didn’t put them in the same category as someone like Salvador Dali, Buckminster Fuller, William Burroughs, Joan Miró, Hemingway, HP Lovecraft, Picasso, or Jack Kerouac—all illustrious weirdos on whom I’d developed a teenage obsession at some point.

Also, less illustrious but no less weird: Robert E. Howard, Jim Starlin, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Robert Aspirin, Lynn Abbey, Dave Sim, CJ Cherryh, and many other sci-fi / fantasy people, who were great in pop-culture, but who were a bit too lowbrow to garner respect from anyone in my family.

To be fair, like any teen, I didn’t understand that these “names” were the product of intense cultural mediation, specifically economic and industry concerns, their greatness established and maintained, by multinational media organizations. As Foucault writes in “What is an author?” “an author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. . . . [I]ts status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.”

Instead, I mistook marketing for mystery and felt the answer to my suffering was somewhere far away with these special people—maybe in a comic book, a fantasy novel, or whatever esoteric elephant vapor held up Dali’s melting art chateau. I had to Find The Others. But at that time in my life, I would have had to borrow the car to do it.

One day, I asked my mom to explain the weirdness to me and why she wasn’t like that. Her answer was something I’d never forget. You can’t generalize about art and artists because everyone is different. But there are such things as posers and they are numerous.

A poser is someone who takes his creative energy and puts it into his appearance and identity instead of into his work. She added that some people are posers and artists at the same time. Warhol, Basquiat, Hemingway, and Dali are good examples. Others are just framed by the media in colorful ways for author-branding purposes. Hence, the Hollywood image of the artist as a flamboyant weirdo. Hollywood understands this pose because the poser-weirdo artist is an evergreen role that makes conventional Joe Sixpack comfortable.

Artists are people willing to dwell in the imagination. They’re indulgent, often emotionally arrested in some ways and hyper-developed in others, and they’ve given themselves certain inner permissions to an unsettling degree. This might be generally true. But if we can put them in a container, labelled FREAK, we can feel less threatened by their existence.

At least from the standpoint of values and expectations, this is what Hollywood is usually about: reinforcing dominant social attitudes and trends and making lots of money as a result. Sometimes, Hollywood stumbles into art and makes something amazing. But most of the time, it recycles garbage. And one of its often-recycled garbage products is James Franco playing a writer.

It seems like he does this far too much. He’s an actor, so a creative person by definition, and he actually does have an MFA in creative writing (not making him a writer by definition, which is something for a different essay), but he seems to be suffering from the actor who really wants to be the thing he portrays syndrome.

Yes, Franco has published multiple books. And I feel sure it was as difficult for him to find a publisher as it was for Jewel, if anyone remembers her as a literary sensation. Some of his material might be good. I haven’t made a definitive study of the Franco corpus. And I don’t want to bag on him as a writer or as a person. But I do think he does a disservice to the discipline of literary writing by reinforcing Hollywood’s poser-weirdo artist stereotype. Then again, he’s an actor. Posing is his primary skill.

So I watched The Adderall Diaries after a nine-year cleansing period. It has not aged well. The story, in case you wisely abstained the first time around, is that Stephen Elliott has writer’s block. He’s on the verge of a big deal with Penguin for a creative nonfiction book on his late, abusive father and shitty childhood. But it all falls apart when the supposedly dead dad (Ed Harris) shows up at a very posh, exclusive publishing-industry reading and calls Elliott out as a fraud.

Cue Cynthia Nixon, playing a literary agent but really just reprising her Distressed Middle Management Lady role from Sex and the City: no one wants anything to do with Stephen Elliott now that he hasn’t really been chained up in a basement like he claimed and his dad is still around. He’d better produce hard evidence that he was a messed up kid and fast.

Then we get Amber Heard, a spectrum of drugs appearing out of Elliott’s pockets, and multiple S&M intercuts with hookers throughout the greater New York metropolitan region, representing to Joe Sixpack the Decadence And Depravity To Which An Artist With A Wounded Soul Can Descend. In movies, you never see an artist washing the dishes unless she has a needle hanging out of her arm. And yet, the dishes do seem to get washed. Who does them? Maybe “Dobby the House Elf,” since this is about as realistic as Harry Potter.

You never see the high cost of the rock-and-roll lifestyle supposedly led by creative people because, much like me as a teenager, Joe Sixpack must have certain assumptions reinforced. Artists are “other.” The normal rules of human life don’t apply to them. If they debauch themselves, the consequences are largely aesthetic, quickly forgotten by the next scene.

