I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Practical Notes on the Possibility of Time Travel

Yesterday, for the second year in a row, I went onto campus on a sunny springlike Saturday to read questions for a high school academic tournament sponsored by the university college bowl team. I did it because I used to be on the other end, a high school student who must have gone to five or six of these things every year (and to think he grew up to become a nerd), and I came back to verify that fourteen years and seven hundred miles have changed absolutely nothing. Everything about the tournament is deeply familiar, right down to its setting in a seventies eyesore in windowless brown brick that’s disconcertingly evocative of my high school. I give up my Saturdays because the tournament offers the promise of time travel, the prospect of stepping bodily into my own memories.

Anyone convinced their teenage experience was special or unique ought to spend a couple of days in the company of the young. These kids are instantly familiar, a bunch of Platonic archetypes so perfectly embodied in one of last year’s teams they could have been my old classmates. There’s the High School Rebel, his rebellion limited mostly to wiseass comments and a bad haircut (if I seem obsessed with coiffures in this post, and I will, it’s only because adolescents regard these external signifiers as more expressive of their character than anything they could ever translate into words, let alone action, right?). There’s the Smart Guy, Quiet Guy, Point Gatherer, racking up the questions and shouldering his team without complaint. There’s the Fey Guy. I wonder if he’s allowed to come all the way out by now, but then this is Tennessee. And there’s the Girl – no, let’s not reduce her to her gender, uncommon as it is in these circles. There’s the Brilliant, Attractive Girl who seems… there is no nice way to say this… a Bit of a Head Case. They’re all head cases of course, but the gender always makes the B,A,BofaHC Girl more visible. No, it isn’t fair, and if my taxonomy seems cruel remember that every time I type “they” I really mean “we.”

I’m writing this not out of cruelty but delight. Walking through the crowd yesterday I realized I was just as keyed up as they were, not because I had anything riding on the tournament but because I was surrounded by some quality or qualities I didn’t even know I was missing. Maybe it’s their astonishing, liberating lack of judgment. These kids have no internal editor telling them not to fill their notebooks with cyberpunk novellas or their sketchpads with manga elves. They don’t know these things reveal an impoverished imaginative lexicon and that fidelity makes them seem a little less impoverished. They can honestly believe that no one has ever written their poems or suffered their agonies or heard the first half of the White Album in quite the same way. They haven’t yet figured out that their story, everybody’s story, has already been written. They honestly believe they are unique.

With that comes a certain arrogance, of course, especially in the kind of kid who’s likely to end up spending the first springlike Saturday afternoon of the year holed up in a windowless brick building answering trivia questions. The best kids, justifiably confident in the depth of their intellect and the breadth of their knowledge, are often convinced that they already know all there is to be known, at least in the safe and masterable fields of literature and chemistry – but even that is a complement to their winning naïveté. After fifteen years I’m ready to pardon even their worst traits (remember, every time I type “they”…), and seeing them always brings on an intense desire to forgive or atone for all the stupid little mistakes from my own past, even those not worth remembering.

You would think this experience wouldn’t be quite so foreign to somebody who interacts with eighteen-year-old college freshmen almost every day, but there you have it. Perhaps it’s because these tournaments are filled with the kids I spent most of my time with back in high school, undiluted by the general population, and as such they constitute a kind of reunion; or perhaps it’s because I wisely separate myself from the lives of the kids I teach, filing that under “work,” while I know from experience how deeply, strangely personal these tournaments really are. These events were never just public interactions but some sort of personal testing in the only arena we had: geek duels fought according to nerd bushido. Then again, maybe this is true of everything in adolescence, even the public parts, especially the public parts: it all has something intimate riding on it. Every moment is legible as some narrative of ability, virtue, achievement, romance, every day a potential roller coaster of triumph and failure, love and rejection. Small wonder that it looks more attractive now than the daily grind of shower work eat sleep – in small doses, anyway, and at a great remove.

