portents and blowflies

And the Ass Saw the Angel
Nick Cave
1989

In his only novel, Australian Nick Cave out-Southern Gothics William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor with his ur-swamp tale of total corruption, the degradation of all life and complexity into unthinking muck. The primal swamp lies in Ukulore Valley, which travellers and the march of history avoid even before the apocalyptic three-year rain. Despite spanning the 1930s through the 50s (arguably beginning even earlier, when Euchrist’s father is born in 1890), the valley is untouched by wars and social progression.

This rift in the land nurtures both sugar cane and the most repellent consanguineous tribes of people on earth. One is the Ukulites, the minority ruling class population in the valley who follow the 1861 bible written by an excommunicated Baptist. The other is the Morton clan, sometimes cannibalistic inbred hillfolk who prey on travellers, and are nearly wiped out by lawmen in the novel’s early chapters. One, Ezra Eucrow, whose tangled genes are revelled only in his shuddering light blue eyes, escapes before the slaughter and settles with the town’s outcast moonshiner, Crow Jane. Jane gives birth in the burnt corpse of a Chevy to twin boys, badly damaged by their tangled genetic code, fetal alcohol syndrome, and congenital disease. The firstborn, luckier twin dies soon after; the second, Eucrid, grows into a twisted and desperate young man who lacks the power of speech.

Despite its religious focus, Cave insists And the Ass Saw the Angel is not an allegory. Nevertheless, it is packed with possible thematic markers and symbols that blend to ultimately form little more than a message of abject wretchedness. Breaks in this despair are rare and exist sole as lights to be snuffed out by the next horror and leave the darkness that much deeper.

Euchrid’s insane parents avenge his terrible beating by throwing his persecutors into a patch of nasty thorns, where he later hides from his pursuers. Before her own mob assault, the town’s heroin-addicted whore treats Eucrid kindly, establishing an internal heaven in his mind made up of her perfumes and soft breasts. From this safe mental haven come his worst heavenly commands to build himself a fort of horrors and plan the murder of the town’s young Virgin Mary. The town’s disgraced minister adopts and sincerely loves this foundling girl, but allows the parishioners to “prime Beth for sainthood” in return for their care and cooking.

In Ukulore Valley, individual yearnings toward the spark of divinity lead only to mass abuse and profanity. God’s plans figure heavily in every character’s thoughts, albeit in twisted and self-serving fanaticisms. For Euchrid in particular it shapes his formless need for acceptance into a targeted and devastating vengeance on his small world. The Ukulites scramble to keep hold of their faith in the face of a hard rain that for three years destroys their cane crops and keeps them inside. They briefly fall under the sway of wayward preacher Abie Poe, who moves them to symbolically destroy the corruption in the community by brutally beating the whore Cosey Mo and to clense themselves in the fetid swamp. They reject him after the aborted mass baptism—crippling an innocent is fine, but humiliating the parishioners is right out.

Euchrist and the townspeople descend separately into mad religiosity after the discovery of Cosey’s abandoned infant coincides with the return of the sun. Euchrist lurks on the fringes, abused by all who spy him there, escaping into dreams of his angel that cover and entwine with masturbation (he notes the “ectoplasm” left on his hand from the angel as proof of her presence). He thinks of himself as “a Voyeur to the Lord.” Meanwhile the townspeople venerate Beth as the womb of Christ’s return, medically verifying her virginity and impatiently waiting for her to conceive. Beth retreats into the same staring fits that marked Ezra’s mountain lineage and pathetic religious visions similar to Euchrist’s, implying Ezra had a progenitive relationship with Cosey, whose body he secretly buried with tenderness.

These two insanities come together as Beth misapprehends the mute and wild Euchrist as the Holy Spirit come to enact the Big Plan the townswomen have groomed her for. Euchrist, in a very concrete Freudian slip, comes to kill the teenaged Beth (as a false prophet and devil) and instead has sex with her, an act lost in the delusional muck of his perceptions. As the Ukulites hunt him down and destroy his hideaway of horrors on the suspicion he’s assaulted Beth, he succeeds in plunging his scythe into her in the town square (this time, not metaphorically). As the townspeople kill Euchrist in revenge, the rain once again begins to fall.

The final image is of the core fundamentalist women gathering around their newborn Christ. The labor has killed Beth, who narrowly survived Euchrist’s attack. With Ezra’s “shivering, pale blue eyes,” Beth’s son is the consanguineous grandchild of the despised town rejects brought to the very heart of the community. Euchrist has proved not a cancer to be removed from the town’s body (in which his mother’s moonshine is shown repeatedly to be the blood) but a testicle, the literal distillation of their shared nature producing the next generational evolution.

The fanatic Ukulites and the twisted, dying clans will descend into fruitless entropy together.

the truth of what happened

Nick Walker
Black Box (2002) and Helloland (2003)

Today’s quandary: to review a Nick Walker novel is to spoil the pleasure of reading one. In fact, it’s difficult to enjoy even a second read, compared to chewing over the vivid complete picture it has left in your mind. I was lucky, picking up Black Box and Helloland together with a handful of other secondhand books, and in the weeks they sat on my to-read pile I forgot their spoilery blurbs.

Thus: the short version: worth reading, just not on a flight. Trust me on that caveat.

Walker has a consistent style, presenting snippets of a disparate group of people, grounded in one method of information dispersal. In Black Box, the method is a series of audio and videotapes, and in Helloland, calls through a hotel switchboard. The stories move through one story in “real time”—a transatlantic flight or one morning shift in reception—interspersed with flashbacks. The effect is playful even when the subject matter is grim, a winking reference to the flashback episodes of slight tv sitcoms, and reflects an internal discipline that imposes artificial frameworks for the challenge of solving them in prose.

The experience of reading is similar to putting together a massive puzzle on a rickety card table. Opening the book dumps a mess of unrelated colors and shapes in your lap. The spare wording offers a few clues to latch onto and set aside. Then, a flashback puts together a corner and two borders begin to stretch along the table’s north and east borders. Characters form just enough to fill the bulk in ourselves. The final chunks fall into place more quickly than hands can put grooves and protuberances together and the full picture becomes obvious—shocking and unintuitive, but obvious once complete.

This archly postmodern style will enthral or repel the reader within five pages.

Both novels thematically centre on the temporary escape of travelling, specifically travelling in climate-controlled technological wonders that create an artificial world—one that could seem like slipping into heaven compared to the chaos of the natural world below. Each also offers the hidden threat, or enticement, of death in the hostile airless vacuum that surrounds it. What brings people to escape or die, indifferent chance or the malicious actions of others? In all situations, others are blamed for the work of fate and vice versa, while those affected stagnant in obsession with their traumatic moment.