They drink whiskey like it’s apple juice. They’re pursued by modelesque beauties or hunky men, who find them incredibly interesting. They engage in a smorgasbord of extracurricular porn sex. And they rarely need to consider whether such a lifestyle might interfere with their writing. In reality, if you’ve got a headache, you’ll notice you typically write fewer pages that day. If you’ve got a hangover, the manuscript can wait.

James Franco is an attractive man and Amber Heard, even post-Depp, is gorgeous. I have no doubt they are in the right field. They should be looked at for money. But being able to strike a pose is not the same as being able to work with lousy source material or function effectively as a different type of artist. It’s definitely not enough to turn you into the real thing. The difference between Franco and, say, Salvador Dali, Hunter Thompson, Charles Bukowski, or Andy Warhol is simple. They were exceptional because they had enough creative energy to weave self-aggrandizing image-myths while also making real art.

But most artists want to live quietly. They want their energy and attention to go toward one thing. In the meantime, the movie industry (and, to a certain extent, the publishing industry) chugs along, recycling comfortable stereotypes so that everyone can feel a little less bad about the poems they wrote at age 14.

Speaking into the Dark

Speaking Into the Dark

A Thank You

I want to thank those who’ve consistently supported and encouraged me over the years. I’m not going to put up a list of names—because I know you probably don’t need or want me to do that—but I’m very aware and you have my gratitude.

Nobody can write consistently (and, by that, I mean decade after decade) without some form of support. If you doubt this, try an experiment: every night for a week, sit in a dark closet and speak for 90 minutes, imagining there is someone listening on the other side of the door.

I only ask that you try this for a week because I doubt most people could get to the third session without going a little crazy. Now imagine trying to do this every night (and feeling like a total imposter and failure anytime you miss) for 20 years. That’s what it’s like to be a writer.

The illustrious Chuck Wendig puts it like this:

And the writing life? The publishing world? Definitely not a realm of pure kindness. The writing life isn’t cruel to be cruel, but there exists a lot of ambient cruelty built into any system based on envisioning art, producing it, and trying to earn an audience for it. Further, writing is an often isolated and isolating act—you’re planting yourself in front of a notebook or computer and writing one sentence after the next for weeks, months, maybe even years. And then once you’ve finished that part, you’re holding it out, asking the universe to love it. No one part of this is actively or personally cruel, but it can sure feel lonely. It can feel desperate, too. It’s easy to lose focus and lose hope—and it only gets worse when someone (agent, editor, audience) takes that story you’ve worked on forever and tells you, “Meh. Nah.”

This is the truth. But Chuck isn’t complaining and neither am I. I think we’re trying to get at the same thing: speaking into the dark is hard. And it’s always dark. It gets significantly darker when you “make it,” when you become a marketable brand and you’re surrounded by businesspeople who want to see you excrete more salable units, forever.

There’s a lot of irony embedded in writerly success, but I haven’t experienced that sort of thing—what passes for fame and status in the highly self-conscious and pathological publishing industry. But I’ve been close to a few writers who have and I’ve seen how brutal “success” can be.

If you want to publish me, grand! I’ll take it. Send me a check and put my face on a website. Still, I’m not so naïve that I believe there’s an end to this or that someday there’s going to be a parade in my honor where everyone will love me. I’m not in this for love or money. I’m in it because I’m addicted to it.

So the best thing for me is just to be able to continue. And expressions of support along the way, the sense that sometimes, perhaps unexpectedly, there actually is someone listening out there, are important.

Now I will stop writing before this seems even more like a metaphor for sitting in the confession box. Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been 35 years since my last confession . . . or about 10 hours, depending on how I want to think about my writing habit . . .

Eating

Everything eats. That’s not the problem. The problem starts with what lies beyond that fact. And there’s no solution: what we don’t consume has no value. What has no value does not exist. Consider the cafeteria. I’m sitting in it with my friend, Hector, facing the conundrum of life over mashed potatoes and meatloaf for him, a boxed ham sandwich for me. Who are we to complain? It’s not horrible food. It’s edible. Kind of stiff. A little stale. Somewhat undercooked. But don’t cry for me, Argentina, it’s a campus lunch. If it goes down and stays put, I’ll bow in gratitude to the bounty of celestial providence.

“That’s a dry sandwich,” says Hector.