I would be lying – or tactically omitting an unpleasant truth – if I didn’t mention one other reason for the stark affective disconnect between my everyday interactions with my students and these annual glimpses at their immediate successors. The kids who come to these tournaments are not the kids who come to my university. Many of them have already made their college plans, and they don’t include us.

If it sounds like I’m accusing one party of either superiority or inadequacy, all I can say is that it’s a little more complicated than that. A few of the teams do bring a certain air of affronted snobbery; hearing a couple of kids snicker their way through our admissions officer’s presentation at lunch (the university has tried to use this tournament as a recruiting event, with how much success I can’t imagine) did not endear them to me. But most of the kids take the event extremely seriously, some of them driving three hours to come here just so they can say they tried and won. (Three hours. That would have been unthinkable in Maryland, where there were at least three college-run tournaments and a couple of high school ones all within an hour’s drive, and it testifies to the scarcity of opportunities in a less doctorate-rich environment. Maybe you have to drive three hours to find an academic competition when you live in an income tax-averse state that’s ranked forty-ninth in the nation in education funding.) I’m still not going to see them this fall. Perhaps they’re on their way out of the forty-ninth ranked state.

But if they aren’t lining up to enroll, neither did our university put its best foot forward, whether it was the generally disorganized proceedings (not exactly doing anything to contradict our local reputation) or the glimpses we tendered of our own impoverished lexicon. A student from our college bowl team presented the tournament awards with a speech that blithely recycled the language of bland affirmation so common to our own administrators, a language so bankrupt I can’t even call it inflated. He didn’t seem to notice that the kids could already see through his rhetoric, that his repeated invocations of “intelligence” and “achievement,” so flattering to the schoolmarms and hucksters from whom he stole them, mean nothing to students who know intelligence by more and subtler names. They only marked competitors and host apart, linguistic reminders that this day was just a momentary meeting of people on their way to and from different positions in a hierarchy too universally understood to be named. At that moment the day became a parody, a painful joke the star performer wasn’t in on. But this isn’t what I wanted to write about. This isn’t nostalgic at all.

I can accept, then, that I was also affected by a sense of restored inheritance, recovered belonging. The kids’ fashions and haircuts – when not indicative of that tragic nerdish inattention to fashions and haircuts – suggested a comfortable sort of rebellion I’m used to seeing at universities, that I don’t see enough of here. Every caste has its own privileges, none moreso than these kids who have the luxury of being different in all the approved ways, but before you judge them too harshly consider that schools are much worse off without their sense of intellectual entitlement.  It's the only thing holding anyone accountable.

One of my favorite movies, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, tells me that high school in Texas in 1976 was not so different from high school in Maryland in 1988. Now I see that you can add Tennessee in 2005, and probably anywhere else as long as it offers the same middle class privileges. I love Dazed and Confused because I see myself in it, but now, having played the Wiley Wiggins and Adam Goldberg and maybe just a hint of the Jason London parts in their turn the only one left is Matthew McConaughey’s brilliantly sleazy slummer, Wooderson. As I saw the kids in their moptopped hair and retro shirts – not even remotely in style when I was coming up in the long leaden shadow of the 80s – I had a moment where I could imagine stepping into the role, walking up to some teenaged rebel and asking Y’all know where the party’s at tonight? Because there’s always something going on afterwards. It’s a Saturday night for God’s sake, the night of the first sunny Saturday day, and you’ve just been through your intellectual trial and now the social ones are coming up, and if you don’t get out there and make something happen no one else will. Actually, come to think of it, that was most of my twenties too. And as I thought about this last night, I wondered, what triumphs and tragedies are happening right now?

Me, I didn’t have any dinners or movies or parties or awkward, fumbling attempts at romance awaiting me afterwards. I just went home to my wife, a prospect that seemed distant and unlikely back in the days of Mac McGarry. It’s the brass ring, kid – you made it – so how come you’re still on the outside looking in?

At least now I have a good excuse.

