Border Crossings at a Therapeutic Prison: Some Thoughts after Reading Chuck Bowden’s “Torch Song”

I revisited Charles Bowden’s “Torch Song” in the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction the other day, and it reminded me of a joke I heard when I worked with adolescent-aged sex offenders that I never quite got but always thought was funny.

I spent my twenties ping-ponging between school and nonprofit work. My time coaching children in rape therapy was a particularly strange chapter of the nonprofit side of things. For two years, I worked at a facility that provided court-mandated treatment to juvenile sex offenders. The facility also had a program for treating youth who had been convicted of non-sexual violent offenses, which I worked with, as well as one for violent youth with low IQs, which I didn’t.

The anthropologist James Waldran researched similar facilities for adults and coined the expression “therapeutic prison,” which nicely captures both the place’s daily atmosphere and conceptual incoherence. As one astute youth put it to me: “This is prison with therapy.” No one seemed able to figure out when it was one, when it was the other, or how to square the circle of an institution premised on punishment that also provided therapy that aspired to moral pedagogy (“moral habilitation” in Waldran’s apt terminology).

Anyway, the joke I never got came after I’d spontaneously quit. I hadn’t planned to quit, and I had no sense of what I would do after I’d left. For a while, I floated by on money I’d saved, but I didn’t have healthcare for a long time after that. I guess I had the vague idea I’d be going back to grad school, which is what I ended up doing.

I don’t remember the details now, but the joke must have come when people were discussing the fact that I was leaving. Someone cracked to one of the supervisors that I was in fact an undercover journalist preparing to write an exposé on the facility. I was leaving because I’d gathered enough material for the project.

It was a funny joke. But why was it funny?

I guess one reason was that it was kind of true: at the time, I was gathering material for a planned experimental novel. No one knew that but me, but I guess people had sensed that I was up to something. I’d had the idea of telling a story with the constraint that the narrative would entirely be told through the documents we used in the facility (e.g., in-take reports, legal incident reports, meal report records, psychological evaluations, report cards, etc.). It was a neat idea, but I didn’t have the skill to pull it off and ended up shelving it (alternatively, maybe it wasn’t that neat of an idea).

In another sense, I always wondered about the joke: what was I going to expose? Everything at the therapeutic prison was run by the book as far as I could tell. I don’t remember any conspicuous abuse or corruption. It wouldn’t have been too juicy of an exposé.

The joke stayed with me. It felt telling. Everyone at the therapeutic prison seemed, and I think felt, guilty. We were superficially transparent but nothing if not covert. In every regard, we were heavily monitored. Of course we were accountable to the courts, and the state, and various laws. In terms of daily affairs, literally almost everything that happened at the facility was recorded by its ubiquitous security cameras. Almost every door was locked. For a long time after I quit, I would pause at doors before walking through them—a Pavlovian vestige of my time always having to unlock a door before going through it.

“Torch Song” is a unique essay; I can’t think of anything else quite like it. Through a series of impressionistic vignettes, Bowden provides an account of the psychological impact that the experience of being a sex crime reporter had on him.

“Torch Song” is meandering and not at all systematic—this is as true of the prose as of the analysis. I’m inclined to like that part of Bowden’s writing in general, but it’s particularly apropos here in capturing the odd and repetitive swirls of thought engendered by the experience of sex crime work. I’ve never read an article that has more accurately captured those psychological realities. Perhaps appropriately for the subject matter, I’ve never read one that’s tried. Indeed, Bowden presents five rules garnered from his experience:

1. No one can handle the children.

2. Get out after two years.

3. Always walk a woman to her car, regardless of the hour of day or night.

4. Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things.

5. No one can handle the children.

I like his list, but I might amend it just slightly:

1. No one can handle the children.

2. Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things.

3. Get out after two years.

4. Don’t talk about it; no one wants to hear these things.

5. Always walk a woman to her car, regardless of the hour of day or night.

6. No one can handle the children.

7. In case you missed it: no one wants to hear these things.   

To be fair, Bowden repeatedly returns to that silence in his essay, which is ultimately one of his main points. The topic of sexual assault, particularly child sexual assault, is so taboo that even just mentioning it (as, for instance, I’m doing right now in this blog post) can cast the speaker in a dubious light. If you think about it, it’s strange to have an offense that is so sensitive that even mentioning it leads to almost immediate doubt about your own intentions (for the record, I wasn’t a sex offender as a child and am not one as an adult).

We certainly don’t handle most forms of violence that way. At least part of this is the result of the peculiar way we’ve come to conceptualize the variety of sexual assault we’re willing to acknowledge (many we don’t): it’s awkwardly framed as both a mental health issue and legal transgression. This is nicely unpacked in historian Elise Chenier’s Strangers in our Midst, though much remains to be said of that story. Needless to say, this characterization is on shaky theoretical grounds, and we’ve never quite ironed out when it’s a medical (mental health) issue, when it’s a legal (punitive) issue, when it’s a universal human issue, and when it’s a sociological issue. The first two often eclipse the second two.

Bowden points out this incoherence, and he’s right to point it out. He’s also right to insinuate that there’s something a little strange and perhaps even self-serving about it. Common sexual practices and pornographic material often contain direct reference to (at least simulated) compulsion and humiliation. Sexual assault by any definition is so wildly common that it would take a complete disconnect with reality to imagine that ordinary people aren’t complicit.

The point isn’t that we’re all rapists but rather that the line between “deviant” and “abnormal” in this area gets fuzzy really fast. I suppose this need not necessarily be related to discomfort about the violence woven into large parts of our collective sex life and desires, though I’m inclined to think that’s the bulk of it. Still, part of that willful blindness doubtless stems from a broader anxiety regarding our potential for violence and the capacity of our drives and impulses (sexual and otherwise) to manifest violently. It takes a lot to come to terms with your own potential to be monstrous (even if not only unrealized but also detested—perhaps particularly then). I suspect that’s part of why Bowden opens “Torch Song” with an anecdote about violence in general rather than sexual violence in particular.

“Torch Song” is a rich little essay and a lot can be pulled out of it, but from one perspective it can be seen as an extensive account of the type of psychological breakdown that follows from having one’s access to convenient, self-soothing falsehoods taken from you. Indeed, sex crime work is not amenable to simple stories, and the experience can quickly sensitize one to how even very sophisticated thinkers are often motivated by simple morality tales. An impatience with comforting sociological fairy tales is one of the enduring consequences of having done sex crime work.

I hear an echo of that impatience in much of Bowden’s work—regardless of whether he’s doing interviews with cartel sicarios or providing his take on nature writing. There’s an almost punk rock spirit to the way he seems constitutionally incapable of not blurting out dark and complicated truths that are impolite but cut to the heart of the issue. I suspect that language is something of a dialect that those of us with visas to the neck of the woods documented in “Torch Song” take on.

As one can imagine, this tendency towards simple solutions was particularly thick given that I was working with children. Both staff and general observers never seemed quite sure how to frame the children: victims? Rapists? Monsters? Regardless of the garment you chose, the fit was awkward. Some staff members seemed almost clinically unhinged in absurdly suggesting that minor acts of kindness (e.g., access to fresh fruit, basic manners) would mitigate the trauma that it was implied wholly explained the children’s “acting out” (a euphemism I’ve always detested).

Our treatment clearly wasn’t effective by even the most superficial of metrics, but I don’t remember anyone talking about that. We carried out the most superficial of treatment for an “illness” we couldn’t effectively define as such while preparing children for a nonexistent world of vapid sexuality defined in 2D.

I was aware of this, and it got to me. We were all aware of it, and it got to all of us. As with Bowden, what followed for me was a slow-motion breakdown. My personal trajectory was less dramatic than Bowden’s, the fireworks of his lunatic, alienated promiscuity weren’t part of my path, though we both ended in the same place: rage.

In hindsight, I was furious after leaving sex crime work. I would introduce uncomfortable topics in discussion and propose research projects on sensitive issues. I was angry.

To return to the start, what made the joke funny was that we all knew what I would have exposed. The redundancy was the basis of the humor: everything was already exposed. We were already exposed. We are already exposed.

In this regard, the final word belongs to Bowden: “You can know some things and the knowing seems to help you not at all.”

Degrees of Reality

It takes a few days after getting back to straighten out my affairs. I visit banks. I sift through the heaps of mail my mom piles on the desk in my bedroom. I wait in line. I make calls, sign forms in black pen, and make photocopies and scans at the public library. I renew my library card at the public library after making photocopies and scans. I go to birthday parties and watch my friends’ ever-growing, now-insanely-old kids turn yet another year older. I text my cousins, who at this point barely know me but still sign their emails with “love.”

Occasionally, I see someone from college, AmeriCorps, or one or another grad school tour. We trip out on how much time has passed, the people who have retired from whatever we knew them from, and the people who have died and thus retired from whatever it is we all know each other from.

I’ve been an expat for six years. I don’t have kids, and I’m not married. I stave off the forces of bureaucratic and social entropy because I like to go home for visits. I do it because I’m almost certain to move back at some point. Despite its endless challenges, the US is too big, too wealthy, and too dynamic to ignore. In my case, it’s also too personal in housing all of my family and most of my friends.

It’s not in my interest to hide. Besides, our hyper-technologized world makes it tough to hide. Everyone knows right where to find you. That is, if they care to find you. If they don’t, then you have to scream and scream to avoid disappearing. You have to post on social media, send out-of-the-blue texts, respond to each and every email. I guess that’s the lacuna at the heart of the panopticon: surveilled if inside or invisible if outside.

When I lived in China, there was a certain segment of questionable folks who’d arrived in the ‘90s before China was what it has become. They hadn’t been home in years if not decades. They were escaping various things—family, failure, responsibility. Some seemed to be fleeing legal issues, but none ever admitted that to me.

They had cell phones—life in China would be impossible without one—but they didn’t use Western apps, which were unpopular and often blocked anyway. They circulated in a different Internet ecosystem, using WeChat, Taobao, Alipay, Weibo, and Red.

They lived in smaller second- and third-tier cities or dodgy rural areas. They kept up with their visas, or they paid bribes, or they just hoped for the best. They paid in cash at glum expat bars. A lot seemed to be English teachers. I had the sense that many saved up to visit prostitutes, but that might just be a stereotype.

These days I live in Bogota. It’s easy to disappear here if you want to. It’s easy even if you don’t want to. Parts of the city are unpoliced, and parts of the country are ungoverned. If I really wanted to disappear, I would need a way to make cash and get paid off the books, but there’s always a way to make cash and get paid off the books, though they’re rarely pleasant.

Like seemingly everywhere now, there’s a big homeless population in Bogota. It’s rare, but every now and then, I’ll see a homeless foreigner. I imagine they’re off the books. Some have tattoos, which for some reason always makes me wonder what their lives were like before whatever happened to them happened to them.

The last time I was home, I renewed my driver’s license. I paid a little extra to have it done at a satellite location, which I was told would be faster. I still had to wait. As I waited, I thought of the expression “degrees of reality” and pictured a person becoming gradually fainter like in a movie about time travel where a character has been written out of history. That was the image that came to mind even though I know that’s not what people mean by “degrees of reality.”

At first, the people at the DMV didn’t want to renew the license because the mail I’d brought to prove my address was junk mail. They changed their mind when I showed them some bill or other, which made me feel weirdly proud. As I walked out, I pictured myself slowly filling in and becoming sturdier like the scenes in time travel movies where the process has been reversed and the character has no longer been written out of history. That’s not what people mean by “degrees of reality” either, but it kind of is, though.