Yes. I know. I’m eating it. “Those potatoes look runny.”

He nods slowly, regarding his mashed potatoes the way one views an autopsy subject. Damn shame, such violence. But at least it’s not a dry sandwich out of a plastic box. He got his meatloaf and potatoes from the food line, ladled out of a metal tray like in every prison movie right before the commissary riot. Greasy steam rises from the food-line entrées and they never smell good. Runny potatoes. Feral carrots. Dubious peas. Condemned meatloaf. Overcooked bok choy in a forlorn soy sauce. Bricks of peaked mac and cheese so dense they have to be chipped off with the tip of the spatula. I’ll suffer the dry sandwich, thanks.

Hector and I meet in the campus cafeteria about once a month, ostensibly to discuss the renovations being done to the building where I work, but in reality just to insult each other’s food choices and make disparaging comments about the students.

“Look at them snakes,” he says as two undergrads dressed like ice cream cones float by. Not actual ice cream cones; though, I’ve seen that and many comparable absurdities on this campus, but looking like they just went nuts at a discount white sale in June. Something out of the director’s cut of Zardoz—new age Egyptizoid background extras in a dystopian shopping mall, while Sean Connery runs around in a red diaper shooting people. The one wearing a huge amethyst pendant glares at us.

The gun is good, I think to myself, but I don’t say it because Hector won’t get the reference and anyway he’s still going on about them snakes.

“We didn’t see snakes like that when we were in college, am I right?”

Hector’s a large man, completely bald, and, as far as I know, has been faithful to his wife for 25 years. But he talks like he’s still working on gen ed requirements and an internship. College females are “snakes.” College guys are invisible. The university is “this shit,” as in, “This shit wants me to supervise over Christmas to make sure the HVAC gets in. Can you believe it?”

I can believe this shit.

“Snakes like that—it’s the social media, okay? The TikTok.”

“Chinese spyware.”

“China don’t care,” he says. “Look at them robes. They look like Stargate. Leisure studies majors. You think China cares about leisure studies majors? That ham’s killing you by inches, brother.”

“China wants me to eat this ham.”

He frowns at my sandwich, cuts into the meatloaf slab with his plastic fork. “That’s not even ham.”

I came to this job over two years ago because I was starving. Let’s not say, “starving.” Let’s say facing the prospect, such that boxed cafeteria lunches came to seem like mana from on high. My old life got invalidated by a bat virus doing what it was engineered to do—eat. The freefall unreality of the pandemic, where going to the grocery store felt like dicing with death, ate my finances. I didn’t like how broke I got, how politicized everything got, didn’t feel like the virus cared much about feelings, opinions, theories, or rent.

All I knew was that, when I got Covid, it was the worst flu of my life. I hallucinated conversations with dead people, ancestors, goddesses, spent a few weeks in a delirium where I thought I was probably going to die, then managed not to. After it cleared up, I found a job on campus—not the university teaching job I’d always wanted, but still. Still.

“That meatloaf looks more loaf than meat.”

“Cute. This fantastic repast is straight from heaven.”

“Send it back. Make god eat it.”

“Don’t blaspheme.”

And now, a new life of blasphemy and snakes. As Dante wrote in La Vita Nuova, “If I bethought myself to seek out some point at the which all these paths might be found to meet, I discerned but one way, and that irked me; to wit, to call upon Pity, and to commend myself unto her.” Those of us who lived through the pandemic will never know why we did while others didn’t. All we know is that chance or fate took pity on us so that we could sit on college campuses and watch self-conscious children glare and parade around in costumes.

“If I tabulate all the money I’ve spent on bad campus food, it’s like I’m giving back my paychecks.”

“That’s what you do,” he says. “They give you money. You give it back. They give you things. You eat them.”

On that note, we do. Perhaps, as we consume our vital sustenance, we ask ourselves what we’re feeling. Perhaps, as we are sensitive individuals, in touch with our emotions, we turn inward as we eat, content to probe the range of personal meaning inherent in the act. Or maybe we just shovel it down as quickly as possible. I set the last quarter of my ham sandwich aside. It is truly dry and I didn’t get anything to drink.

“Linda says she thinks she might be a lesbian.” Hector stares across the cafeteria, through the beige wall, over the landscape, beyond at least one ocean, at an image in a distant land that holds the truth of that statement. Maybe a better meatloaf. He puts the last chunk in his mouth and chews.

“You getting a divorce?’