Those who focus on the past, demanding remittance or trying to make amends, are doomed; escape is only possible for those who forget and choose to live without past or future.

One glaring flaw in both novels: relationships fall apart in grandly realised detail, but characters come together because one has nursed a resentful crush and sufficient wacky, offputting events have passed between them—which the object of affection ignores without explanation rather than quickly changing her address and routines. All of these objects would be played by Natalie Portman—unbelievably pretty and blandly quirky, with no awareness of her attractiveness or potential solo success: the educated boy’s fantasy girl.

This affect, however, is potentially balanced by the choking cynicism of both books. All lives begin as compressed and plagued by unsatisfying human connections—palpable pain of life ticking away unlived—and most pathetically focus on the magic bullet of a new relationship or affair with someone they barely know, more fantasy than reality. Other people’s wants and thoughts don’t exist in their plans.

The connections that do form—if weakly made—are meant to contract that futility. Does it matter more that the relationships won’t last beyond the final page or first honest conversation, or that in connecting at all, both partners have stepped out of their solipsistic malaise? Only outside the navelgazing of one’s past and current needs lies any hope for a future.

prozzies and other respectable women

Ashes to Ashes 1.03

Ashes to Ashes continues, hitting many of the same notes as Sam’s stint in Gene Hunt’s world.  Since the pilot, Alex has reliably featured moments of headdesking stupidity in the presence of her mother and her mother’s law firm partner (in 2008, the godfather of her daughter).  Abandoning her ‘you are all figments’ stance, she alternates between amazed gawping and craven attempts to elicit approval.  Rather than backing away slowly from the crazy woman, they offer brief but meaningful insights into their perspectives that inadvertently guide Alex through her hallucinatory new world.  Again like Sam, the gang surprisingly takes her lapses of cranial continence in stride while being horrified by her minor futuristic faux pas…but I suppose without this contractual genre blindness (or just plot-induced stupidity?), the show would be called Special Woman Is Instantly Institutionalised and Spends Thirteen Episodes Heavily Sedated.

Still, it bugs me.  Almost as much as Alex’s club-appropriate workwear, set in a time when a female professional, let alone a detective, would have been strapped into restrictive chin-to-knees pseudo-Victorian armor, heavily featuring those awful high-necked blouses with sewn-in bows and boxy pleated wool skirts.  A few years later, she’d be clad in a solid-color power suit with shoulder pads up to her ears.  Professional specifically did not equal sexy, outside of fetishes similar to those surrounding schoolgirl uniforms (and bearing as much relation to the reality).  A white-collar female was an impenetrable tank.

Despite this incongruity, the show is starting to play with a more complex morality.  Along the lines of the impenetrable tank…after subtly hitting on Gene and being shot down, Alex lets herself be picked up by a red suspender wearing Thatcherite, who she drunkenly boffs to the energetic beats of Bucks Fizz.  Her coworkers start out teasing her when she drags herself into work the following day, hungover and exhausted, but she reacts the way a modern woman working in a chauvinist environment should: yes, I’m dead tired because I was up all night shagging a total stranger, and it was bloody fantastic.  No shame, no cringing, just one of the boys.

Unfortunately…1981 wasn’t quite modern enough for that, or at least for these blokes.  No matter what Aaron Spelling and his Starsky & Hutch taught us in the late 70s, a confident, pretty woman interested in getting laid wasn’t a great girl but someone who should be far more discrete.  The men are uncomfortable, Gene is furious and offering the hard truth that she won’t be respected if she’s known to have sex—part advice for someone working beneath him who needs the respect of his crew, part fury that a woman who’d made herself ‘his’ in some vague but definite way by hitting on him had flipped over to someone who wouldn’t look after her.

This is set in an episode focusing on prostitutes, specifically whether one can be raped, as she claims.  Gene & Co display the sentiments that continue to linger in many minds today—prostitutes, as people who sell their bodies for sex, cease to be properly human.  A woman who doesn’t strenuously resist having sex with men, let alone chasing them for her own pleasure, becomes something closer to a prostitute.  These aren’t rational preconceptions, by any means, but divisions usually instilled before a child hits puberty and are rarely challenged.

Ray, however, possibly the thickest member of Gene’s squad, does rise to the challenge.  He befriends a traumatised young woman and, while he’s obviously disturbed by her revelation that she’s a ‘lady of the night,’ it leads him to the second moral quandary of the episode—framing the man who raped and assaulted her for cocaine possession.  Ray is now unable to accept that a man could go unpunished for violating just a prostitute, and betrays the law he is sworn to uphold in a satisfying but disturbing way.

Even more jolting, this takes place during the denouement, and Alex and the police watching the rapist being arrested on an obviously bogus drug possession charge applaud and congratulate Ray.  None of them acknowledges Ray’s legal violation or suggests there was a better, legal way to go after him—ideally by following the bugger and establishing relationships with the local prostitutes to catch him repeating his crime, rather than bunging him up on a charge that will likely fall apart in court.

This department feels that, together, they can answer to a higher morality than the law when the law fails them.  What terrifying disaster awaits this crew of celibate ersatz Dark Knights if they continue to follow this ‘higher’ calling?

fire up the quattro!

Ashes to Ashes:1.01
2008

The spin-off from the acclaimed (if sometimes excruciating) Life on Mars is self-consciously extreme, with both the drama and dark humor ratcheted up to the appropriate 80s excess.  This year’s timetraveller-slash-madman is DI Alex Drake, a police psychiatrist and single mother who has been investigating the suicide of Sam Tyler.  Familiar with Sam’s fantasy world and characters that suddenly surround her after being shot in the face by druglord-cum-vagrant Arthur Layton, she believes she’s having an elaborate hallucination in the seconds before she dies, but still fights to wake up from it and return to her demanding, impulsive daughter.

Ray Carling, who BBC informs us is now “The Bear,” tells her with regret that her acquaintance Sam Tyler died with the 70s a year earlier, crashing his car into a river after leaving Gene behind on a police chase.  His body was never found, allowing speculation on his Schrödingeresque state to rampage on.  He tells Alex that they key to surviving is to stay with Gene, not only expressing his own philosophy of life but possibly offering a key to why the two officers have been drawn back into the past.