Carnival of Souls (1962): The Horror of What Lies Beneath

Credit: Harcourt Productions. Distributed by Herts-Lion International Corp.

Carnival of Souls (1962) is a film with style—miles and miles of it. Director Herk Harvey intended it to have the look of Bergman and the feel of Cocteau, and he succeeded admirably. It’s easy to see why it has been an influence on filmmakers like David Lynch and George Romero.

While Carnival of Soul’s masterful expressionistic style is much of its appeal, the film has sufficient depth to have led to considerable commentary—both academic and popular. As I see it, that commentary fails as much as it succeeds, and that is its success.

Plot

Carnival of Souls doesn’t give us much time with Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) before she is shown crashing off a bridge during a drag race. Mysteriously, while the other passengers die in the crash, Mary surfaces out of the water unharmed and unruffled. From there, the film picks up a few weeks later as Mary, a professional organ player, moves to Salt Lake City, where she has a job lined up playing organ for a church. She takes a room in a boardinghouse and resists the pushy advances of her sleazy neighbor, John Linden (Sidney Berger). As she adjusts to life in her new city, she begins having strange visions of a ghoulish man (played by Harvey himself) following her. She occasionally becomes invisible and experiences a bewildering, powerful attraction to a deserted pavilion. By the film’s end, it is revealed that she had in fact died in the car accident, and the final scene is of her in the car with the other drowning victims.

Carnival of Souls has a lot of weird quirks. Even by the standards of dated gender norms, the other boarder, John, is particularly dishonest and creepy. At one point, Mary has an episode in a park that leads a doctor (Stan Levitt) who happens to be passing by to treat her with therapy despite acknowledging he’s not a psychiatrist. At the end of the film, for some strange reason, the local sheriff thinks to call that doctor, as well as the priest who had previously employed her, to join him in investigating Mary’s disappearance.

Credit: Harcourt Productions. Distributed by Herts-Lion International Corp.

Interpretations

Carnival of Souls has spawned a respectable little literature for an obscure B-movie that flopped on its initial release. I remember once reading the crack somewhere or other that Shakespeare’s work has been so heavily mined by other writers that soon all that will be left unpilfered are the punctuation marks. Carnival of Souls gives a similar impression of having been milked for everything it can give.

For example, a convincing thread of literature addresses Mary as struggling with the stifling conformity of her era. In that spirit, some have provided a queer reading of the film. Psychoanalysis has been a useful register for commentators in this camp, and some have offered striking Freudian and Jungian readings, drawing occasionally on Julia Kristeva’s discussion of abjection to illuminate the terms of Mary’s gendered experience. Similarly, the centrality of the (male) gazeturns up in a number of readings.

Interestingly, some readings have treated Carnival of Souls as a road film and addressed its handling of car culture, sometimes treating the film as a vehicle for addressing broader societal discomfort around auto deaths and others zeroing in on Mary’s road trip as itself indicating cultural anxieties regarding changing gender norms by unwittingly expressing bias aimed at “women drivers.”

Carnival of Souls traffics heavily in religious imagery, and of course, Mary’s experience as a type of zombie has led to purgatory being a central theme in the secondary literature. In that regard, I had expected to see more direct comparisons between Carnival of Souls and Jacob’s Ladder (1990), which covers similar thematic territory while reaching a seemingly less bleak conclusion.

Wrapping up our whirlwind tour, some viewers have seen the film as a metaphor for the psychology of trauma. Other accounts have focused on the centrality of organ music. Still others have paid particular attention to the carnival itself by drawing on figures like Bakhtin when accounting for the fact that the pavilion is a former carnival site and that the film culminates with something of a dance celebration (carnival) of the dead.

Credit: Harcourt Productions. Distributed by Herts-Lion International Corp.

The Student Eyeroll and The Horror of What Lies Beneath

I’m sure there are more readings out there, but those are what stood out to me as the primary threads in the literature. Many focus on my pet themes and fixations, and I had expected to riff like crazy on Carnival of Souls—a film I adore and could watch time and again.

But I couldn’t find my way into this territory. Somewhat hilariously, it was an undergrad’s dismissive blog post from 2012 that triggered my thinking. The author of the post, Christine Sellin, asks: “Does this film [Carnival of Souls] really provide intelligent commentary on societal issues (particularly feminine) of the 1960s, or is it less than what we make it out to be?”

The psychology of the teacher-student relationship leaves the eyeroll one of the student’s main self-defense weapons. Sometimes it’s used well, and sometimes it’s not. In this case, Sellin has used it to good effect. One of the more indulgent forms the student eyeroll can take is the genre of term paper that either overtheorizes a pet interest or shoehorns a pet interest into a discussion of unamenable material.

To me, some of the literature on Carnival of Souls might have a little bit of that going on. I don’t say that to disparage the literature, however. Somewhat puzzlingly, it’s a testament to its applicability. As I see it, both psychologically and epistemologically, what this failure indicates is our attempt to scratch at the horror felt in response to the invisible below the visible—or the invisible that makes possible the visible.

In a psychoanalytic sense, you could see this as horror regarding particular psychological impulses that are below the surface just as much as the fact that it’s creepy that we are creatures with submerged psychological impulses in the first place. It feels weird when we sense both the darkness of the impulses themselves and the more foundational fact of things being obscured.

In a broader epistemological sense, some element of obscured or curtailed view is necessary for our perceptual faculties to work—we can’t perceive everything at all times, and there has to be that which we don’t directly perceive for there to be that which we do. It’s eerie when these things peak through and we find ourselves thinking of the element of the world that inevitably goes unseen. This is doubly true when those things themselves are disturbing.

Like much of David Lynch’s best work, Carnival of Souls hints at the inevitable darkness that lurks below the world of appearance. We intuit it on the edges of our experience. It’s weird and frightening and can lead us to pin whatever we can on it to make sense of it.

Proust said that putting an idea in fiction is gauche in a way akin to leaving the price tag on an item. But there are autochthonous ideas in every work. The text’s plot is an idea. Its style is an idea.

Indeed, its style is an idea, and Carnival of Souls is a film with style—miles and miles of it. And we feel that style tighten around our throats when we squint to see the invisible below the visible.

Selected Bibliography

Brown, J. (2010). Carnival of Souls and the organs of horror. In N. Lerner (Ed.), Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. Routledge.

Monteyne, K. (2018). From the question of soul of a carnival of souls. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 58(1), 24-46.

Murphy, Bernice M. (2017). “‘Wheels of Tragedy’: Death on the Highways in Carnival of Souls (1962) and the Highway Safety Film”. FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & The Arts, no. 24 (May). https://doi.org/10.2218/forum.24.187

Olson, C. (9 December 2013) Carnival of Souls and emergent feminism in the early half of the sexual revolution. Seems Obvious to Me: Adventures in Pop Culture Studies. https://seemsobvioustome.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/carnival-of-souls-and-emergent-feminism-in-the-early-half-of-the-sexual-revolution/

Riley, J. (2007). Have you no respect? Do you feel no reverence?’: Narrative and Critical Subversion in Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls. In M. Goodall, J. Good, and W. Godfrey (Eds.), Crash Cinema: Representation in Film. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Shaffer, B. (2024). Carnival of Souls as seen by its creators. In L. Broughton (Ed.), Reappraising Cult Horror Films: From Carnival of Souls to Last Night in Soho. Bloomsbury.

Being Coherent about Coherence (2013)

Credit: Bellanova Films/Ugly Ducking Films. Distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories

Coherence (2013) makes the first impression of a philosophy major but turns out to be a lab supervisor in the psychology department. This Twilight Zone-style thought experiment is a brilliant, multi-layered examination of character. In particular, its use of the doppelganger tells us a lot about desire and how life feels.

Plot

Coherence is about eight friends at a dinner party. The group meets on a night when a comet appears to trigger a series of strange happenings. The characters soon meet versions of themselves (doppelgangers) who mirror their behavior. To make sense of this, the characters postulate a figurative use of the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment and conclude that they are facing a potentially infinite series of iterations of the dinner party (which for some reason play out in a void).

We meet multiple doppelgangers; it was only on the second viewing that I came to appreciate how many different versions of the characters make an appearance. Em (Emily Foxler) is our primary focus across the various universes. When we meet her, she’s struggling to decide whether to go to Vietnam with her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling), while navigating an awkward evening with Kevin’s ex, Laurie (Lauren Mahr), who for some misguided reason, party guest Amir (Alex Manugian) brought to the party.

The exact terms of the thought experiment aren’t particularly important or lucid. Coherence is a dialogue-driven film that’s really about character. Much more than the details of quantum mechanics or the metaphysics of alternate worlds, the film’s point is what the characters’ attempts to manage their surreal situation reveal about them.

Coherence was shot on a nearly non-existent budget in director James Ward Byrkit’s living room and was almost entirely improvisational, based on a skeletal script of only twelve pages. The resultant choppiness of its found-footage cinematography is a small price to pay for what that improvisation provides. The actors’ unrehearsed, spontaneous responses add additional depth to the dialogue in a film that is heavily invested in its dialogue. We often say more than we mean when we speak, and Coherence harnesses the spontaneity and subtlety of its improvised cinematography to provide considerable depth.

What Does it Mean?

Choice

What is that depth about? Well, on a first pass, Coherence is obviously about the complexities and ramifications of choice. From the start, the characters are revealed to either be preparing to make a significant choice (e.g., Em deciding whether to go to Vietnam with Kevin) or accept the consequences of past choices (e.g., Mike’s alcoholism — one of the film’s many entertaining meta-winks that the viewer’s reality may be one of the film’s alternate universes; real-life actor Nicholas Brendon (Mike) has famously struggled with drugs and alcohol). Thus, on one account, the film addresses the question of the path not taken and what it means to be saddled with the baggage of what we’ve done.

Self

Coherence also touches on more traditional doppelganger territory. In classic psychoanalysis, the doppelganger as a figure is about unacknowledged desires and the darker parts of one’s psyche. Unlike above, this is less about what one does than what one is. The film makes this theme explicit when Mike, lost in a self-pitying haze, says to Em, “This whole night we’ve been worrying there’s some dark version of us out there somewhere. What if we’re the dark version?” The metaphor is clear: through the doppelganger, we distance ourselves from our inner darkness by externalizing and projecting it onto other versions of ourselves.

Experience

Notably, neither interpretation fully explains Em’s behavior at the film’s end. By that point, the house is an emotional disaster zone. Em has realized that the only versions of the people in the house from her original world are her boyfriend Kevin and his ex, Laurie, who clearly still have feelings for one another. The group is in an uproar as an old affair comes to the surface. In the midst of this chaos, seemingly apropos of nothing, one of Mike’s doppelgangers spontaneously enters the home and beats him.

In response to that hopeful scene, Em decides to cast her lot in the parallel universes. She wanders the void, literally looking in the window at different versions of the night before settling on one that she attempts to enter through violent, homicidal force by killing the version of herself from that world. While her own universe might be a wreck without much space for her, she seems to reason that she might be able to force her way into something better.

Note that what finally pushes Em to search for a different world isn’t the choices she’s made or the darker sides of herself per se. Rather, it’s her fit with the world that is the issue. In this case, the alternate universes represent a menu of potentially improved life opportunities.