“Maybe. She said don’t worry, though. Right now, it’s just a thought she’s having.”

Two boys with skateboards sit at the table in front of us. They don’t have any food. And I wonder why they’re here, why, of all places they could go, they’ve chosen a space that smells like rancid creamed corn and burned toast.

“Thoughts are just thoughts.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Exactly.”

I look at the scar that runs up his right forearm, perfectly dividing the sun tarot card tattoo surrounded by cherry blossoms. I look at the red-and-white Aloha shirt and the heavy gold chain he wears on the outside of his black undershirt so it will stand out in the “V.” And I think sometimes I must not be the loneliest person on campus.

Hector and I are both 30 years older than these students. We’re in the gray area, marked “staff.” We’re not on the academic food chain. We don’t consume. We are not consumed. We merely facilitate the consumption. And that which is not consumed cannot exist. We’re ghosts.

A couple dressed in skin-tight gym wear starts to make out at one of the central tables and everyone in the cafeteria stares, but only for a moment. It’s a new life, I think, a new world. It intersects my old, dead middle-aged life that barely sustains, that nobody wants, that tastes like something from a cafeteria food line. Hector stares a little longer then looks over at the last of my sandwich.

“You gonna eat that?”

I tell him no and he picks it up with two fingers, puts it in his mouth.

“Peace,” he says, still chewing. “Stay healthy.”

I wave and watch him move toward the door, a foot taller and two wider than everyone present. No one looks at him. He’s not an entrée.

I sit there for the remainder of my lunch, empty plates in front of me, watching young love in action. The outer part of me wants to feel contempt for them doing that in public, but when I ask myself what I’m feeling, I have to remember to be grateful. I’m alive. I’m still here, for what it’s worth. I still get a boxed sandwich, a little more time, and a table off to the side.

Digging to China: Utopias Always Become Nightmares

One of my favorite Johnny Cash songs is his cover of Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind.” The refrain goes like this:

How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money,
I could do things my way

But little they know
That it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind.

It’s very country and it rests on the country music genre cliché of human relationships being more valuable than wealth, status, and power. It also makes me think of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Richard Cory,” from Sounds of Silence, which was the first time I encountered the idea in music outside my uncle’s self-produced country albums. Richard Cory has everything, then shoots himself, yet the impoverished speaker in the song continues to envy him. They’re both good songs. They both carry a timeworn message in popular music: money can’t buy love.

Still, as a cynical friend of mine has pointed out more than once, it may be true that money can’t buy love, but it can buy travel, leisure, interesting rich-person adventures (vs. the poor-person variety), politeness, serenity, entertainment, granite countertops, educational opportunities, good food, access to the gifted and fascinating, and quality healthcare, which in the aggregate starts to look a lot like love. Love of the world. Love of life. Love of fate. Amor fati.

It’s easy to love what your life has become when you can do things your way. Oh Allfather Zod, I don’t often pray to you (because why? I have a shit ton of money), but I’m here at your subterranean temple of fire and perdition on Zodsday, just like last year, to recite my only prayer: DON’T CHANGE A THING. Amor fati, you know? I’m good. You do you.

The rest of us will have to sacrifice two blocks of insect-soy protein at the altar of the Allfather on a regular basis or our paranoid, sadistic deity will smite us. We may ask ourselves why the Sam Bankman-Frieds, Martin Shkrelis, and Anna Sorokins of the world have millions (ostensibly there are many, or at least some, of these individuals who have not yet been indicted), while we labor in Zod’s gulag, but that’s asking the wrong question.

The real question is whether we are about to own nothing and be happy, which is to say, whether we are authentically mentally ill (as opposed to performatively “mentally ill” as part of a curated online identity). Think of Elon Musk declaring that he was just going to live with friends for the rest of his life instead of owning houses—because friends are the spice of life, no? I wonder what sort of friends Elon has. Sure, take the fifth wing. Yeah, kitty-corner from the spaceport and the athletic complex. Stay as long as you like!

Amor fati, brother, amor fati.

If the definition of mental illness is, to a certain extent, mediated by culture and indicated by transgressions that show deviant behavior (i.e. behavior that indicates deviation from cultural norms), then Elon’s version of owning nothing might qualify. Klaus Schwab’s utopian vision of the post-pandemic “Great Reset,” in which every human culture, corporation, nation, and industry must immediately “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions” likely also qualifies.

Klaus Schwab, at the World Economic Forum, envisioning utopia.