The pilot was a conscious retread of the Life on Mars pilot.  Set-up of current life in the present, spotlighting the few personal connections?  Check.  Introductory Make Ass Of Self scene?  Check.  Enigmatic flashbacks in old-film filter?  Check.  Parent issues centring around that year?  Check.  There’s even similar avatars of hostile knowledge in the form of different childhood icons (which, lacking a UK childhood, had no more significance to me than ‘sort of like Sesame Street’ and ‘some freaky Euro-clown’).  The subject is partly aware of this reality—or only thinks she is—and seeks out the missing signifiers from Sam’s reports.  Unfortunately, phones, radios, and tvs give her nothing; her only communications come in dreams and visions.

Most of the direct communication from the hostile avatars in fact goes over her head, couched in subtle visuals only the viewers see—such as the clown’s head on a shelf in Layton’s junk store, or its reflection looming over her shoulder in a shiny interview table.  While Life on Mars followed Sam’s point of view, DI Drake of more an active object of the mystery than an identification figure.  The audience has more pieces of the puzzle.

Alex thus far seems to be a less sympathetic character than Sam, but a more confident timetraveler-slash-madman, hopefully less likely to likely to commit the forehead-smackingly boneheaded moves that Tyler’s run included at least once per episode.  Instead of acting generally unhinged in a manner that would leave most professionals escorted by security carrying a box of personal belongings, Alex calmly treats the others as both people and figments in turn and with equal sangfroid expects to be treated with respect while stuck wearing uncomfortably revealing clothes.  She also gains a few points by getting drunk with the team and groping Gene on her very first night in the past, thus ensuring they’ll overlook a greater proportion of weird behaviour than if she’d remained in the remote and dismissive pose Sam initially chose.

This spinoff so far seems to retain the parent show’s flaws, particularly in the imbalanced drama/comedy tone.  Particularly, scenes and setups still misfire as often as they catch.  The “A-Team”’s emergence in the gunfight via speedboat with machine guns, while a good visual gag, destroys the delicate dream vs time-travel question.  That could only be a modern person’s fantasy moment.  When scenes catch, though, they really really catch.  When Ray tells of Sam’s death, he is a man more comfortable with his place in life than the resentful demoted DI of the earlier decade.  Gene’s frustration while on the phone to his superior shows a big man who’s time has passed, and knows it.  And entire shows could take place in their new hangout, a wine bar where a long-suffering Magical Italian possibly takes Nelson’s place as the wise bartender.

There is one unbearable bit, though.  I don’t know how I’ll get through a season of an entire cast in those terrible pleated trousers and white jeans.  For the love of Oxford Street, let no lazy designers take those on as this fall’s new look!

Darkly Dreaming Dexter: blood and ethical sociopathy

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Jeff Lindsay
2004

Dexter, Season One
2006

Dear Dexter is a single white male in his thirties who lives alone and works peripherally in law enforcement, and is generally considered to be a quietly well mannered and quirky guy.  He is, of course, an insane serial killer preying on the residents of Miami.

However: that “prey” is only those who he can prove to his own high threshold of satisfaction are like him: serial predators who have escaped the law’s prosecution who will continue to kill innocents.  The undisturbed lives of those innocents, unfortunately, are an incidental by-product of scratching his itch to main and kill.

The novel upon which Dexter’s first season is based calls this urge the “Dark Passenger”.  It’s worth experiencing this introduction in all its purple glory:

Moon.  Glorious moon. Full, fat, reddish moon, the night as light as day, the moonlight flooding down across the land and bringing joy, joy, joy. Bringing too the full-throated call of the tropical night, the soft and wild voice of the wind roaring through the hairs on your arm, the hollow wail of starlight, the teeth-grinding bellow of the moonlight off the water.

All calling to the Need. Oh, the symphonic shriek of the thousand hiding voices, the cry of the Need inside, the entity, the silent watcher, the cold quiet thing, the one that laughs, the Moondancer. The me that was not-me, the thing that mocked and laughed and came calling with its hunger. With the Need. And the Need was very strong now, very careful cold coiled creeping crackly cocked and ready, very strong, very much ready now—and still it waited and watched, and it made me wait and watch.

Urgh.  Take a moment—that was a thick chunk of corrugated prose to force down an unsuspecting reader’s throat.  The series, fortunately, lacks the Dark Passenger.  The Dexter who partially garrottes a secret paedophile, forcing him to confront the bodies of the boys he’s murdered, before antiseptically dismembering him, is the same Dexter that greets his girlfriend’s children warmly and patiently guides the career of his impatient sister.

With his deserving victims, Dexter is a more honest version of himself, ironically closer to connecting, but he stalks and kills on his own impulse rather than obeying a voice in his head.  Unlike the common perception of a sociopath, Dexter does want to connect, and with some logic seeks an understanding from monsters like himself as much as he tries to force upon them an understanding of their own crimes.

Blood

“Blood. Sometimes it sets my teeth on edge. Other times it helps me control the chaos.”

Dexter works as a blood splatter technician with the Miami police department.  Early on, he tells the viewers (or the inside of his own echoing head) that he chose this position and city to monitor his own criminal activity, and feels Miami, with its law enforcement’s 20% solved murder rate, is the best setting for a journeyman killer.

Blood is the one indulgent memento he keeps from victims, single beads dried onto slides and tucked away in his ac unit.  He enjoys flicking through his collection and remembering his work, fingering the dry red ovals.

He reveals in later episodes a great antipathy toward blood, despite making it his life’s work.  His plastic sealing of his killing scenes turns out to be not only a practical method for hiding DNA but a way of containing the splash and gush of sticky blood.  His job, as well, while it requires he confront and contemplate his personal bugaboo, allows him to explain and contain it as well, like his kills, tidying away his corner of the world.

Dexter begins to realise why he has such an intense connection to such an abstract bit of life, eventually unearthing a long-repressed memory of not only witnessing his mother’s brutal murder at the age of three but also spending over two days in a drying pool of the victims’ blood.  He was discovered and rescued by Harry Morgan, then an ordinary policeman, who fostered and then adopted the young boy, but his fixation with blood and murder was already set.

Sociopath

Harry recognises in dear dark Dexter (to follow the book’s alliterative nomenclature) the signs of a budding sociopath, specifically the torture of animals and lack of normal emotional responses.  When he pushes young Dexter into admitting his need to hurt and kill, the boy clings to his foster father for comfort.

Harry, by now a detective and growing jaded with the justice system, becomes a more sophisticated Pa Kent.  He teaches Dexter how to fake normal with the rest of the world, encouraging a dual identity.  One side he makes into the perfect son, helpful, happy and obedient, and shows him how to feed the other side with socially acceptable murderous acts, like hunting.  This doesn’t totally satisfy Dexter, and perhaps doesn’t totally satisfy his mentor, either.  Dexter’s high intelligence and physical strength, combined with his need to ritualistically murder, are wasted on deer when there is a city full of dangerous men outside the hunting range.