We can think of this in a few ways. One is to side with Mike that the film’s default world does indeed reflect darker impulses and desires. From that vantage point, regardless of whether Em is herself the physical manifestation of those darker impulses or is pushed to them by the pressures of a crazed universe, the result is that tragedy happens when she tries to force her way into a better world.

Pushing further, one wonders if the film isn’t hitting on a type of uncanny lived experience. In the most immediate rendering, this could speak to the experience I think we’ve all had of wanting to escape to a less damaged version of the lives we know.

Beyond desire, this could also point us toward a certain uncanny experience — something akin to Heidegger’s conception of a mood in the sense of a particular lived atmosphere or vibe. There seems to be a common if not universal experience of feeling like one is living a life that runs parallel to other versions of that life. This is a visceral feeling more than a conscious thought (cue “Once in a Lifetime”).

Seen from this perspective, much as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot captures the fact that waiting is a foundational facet of what it is to be human, Coherence might capture a common, surreal feeling that we’re living out one of many versions of some approximation of the same life. One would think not every sentient creature would have that experience, but who’s to say. I’m unsure how common it is, but at least in some cultures, it seems like a basic facet of human experience.

Conclusion (Introduction’s Doppelganger)

We started by downplaying the philosophical dimensions of Coherence, and yet we’ve found our way back to them through philosophy’s boots-on-the-ground wing of phenomenology (which on some meta-level might track the development of a field that treats phenomenology and its ilk as philosophy’s malformed doppelganger).

In this sense, and perhaps in the spirit of the film, we’ll close with a modified doppelganger of the sentence we started with: Coherence (2013) makes the first impression of being a lab supervisor in the psychology department but turns out to be a philosophy major. It tells us about how life feels and what we desire.

Because you Say “I” For Me: The Doppelganger in Possession (1981)

Credit: Oliane Productions/ Marianne Productions/ Soma Film Produktion. Distributed by Gaumont

Andrez Żuławski’s Possession (1981) is a disturbed, sprawling film that borders on incoherence. But it’s a productive incoherence.

This is a film that is so raw that its filming led the lead, Isabelle Adjani, to both attempt suicide by its completion and win the Best Actress award at the 34th Cannes Film Festival. It’s so ambitious that as an exploration of divorce, it manages to incorporate espionage, body horror, the Cold War, possession (of course), Eastern spirituality, Western spirituality, murder, and nuclear apocalypse.

It attempts a lot, and critics have rightly suggested that it’s not always successful in pulling all of those disparate elements together. Still, its ambiguity is as much an asset as a liability: Possession’s fissures, inconsistencies, and indeterminacies are part of what make it so rich.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the film’s use of doppelgangers, which while being the key to understanding its deranged ravings, resists a single reading. What to make of them?

Plot

It’s either really easy or really hard to give a summary of Possession.

In short, Possession is an avant-garde, psychological horror film. It is about an international spy, Mark (Sam Neil), who returns to his East Berlin home, where his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), has been living with their son, Bob (Michael Hogben). Anna requests a divorce, and it’s revealed she’s been having an affair. As the film progresses, she is shown engaging in increasingly strange and violent behavior while having a second affair with a tentacled monster in a rundown apartment.

That’s an accurate enough summary, but it’s simplified to the point of disingenuity. Possession is a convoluted and hateful film through which Żuławski channels the venom of his own messy divorce. It’s confusing and painful to watch.

The Doppelganger: “Too Hard to Live With, Brother”

There’s no shortage of threads to pull on in Possession. Much has been (rightly) made of the film’s use of doppelgangers—doublings of Mark and Ana, who share the same electric green eye color.

Many commentators have interpreted the doppelgangers as reflecting the characters’ idealized versions of their partners. Thus, on this account, Mark’s unnamed doppelganger is a more confident and less emotionally needy version of Mark, while Anna’s doppelganger, Helen, is the ideal housewife.

That reading definitely tells part of the story, but a few complexities remain. Mark’s doppelganger is grown out of a literal monster that Anna nurtures on the blood of her murder victims. Anyone who sees it in its monstrous, larval form is horrified. The doppelganger isn’t shown as anything resembling Mark until the film’s final scene, when it idly watches Mark and Helen be shot by government agents before inexplicably pressuring a bystander to shoot at those same agents and fleeing to the roof.

Prince Charming, right? It’s hard to say what’s being idealized here. Anna is of course possessed (or something), but that doesn’t sound like the type of fantasy to which one would look for emotional comfort in response to a murderous and abusive husband. The doppelganger is arguably more controlling and homicidal than even the “real” Mark, though potentially more competent and self-assured (in an odd, distilled way).

In contrast, Mark doesn’t harvest Anna’s doppelganger from a monstrous, larval state. Instead, he finds her working as his son’s teacher, Helen. Notably, while everyone seems to find Anna’s tentacled monster to be hideous except Anna, no one seems to see Helen as Anna’s doppelganger except Mark. Helen is mystified when Mark attempts to unmask her as Anna when he first meets her. As Bob’s teacher, she knows Anna but has no idea that they look alike.

In a later scene, Bob asks Mark if he thinks Helen is more attractive than Anna (“our mommy”). The question doesn’t make sense—the two are identical in appearance. That’s the point. Bob isn’t Mark, so he doesn’t see Helen as Anna’s doppelganger. Mark sees Helen as a version of Anna because he’s blinded by his obsessive, solipsistic misogyny and can’t see women he’s attracted to on their own terms.

Of course, Helen isn’t a real-life doppelganger any more than Anna is possessed by a real-life supernatural spirit. Both strange occurrences reflect the way that the surreal horror of unhealthy relationships can manifest as mental health episodes. In a very different way, this relationship was wonderfully explored in anthropologist/philosopher João Biehl’s brilliant, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment.

As in the case of Mark’s doppelganger, one question is how idealized Helen really is for Mark. After all, one could argue she is the one to initiate an affair with Mark when she goes to his home under the pretense of wanting to talk with Anna late at night. She sleeps with him (or some approximation of such) despite him being married and his wife not being home. She is right to then note that Mark will interpret this as confirmation of his angry, spiteful attitudes.

Thus, on this reading, while the doppelgangers have idealized elements, they retain a twisted undercurrent because neither Mark nor Anna are capable of imagining a doppelganger that isn’t refracted through the bitter prism of their failed marriage and codependence (the film ends with the two embracing for a final kiss, which is almost romantic until you remember all of the murder, private detectives, and vomiting of green goo). The doppelgangers are projections of crazed, manic minds.

Who’s Possessed? “We are all the Same. Like Insects! Meat!”

Seen from this perspective, while commentaries on the film often emphasize Anna’s possession, it could just as much be argued that it’s about Mark’s possession. Through the two characters, the film explores how dysfunctional romantic relationships can breed mental illness, which codes as “possession” in the film.

It’s interesting that Possession ends on a scene of Helen. As the sirens sound that indicate the start of the apocalypse, she turns her back on Mark’s doppelganger, who lurks creepily at the door. This is after she has defied Bob’s screaming protest not to let his father into the apartment.

It’s implied she would have let Mark in, but upon seeing that it’s the doppelganger, she turns her back on him, leaving him outside. On one level, this makes sense: Helen had previously said that she comes from a world where “evil takes physical form,” which would seem to suggest that she is equipped to see the doppelganger as a physical manifestation of evil (in this case, an “evil” bred of toxic emotional codependence).

Yet, the film heavily implies that the apocalypse is the result of Mark’s work as a double agent (via the famous pink socks MacGuffin). Aside from kicking off the apocalypse, Mark is a controlling, dishonest, and physically abusive murderer. One wonders: for someone who professes to be able to see evil in the flesh, how does that register for Helen—particularly given both her and Bob’s response to the doppelganger?

One take on it would be that Helen isn’t that understanding, and Mark’s impression of her as such is another manifestation of his biases and delusions. Alternatively, we could reframe it and see Helen as a nuanced, empathetic thinker capable of recognizing the flawed but well-intentioned undertones of Mark’s humanity. If Helen has any request for him in the film, it’s that he recognize her individuality—time and again, she challenges his self-pitying misogyny. Maybe she thinks he’s capable of more.

In a final reversal, maybe Helen is as blinded by her own preconceptions as any of the other characters. There’s no reason to take her at her word when she says she can perceive evil in the flesh (even if she thinks she can). Who’s to say how she sees things or why. In an ambiguously figurative and literal sense, it might only be when the twisted undercurrent of Mark’s and Anna’s dysfunctional relationship appears before her in physical form that her own preconceptions are punctured to the point that she has an inkling of the horror that’s at her (metaphorical but also literal) door.

Put differently, maybe Helen is in a sense as possessed as any of the characters.

Possession is a paranoid, cynical film. It’s too equivocal to provide closure for the endless loop of reflection it can inspire. Really, this is fitting--maybe the point of its indeterminacy about who or what is possessed is that we’re all vaguely possessed and indeterminate.

Punk Rock Rip Van Winkle

Photo by Evgeniy Smersh on Unsplash

In the original story, Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years, which is somehow shorter than the time I’ve been away from punk rock and its metallic sibling hardcore. I’ve recently checked in with the scene, and while I can’t say my realizations have been quite as startling as Rip Van Winkle’s, they have been illuminating.

I was young when I attended my first show—13 or so (I believe it was ’97 with VOD, Crown of Thornz, and One King Down). For the next few years, I went to an average of one show per week and systematically worked through every major subgenre of extreme music.

After a few years, my interest lost steam as I came to feel like I was retreading much of the same ground. Now and then I might put on The Age of Quarrel around the house, but I didn’t think much about hardcore/punk for a long time.

Over the last year or so, I’ve returned to hardcore with much interest. However, it’s not so much the music itself that I’ve picked up on. Through podcasts and the like, I’ve slowly pieced together the stories of where the culture and its participants’ lives have gone over the last quarter of a century. A few insights stand out.

Expected

In some cases, things have gone exactly as an informed observer in 1999 might have predicted.

There’s a grim side to this: people who were particularly unhinged, violent, or reckless often ended up meeting unfortunate fates. That probably sounds obvious, but I was a little taken aback as an adult when I realized quite how damaged many of us were. I would rather not dwell on specific cases, but considerable talent and charisma were wasted.

Yet, there’s a more hopeful slant to this as well. I grew up in Connecticut, and by the time I came along, Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed was already a key architect of the scene (my New England accent gets hilariously thick after I watch interviews with him). It's a little striking for me to see quite how famous he’s gotten, but I’m far from shocked.

Even in the ‘90s, he had a reputation for hard work. What stood out to me then and still stands out to me now is how deftly he’s been able to balance ambition with artistic integrity and taste. The result? Underground credibility combined with opportunities to host MTV shows, be nominated for Grammies, and collaborate with legendary rapper Ice-T. All this from a guy I remember passing out fliers for his band in the parking lot.

Habits and lifestyle choices matter—particularly when navigating the puzzle of how to move up without losing your way, to borrow the brilliant philosopher Jennifer Morton’s phrasing. Those things can be done both well and poorly, and it doesn’t take long for how you choose to handle them to register in your life.

Unexpected

Alas, if only things were so simple. It hasn’t all been predictable.