We might ask why utopian visionaries, who seem to know the truth and have a final solution worked out for the world, always end up as Robespierres. Moreover, why do social movements dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” tend to devolve into bitter gestures of intolerance, over-compensatory bias, and exclusion? Well, money. It’s the economy, stupid. And pandemic dread really seemed to fuel that sort of white-knuckle utopianism. It goes without saying that any future vision according to a tight group of political and economic experts will not stay very bright.

Utopia nearly always leads to the dys– version. Utopian visions born out of pandemics and other global traumas seem the worst. As the British sci-fi roleplaying game, Carbon 2185, put it: “Carbon 2185 has a highly detailed economy with reference tables and charts to help you instantly know how much a bowl of street ramen costs.” I tried playing this game by post with some friends during the pandemic and we gave up. According to the rules, a bowl of street ramen cost more than my monthly take-home and we had to rent all our guns. I’ll pass on the ramen, thanks. Bring on the insect-soy. It was depressing. Someone proposed D&D instead. Someone said, “Fuck that.” We didn’t talk for a bit.

Why lean into cyberpunk dystopia when talking about the future? Why put a frame of Max, from Elysium, visiting his parole-officer bot, who asks, “Are you being sarcastic and / or abusive?” at the top of this piece? Why call it, “Digging to China”? Am I implying that, in the Monbiot-Thunbergian horseshoe irony of the post-pandemic near future, we will be eating processed insects and living in the pods of a grubby rental economy, where the CCP and the USA have arrived at the same socio-economic terminal? Am I now going to start referencing the episodes of Black Mirror that made me the most depressed because they seemed the most likely? Am I committing tone crimes and microaggressions in this paragraph? I’ll spare you.

Instead, I’ll propose that there has never been a better time to stop monetizing your hobbies (or your art or your body). The impetus for such a proposition comes from Colleen Doran’s excellent, “How Long Does it Take to Draw a Comic Book Page?” on Colleen Doran’s Funny Business. I love Colleen Doran’s newsletter. She’s a wise professional who’s been around long enough in her industry to have a few things to say about creativity, money, and staying sane.

At the same time, the way she tracks her time (“I tried to stick to an eight hour day for awhile, but it is impossible for a working cartoonist to work only 8 hours per day.”) reminded me of how I’ve been tracking my fiction words-per-day and how stressed I’ve felt (for decades) about staying productive. Where does this stress come from? From the same economic imagination that envisions being priced out of a bowl of street ramen. From illusions like “upskilling” which seems to borrow logic from the old trickle-down economics that clearly worked so well. And the self-publishing option is no consolation for a working writer. You have to grind. You have to write more or nothing works. You have to monetize everything and keep a straight face. No sarcasm permitted.

Yes, there have been some slot-machine winners in the self-publishing game (read their work and the slot-machine metaphor will begin to make a lot of sense). There have also been slot-machine winners in social media influencing, self-managed parasocial porn sites, and various forms of crowdfunding. And I have no doubt that some of it is good (Chuck Wendig’s writing comes to mind along with the band, Scary Pockets—no comment on OnlyFans and its clones). But mostly people seem to have been lured, at least for a while, into another self-exploitation gulag.

The self-publishing platform (Amazon, Lulu, etc.) now stands in the place of a traditional publisher, only with non-existent gatekeeping. Sure, buddy, you’re an author now. Good luck with that . . . another utopian vision gone westward to seek its fortune while the company takes its cut.

As a writer, you will eventually eat the bugs. You will own nothing. You will labor to pay rents to monolithic inhuman organizations with AI customer service—economic entities that conflate sarcasm with abuse and practice zero tolerance toward any microaggression that may question their mission statements. You will prostitute yourself from your temporary pod. And you will be happy.

I’ve learned a lot about how my body and mind get monetized by scrupulously tracking time spent working on various projects. I think Colleen Doran and my many creative friends are right to pay attention to how they’re spending their days. But I also think, absent a trust fund, time and grind eventually converge violently in you. The personal sacrifices, the mental illnesses, the continual self-betrayals in the interests of time, money, and productivity point more to the cruel altar of Allfather Zod than to some glorious worker’s paradise.

How to Be Good

Black Swan is Midsommar. Stop talking, Winston.