Unsolicited Advice

In which I butt in on somebody else's conversation for an easy post and a cheap bit of self-promotion.

Jog fields an interesting question in the comments to this post, where a reader tells him,

I recently got an e-mail from one of my professors saying "I'm kicking around the idea of a class looking at the golden age comic books, the novelists that are riffing off them now, and then contemporary comics that participate in the same commodity pool as Chabon and Lethem and all the guys who are mining their comic book nostalgia." and then asking for suggestions.

As it happens, I spent about half of last year working on an article about this same group of nostalgic comic book novels (current status:  finished, submitted to a journal, waiting patiently to hear back from them, still ensconced in slow time), so I naturally think this would be a fantastic idea for a class.

Jog offers some good suggestions (Alan Moore's Supreme) and reluctantly tenders some not-so-good ones (it may fit the bill, but I'm not sure I could recommend teaching Kingdom Come under any circumstances).  I would add that since many of these novels express nostalgia for Silver Age comics, particularly Marvel Comics, comics trading on that period would serve just as well.  Kurt Busiek's Marvels and Astro City ought to be at home on any syllabus that can include Rick Moody's paean to the Fantastic Four.

Any comic that deals with comics as objects (particularly fetish/nostalgia objects) would match the tone and content of many of these novels, so Jog's suggestion of Clowes's David Boring works perfectly - even though I suspect Clowes's work would especially suffer in comparison to actual examples (and fine examples) of the psychologistic, novelistic mode he so frequently apes.  Indy comics, and Clowes's comics in particular, are littered with comics/nostalgia fetishists and a few representatives would make a nice complement to the novels and superhero comics.

Finally, there's the Escapist comic itself - not great comics by any means, but an interesting example of Chabon's Golden Age nostalgia coming full circle.  Of course, I'm not sure the Escapist series does the historical pastiche thing any more inventively than Planetary or the dozens of other meta-comics, mostly dull, that have come out in the past decade or so.

What would be really interesting, in light of Moody's and Jonathan Lethem's celebrations of the intricacies of continuity-heavy Bronze Age storytelling, is to find a well-done modern nostalgia comic that looks back to that era.  It may be too soon, but it seems like superhero comics have just wrapped up a wave of Silver Age nostalgia and are pushing into the 1970s, with reprints of everything from Luke Cage, Power Man to Super-Villain Team-Up.  Writers like Brad Meltzer and Geoff Johns are frantically referencing the comics they read as kids, but they usually incorporate them into a distinctly and unpleasantly modern style of storytelling.  I'd think there must be somebody who's writing Bronze Age homages in the Bronze Age style and writing them well, but I can't think of anybody at the moment.  I suppose Busiek and Nicieza tried to pull it off in their Marvel work, but there's a difference between copying Bronze Age comics and writing about them as a site of nostalgia, and it seems like this hypothetical class would require the latter.  Perhaps this comic is yet to be written.

Other suggestions?  Send 'em Jog's way!

(By the way, that same post links to this group of reviews of Grant Morrison and Philip Bond's Vimanarama #1 - scroll down for Olivia Woodward's fascinating reading of religious symbology in the double-page splash, hidden in plain sight!)

Andersen & Anderson

It's been a good week for movies.  After catching one of the last showings of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, I learned that the Belcourt Theatre was hosting a festival of the best films that didn't play in Nashville in 2004.  So far I've seen Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee and Thom Andersen's documentary-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself.  (Yes, that means I've seen two of J. W. Hastings's One Note Wonders in the last week, and more on that subject later.)  I'm hoping to catch the re-release of Orson Welles's Confidential Report and F for Fake, and Overnight, a documentary about the rise and fall of the director of one of the most asinine movies I've ever seen, The Boondock Saints, entirely for schadenfreude.