As above, we’ll start with the darker side of things. In some cases, bands I was sure were right on the cusp of something great didn’t last more than a few years. Candiria stands out as one of the sadder examples. Their stuff still sounds fresh now, but back then they were truly at the cutting edge of extreme music, blending hardcore, death metal, jazz, rap, and atmospheric sound design. I was sure they would end up in something resembling Jasta’s shoes today.

And I don’t think I was wrong. But, apparently, the band experienced a terrible car accident while on tour. It seems that for a variety of reasons, they never quite got their footing again after that. I’m convinced that without that tragic and unexpected turn of events, things would be very different for them as artists and for us as music fans today.

Fortunately, it’s not all so bleak. Some deserving groups have blown up in ways I never would have imagined. I still only half-believe some of that and had to double-check a lot of these developments as I wrote this.

For example, in the ‘90s, I never in a million years would have believed that The Refused would headline Coachella or At the Gates would spawn entire subgenres. Seriously? This isn’t to take anything away from those talented groups, but even at what seemed like their relative peak following the release of their signature records, I remember them playing to crowds of 150 people with half the audience going outside to smoke during their sets. How could anyone at the time ever have guessed the success those groups had ahead of them?

Habits and perspective matter, but they have their limits. We make history, but we don’t do so in conditions of our making. This fact can be as disheartening as heartening: it might take a bit of time, but forward-thinking work can find its audience.

Who knows—maybe your Medium post with ten views will inspire entire subgenres in twenty years. I’ve seen roughly comparable things happen.

Values

I thought Finn McKenty did a great video capturing what stood out to me about hardcore in the ‘90s (and I’m sure is still true now). For all its ostensible thuggery, punk/hardcore was (is) a potent setting for the exchange of ideas.

Perspectives that seemed new or unorthodox at the time but were central to hardcore have worked their way into the mainstream. McKenty rightly points out a variety of examples. Veganism was seen as a fringe lifestyle for weirdos in 1998. Now it’s mainstream to the point of being trendy (as Karl from the militant vegan/straight edge group Earth Crisissaid in a recent interview: “Somehow, we won”). I would argue even some version of modern productivity discourse has a lot in common with punk’s idea of a positive mental attitude or PMA (just check out some of the guests on Toby from H2O’s podcast to see what I’m talking about).

On the one hand, as an adult, I almost have a greater appreciation for the importance of the DIY ethic and the sacrifices it entails. The exchange of unconventional perspectives that McKenty points out wouldn’t have been possible without the obstinance of a culture that insisted on its members sleeping on floors and living in vans so they could produce magazines on xerox machines, organize concerts in VFW halls, and run record labels out of bedrooms. It took sacrifice and a certain amount of stubbornness for that to come together.

On the other hand, I see this from a more nuanced standpoint now as an adult. As one example, as a kid, I thought the Misfits’s gimmicky marketing of plastic tchotchkes, diet drinks, or whatever was eye-roll worthy. It looks a little different to me now. While it’s true some of their peers might have aged a little more gracefully, just as many if not more completely fell apart. From the perspective of creeping middle age, I can see what’s valuable about people making a living from their campy punk art. Dying from an overdose in some squat somewhere or never reaching an audience beyond a few dozen angry adolescents is hardly preferable.

Without a certain amount of pigheadedness, the culture wouldn’t have been so fresh and vital. At the same time, wisely chosen compromises can ensure that both the innovators and their innovative ideas will have and continue to have an impact.

Conclusion

Will hardcore become much a part of my life going forward? I doubt it, but my impression is that it’s a little less rigid these days, which is a welcome change. The music can be a bit much for me to digest comfortably after years of more sedate fare.

Regardless of whether I retreat to another Rip Van Winkle slumber, I’ll be curious to check in with hardcore over the next twenty or even forty years. We’ll see what geriatric punk rock truths there are to wake to in 2060.

Why I Left Academia

The author looking for a suitable place to self-immolate

I always think of my first car accident in China when someone asks me about leaving academia. A few weeks before the accident, I’d been a PhD student on a leafy New England campus when my coworker, Ellen, and I found were in a taxi hit by another taxi. Ellen was from the HR Department, which was a one-person department in which Ellen did work she hadn’t been hired to do.

I hadn’t been in China for long by that point, but I’d already figured out that I’d been tricked into working for a high-class, high-tech plagiarism firm. Ellen had taken pity on me and gone rogue in helping me to get out of my contract while maintaining my visa. The process wasn’t simple—streamlined bureaucracy doesn’t rank with Daoism, calligraphy, and education as among China’s many cultural riches.

The clock was ticking, and we were hustling. As I remember, we were rushing to submit an important piece of paperwork to some office. The accident wasn’t serious, but that taxi wasn’t going anywhere, and the driver was freaking out. Rushing against the deadline, Ellen and I played a game of Frogger with the oncoming traffic before climbing through a hole in a fence on the side of the freeway. Stumbling down the embankment, we found ourselves on a weird side street in a residential neighborhood neither of us knew. We were down to the wire, and things looked bleak until, out of the blue, a slow-moving taxi happened by that we were able to flag down.

Ellen was irritated as we got into the back. “I can’t believe this. A day from hell,” she said, arching an eyebrow and glancing at her phone to check her messages. “I’m so sorry.”

“I think this is one of the best days of my life,” I blurted out without thinking.

“What?” she said, seeming perplexed and maybe a little annoyed.

The rest of the day comes to me as a montage of questionable authenticity. I remember the person we were supposed to meet laughing as we tumbled into the room to submit the required form only minutes before the office closed. I remember eating dinner at my favorite noodle place up the street, and I remember sitting on my balcony that night as I tried to escape the humid Shenzhen air.

That probably is what I did that night because that’s what I usually did, but I don’t really remember. What I do remember is being surprised by Ellen’s irritation and thinking that I couldn’t remember a time I’d felt that alive in years.

***

It’s a true story, and it’s true as far as it goes. But this isn’t my shot at a third-rate version of expat Kerouac. Moving to China was the first thing I did after I dropped out of my PhD program. It was an exhilarating time, but of course there was another side to things. Leaving academia was one of the hardest decisions of my life, and after leaving, I grieved like I’d lost a loved one. I remember wincing when I broke the news to my former colleague, Reid, in Café Algiers.

I loved and love academia as much as anyone I’ve ever met (which is not to say I’m as good at it as everyone I’ve ever met). I still read academic sources both for fun and for my professional life as an editor. More than once, I’ve been called an academic machine.

So, why did I leave? There are a lot of answers to that question. There are the more routine ones. Often when the topic comes up, people mention important practical advice. Examples are easy enough to come by: choose a program based on research fit, choose a program with multiple potential advisors, be ready for an extremely harsh job market, etc. 

All of that is good advice. Some of it I took, and some of it I didn’t. There’s no question that poor research fit, limited career prospects, and my own thirty-something age were starting to catch up with me by the time I finally got around to leaving. At the time, I was already thinking about going into writing, editing, or publishing, and the fact that literally every person I talked to in those industries recommended I leave my program to get hands-on experience certainly made it easier for me to go. For once in my life, the thing I wanted to do was also the prudent thing to do.

However, the deeper answer for why left I has a lot to do with my willingness to take responsibility for myself. I’d let too much go for too long, and that bill came due. In hindsight, I can see how clearly many of my choices in my teens and twenties were motivated by fear and insecurity. My compulsive attempt to distinguish myself from my mal-intentioned, lumpenproletariat father combined with the feeling that I was behind in life to foster an obsessive perfectionism that at times bordered on self-abuse. That outlook, particularly when united with a moral code that was as quirky as it was rigid, wasn’t a recipe for lucidity regarding major life decisions.

Other troubling dynamics took hold. I was a first-gen college student from a milieu in which college was a fairly unusual path. Amongst my family and friends, no one seemed to know quite what to do with me until we settled on something of a hometown hero role, but that jerry-rigged, pariah-parvenu fix wasn’t sturdy enough to last.

Ultimately, however, the core issue was my own self-infantilizing. In bad faith, I’d convinced myself that outsourcing my decision-making regarding basic life choices would free me up to focus on weightier matters. I turned those decisions over to other people and common-sense solutions. I guess I saw this as the rough equivalent of other strategies I’d adopted to free up cognitive bandwidth, such as eating the same lunch every day to save time (a tossed green salad with raw tofu, a piece of fruit, and a peanut butter granola bar).

I don’t want to turn this into third-rate existentialism any more than third-rate Kerouac, but I suspect at least part of what was behind all of that was an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for having to make major life choices and deal with the messy complexities of life. Surprising perhaps no one but myself, this life strategy mirrored the one my father had employed on a very different register to disastrous and disreputable results. Abdicating responsibility for one’s life is a potent narcotic, and I still have to watch my impulses in that direction.

To bring it back to the PhD, the result was I woke up one day with no real sense of what I wanted out of the degree—or, even more fundamentally, what I wanted out of life. I was riddled with anxiety about my capacity to make decisions. What I experienced as resentment of everyone, and everything, was ultimately a reflection of the resentment I felt for myself after having turned over my life to be lived by others.

My response was to burn down everything I’d built, including a ten-year romantic relationship, and move to the other side of the globe. This forced me to find my own solutions for car accidents, visa challenges, and whatever it was I was going to do with myself. It made life seem impossible in the day-to-day, yet ever easier in the broad scheme of things.

***

Should I have finished it at the time? The answer depends on how far back we go in the thought experiment. If we take our time machine back to the day I chose to leave, then I suppose I might as well have finished. I don’t know how big of a difference it would have made in my life, but I had enough material on Dewey kicking around that I probably could have put together an unremarkable but satisfactory dissertation without terrible strain.

If we go back before that, then I’m not so sure. Hindsight is 20-20, but I certainly could have spent that time in ways that would have made my life a lot easier now. Then again, past a certain point, the question becomes so counterfactual that who’s to say what path I would have found myself on, and there’s no guarantee I wouldn’t have continued fouling things up for myself if I’d continued trying to make that path work.

Besides, I was spoiled, with a quite generous funding package from the university. Little of what I did during that round of grad school had anything to do with building an academic career, but I learned a great deal in a number of areas and left with not much more than my pride damaged. A lot of the skills and bodies of knowledge I picked up are central to my life now, and I salivate thinking about the resources and opportunities that I casually took for granted in the university setting. In the end, I guess I got out of it what I needed, and I have a certain fondness for the experience despite the frustration and bitterness I felt at the time. If I’d had the foresight to know I’d feel this way, I probably could have taken even more from it with less pain.

Would I go back now? There are days I miss it, and there are days I don’t, but that train has left the station. When I left, I’d told myself all sorts of things—I’d go back, I’d transfer programs, I’d switch fields. On some level, I think I knew that was the end, and as is often the case in life, after you’ve moved on, you’ve moved on. The currents are too strong.

***

So, we find ourselves back on that highway with Ellen. Every now and then I hear from her. The last I knew she was living in Vietnam and working as a translator. Once she’d jokingly asked if I still thought that was one of the best days of my life.

“I really don’t know, Ellen, but it was the best of something,” I’d said.

Spit and Style

The only time I spit these days might be when I’m brushing my teeth. I hadn’t thought of that until the other day when I saw someone spitting on the ground in a restaurant. I guess spitting isn’t much a part of my life anymore, but when I was a teenager, we all spit all the time. It’s true we spit beautifully — we had a certain defiant style down pat — and I wonder about its execution and purpose.