Dexter voiceovers that he can’t connect with people, and to the degree that someone without remorse can be bothered, he is bothered by that.  Here is where the book and series diverge most sharply; book-Dexter ends up breaking from the Code of Harry, killing LaGuerta and planning to kill Doakes to remain undetected.  Deb has learned the truth about him but he’s sure she’ll come around to approving what he does, like their father.

Series-Dexter comes to care for Rita, becomes frantic that Deb will be tortured and killed, and mourns after killing his truly sociopathic brother.  He is helped by talk therapy (even if he does later murder the therapist).  He leaves a session that has begun to bring up memories of his Traumatic Event to finally have sex with a girlfriend without creeping her out.  He also seeks out a connection with a young serial murderer, intending to be the mentor to the teenager that Harry had been to him.  In the end he imagines himself surrounded by normal Miami residents who would cheer him on, even love him, if they knew what he did, and smiles.  The saving of innocents is no longer purely a byproduct.

His way of life is only possible because of his bond with Harry, whose approval and comfort he needed as much as understanding and protection.  Young Dexter really really really wants to kill people, especially a bullying jerk at school, but he doesn’t because of Harry—not because he doesn’t want to be punished or imprisoned, but because Harry would be disappointed and hurt.  The 1 sociopath in 25 individuals one encounters any day wouldn’t have that connection to prevent his or her destructive actions.

Brian deliberately brings Dexter to the realisation of his past, in the hopes he’ll be free to join him in the ritualistic killing they share.  They’re both the children of criminals, and may possess the faulty mental wiring in their shared DNA.  Harry thought that Dexter might be young enough to remain unaffected by his gruesome experience, leaving Brian to mental institutions, but when proved wrong labelled the boy a sociopath and trained him like an attack dog.  But, while he’s a deeply disturbed man with a compulsion to kill, Dexter’s emotional growth suggests he’s something less than that.  More pathetically, he may have spent over thirty years with the emotional acuity of a three-year-old.

Ethics

To come: Bats and Supes In Tropical Bowling Shirts

that, and NYC blew up…

Heroes interrupted: Volume One in retrospect
1.02 Don’t Look Back

I really wanted to give Peter a break.  He was a nice enough leading character the first time I watched these, after all.  But…he told Nathan he’d been standing on that roof all night.  And when we first see Isaac and Simone in his studio, she tells him they’ve had a hard night.  Ah man…Peter really did stare vacantly at the painting of himself while the medically untrained girlfriend tried to revive her dying boyfriend, before dashing off muttering something about his destiny—leaving her to nurse both her dying boyfriend and dying father ALONE.

That trust fund baby is such an ass.

Angela Petrelli: maybe Freud was right

One of the more reliable combination spoiler/speculationsI’ve found (coming from showrunner interviews that Peter has used his mother’s power on screen) is that Angela Petrelli’s ability is related to Hiro Nakamuru’s.  She can see the future and past, and even be there to some extent (leaving her physical body in the present moment), but can’t affect it while she’s there.  She can only alter and manipulate the present in an attempt to change or cause what she sees.

In this sense, she could be the sort of monster she accuses Matt Parkman of becoming in the second season, using his powers to manipulate others in order the cause of his personal greater good.  Peter, who needs others’ attention and approval at all times to have any sense of self, would be more vulnerable to and damaged by the constant nudging than Teflon Nathan.

This is all supposition, of course, but there’s an oddness to the way she convinces hospital-bound Peter that he is delusional by telling him of his father’s “suicide”:

“He committed suicide.”
“What?!”
Same flat tone: “He committed suicide.”  Come on, be manipulated already…

If this is the way they go with her character, it could be quite interesting.  On the other hand, I’m still holding out for something completely undignified, something Hulk-like.  She’s always so pulled together and dignified that I’d love a scene where, after, say, battling Sylar to a standstill in some physically powerful way, she huffs in annoyance and starts the process of rebuilding her perfect WASP updo.

Simone who?

What did I remember of Simone?  Father owned the building where much of the show’s action took place.  Had a gallery full of Isaac’s prophetic paintings, most of which were sold to Linderman.  Started off dating Isaac, briefly dated Peter, shot and killed by Isaac.  Seemed to know everyone (in her services as plot enabler), none of whom noticed her death/disappearance.

She’s more interesting now, the token ‘normal’ who wasn’t obsessed with abilities.  Her interests and her worries are mundane: her father is dying slowly, and she’d like some damn support.  Instead, her boyfriend and the hospice nurse demand she prioritise their self-inflicted dramas.  Like most female characters on tv, she lacks a life—complete with friends—outside the male leads, and is thus narratively stuck hanging around these drips hoping they’ll reciprocate and, unsurprisingly, is only loaded with more demands.  And, not to mention, left out of the adventures, while she buries her father, alone.

Unfortunately, the arc requires her to be the resistor in the circuit of plot, as often the obstruction as the enabler.  She’s a successful (if born to privilege) businesswoman who expects support and respect from those who want to be close to her…in this group, she’s the freak.

Mr Bennet’s daughter

Ah, the days when Mr Bennet lacked context, backstory, even a first name…one of the first season’s great hooks was his interaction with his adopted daughter, Claire.  Was he a monster, a cynical experimenter, or even—least likely of all—a loving father?

Claire inhabits a well worn character slot, the teenage girl who is potentially powerful, but vulnerable not only to the revelation of her abilities but to the usual pains, parents, and sea changes of adolescence.  Her father attempts to manipulate what facets of her identity she explores and develops—while her latter-day “cool” Mom encourages her indiscriminately—from both altruistic and selfish impulses.  Her power threatens the fragile identities of both.

Not only is Claire a teenager, and thus not only free but expected to explore alternate personas—from cheerleader to hellraiser to krelboyne—she is also adopted.  Her strange ability is something that is unexpectedly part of her but upsets her “real” identity and life, as her own DNA has the potential to do.  Her present image as a smart, popular girl with an average and loving family is more a surface than she realises, but at this stage she only worries that her ability to heal from any injury hints at something horrible, or wonderful, in her past and biology.

Bennet thwarts her efforts to explore that past and her ability in order, he says, to protect her from leaving the relative safety of childhood and facing the adult world.  And, incidentally, from a life of torturous experimentation at the hands of his employers.  Mostly, though, he’s protecting himself, his sane, bland family life, and his unexpectedly cherished identity as a dad.