But I've been thinking the most about Los Angeles Plays Itself. Thom Andersen's essay in cinematic form is a comprehensive study of the representation of Los Angeles, the most-photographed city in the world.  He suffers no shortage of examples, of course, from contemporary blockbusters and longstanding critical darlings to bygone pieces with wonderful names like Putting Pants on Philip (1928) and What! No Beer? (1933).  Andersen's project is to place the background of these films into the foreground, to look at all the defensive and cynical and clichéd and self-serving and occasionally insightful ways the movies have portrayed their capital city.

Andersen's study is most effective when it offers comprehensive surveys of multiple films or close readings of pivotal ones.  In one early sequence, Andersen tallies the many incarnations of iconic locations like Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House or the Bradbury building, which plays out as a Hollywood melodrama of its own:  the building starts as a late 19th-century attempt at utopian architecture and ends up in Blade Runner.  But even there, Andersen finds a surprising ray of hope: for all that it's become synonymous with urban dystopia (the "official nightmare" of Los Angeles, Mike Davis says), Blade Runner does represent "a modern city planner's dream" with its bustling downtown life and high pedestrian traffic.

Andersen's tongue is lodged firmly in cheek during that little rehabilitaton, but it's indicative of his refreshing tendency to ignore the received wisdom and just watch the films; his fresh eyes reveal details that have been hiding in plain sight all along, buried underneath too much critical tradition.  Nowhere is this stronger than his reading of Chinatown, in which he dismantles the myth that Roman Polanski's film presents a historically accurate exposé of that carefully buried original sin, Los Angeles's theft of water from the Owens Valley.  Andersen does a great job of reminding us that most politicians tend to commit their crimes in plain sight, with the full approval of the public; I hope to show this section when my graduate class gets to Polanski.

My personal fascination with Los Angeles and southern California makes me pretty much the ideal target audience for this movie (as the Mike Davis and Joan Didion books over on the sidebar will attest; Andersen references both, and not always positively).  However, it isn't perfect.  The film is often formless, a serious problem at nearly three hours, and it ends at its most shrill point. 

I think Andersen wants to go out on a note of solidarity, praising movies that represent the Los Angeles that most of its residents live in, but it rings false because he's just spent the last twenty to forty minutes - time dilates oddly in this film - denigrating a large proportion of them, including anybody who owns a car or thinks owning a car is important in Los Angeles.  (And this after he does brilliant readings of cars in Chinatown, Double Indemnity, and Blade Runner.)  In this final section Andersen only accords credibility to directors or critics who make movies or write books about African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, the poor - and even then they'd better shoot it in a neorealist style.  It's an unfortunate example of the confusion of "diversity" for alienation and condemnation that too many people mistake for contemporary liberalism, and films like Andersen's only fan the flames.  And then it ends.

Up until that point, though, Los Angeles Plays Itself is a rambling, entertaining, fascinating, almost endlessly insightful look at how the world capital of unreality (back off, Vegas) simulates itself.

As for those One Note Wonders:  by now everyone has noted the limited range of Wes Anderson's movies and everyone seems to be waiting for him to break outside it.  I think Anderson's challenge is that he's already made the perfect movie about an adolescent's conception of adulthood in Rushmore, and he hasn't gotten far enough away from it by making his subsequent movies about adults who live out the fantasies of childhood and adolescence.  (The shot of a joyless Bill Murray carrying a child on his shoulders at the end of The Life Aquatic is the perfect condensation of Anderson's films.  Great soundtrack, too.)

But to suggest that The Life Aquatic would play better as an action comedy directed by Ron Shelton (writer of Hollywood Homicide and Bad Boys II) is to celebrate mediocrity.  One note perfectly played sounds better than a couple of merely competent ones - and I'm not sure that Bull Durham to Tin Cup reveals an expanded range so much as a more conventionally naturalistic, more acceptably middle-aged, but equally limited one.  Wes Anderson makes movies from the worldview of the disaffected adolescent and the burned-out middle-ager; Shelton doesn't even cover both.

Next up:  why Ghost Dog shouldn't be a fish-out-of-water buddy cop movie by Brett Ratner.