Hollywood has never seemed more Orwellian in its insistence that it is the repository of everything admirable in culture and that it represents the right side of history. We know Hollywood will hold its own mother down and pull the gold out of her teeth with a pliers, but it prefers to pretend otherwise. And no one wants to dwell on this as long as the entertainment keeps coming. With streaming, the rapaciousness of the entertainment center of the world is even harder to see. Hollywood says it’s your friend. In reality, it’s INGSOC conformity and you’re awful if you disagree.

Streaming technology is as 1984 as it gets.

The tragedy of streaming content is that it never goes away. It’s in your house, up in your perceptual field, at all times. Even when you’re not watching, you’re getting emails reminding you to log back in. Back in the halcyon days of Blockbuster Video, a pretentious, emotionally manipulative stinker might show up on VHS, but there was a bit more personal agency involved in renting and watching it. It wasn’t accessible unless you physically sought it out. It was a tangible thing and you weren’t quite such a passive blob of content consumption—seeing the movie demanded that you get up, at least temporarily, from the couch.

You also didn’t have the same plausible deniability if you found yourself watching a lousy film. At some point, from the rental store to the final credits (if you made it that far), you had to remind yourself that you put down good money for the thing and brought it home. You did it to yourself, friend.

In the worst cases (Tree of Life? Vanilla Sky? The English Patient? Legends of the Fall? Crash? Life as a House?), you may have admitted that you were powerless against the overwhelming pretentious hype-suction and were thereafter drawn into a vortex of melodrama against your will. Then you may have made a searching and fearless moral inventory and resolved never to relapse again. Sometimes, bringing back drippy garbage from Blockbuster could be a cathartic, healing experience, like going out with the guys while on Antabuse. The best lessons are the ones we teach ourselves.

But now, with streaming television and movies, everybody’s on the juice 24/7 and done learning. You can now quietly demean yourself with bullshit Hollywood affectation and faux-political posturing every month for a discreet subscription fee. Nobody has to know. You don’t have to look the Blockbuster cashier in the eye and say, yes, I want to rent The Fountain. You can violate yourself, from beginning to end, with all the pungent streams you desire in the privacy of your home. Draw the curtains. Click on I Am Love. It’s okay.

You might occasionally feel a twinge of self-criticism—why have I watched Babel 15 times and The Maltese Falcon only twice? What does this say about me? But there are certain politically coded stinkers that remain beyond criticism, no matter how fetid and endless their streams may be. Those are the films you are permitted to enjoy without needing to painfully reflect on why you are doing it to yourself. Or if you do happen to wonder, the Party has provided a simple thought-stopping idea: because I am a good person.

The Party tells me I enjoy Magnolia for its drawn out emotional exploration of human meaning and compassion in the San Fernando Valley, a concept which, in itself, is astounding. Thankfully, it’s streaming right now on Netflix. I watch Magnolia because I am good. It provides an emotional release and ultimately represents the best parts of me. I enjoy what is good because I am a good person. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Thank you, Netflix. I feel happy. Let’s watch it again.

What’s going on in my brain? Why is George Orwell haunting my laptop?

Ideally, a movie will go through a production funnel that starts with a compelling idea, and ends with a completed feature. Along the way, there will be setbacks and workarounds, windfalls and compromises. And as Rachel Ziegler, the most likeable actress in Hollywood, has so famously put it, “That’s Hollywood, baby.” * But we do not live in an ideal world, which means the “completed feature” can come into being before its concept. That, too, is Hollywood, baby. In fact, that’s even more Hollywood than Hollywood. **

A film is sometimes made and then the hype apparatus around it tries to make it into something. Is it a trenchant commentary on the state of race relations in inner-city schools? It could be. Is it a masterwork of ironic feminist critique? It could be. Is it a moving historical epic in which unrequited love is cast against a tapestry of chaos and war? It could be. Let’s see. And if we can’t “position” it—

A book publicist once asked me how I’d position my second short story collection, Cruel Stars. I said, “Wut?” She took a deep breath and said, “What are the books on either side of it in the bookstore?” Then I took a deep breath and said, “Well, the one of the left is, of course, my first collection, Gravity. The one on the right is the collection I’m just finishing, Living the Dream.” She nodded slowly at something over my shoulder.

—does it even exist? Art is nothing without the marketing because marketing is what communicates The Message, the values of the Party. It explains why you are good, why certain things should make you feel happy and sad, and why this should matter to modern audiences. And if such an explanation is impossible or requires too much scaffolding, the Party might want to delay the release or even consign it forever to the vault.