Parkman: now with more fail

Matt Parkman is blessed with suck.  After failing the detective’s exam, again, the bored traffic cop begins to hear voices in his head that originate as other people’s thoughts, and immediately uses the ability to find the terrified little girl that the dozen or so detectives think has been kidnapped or killed.  He’s a hero, and goes on to become first a detective with a spotless conviction record, then commissioner, governor, and eventually the guy in one of Isaac’s Oval Office paintings.  He knows what everyone within earshot (so to speak) is going to do and how they can be persuaded to go his way, so there’s no stopping him!

Except, actually, there’s no non-psychic way he could have known where the little girl was hiding or the name “Syler,” so he instead turns from bored traffic cop to oversharing nervous schmoe to serial murderer suspect being roughly handcuffed and searched.

Part Xander, part object lesson, Parkman is the ordinary person who demonstrates to all potential heroes why they could do worse than liming their extraordinary potential in mediocrity like layers of playground mulch.  Those who witness—or in particular, are show up by—a hero’s unexplainable heroics will more often ignore Occam’s razor than favour of a convoluted conspiracy theory that leaves the dangerous person safely institutionalised, whether by Homeland Security or the men in white coats.

Even worse for poor Matt, his arc is defined by one of the first thoughts he hears, from a female superior: This guy is worthless.  In a slight change from the original pilot, Matt’s internal filter sifts away others’ calm, complimentary, or even relieved-at-seeing-a-cop thoughts, but turns up the volume for the dismissals and insults that feed his deep insecurity.

His power is paralleled by his severe dyslexia, which he refuses to reveal even when he is legally entitled to assistance or alternatives.  Parkman may not prove to be the pointiest pin in the cushion in later episodes, but he’s never shown to truly lack intelligence; nevertheless, he considers his problems with processing written information to be a secret stupidity that needs to stay hidden.  His dyslexia is only a component of his deep insecurity, and his telepathy becomes another.

how to kill your sex life in one difficult lesson

Cannibal Holocaust
1980

Why analyse an infamous schlock horror flick nearly as old as myself, especially one with such an unoriginal and heavy-handed moral as Cannibal Holocaust?  Especially when, barely a generation past Auschwitz and Dachau, said schlock horror grabs that shock value for its title?

Because it hurt to watch, and in the sense of pure horror—a thing of the wordless id—Cannibal Holocaust is worth some study and, guardedly here, emulation.

Anyone conscious in the late nineties will recognise the beginning: a team of young, photogenic and vaguely repellent filmmakers venture into the wild to document an eldritch corner of modern (Western) humanity’s fears, and disappear, leaving behind only spooky footage.  In this case, they are seeking the Yanomamo tribe, cannibals in deep jungle that “civilized man has never seen.”  The words “civilized” and “civilization” (and later, “savage” and “primitive”) crop up roughly three time each per minute of footage, making me suspect that Ruggero Deodato wanted his savvy audience to pick up on some subtle theme.

Cue professor Harold Monroe of NYU’s anthropology department publicised decision to penetrate the jungle himself with the rain forest’s answer to Crocodile Dundee as a guide, to rescue the filmmakers or, at the very least, their footage.  The first animal, a spider monkey (or possibly a raccoon-like coatimundi), is killed on screen, ostensibly for food, its front paws gripping the knife.  Several more animals are killed on film, sometimes just inefficiently, but sometimes cruelly.  They meet first one tribe, the “Yacumo,” via an extended rape and murder scene (the director’s go-to move throughout the film), who are wary of more Western visitors but lead them on to the Yanomamo and Shamatari—tribes named after highly studied indigenous people in Brazil who little resemble their portrayal here and, by 1980, had become significantly more modern as a result of continuous contact with outside researchers and miners.

Monroe locates and bargains for the miraculously intact documentary footage—after chowing down on partly cooked human entrails—but discovers upon his return to the land of fresh underwear that the footage shows that the filmmakers herded the Yacumo tribe into a hut and deliberately burned many of them to death, planning to edit the footage into an example of a Yanomamo attack.  Monroe is the only Western character who objects to broadcasting a version of the footage that casts the dead filmmakers as innocent victims, and only convinces the others after showing them further footage of the gang rape and grisly murder of a native woman, as well as the filmmakers’ own well deserved executions by the Yanomamo tribe. 

The vast majority of fake brutalities (aside from the real animal deaths) happen to women, and almost all have a sexual component.  In defence of his gender, the husband postulates that this is standard fare in horror flicks because it is more frightening to the male audience.  Men are culturally encoded as the perpetrators and victims of violence, particularly in coming-of-age scenarios, but physically hurting women is a reinforced taboo.  Watching fictional representations of women being hurt should thus make a socially “normal” man feel more visceral pain than seeing a grown man assaulted, who “should” be able to defend himself.

More cynically, I wonder if it doesn’t fulfil a semi-conscious masturbatory urge, giving the audience more of a visceral response to seeing the gender that has the power to sexually reject the overt or implied sexual advances of insecure, unlucky, or socially repellent males.  In Cannibal Holocaust, however, unlike the quick edits—teases of pain—of  traditional gore flicks and even later meme-droppings like Hostel, the pain and gore is drawn out, too sickening to allow any but the most sadistic to maintain the hazy arousal.

The on-screen killings of animals creates an infamous halo effect over the cinéma vérité style brutalities against humans.  This film was banned in many countries upon its release under the mistaken belief it was a snuff film (accidentally supported by the contracts that held the actors to not appear in any media for a year after filming), although the special effects are often clearly visible.  The viewer, however, has just seen several animals killed in torturous manners, and the more primitive lobes of the brain refuse to believe that the human victims are just actors pretending to rape and dismember.

It’s terrifyingly effective, in a way that most horror films can only pretend to feed the alligators, in Stephen King’s term.

It’s possible the director deliberately conflated rape with sex in some scenes to draw a contrast between the natives and the filmmakers.  The filmmakers don’t directly assault their script girl, perhaps because she is something of an equal, or because she is in a relationship with one of them, but she is the target of visual violation.  Twice when she’s vulnerable, her partners film her nude, and continue to film as she attempts to cover herself and deflect attention to other possible victims.  She can’t stop the filming or get an apology; her only option is to laugh it off.

The indigenous women are fair targets.  The men rape a Yanomamo woman, while their female colleague protests not the act but their filming of it, and joke that they’ll be able to sell it as a porno movie.  Afterward, they film documentary footage of the same woman, impaled on a pike, smirks peeking through solemn expressions as one narrates that she was likely killed by her own people due to an obsession with virginity.

When indigenous characters rape, it’s emphasised to be punitive, as prelude to execution for adultery or murder.  There’s a clear divergence between assault and reproductive or recreational sex. 