Of course, there are different ways to spit just as there are different ways to do any physical thing. Still, it strikes me that its spectrum of meaning is slightly more restricted than that of some other acts. I think part of this has to do with the fact that spitting is more voluntary than something like walking, for example. Many of us walk to get to where we’re going, though we rarely need to spit to do anything.

How one walks can communicate how one feels about others, as in the case of an angry stride or seductive saunter. It can communicate how one feels internally or about oneself, as in the case of a contemplative stroll or anxious plod. The place one chooses to walk can add another layer of meaning, as in the case of a march on the capitol.

I’m not convinced spitting is quite so versatile when it comes to style. This isn’t to say spitting can’t be done in different ways or to communicate different messages. The clinical spit done at the dentist’s office is certainly different from the panicked spit triggered by eating something soiled. Still, in many cultures, spitting is seen as unhygienic and disrespectful. This varies, of course, and I’ve been in settings where spitting was seen as more neutral — akin to a sneeze, I guess. There’s not much room for style when it comes to sneezing; it’s too reflexive and monochromatic. It is not particularly amenable to style, though there’s some wiggle room there. I’m not sure if cultural tolerance of spitting gives it more or less latitude in terms of style.

At least in Western settings, part of what gives spitting its strong but relatively narrow band of meaning is that it’s frowned on. This makes spitting an excellent choice for those looking to be disrespectful. The most violent case would of course be the symbolic and literal pollution of spitting on a person.

The punk rock movement has a long history of spitting — both on things and on people. In the case of punk, given that the culture is premised on being offensive, the choice to join in on the spitting is a way of respecting the culture by disrespecting everything else. I suspect this was more revolutionary in the 1970s. At this point, it’s quite stereotyped and ritualized.

I remember seeing the band Kill in Your Idols in the 1990s and the singer requesting that the audience stop spitting on him. “Do something new — figure out your own thing,” he’d exhorted the audience. “Maybe try spitting in your hand and rubbing it on your face.” A few concertgoers willingly or unwillingly missed the irony and took his advice. As a viewer, I felt that in terms of style, what that strategy gained in innovation it lacked in zeal: dousing yourself in your own spit somehow just isn’t the same as dousing other people or things in it.

As skateboarders in the ’90s, we all spit constantly. This might have been a vestige of the punk rock influence on skateboarding culture, though the cultural antecedents don’t need to be that direct. If anything is egalitarian, it’s spitting. It nicely complemented skateboarding’s outlaw aesthetic. Still, I think many of us wished we would spit less. Falling on concrete was painful and annoying enough without having to avoid pools of spit or have insult added to injury when unsuccessfully avoiding those pools after bumbling a tre flip.

One of my weirdest and creepiest memories of spitting comes from those skateboard days, when a quasi-homeless guy with vaguely pedophilic vibes who always insisted on being called “doctor” attempted to negotiate with a group of us to allow him to video tape us spitting. We rejected the offer, as appealing as it was. Afterwards, I’d spit as I was walking away, which he then scraped up with a folded business card he’d had in the pocket of his soiled shirt. He delicately folded the card before returning it to his pocket. I suppose spitting had a very different meaning for him, though I’d prefer not to give a ton of thought to what that was.

Style aside, one obvious physical explanation for why we spit would have been chewing tobacco, but I don’t remember that being particularly popular when I was growing up. Smoking was, though, and that seemed to correlate with spitting. I’m not sure if that was because we were always spitting and would have done it anyway or because smoking encourages spitting. I do remember the sound my friend Ian’s cigarette made when he put it out in a pool of his own spit, though I suspect the gesture was more utilitarian than symbolic in intent.

As with Ian and his cigarette, maybe we spit just to spit. At the time, I doubt any of us gave thought to what it meant. Still, the stylized and exaggerated manner of our spitting would make it seem more than just a habit. It was often as auditory as visual, and the conspicuous turn of the head and force that accompanied it made clear that we were spitting. I’m convinced you could tease out a subconscious cultural imperative to the performance. We spit because it felt good, sure, but we also spit because it said something about how we saw the world. The message might not have been subtle, but the execution had remarkable panache.

Unlike spitting, I never really cursed much. But even now I have to admit that it does feel good as a release and to punctuate a point. Similarly, maybe I should take a page from my youth and reincorporate spitting into my communicative repertoire. It’s not the most versatile gesture, but it can have a certain blunt flair when done well, and I’ve had enough practice that I could probably still pull it off with finesse.

*Spit*

Mental 📸: Lina Ferreira, Hofstadter, Dark, Karaoke Paradise

Hi! A picture inside my head on this Memorial Day:

📚 “CID-LAX-BOG” by Lina Ferreira

In picking through Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay (2021), Lina Ferreira’s “CID-LAX-BOG” caught my eye because of the Colombian connection. It’s very powerful. Lines like the following about a trip to donate blood hit like a blackjack to the nape of the neck:

 And as a thin thread of blood drips down my forearm, I picture my veins like great cylindrical halls lined with all the willing and unwilling participants of my mixed heritage. The rabies virus pumped in as if through the vents, weaving in and out, drifting over and under all the bodies inside my body, all the mixed blood in my blood.

📚Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
I’d previously read The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and seeing Hofstadter’s article version of that text in Lopate’s The Golden Age of the American Essay (2021) brought this one to mind. I’m about 20% of the way through, and at this stage, he’s exploring the relationship between pietism and rationalism in 19th/20th-century American history. Hofstadter was a masterful stylist and illuminating thinker. I thought his distinction between intellect and the intellectual was useful. I like this quote he includes from one of my heroes, John Dewey:

Let us admit the case of the conservative…If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place (45).

Beyond Dewey, quotes like this from the evangelist Billy Sunday are too much:

Jesus Christ could go like a six-cylinder engine, and if you think Jesus couldn’t, you’re dead wrong…Jesus was no dough-faced, lick-spittle proposition. Jesus was the greatest scrapper that ever lived (116).

🍿Karaoke Paradise (2022)

I saw this one at the European Cinema Festival at the Cinemateca in Bogota. It’s a Finnish documentary that follows a woman who travels to bars, nursing homes, and the like in rural areas to host karaoke events. It’s powerful in capturing the power of karaoke to combat loneliness and leave the performer feeling validated and affirmed. I’ve been revisiting some of the old punk rock/hardcore music of my youth, and group chants of the lyrics are a huge part of the live show in that subculture. The idea might be a little different, but it’s interesting to see a similar phenomenon take shape here in terms of the way that participating in rather than just observing live musical performance can satisfy deep emotional and social needs.

🍿 Dark (2022)
I’m on Season Three now. I admit things are starting to go a little off the rails for me. I adore the metaphor of time travel as a vehicle for exploring life’s untaken paths and previous mistakes. The moody atmosphere nicely carries through the entirety of the series, and some of the doubling of scenes at the start of the third season cleverly underscores the shift to a parallel universe. I like the show’s metaphysical reflections on the nature of time, but I might have dwelled for too long in the sectors of formal philosophy that take on those questions for its work in that area to hit as hard for me as perhaps it would otherwise.

Thinking Like a Girl

Credit for the image: Albion British Comics Database Wiki (https://britishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/School_Friend)

“You learned to think like a girl,” she blurted out with a force I hadn’t expected. Then she gestured toward the wine bottle. 

“Thinking like a girl.” For a second, I thought of “Throwing like a Girl” by Iris Marion Young, which is a response to Erwin Straus’s “The Upright Posture.”

In his essay, Straus writes: “Upright we are, and we experience ourselves in this specific relation to the world.” In her essay, Young writes: “At a more specific level, however, there is a particular style of bodily comportment which is typical of feminine existence, and this style consists of particular modalities of the structures and conditions of the body’s existence in the world.”

“Finish it,” I said. The brand had been new to me, but the wine had been a hit everywhere I’d brought it. I’d picked up a few bottles here and there as I made the rounds on that trip home. People liked it.

She poured from the bottle, starting with my glass.

“All for you. I have to drive,” I said.

She looked at me dubiously with her head half-lowered. “Half and half,” she negotiated.

I nodded assent, and she filled our glasses. Mine was already kind of full, I thought.

What had started this was that she’d asked about scopolamine, and I’d been explaining how important it was to be aware of your drink when you were out around the city. It was common for people to spike your drink with scopolamine to make it easier to rob you. As the stories went, it made you like a zombie—up and moving around but with no real awareness of where you were or what you were doing. In the morning, you’d have no memory of the night before. You learned to keep a close eye on your drink (drinking like a girl?).

“That’s an interesting…” I trailed off. “I was recently reading, well…” I trailed off again, aware that other people at the table were half-listening. I’d started to say that I’d recently reread Chuck Bowden’s “Torch Song,” and he made a similar point there, but I felt pedantic saying it. “These recognizable patterns, they’re….”

I was floundering, and she offered a hand. “Something like that happened the other day when I was showing a guy around the Town Hall. He was there to install something.” 

“Torch Song” is about Bowden’s experience working as a sex crimes reporter. It’s the only essay I’ve ever read like it. I read it after spending two years of my life working at a treatment facility for juvenile sex offenders (i.e., kids who’d assaulted other people, but pretty much all had previously been victims themselves, so you’re as right as you are wrong if you read that clumsy, Orwellian formulation as meaning its opposite).

I took an unintentionally large sip of wine from my glass because I have a tendency of eating and drinking quickly. I surreptitiously scanned the table; attention seemed to have shifted elsewhere as people returned to whatever it was they were talking about with whomever they were talking with. The room looked like it should smell like woodsmoke but actually smelled like food.

She continued: “I was showing him around the top floor, which is kind of like an attic. I realized when I’d walked in that I’d positioned myself so that he was in the door, and there’s only one door. I felt trapped.”

I’d left my work at the treatment facility feeling burned out and cynical after watching wave after wave of kids be perfunctorily shunted through the facility’s shoddy CBT program. The treatment curriculum’s lack of sociological awareness or appreciation for the darker sides of human psychology offered flawed foundations for its already half-assed approach.

Bowden’s is the only account I’ve found that documents the type of psychological unraveling that can follow from exposure to all of that, though my slow-motion breakdown had fewer pyrotechnics than his.

“What did he do?” I said.

“Nothing. We did an awkward little dance getting out, and I took him back downstairs.”  

Virtually every door was locked at the juvenile sex offender treatment facility. Freedom of movement was restricted there. As one astute young resident once noted to me, the place was prison with occasional therapy.

“Was he threatening or creepy?” I asked.

For a long time after I stopped working with JSOs, I would pause imperceptibly before going through doors, as though I had to remind myself that they didn’t need to be unlocked. I stopped doing that after a while.

She shrugged.

Upright we are.

Mental 📸: Someday is Today, Phillip Lopate, Dark, The Cruise

A snapshot of inside my mind would go some weird directions today. I woke up this morning and spontaneously thought of this bizarre 1990s documentary of a NYC bus tour guide. I probably saw it in 1998 or 1999 after getting it from Mad Mike’s Video in Wallingford, CT (RIP; that place was incredible). Apparently, it’s the same director who later went on to do Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman. Amazingly, they have the whole thing on YouTube: The Cruise.

I can only imagine the tours this guy gave. It must have been a very unique way to experience NYC:

“When I went in for my arraignment, the judge said that the problem is that this guy, this current person we’re judging, ran from the police for a month.