But those of us who are not Party members, who are not on board with what passes for the New York Times concept of the right side of history, may object that this seems untoward for everyone concerned—like pushing a baby back in so the birth might be restarted more strategically, in a more profitable and impactful time.

Most unfortunate. When something is created, you can’t uncreate it so it can hit the zeitgeist more advantageously. You can only change it. And generally the more post-hoc changes and delays you make to a creative product, the more it becomes a horrific golem, an accidental parody of a commercial concept, instead of a coherent piece of art. Put differently, one usually does not do a thing and then justify or position it without making a mess. No, no, I’m not criticizing the Party. Don’t look at me like that. I’m merely making a small, harmless observation . . .

This brings us to the example of Black Swan and Midsommar, which is the same horrendously pretentious, emotionally coercive movie.

Black Swan is now available again on Netflix. We might say it’s been raised from the dead one more time thanks to the always-already necromancy of streaming video. It’s definitely a film approved of by the Party: a break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character, Nina, is romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out.

There are certain inchoate feelings loudly expressed. There is a certain amount of weeping and there are various episodes of emotional violence that we are encouraged to think must mean something. Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) means you are good. You get the message. You are indeed on the right side of history.

Midsommar is the same break-up story, masquerading as feminist folk horror, in which the main character is also romantically involved with herself and finally decides it’s not working out. Sympathizing with her struggle (even if she would seem repellent and self-involved to non-Party members) also means you are good. Criticizing this Frankenstein’s monster of highly telegraphed political position statements means you are a counter-revolutionary, a subversive, not of the Party. You are bad.

To be fair, there are some hapless men who travel through the scenes of these movies like runaway spaceships soon disappearing beyond the rings of Saturn, behaving awful or squeamish or unreliable according to the plot-furniture needs of the moment. At least one of them is immolated in a bear suit, which might be interesting if we could bring ourselves to give two shits about him. Instead, we think, well, there he goes. He’s a crispy critter now, kids. Woo.

The reason Black Swan-Midsommar is a good example of Hollywood’s shallow, monosyllabic politics is that these films (or we might say, this film) are actually very overt in their need to seem right and to make you agree that they are. They’re the same yoked-up melodrama we’ve always gotten only now repositioned as edgy and essential, now back in our homes, telling us about politics and social justice, and not going anywhere.

They’re pretending to be one thing (folk horror) as a container for another thing (third-wave feminist critique) and are actually neither. They’re telling us that if we like this, if we watch it many times, if we digest it, if we approve of it, we “get it.” We’re in the know. We’re correct. And so we are good human beings. 2 + 2 = 5. Of course, this is abject bullshit.

Why is Florence Pugh having a hysterical meltdown throughout the movie? Stop talking, Winston. It doesn’t need to make sense. Just go with it and you’ll be safe. There is no need to think critically or make small, troubling observations. All you need to do is accept that she is sad. You may cry with her if you wish. That shows solidarity and that you are loyal. Yes, you are a true believer . . .

Unintentional Orwellian patterns are ubiquitous, especially in the pop-culture mediated by Hollywood, which is most pop-culture. Orwell wasn’t just concerned about totalitarian communism, his deeper project was criticizing thoughtless social conformity in general.

For example, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, one of his largely forgotten novels (perhaps because it cuts a little too close to middle-class status anxiety and the obsession with money), the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, gives up on art to make a modest living in advertising. What is art without marketing, the novel asks? In the end, when he discards his poems, Comstock concludes it really is nothing.

Ultimately, there is no accounting for taste. There is also no accounting for technology. And when taste and technology coincide, there is no accounting at all. Black Swan and Midsommar would have flashed through the pan with a lot less “positioning” had the big streamers not put them in perpetual rotation—unlike many far superior and less ideological films, which blink out of existence on streaming platforms all the time.

We hope Hollywood goes on a retreat in the mountains and finds itself, comes to terms with its pathological need to always be class president, and decides to stop bullying its audiences. But the aspidistra’s airborne and, let’s be honest, nobody knows how to land.

—

* Interestingly, it’s the same when writing a novel, only you get to create all your own obstacles, betray yourself, meddle with your own story, make all the compromises, and know from the beginning that you’re not going to get paid.

** There is no point in arguing that a particular production “isn’t mainstream” or isn’t influenced by Hollywood in whole or in part. The global movie industry in general and streaming technology in particular has had an enormous centralizing effect on film. “Indie” is now a flavor. It is not a substantial alternative.