The contrasting attitudes to women and sex, however, are only part of the false moral relativism (the savages commit horrible assaults on each other, but it’s their way and we can’t hope to understand) and false liberal enlightenment (the Western, civilised characters are worse, raping for fun and murdering for profit).  The film’s view of indigenous people is purely colonial.  They are both inhumanly violent lunatics and innocent victims of corrupt Westerners, two stereotypical sides of the same outside judgements.   Their own point of view and interior lives remain opaque.

The same year this movie was released, white South African writer JM Coetzee published Waiting for the Barbarians, set in a universal colony surrounded by unspecified barbarians.  Typical of his work, Coetzee implicates his colonial protagonists for their complete incomprehension of the Other they feel free to use, oppress, brutalize, or lionise in turns.  Inside these narrators’ minds, we are shown their preconceptions to be cloaks thrown over real people, who are never completely covered but also never turn to the reader themselves with the truth.  The narrators will never understand them as people, and so the reader is never given the ‘in’ to understand them, either.  The end of his novels is designed to leave us with that loss, the knowledge that there was something fascinating that has been crushed and can never be truly recovered or even remembered—to feel the consequences of a postcolonial society ourselves.  Much like the Holocaust from which this film cribs some spare horror—the tragedy and survival become an indelible part of cultural identity, destroying the original context.

On a purely visceral level, this is a fine, uncompromising horror film that strips the viewer emotionally raw.  It displays the sheer power of film to affect a person’s real emotional experience like few movies I’ve ever seen.  Unfortunately, like the filmmakers portrayed, Deodato presents as savage monsters a remote group of people with no ability to refute his assassination of their culture as the worst fears and id impulses of all humanity—ostensibly to make the liberal point that Westerners are even worse under the nice clothes and tall buildings.  His Yanomamo are barbarians in a barbaric world, who we can never hope to understand or judge, so the finger points only to us…or, with better aim, at those like Deodato who cynically exploits everyone involved, from indigenous actors to every audience member.

A must-read review: 1000 Misspent Hours

(extremely pretty) ordinary people

 Heroes interrupted: Volume One in retrospect
 1.01 Genesis

Where does it come from—this quest, this need to solve life’s mysteries when the simplest of questions can never be answered? 

Inadvertently postmodern

The superhuman hero genre has historically existed in pulp comics and camp tv and film aimed at a preadolescent audience.  Saving the bulk of screen time for use and abuse of powers and the epic battles that spawns, backstory and motivation only had a place in Very Special Episodes/Issues that made little sense.  I have fond memories of an 80s Superman cartoon that revealed Lex Luther had been a farmer with red hair who somehow caught fire in his field, and when Supes blew out the fire with his super lung capacity, he blew away all of Lex’s hair as well.  Psychotically angered by his baldness, he swore vengeance on all superheroes, and, I assume, earned several scientific and engineering degrees on special vendetta scholarships to make the jump from man of the plow to genius supervillian. Ah, revenge: the best reason to better oneself.

Whether intended or a side effect of a skimpy FX budget, NBC’s Heroes takes the opposite tack.  Ordinary people discover that they have extraordinary abilities, but find reasons not to use them.  Plots often turn on the practical and psychological reasons why most people would fight to remain ordinary, not immediately abandon the mortgage, squeeze into spandex, and start looking for a chance to show off.

Split hitmen

For instance: Niki Sanders, the single mother under a lot of stress.  One of her many pressing issues is the friendly representatives of organised crime threatening both her knees and her virtue.  There are people who might welcome a psychotically violent invisible protector in such straits, but she isn’t one of them.

For reasons that become more obvious later, Niki is terrified of violence, particularly if she’s the instrument.  In fact, for reasons that become clearer in a later episode’s flashback, she’s resistant to being in conflict with other people at all, attempting to flirt and cajole her way through disputes.  When she does come close to losing emotional control (when insulted by Ando via lasvegasniki.com, when afraid that Micah’s in trouble, and when the headmaster of Micah’s snobfest refuses to refund her donation), she sees ‘someone else’ in nearby mirrors, a separate person to make the dangerous actions.  When she is finally unable to escape, she is only able to defend herself by sprogging a separate personality to do so, and like most repressed impulses, this one bursts forth grotesquely out of proportion to need.

While her life gets no less dangerous, particularly in her association with the mysterious Mr Linderman, Niki will only continue to resist the physical strength she needs, and see her amoral alter-ego Jessica as only another enemy.  Post-Volume 2, it seems that she’s only able to act heroically as herself, or at least beat up a bad guy, when she’s been relieved of her inhuman strength.

Stoned hands are the devil’s playthings

Similarly, the artist Isaac Mendez is first shown destroying his own work, a painting of a masculine hand clutching a glass of boiling liquid.  He painted it while high on heroin, an addiction he’s been struggling with for some time, and is convinced it and others foretell the future—or perhaps plant the seeds of destructive events that otherwise would never have come to pass.

Isaac is another character who could desperately use something like his gift.  His heroin addiction threatens to send his promising career spanning the commercial and fine art worlds into a tailspin, along with his relationship and grip on reality.  By rejecting his graphic foresight, Isaac not only loses the sustaining joy of creating but also the potential for clarity.

Unknowing, Isaac has been recording bits of the future for some time, possibly for his entire artistic career.  Perhaps his increasing heroin use strengthened the ability or made it unstable, focusing only on the immediate future and just on senseless, destructive events.  In the first of many misapprehensions, he sees this as an effect of the drug, and therefore just as dangerous, poisonous, and damning as street-quality heroin.

It’s not overly surprising then that he should end his introduction trying to overdose on both and escape the entire mess, discovering instead a horribly future he’ll risk damnation to fight.

The flying shark and incredi-boy (go home, Buddy)

Nathan Petrelli, we discover in the episode’s final moment, is another hero in denial.  He can fly—or possibly, hover—and not very well.  He saves his brother’s life after repeatedly squishing Peter’s enthusiastic insistence that he’s special: “Do not pull a Roger Clinton on me, man.”

Nathan hides his ability—and his brother, when possible—to avoid tarring his election run with more scandal, but also because he just doesn’t need it.  He’s an admitted shark, a magnificent bastard with a brilliant political career ahead of him, not to mention his own family and a bottomless checking account.  The gift of flying is a useless attribute that would only interfere with perfection.

The only characters enthusiastic about ubermench abilities are those without obvious traits, like Peter Petrelli.  Peter has fantastic dreams of flying that convince him he’s meant to be more special than the rest of humanity, and craves a thumbs-up from his successful big brother to support that.