Of course, if I could have spoken, I wasn’t allowed to speak, but I would have said: ‘It’s been a lot more than a month. I’ve been running from you people all my life. And I’m going to keep running…and it made me think that, in some ways, from the perspective of molecular biology, we have the same infrastructure as plants.’”   

📚Someday is Today

I feel like I’ve slipped into full productivity-nut terrain. I’ve covered quite a bit of ground in that space, so I try to prevent my focus on productivity strategies from crowding out my actual productivity. Still, I like to incorporate a productivity book into my reading diet every few months. It provides a nice tune-up. I’d heard Someday is Today was good, and I really liked Dicks’s book on story, so I figured I’d check it out.

There are a lot of connections with my personal life--Dicks is a full-time teacher in my home state of CT, and one of the key anecdotes in his origin story is his experience of being robbed while working at a McDonald’s in Brockton, MA, twenty-five or so years ago. I did my first year of service with AmeriCorps in 2007, so I know a little about the town.

The writing style and humor didn’t always resonate with me—in some places, the voice veers into “high school valedictory address” territory that isn’t quite my cup of tea. Still, even from the perspective of a time-optimized guy, Dicks’s level of time optimization and productivity is insane. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t, but it’s hard not to admire his level of achievement and commitment to living the most meaningful life he can.

Some of his stories were inspiring; some tips were useful: per his suggestion, I’ve started standing on one leg while flossing to take the extra opportunity to strengthen my core/balance. This makes me feel completely absurd and “eccentric” in a bad way, but I think it’s helping.

Questionable flossing habits aside, I felt like I took a lot from his advice to be a “criminal.” His point is that many rules are pointless or more flexible than they appear. Often not following relatively superficial rules can save a lot of time and energy that can be put into more substantial undertakings. More concretely, he recommends carrying what he calls a “burglar bag” of useful materials that you can draw upon to steal back your time when it’s being wasted.

I’m something of a recovering rule-follower. I wasn’t much of a rule-follower as a kid, but I became one as an adult for reasons likely related to some guilt complex or other I only vaguely understand. More recently, I feel like I’ve started to see the wisdom of being a micro-petty criminal of the caliber Dicks suggests. So, I guess I’ll start to pack my productivity burglar bag.

📚The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970, edited by Phillip Lopate

Lopate is a fantastic essayist in his own right, and I adore the treasure troves that are his essay collections. I’ve worked through nearly all of The Personal Essay, as well as selections from most of his other edited volumes.

However, this is my first time looking at The Golden Age. Paul Goodman’s essay “The Universal Trap” stood out to me. I previously only knew of him as a somewhat forgotten 1960s figure, but his essay on schooling ended up being more nuanced and better written than I’d expected. Richard Hofstadter’s “Paranoid Style” is in there, which is a delight to read and left me sufficiently inspired to pick up Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which I’ll probably start later this week. Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” was illuminating, particularly in its reflections on Modernism’s awareness of the essence of painting being the two-dimensional art form. The dimensionality of art (2D vs. 3D) has been on my radar since reading Michael Clune’s Gamelife, which has a completely fascinating discussion of the aesthetic and philosophical implications of 2D vs. 3D art.

🍿 Dark

The German Stranger Things. What it lacks in style vis-à-vis ST it makes up for in depth. The painterly quality of its visual aesthetic stands out. A lot of cool interweaving plotlines—I feel like I need a whiteboard to keep track of the relations between the characters as we follow them across various historical periods. Allusions to Nietzsche, Freud, and the heavy metal band Kreator stand out.

A Note for the Guy I Impersonated in 2003

Photo Property of the Author (sort of)

I wasn’t sure if she meant me or the guy I was pretending to be when she said, “You have beautiful eyes.” She’d been staring at the ID for a while, scrutinizing it carefully and hadn’t looked up when she’d spoken.

It could have been either of us or both—maybe the way one of us looked had affected how she’d seen the other. We both had blue eyes, which had been one of the main arguments in favor of me choosing him to pretend to be.

It was a strange case where our identities—mine and the guy I was impersonating—converged.

“Thank you,” I’d finally said, having no real choice but to accept the compliment as my own. Clearly dubious, the woman had apparently decided I’d suffered enough and finally decided to ring up my order, leaving me to slink off to my other underage friends.

My fake ID. I remember my friend flipping through a small stack of IDs before settling on the one she had: Andre Y---.

Where had she gotten all of those IDs? I must have asked, but twenty years later, I don’t remember.

For a period, that became my nickname with my friends: Andre. I was Andre.

I wasn’t Andre for long. For some reason, an ID that said I was six inches taller than I was and of a different ethnicity never worked that well. I used it to get into some bars and concerts, and I think I bought beer with it a few times. It was always nerve-racking. People let it slide, but I don’t think anyone ever believed I was the guy on the license. Besides, I was almost 21 by the time I got it, so after a short span of appealing to the kindness of strangers to avoid arrest, I was able to retire it in favor of my real ID.

It never occurred to me to ask who the real Andre was, or if there even was a real Andre. I vaguely remember my friend John saying at the time that he knew the real Andre, but I didn’t believe him. I guess I’d assumed there wasn’t a real Andre.

It popped into my head the other day, and I decided to do a quick Google search. It turns out there was an actual Andre. For a few months in 2003, I was going around pretending to be him.

Reading about the actual Andre reminded me of the scenes in war novels where characters find a picture of an enemy soldier from their civilian life. The Naked and the Dead has a scene like that. Suddenly, Andre wasn’t “Andre”—he was a real guy with friends, family, a career—a whole personal history.

In hindsight, maybe John had known him. Andre and I could have easily crossed paths. He reminds me of a lot of people I knew during that time. He briefly went to the same local college many of my friends attended. He lived in a town I’d often visit for its record shop. Apparently, he dabbled in skateboarding, which was a big thing for me during that period.  

There’s not a ton I can say about the actual Andre for certain, but I can be sure that at some point on May 23, 2001, the real Andre had gone to the DMV and had his picture taken. Overall, things seem to have gone well for him after that: he took up a trade after leaving college early, got married, and had two daughters.

At least, they went well until they didn’t. Most of what I know about him comes from obituaries. He died young in 2018. The obituaries don’t say how. Often that’s done when the person died for a particularly unfortunate reason. I hope that wasn’t the case for him.

Someone hosted an online fundraising drive after his death. The money was supposed to support his family and pay for his burial expenses. I took an inexplicable sense of pride in seeing that it had exceeded its $10,000 goal.  

His expired license is a record of a man who no longer walks the Earth. Despite this, his memory kicks around in the head of another man he’d never met and now lives on a continent he likely never visited.

If he’d lived longer, I would have told him the lady who worked at Teri’s Package Store in Higganum, CT, in 2003 said he had nice eyes. I’d be willing to turn the compliment over to him. After all, she’d been looking at his picture when she’d said it.

Mental 📸: Mailer, Possession (1981), Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

I didn’t include it in this list because I just started it, but Dark seems promising. It was presented to me as a blend of Stranger Things and Twin Peaks, which is quite a combination, so I’m going in with high expectations (at least based on the first and final TP seasons; the stuff in the middle was too much for even a Lynch fanatic like myself).

🍿Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Along with Faces of Death, this one had been something of an urban legend for me. I saw they had it on Kanopy and finally got around to watching it.

It’s famously controversial for its potential racism and authentic mutilation of animals. Despite its best efforts, it certainly reflects the biases of its time, and it’s hard for me to justify the torture of animals for the sake of art. At the same time, the film’s anger is palpable, and I can understand the rage that could lead to the use of grotesque measures to underscore the grotesquerie of Western arrogance, ignorance, and violence. From a cinematic standpoint, its help in pioneering the modern found footage approach to cinema was more innovative than I’d expected.

🍿Possession (1981)

I’m unusually patient with maximalist art that fails from overreach. This one weaves together many of my pet tastes: the Soviet bloc, body horror, doppelgangers, impressionistic representations of mental health challenges, etc. It feels genuinely deranged, which is part of its artistic merit but also makes it uncomfortable to watch. Even I felt like it started to get a little top-heavy, and any film that tries to do that much is bound to spread itself thin. I guess I ended up being of two minds about it; it might be worth watching it again.

I was surprised to see that this Massive Attack video pays homage to the film’s subway scene. Pretty cool!

📚The Naked and the Dead (1948)

I finally finished off this one. I thought the final scenes were deftly handled, and Hearn’s death in particular was superbly rendered. The sections in which the men carry Wilson down the mountain were some of the strongest of the entire novel. In the end, the book’s cynicism felt earned, and I found it to be genuinely disheartening. Passages like the following hit hard:

Only…for an instant when he [Cummings] heard the news of Hearn’s death, it had hurt him, wrenched his heart with a cruel fist. He had almost grieved for Hearn, and then it had been covered by something else, something more complex. For days whenever Cummings thought of the Lieutenant he would feel mingled pain and satisfaction.

Hot dog, indeed.

Better get Into What you Gotta Get Into: Misogyny and Institutional Failure in Barbarian (2022)

Barbarian (2022) is a frothy film of themes like intergenerational trauma, incest, and urban blight.

The line on Barbarian is that it’s best experienced when you go in blind, and I think that’s right. The plot goes in some genuinely surprising directions, and much of its pleasure and intelligence is in those twists and turns.

With that in mind, I wouldn’t recommend reading a blog post about the film if you haven’t already seen it, but here’s a quick summary if you prefer Cliff’s Notes to roller coaster rides:

A woman, Tess (a fantastic Georgina Campbell), arrives at an AirBnB in a dangerous, largely abandoned neighborhood in Detroit (Brightmoor) in the middle of the night. As it turns out, the AirBnB has been double-booked. Tess is initially suspicious of Keith (Bill Skarsgard shining), the other guest, but as it turns out, he’s well-intentioned. Less well-intentioned is the monster (Matthew Patrick Davis) lurking in the basement. The monster is shown to be the product of generations of incest by a serial rapist and murderer, Frank (Richard Brake), who owned the home prior to the neighborhood’s decline. Meanwhile, in the present day, the home is visited by its current owner, AJ (Justin Long), a disgraced Hollywood actor now facing a rape allegation. While AJ hopes to sell the home to scrape up money for his legal defense, his fate comes to overlap with Tess’s as they both attempt to escape the monster.

Light viewing (which I mean both seriously and in jest).

Commentators have rightly pointed out that the film investigates different forms of misogyny. It nicely unpacks how misogynistic abuse can lead to successive generations of trauma (admittedly the plot mechanics of having multiple inbred generations that result in hyper-strong mutant monster offspring take shape across 30 years requires a little suspension of disbelief, but, hey, being cavalier about literal accuracy is one of the appealing features of popcorn sociologizing). It captures the heartbreakingly obsessive, smothering form of love that an abusive relationship can foster in its victims. It sets up Frank and AJ as corollaries while underscoring the “monsters” that their hatred and violence produce as a result of them being monsters themselves.

In this regard, as absurd as this sentence is about to sound, the final scene of the monster’s death is touching and is effectively juxtaposed with Frank’s death: while both die from a gunshot to the head, Frank’s is done selfishly when he realizes he has finally been caught while the monster’s acceptance of its death is an act of mercy to set Tess free.