Unfortunately, I find myself disliking the lesser Petrelli, even though I was completely with him as the centre of the journey at the time.  Despite Simone’s exposition that he’s “got a real gift” for nursing, his actions reveal a terrible medical professional far more interested in his own navel-gazing than his dying patients.  In his first conversation, he brushes aside the grieving daughter’s concern for first her father and then her boyfriend to first hit on her, then abandon both patients to spend more time obsessing about his longed-for destiny. 

It feels more like narcissism than empathy, caring for others only in hopes of validation.

The strength of a thousand expositions

Thus I remain amused by Mohinder Suresh’s first line, directly following Peter’s introduction: “Man is a narcissistic species by nature.”  He’s in his element, pontificating knowledgably to a class (ignoring his reiteration of the disproven trope than man uses only 10% of his brain), championing the superiority of the cockroach, and so obviously waiting for something incredible to happen.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why Sendhil Ramamurthy has the voiceover duties—Mohinder will lecture anyone, anytime, on a vast range of subjects from genetics to evolution.  In this episode alone, he jumps to illuminate bored grad students, a friend of his father’s, and a random black hole of emotional need who flags down his cab.  There’s no chance the captive viewers would be spared.

Mohinder is an early parallel to Peter, yearning to be special and earn the approving attention of his family idol.  I’m curious now how their decisions will line up through the rest of the episodes, if Peter’s more obvious right and wrong decisions will illuminate Mohinder’s ambiguous paths.

Yatta ftw!

Finally, there’s the early favourite, Hiro Nakamura, who takes an inkling of ability and spins a fantasy world of heroics around it—then proceeds to live up to his expectations.  In one day, he moves from struggling to hold back one second to transporting himself across the world.  And, he’s chuffed with himself, unconcerned for the many potential consequences.

Later, Hiro will live up to the prevalent attitude to his powers all too well, but for now he’s fun.  Here’s the thing, though—in retrospect, Hiro’s a really odd duck, nearly a self-hating Japanese person.  All of his references are to Western, specifically American, archetypes, Star Trek and Superman and X-Men.  Given that his cultural background is so rich in contemporary super-human heroes, why wouldn’t he and Ando reference Sailor Moon or Steam Detectives?

On one level it’s obvious that much of a US audience wouldn’t recognise the name Tuxedo Kamen, for example, the way they would Mr Spock—but it does odden up his cultural coding.  Aside from a childhood fondness for Takezo Kensei, he focuses on western Baby Boomer-era fantasy culture.  Is there a Japanese equivalent for the otaku kid who rejects the ‘inferior’ fantasy worlds of western culture, and, if so, would they also lose in a fight with any given goth child?

Ripe for retcon

Angela Petrelli: daffy recently widowed mother jumping in where Winona Ryder left off in the rich white girl shoplifting finals, or spider at the centre of a Big Bad web?

Given spoilery spoilers spoiling the unspoiled, I’m really looking forward to the inevitable flashback episode, and fearful it’ll resemble a goofy Philip K Dick adaptation.

AU pilot

Heroes interrupted: Volume One in retrospect
DVD Extra: Original Heroes pilot (72 minutes)

 

A fascinating glimpse into what might have been, the original ‘Genesis’ includes one major subplot and character mercifully excised from the first season, along with some outer onion layers of characterisation.Terror by numbersThe subplot involves beat cop Matt Parkman and a 24-esque terrorist plot.  The character that evolved into radioactive caveman Ted Sprague was originally a member of a Middle Eastern terrorist cell that caused a train accident in Odessa, TX to hijack some plutonium and use it to threaten Mom, apple pie, and other innocent American metanarratives.  He attempts suicide after inadvertently causing his wife’s death from cancer, but is rescued by the rest of the cell and seems to decide to use his powers for good.  ‘Good,’ in the sense of very inconvenient for those in the target zone wishing to remain non-irradiated.  Parkman, controlling non-existent crowds outside Molly Walker’s suburban house set, finds anther cell member under the stairs, and after briefly establishing his schmoe-hood with a terrifically miscast LA twinkie as his wife, quickly parlays his ability into a promotion onto the SWAT team.  In his hero moment, he breaks in to the main terrorist subplot as a black-clad operative, only to realise the leader is proto-Ted, with whom he shares some never-explained history.I might be the only American citizen who finds terrorism fiction painfully dull and inevitably ham-handed, but even if I were a fan of 24, I’d have breathed a sigh of relief that this plotline only survived as the train wreck in which Claire Bennett tests her fire-retardant properties. While it would have been great to have another Middle Eastern lead, making that person a terrorist with radioactive powers wasn’t really the subversion of audience expectation the writers may have thought.  As the first season continued, the threat of terrorism became a background threat, the investigators not the heroes or villains but one more element that keeps potential heroes from using their abilities, for fear they’ll be misinterpreted.  The potential terrorist was re-cast to be reminiscent of Timothy McVeigh, the white, Middle-America Oklahoma City bomber, a character that allowed the plotlines to explore the potential danger of powerful people without also seeming to question the danger of Arabic people in the US.

Parkman: made of fail

Unfortunately, Parkman loses his hero moment.  He becomes the poor schmuck whose ability only adds to his struggles, with more missteps and just plain bad luck than achievements.  His ambitions are lower—to use his brain as a detective rather than earning the sexy SWAT gear—and he nearly loses his place on the force entirely when he’s perceived as a crazy person by impatient superiors.  In both the original pilot and the first season (in which he doesn’t appear until the second episode and remains marooned from the other storylines past the December halftime), Parkman is both very dyslexic and ashamedly hiding it, rather than seeking the assistance he’s legally entitled to.

He’s the sweet guy with potential who comfort eats and insists on taking the path of most resistance, both to prove himself and to provide an excuse if he fails.  The unaired pilot affords him a moment of epiphany, listening to the cacophony of internal voices in a park, after which he confidently grabs hold of his dream and saves the day.  Unfortunately for Matt, the loss of the terrorism storyline (meant to culminate in an NYC terrorist attack rather than splodey Pete?) sent him on a season-long odyssey of humiliation, as the thoughts he heard not only reinforced his insecurity but destroyed his marriage and interrupted his career.  It has also left him tied with Mohinder Suresh as “Character Most Likely to Turn Bad Guy By Desperately Wanting to be the Good Guy.”

Oh, and he became my consistent favourite character on the show.  His bad decisions make sense, and his attempted heroics go awry, but he inevitably clears the path for those who can save the day and unglamorously supports the abandoned afterward.  That’s the stuff.

Micah: thieving wee shite

In another lost plotline, wee Micah Sanders loses patience with waiting on his mother, steals $300 from the purse of her floozy best friend, and hops on a Greyhound toward prison.  His last scene shows the small boy alone, at night, next to the high wall of a jail, assumedly heading toward his father, somehow.

It’s most likely, had this thread continued, Nikki would have shown up as Micah approached the gate, yanked him back by one arm, and given him a shrill lecture on the way back to her plotline of driving from rejection to rejection.  Micah spent much of the season sighing as he was moved from place to place like a cute checker, rarely causing much trouble.  Aside from one clever robbery of an ATM machine, which had no consequences—did DL keep the money to avoid having to fire up his wife’s old internet stripping camera himself?—Micah was just a darling kid whose only fault was demanding his mother and father do a better job of parenting him and maybe act like comic book heroes on the weekends.

I like this shadow on his character better—too young to have a strong grasp on abstract right and wrong, or at least not while fleeing mobster loan sharks, lying and stealing and ready to break out the father he’s sure can protect them.  That’s a boy who’ll grow up interesting.

Isaac and Peter: can we trade?

Isaac Mendez’s story is almost the same as was eventually broadcast, with one large difference—he’s so adamant about resisting both the devil heroin and the evil paintings of the future that come with it that he handcuffs himself out of reach of both needle and paintbrush.  Unfortunately, the sturdy saw is close, and when he gives in—to either his addiction or his need to create—he hacks off his left hand to get free.

Peter is much the same as well, still desperate to have some special destiny, endlessly sympathetic to his cold mother and brother, and generally neglecting his dying patient to make cow eyes at Shaft’s grieving daughter.  Isaac and Peter are parallels in terms of power—one wants, one rejects.  Several episodes later, Peter tries to use Isaac to get Mohinder’s attention, not realising he’s absorbed the ability to draw the future already.

The loss of Isaac’s hand, however, reflects badly on Peter, more so than the broadcasted overdose.  This ‘gifted’ young medic seems to be the pre-royalty Diana Spencer of nursing, ignoring both the frantic girlfriend and the patient bleeding out from a self-amputated hand (as well as dying from a heroin overdose) to stare gape-mouthed at a nearby painting resembling himself in mid-air.  Narcissus, eat your heart out.

hope and shovels

US!
Chris Bachelder
2006

Early in Chris Bachelder’s latest novel, US!, the often-resurrected Upton Sinclair tells his reluctant secretary-cum-protector of an early job writing for the funny pages:

“I will tell you the secret of joke writing,” he said. “Jokes are made up hind end forward, so to speak.”

Beginning with a subject—the great Socialist chooses tramps, in this case, and their distaste for bathing—he comes up with a joke clever enough to amuse the secretary, who is occupied in scanning the road for assassins, and then stumps him with a classic joke from “aught-three”:

Mrs. Jones goes into her grocer’s and asks for a dozen boxes of matches. Says the grocer: “Why Mrs. Jones, you had a dozen boxes of matches yesterday!” Says Mrs Jones, “Oh yes, but you see, my husband is deaf and dumb, and he talks in his sleep!”

“It’s a little mind-puzzle,” Sinclair tells the scared young man, refusing to explain the punch line. Much later, when the answer comes to him, at the same time obvious and impossible, he finds himself once again stepping up to save and follow the stubborn, naive old man in his quixotic cause to bring Socialist utopia to the United States.

Both a political novel and an exploration of the value, if any, of political novels, Bachelder avoids the literary criticisms levied on Sinclair’s own prodigious output—namely a general bludgeoning of characters and plotlines in the service of his political manifesto. Bachelder’s Sinclair, who continually returns to a nation that needs his ideas as much as it violently rejects him, is a tragic would-be hero whose political plans are as hind-end-forward as his jokes. The end of his revolution is clear, and clearly necessary: a society in which citizens are voters and workers rather than consumers and disposable labor, and a government that both regulates big business harshly and provides an adequate safety net for individuals. Sinclair preaches—or tries to preach—the evils of unbridled capitalism and the better life for all under a Socialist system without providing a real-world plan for implementing it. When people are convinced of their own best interest, they’ll rise up. Obvious—and impossible.

In fact, a combination of corporate and government pressure (and hired assassins), along with individuals’ knee-jerk hatred of Communism and love of a celebrity spectacle, prevents Sinclair from speaking in public or publishing his books in anything but small batches. His body carries the semi-healed scars of bullets, knives, even a harpoon. His presence galvanises the opposition, providing them with a figurehead of evil that whips the working-class masses into ill-informed frenzy even as it distracts them from the universality of their setbacks. His continual returns from the dead, which one would expect to generate shock at least, are instead condemned merely as unseemly; it’s his beliefs that are unnatural.

What is Socialism? It is Un-American. It is Communists who want to come into your house and take away your tv, your Cuisinart, the SUV in your driveway, leaving you with lower pay and higher taxes, with less food in your children’s mouths and no hope for their future. It wants to take away your American Dream of success through hard work.

The Socialists, many of whom have a small red shovel tattooed on some hidden bit of skin, meet in secret, drinking hot coffee, to watch a film of Sinclair spontaneously preaching, thinking that it’s bad fiction like the reviewers say, but it’s also their lives, and they are moved. The Anti-Socialist Leagues meet in elementary school cafeterias, drinking coffee and organising volunteers to pick up litter, teach parenting classes, and raise funds for public services. The multiple Sinclair assassins are national heroes, nominally punished with jail terms and easily paroled, celebrated in the corporate-owned media and as individually sponsored as Nascar drivers. The content generated about them is based in their skill and personalities, with glancing references to them protecting American society in some abstract fashion. There is no mention of what place debate has in a free society, or what a society has become when threats and murder are acceptably used to stifle dissenting voices.

The people are too tied up in their own problems—layoffs, uninsured health problems, the growing threat of outsourcing—to consider such abstract concepts, like what this ‘America’ is that needs to be protected at all costs. They’re happy to be distracted by an exciting performance, or a good old-fashioned book burning.

US! doesn’t end particularly happily or hopefully for Upton Sinclair or the United States, as one would expect given the current state of the Murrican Left. There’s a moment of shared plenty and happiness, of community and family wellbeing, in a destructive spectacle. The moment for Sinclair’s peaceful revolution has passed, if indeed it ever existed even in the depths of the Great Depression. The human impulse toward community action is safely tucked into bed with the system that erodes it.

As a political novel, however, perhaps US! can motivate readers where Sinclair’s stridently upbeat endings fail. It’s satire, yes, but it’s my life, and I am moved.