I wouldn’t call it a subtle film per se, but it’s suggestive in a number of ways. For example, it stood out to me that when we are first introduced to AJ, he’s shown singing the lyrics to Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi”:

Everybody who read the Jungle Book
Will know that Riki Tiki Tavi is a mongoose who kills snakes
When I was a young man, I was led to believe there were organizations
To kill my snakes for me
i.e., the church, i.e., the government, i.e., school
But when I got a little older, I learned I had to kill them myself

I said, Riki Tiki Tavi mongoose is gone
Riki Tiki Tavi mongoose is gone
Won't be coming around for to kill your snakes no more, my love
Riki Tiki Tavi mongoose is gone

It’s a great song and is superb musical accompaniment to AJ driving in his retro convertible along the California coast.

Beyond that, the lyrics are arguably less subtle than the film: our institutions have failed us, and we have to solve our problems ourselves. No Riki Tiki Tavi working on our behalf. I imagine this was a more striking sentiment when the song was released in 1970. Now, more than half a century later, our institutional cynicism is (rightly) so thick that the song can seem almost quaint.

The link between the song and the film’s thematic content is obvious: Barbarian is pretty clear that institutional failure has contributed to the utter desolation of Brightmoor (and, by extension, a sizable part of American society). Perhaps the most overt illustration of this is the police officers’ blasé and bemused responses to the heavily traumatized Tess after she has escaped the monster and is begging for help. Spoiler alert: the officers don’t help.

In that sense, the Donovan song was an interesting choice to introduce us to AJ. If you think about it, AJ’s situation might reflect the only case in the entire film of our institutions at least kind of working. AJ is guilty of the rape, and he’s paying a price for it: his pilot has been canceled, he’s facing bankruptcy, his family seems skeptical if not horrified, and his lawyer remarks on a “high probability” that he’s about to be arrested.

Of course, this isn’t to say that all is well or that our institutions will carry through at the end of the day, but his case is markedly different from Frank’s, who is never formally held accountable for his years of rape and murder. In the end, AJ is dealt with via street justice on the part of the monster, though his life was trending downward because of his self-delusion and entitlement well before the monster finally gets around to crushing his head.

What to make of that? It could be a statement on social class—AJ’s victim was a Hollywood actress, while Frank’s multiple victims seem to have been working-class people. That would certainly fall in line with the film’s approach to gentrification and urban neglect. Another way to come at it would be to see it as nuancing the film’s treatment of institutional failure: we have occasional pockets of high-profile success in reining in our wildly unchecked social problems while leaving the majority of cases unaddressed. A third of many potential interpretations might give us more of a psychoanalytic account of the monstrous impulses locked away in the metaphorical basement (Frank), which are generally tolerated barring an occasional over-reach into polite society (AJ).   

That’s just a start. The film is suggestive enough that we could take it a number of directions while being vague enough to not point us toward much of a resolution here. And that’s fine. The questions are enough. Director Zach Cregger might not be Riki Tiki Tavi, but in these desperate days, maybe popcorn horror can help guard the garden. Someone has to.

Mental 📸: Fritz Lang, Kelly Reichardt, Mailer, Steven Pressfield

Strange last week or two—I’ve been super busy with client work and also really anxious. As a result, my media consumption has slowed slightly, but I’ve still been able to consume some great stuff:

🎬 Metropolis (1927)

This was my first time seeing the more complete version that was released in 2010; I’d previously seen one of the abbreviated versions in a film history class I took years ago. It was much weirder and angrier than I remembered. A lot of strange details, like the pentagram in Rotwang’s laboratory, stood out to me. Needless to say, it’s absolutely visually stunning.

I know Lang later rejected the film’s conclusion as simplistic, and of course that’s true. Thinking about that made me realize how the viewer can so easily slip into a certain condescension when viewing historical sources—I didn’t consciously think of the conclusion as simplistic (more “cute” or “quaint”), though of course if a modern artwork put forward such a naïve view, I would likely need to be hospitalized from my tremendous eyeroll.

🎬 Showing Up (2023)

I adore Kelly Reichardt’s work, and I was thrilled to see her pair up again with Michelle Williams. I thought it was a fantastic success. The realities of creative struggle and failure stood out to me, though it was the touching treatment of the complex relationship between two frenemy creators that carried it.

🎙️ Various Steven Pressfield interviews

I’m not always on board with a literal interpretation of Pressfield’s stuff on past lives, the muse, etc., but a lot of what he says resonates with my experience of the psychology of creativity. His writing advice is super helpful—both directly and indirectly. It’s also pretty nuts that his agent is 98 and the same guy who originally sold On the Road.

📚 The Naked and the Dead (1948)

I’m about 75% of the way through it now. As always, I adored the “time machine” segments. Red’s section stood out to me, and kind of reminded me of sections of Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy, and I have a soft spot for that one (Lethem’s The Brooklyn Crime Story seemed to have some resonances of that text, which I thought was cool). One of my favorite details is Mailer’s consistent hint that General Cummings might not be clear on his own motivations in shaping military policy around his petty conflicts with a subordinate (Hearn)

The Work of (Not) Mourning

One of the few things as certain as my death is yours. Part of what it means to live is to deal with the deaths of others—those we love, and those we don’t.

I made it through a good part of the first half of my life without losing too many people close to me. That luck has run out over the last few years (weirdly, I wanted to phrase that as “that long overdue debt has come due,” but why think of it as a “debt” and to whom or what would it be owed?). I loved some of those people deeply, others I didn’t know very well, and still some I’m not so sure I liked much at all.

The result is I’ve spent a good part of the last year trying to figure out how to mourn, who to mourn, and when to mourn. Indeed, while mourning might be universal work, we don’t get much guidance on how to do it. Our educational institutions won’t touch it, and most of us get very little broader cultural support in that area.

Once I had a professor from overseas who pointed out how weird it was that American society provided so little education on romance or sex. Those are such important parts of life, he reasoned, but we leave people to figure them all out on their own. A similar point could be made about mourning. Grieving is unavoidable and important for ethical as well as psychological reasons, but we have few reliable norms, practices, or inherited wisdom to help us face death in any of its manifestations.

In thinking about this, one book that came to mind was Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, which I’d first read years ago in grad school. The construction of the book itself is interesting—it’s an edited collection of diverse texts (e.g., eulogies, funeral orations, essays, and letters) that Derrida wrote after or about the deaths of his friends. Derrida was part of a fascinating generation of thinkers, and he outlived many of them. He wrote beautifully about his friends when they were gone.

It's a wonderful book, and it really shows Derrida wrestling with the ethics of how to mourn. In a conceptual strategy typical of Derrida’s thought, he notes how in mourning we are enmeshed in puzzling contradictions. These puzzles generally don’t have solutions; often the best we can do is to try to avoid getting knotted up in them. It’s as hard to mourn well as it is to live well.

For example, Derrida writes about the ethical responsibility we feel to honor a friend’s death by saying something about them. He’s right, of course, and that imperative can feel more like a compulsion. However, he also points out how hard it is to do that right. Is it possible to find the right words to express the depth of genuine loss? If words are bound to fall short, then is the solution not to speak? However, if that silence itself is intolerable or unethical, then do you content yourself with speaking inadequately? If so, then what types of inadequate speech will be adequate?

Lunch is on me if you have an answer up your sleeve. I could certainly use the help.

Derrida’s text focuses on mourning friends. Friendship is a very specific type of relationship. While he acknowledges some stormy moments, at least in The Work of Mourning, he limits himself to writing about people he ultimately liked and will miss.

In that sense, I’ve found myself wondering what puzzles might be true of other cases of mourning. Different relationships will be mourned in different ways. Mourning a parent is different from mourning a friend—or a respected adversary. Mourning a healthy relationship is different from mourning an unhealthy one.

I’m particularly curious about that last one—how to mourn a relationship that wasn’t joyful. Derrida talks a lot about “interiorization” in the act of mourning or the way you internalize the memory of a person. In a different way, I briefly noted this type of experience in a previous post. When you engage with someone, there’s a way you draw their voice and perspective into you as an enduring image. It’s a type of memory you breathe life into, like some strange Pinocchio of people you’ve known. Of course, you’re behind the whole thing, but it can certainly feel like the image acts of its own volition. Think of what it feels like when you suddenly just know what an old friend would think of something you’ve said or done.

Given that he’s talking about friends, Derrida of course discusses interiorization as a way of keeping the dead alive inside you. I like that idea. But interiorizing someone isn’t always what you want—there are plenty of voices in my head that I wish I’d never let in (though I guess you don’t always have much of a say in it). Interiorization is at the heart of mourning, and it gets an interesting twist in the case of mourning an unhealthy relationship: it seems to me that part of mourning a non-joyful relationship is to interiorize the person just enough to remember the failures of the relationship without letting them in too deeply. Their voice can be poisonous.

Just like in the examples Derrida gives of mourning a friend, mourning someone you don’t miss is important for the same ethical and psychological reasons. Whitewashing the relationship of its toxicity is dishonest, unfair to the world, and harmful to your own growth for many reasons—not the least of which is that you need to remember enough to avoid future experiences of abuse.

Is such a thing possible? How do you handle that contaminated emotional material without being contaminated? How do you pay proper respects to the death of one whose voice you should interiorize without really interiorizing? How do you mourn without mourning?

Mental 📸: After Yang, John Franklin Bardin, Mailer, The Trap

They’ve been doing work on the apartment above mine, which has made sleep a little rough. I’m trying to look at it is a meditative practice to see if I can hold a thought in my head while trying to work in a construction zone. Fingers crossed they wrap up whatever they’re doing this afternoon.

A portrait inside my head:

🎬After Yang (2021)

I adored Kogonda’s Columbus, which I’d first seen at the Brattle and recently rewatched, so I was really excited to see this one. It has plenty of big ideas, though I wish it’d had more if it’s going to take that tack. Still, Kogonda is a master of the little moments, and it’s the little moments that make it. My favorite scene might be when Mika wakes up to get a glass of water and interrupts her father watching Yang’s memories, which was beautifully executed.  

🎬The Trap (2007)
Adam Curtis’s stuff is always fascinating. I love the idea of investigating how our conceptions of freedom have led to important social outcomes. The film paints with incredibly broad strokes, and it’s easy to quibble over a million details—both historical and conceptual. Still, it’s provocative, and works for a popular audience rarely if ever take on this type of important approach.  

On a personal level, it felt very characteristic of the intellectual climate of its time, which for me lines up with undergrad and my first experiences reading topics covered in the film like Isaiah Berlin, game theory, US foreign policy in Iraq, etc. As strange as it might sound about a film like The Trap, it had a certain nostalgic value for me.

📚The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin Bardin (1946)

I read this weird little book that plays with the potential depth of pulpy noir over the winter. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory recently, and this passage came back to me:

“Memories exist whole in the mind; to put them down in words demands sequence, a sense of time and space, of then and now. But when one remembers an event that belongs to the far past and relates it to another happening that belongs to yesterday, these memories exist together simultaneously—they are both, for a moment, now, not then. And so it had been with me when I stretched out on the bed in my small room, shut my eyes and with the blotting out of sight closed down upon the present, let the lost past seize me and hold me fast. I saw it whole, lived it all again – not in an hour, or even in several minutes, but in a single, incalculable instant….” (35)

📚The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)

I’m about 25% of the way through it. There’s much more to like here than I expected. Of course the combat scenes are beautifully rendered and illuminating for historical reasons. I would make a similar point about the book’s account of the antisemitism and covert fascism in the US army during WWII. But it’s really the scenes that explore the soldiers’ backstories that resonate with me; I thought the “time machine” chapter on Croft was particularly effective and dark This is my first time reading TNATD, and I’m curious to see where it goes.

People Mountain, People Sea

I’d been in pain for nearly three months when I finally agreed to visit the hospital.

“You are being selfish, racist,” my girlfriend, Xin, had said when I had rebuffed the idea of visiting the clinic. She worked two side hustles in addition to her full-time job in arts management. I knew she’d spent over an hour handling the red tape necessary for a foreigner to see a doctor in China. It had been hard on her for me to be homebound and in constant pain.

“Well, he’s one of the best, right?” I finally conceded.

I arrived at 1:30 p.m., though my appointment wasn’t until 2:30 p.m. When I got to the office, I waited in line to show my ticket to the woman behind the counter. Smiling and nodding, she signaled that I was in the right place. I turned and began to drift toward a line of seats. A woman, another patient, touched my arm to catch my attention. “This is next,” she said, pointing to a small kiosk that I was walking away from.

A security guard came over as he saw me approach the kiosk. He helped me run my card through the machine and handed me a slip with the details of my appointment.

“Do you speak Chinese?” he asked in Mandarin.

“Very little,” I said in Mandarin, shaking my head doubtfully.

He looked worried. “Very little,” he repeated now in English.

“I have a Chinese friend, and she will help me. I am waiting,” I said slowly and deliberately.

“Oh, very good. You will wait, and your friend will help. The doctor will help,” he said, delighted. He gave a thumbs-up. I smiled.

I took my receipt and went to hover behind a row of chairs in front of the electronic billboard that listed the upcoming names and appointments. My name wasn’t up yet. Nervously, I kneaded the wadded-up tissue I’d used to clean my hands after using the bathroom. I had been warned that bathrooms in Chinese hospitals often didn’t have soap or paper towels, so I’d brought hand sanitizer and tissues. It had been good advice.

The Chinese have an expression for crowded places: people mountain, people sea. The room was crowded, and I was jostled by shoulders and elbows. People shouted into cell phones, shouted at each other, and shouted at video games they played on their phones.

Xin arrived at exactly 2:30 p.m. She had taken the afternoon off from work and dressed nicely for the day, wearing high boots and a cool hat

“You look great,” I said.

“I know,” she said, smirking.

We sat together and she browsed through Taobao on her phone as I explained my questions while looking over a short write-up that I’d done before visiting the Western medical clinic in town a few weeks before.

“Do you think I should get this bag?” she asked, gesturing towards the phone.

“I’m really not sure,” I said.

A person came over to sell us some sort of liquid cleaner. I’d seen the routine at tea houses in town: the salesman would first draw on their shoes with a ballpoint pen before demonstrating how quickly the cleaner would remove the ink.

“Bu yao,” I said somewhat fiercely. The guy moved on to the people sitting next to us.

“Do you like the yellow?” she asked, pointing again to the bag.

“Sure,” I said distractedly, standing to see if my name had come up on the screen. I noticed it at the bottom: Jason Hamilton Piers.

“So,” I said, “I have one key question for him: does he see evidence of a new hernia. At the other clinic they mentioned I might have the start of an incisional hernia. That’s also the advice I’m getting online. I’d also be curious to know his thoughts on hernia mesh removal. I know it’s new and controversial,” I said.

She nodded.

We entered the hallway and lined up in front of the examination room. I could see inside and recognized the doctor from his picture online. Xin peered in, and what looked to be the middle-aged husband of the couple ahead of us eased the door shut, gently closing it in her face.

The hallway was as loud as the waiting room, with people darting in and out of examination rooms. The people inside would shout back that they weren’t finished yet. The room was small, so we were only a few yards from the doctor. I peered around nervously. She noticed.

“It’s crowded. This is the best hospital in all of Sichuan, and Sichuan is one of the biggest provinces. If we went to a country hospital, it would be slow and quiet,” she explained, reading my mind. “This is an expert. He teaches medical students at Sichuan University, so a lot of people want to talk to him.” I tried to see it her way: there was a lot of demand for the man’s time.

Eventually, a young woman, likely a med student, opened the door and motioned for us to enter as the couple walked out. We walked the four feet to stand at the doctor’s table.

“What is wrong with you?” he said to me in English. “You have a hernia?”

Xin released a nervous stream of rapid Mandarin that I didn’t follow. The doctor cut her off. “He’ll check for a hernia,” she told me.

I kept my back to the door, which I noticed was still open, and lowered my pants just far enough for him to be able to touch my bare abdomen

“Cough! Cough!” he barked. He palpated my abdomen. Xin said something.

“Mesh? Mesh?” he shouted.

I nodded and Xin said something else. The exam concluded. We had been in the office for roughly 3 minutes.

“Shi-shi,” I said stupidly as we walked out.

In the waiting room, Xin suggested we sit to discuss the meeting. “He noticed a lump. He said a hernia can lead to a lump.”

“Right,” I said.

“But sometimes you can have a lump after surgery, and there is nothing that can be done about that.”

“Definitely. I had my surgery twelve years ago, but I didn’t have a lump until three months ago.”

“He said you have been in pain for a long time, and we should go back if you have a hernia. Meanwhile, he says we should go to the pain clinic because there is nothing you can do for problems with hernia mesh.”

“What? That’s not true.”

She shrugged.

“Wait, what? What was that?” I said, my voice rising. “We saw the doctor for like two minutes. He didn’t answer any of our questions.”

“We should go,” she said, standing. “Have you had lunch?”

“Idiot,” I said while looking in the doctor’s direction. I stood and considered going back into the office. I’d already lost my cool in China in a way I never had in the United States. A few months before, back when I was able to walk without pain, I’d had an outburst when the guy in front of me had smirked after allowing a friend to cut in line during a long, hot wait to get down from one of the lower summits of Mount Hua. It was disorienting to see how quickly the easy arrogance of my scholarly poise could evaporate.

“I think we should go,” she said again. “Do you want to see the campus of the medical school?”

“That guy was a hernia specialist? An academic and professor in the medical school? Are you serious right now?”

Xin got quiet. “You don’t understand.” She paused, and then it rushed out: “Maybe next time go with someone else, someone like Brother Xiang or Brother Lu. They will want to help you. They are men, and they are rich. Maybe he would have talked to us for longer if we had been with them”

“Money?” I shouted. “We are talking about people’s health, for Christ’s sake. I’ll pay him three times what we just did for a reasonable standard of care.”

“You don’t understand. You are not used to this.” She paused. “There is a gap between us.”

The sea of people swarmed around us. I lowered my eyes. “Thank you for trying to help me. We tried. We did the best we could.”

We were both quiet as we zig-zagged through the crowds and made our way out. Outside, we stopped on a corner. I took out my phone to call a Didi. People zoomed by on electric scooters, bicycles, and mopeds. Xin stared at the ground. My abdomen hurt.

“We have a lot of people. It is hard to make sure that everyone has what they need. Rich Chinese go to the United States for healthcare, or they use connections. You can go back home. The doctors there will see you because you are from their country,” she said.

I held up my phone to indicate the Didi was arriving.

She motioned with her head: “We should go into the street. I don’t want him to drive off if he doesn’t see us.”

I followed her into the crowded street, unsure if I was lost on the mountain or lost at sea.

Mental 📸: Derrida, Mailer, Putty Hill, Algren

A snapshot of where my mind has been during the last week of this unseasonably warm April in Bogota:

📚The Work of Mourning by Jacques Derrida (2001)

I’d previously read this around 2010 when I was in grad school, but I had the idea of revisiting it. I’d been picking at it for the last month or so and finally finished it off. I remember once seeing David Krell give a talk, and he mentioned that it was one of his favorites of Derrida. I agree. It’s a collection of diverse documents (e.g., letters, essays, funeral orations) that serve as tributes to his friends while directly or indirectly addressing what it means to mourn. As is often the case with Derrida, it implicitly questions the boundary or what does and doesn’t count as a philosophical text. The piece on Roland Barthes is obviously the centerpiece, but I particularly liked the ones on Lyotard and Louis Marin.

📚The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)

I just started this one. I’m listening to the audio book when I do things around the apartment and reading the physical book the rest of the time. I haven’t done much Mailer before this. Someone said the best character Mailer came up with is “Norman Mailer,” and there’s no question that the “Mailer” character is not in step with the current zeitgeist, so I’m curious to see what I make of this one.

🎬The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)

Went in expecting to hate this; I know Algren was excluded from the creative process and Ray Bradbury turned down a huge sum of money by choosing not to work on it. I’m not a big Frank Sinatra guy. Still, while it could have been a thousand times better with Algren’s help, and it lacks the verisimilitude, poeticism, and depth of the novel, I thought it shaped up to be surprisingly solid.   

🎬Putty Hill (2011)

Absolutely incredible and heartbreaking. The film casts mostly non-actors in an interview format as it tracks the days leading up to the funeral of a young man (Cory) who has just died of an overdose. It nicely succeeds as sociology and doesn’t patronize its working-class subjects, but it also works on a much deeper level by emphasizing the solitude and banality of death; we learn almost nothing about Cory and never hear directly from him. The scenes of his funeral are suitably impersonal. Bleak stuff, but it very much resonates with my experience. It was a nice counterpoint to the Derrida, which takes much more seriously the ethics and importance of mourning along with the unique singularity of a human life.

Naming and the Namesake

At some point, my mind put this sequence together:

I imagine the narrative line is clear enough: I’ve lost some dear friends in the last few years, and in some cases, those friends have had their lives commemorated by having some fortunate young person named after them.

I’ve had the same best friends since I was 8 (literally). As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to see how rare that is.

It makes going home kind of weird. I grew up in a small town, and I left when I was 18. Most of my friends from childhood are still there—really, most of the people I know from childhood in general are still there. My mom still lives in the same house I grew up in. The town has been slightly gentrified, but it hasn’t changed much overall.

This makes going home comforting but also strange. Things feel like they’ve been stuck in a time capsule. I’m never sure how to fit the adult version of myself into that space—or if I even want to.

I have a conflicted relationship with my background. It’s nice to have such old friends, but they also remind me of an oppressive and stifling time in my life.

It’s devastating when a part of that early childhood milieu passes. It reflects the destruction of an intensely local world that will be gone forever.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood lately and how to relate to it. I’ve also been thinking about naming, and how powerful the act of naming can be.

The act of giving something a name is an intervention in the world. It’s a creative act that shapes things.

A name isn’t merely a matter of convention or fashion; it conditions perception. Of course, I don’t mean that it literally changes the objective world, but it changes our experience of the world on a fundamental level. Something’s categorization is part of what gives it the effect it has on us—kind of like the studies where researchers put cheap wine in expensive bottles, which led people to rate the wine’s taste higher.

Maybe a rose by any other name wouldn’t smell as sweet.

And, of course, naming shapes the social world of which we are all a part. It contributes a new symbol to our universe of shared references in a way that preserves and communicates meaning and lived experience. We don’t live in worlds of bland physicality; we live in networks of meaning. Naming helps shape those networks in a way that goes beyond the act itself.

In the example above, it will condition the social world of my hometown milieu. The lived atmosphere of the place is now different and will retain a resonance it wouldn’t have before.

I don’t think I’d fully appreciated the depth of that realization before my subconscious put together this photo series.