Salvaging the Revolution

I don’t expect to get Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives any time soon. I’ve finished it, and the feeling of accomplishment makes me glad I did, but this isn’t a book you finish or master or complete; it’s a book you read until you’ve stopped reading it and which you  think about until you’ve stopped thinking about it. So much is tangential; perhaps everything is tangential. I think that’s the point. I suspect that’s the point.

The bulk of the novel is made up of fifty-three testimonies, collected by someone for some purpose and placed in an order that is far from obvious, having in common little other than tangential ways their personal stories intersect with a pair of poetic Quixotes, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. These are winking pesudonyms for Mario Santiago and Roberto Bolaño himself, who in the seventies – in our seventies – were the founders of a poetry group of sorts, the “infrarealists,” and so, too, are their fictionalized counterparts the quixotic leaders of a group called the ”visceral realists.” This long middle section is bookended by journal entires written by a seventeen year old poet, Juan Garcia Madero, who falls under their spell and follows them out of law school and into the world of quasi-revolutionary poetry.

It isn’t at all clear, however, what “The Revolution” meant in Latin America after ‘68, or after ‘73. Nor is it clear what exactly makes Arturo and Ulises tick in this book; while they are the novel’s only real connective thread, the only thing that makes the book as a whole hang together, they are also completely elusive. Everyone talks about them, and the novel is a wild cacaphonous heteroglossia of voices searching for them, but their own voices are always so mediated by these other people and their other concerns that they lack any definition. Or, rather, they are all sharp edges, edges that never match up, never line up, never cohere. And then they disappear into mythologies of their own making, leaving the book’s fifty-three voices to continue on in their own stories, like tangents having touched at their common value and then moved on, forever (as Daniel Zalewski points out, phrases like “and then I never saw him again” reoccur with eerie frequency). So as much as the book revolves around that moment in the mid seventies, that sort of just-past-the-peak-of-whatever-began-in-1968 moment where the the grand decline of the Third World — Vijay Prashad calls it the “assassination” of the Third World — had begun but hadn’t been completed, it’s always a moment retreating in the rear view mirror, like its protagonists.  

Perhaps nostalgia for a lost idealism is the book’s animating principle. And Bolaño can sometimes sound a little like an older man looking back at the foolishness of youth; as he put it in his acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, “…to a great extent everything that I have ever written is a love letter or a letter of farewell to my own generation, those of us who were born in the ’50s and who chose at a given moment to take up arms (though in this case it would be more correct to say “militancy”) and gave the little that we had, or the greater thing that we had, which was our youth, to a cause that we believed to be the most generous of the world’s causes and that was, in a sense, though in truth it wasn’t.”    

Edmond Caldwell, however, eviscerates James Woods for wanting (as he puts it) to “domesticate” Bolaño, the way Woods “transforms The Savage Detectives into a story about growing into an adult ‘maturity’ after being disabused of adolescent enthusiasms such as aesthetic and political radicalism.” I’ll quote Caldwell at more length, if only because the personalized polemicism of Contra James Wood is enough like Arturo and Ulises hassling their bête noire Octavio Paz to warrant doing so:

“Reading Wood’s review, in fact, you would actually think that Savage Detectives was a book about apostasy.  Wood even includes, apropos of very little, a quote from that arch-apostate Wordsworth: “We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”  Superficially the quotation is supposed to apply to the sad fates of Belano, Lima and their cronies in the novel, but Wood is completely aware of its full resonance and has no doubt chosen it with that in mind.  Bolaño and Wordsworth – it’s hard to think of a less suitable literary association; it tells us little about Bolaño’s sensibility or the book’s, although it speaks volumes about the reviewer.”

I’m with Caldwell, I think, though Woods’ review is too insubstantial for me to find all that much to get upset about. But seeing Bolaño as an apostate would be quite wrong, since there is nothing in Belano and Ulises that signals any kind of retreat from their ideals. The revolution fails, the visceral realists fail, their friends fail, their bodies fail, and their poetry is forgotten. But they still despise Octavio Paz, and they still struggle to be — however unsuccessfuly — whatever it is that they are. Bolaño went on, in fact, to emphasize this distinction, the difference between poets who believed and a world which proved not to be worthy of that belief: 

“Needless to say, we fought tooth and nail, but we had corrupt bosses, cowardly leaders, an apparatus of propaganda that was worse than that of a leper colony. We fought for parties that, had they emerged victorious, would have immediately sent us to a forced-labor camp. We fought and poured all our generosity into an ideal that had been dead for over fifty years, and some of us knew that: How were we not going to know that if we had read Trotsky or were Trotskyites? But nevertheless we did it, because we were stupid and generous, as young people are, giving everything and asking for nothing in return. And now nothing is left of those young people, those who died in Bolivia, died in Argentina or in Peru, and those who survived went to Chile or Mexico to die, and the ones they didn’t kill there they killed later in Nicaragua, in Colombia, in El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of these forgotten youths.”

As did García Márquez — another writer that Bolaño couldn’t stand — the book fights a desperate, failed rearguard action against that forgetfulness. But it does it because it decides, I think — or perhaps it simply has faith — that poetry is still worth doing, that dreaming and idealism can fail without being repudiated. This is not nostalgia, after all, but almost the exact opposite, the belief that doesn’t require anything like validation or victory to endure. And certainly Juan Garcia Madero himself is never repudiated; the gentle affection that Ulises and Arturo have for the boy is shared by the novel in a larger sense: nothing he does or says or is gives him any right to dominate the book the way he does, except that he believes with such a passionate intensity that Arturo and Ulises only tease him gently, sympathetically. Because whatever it is that the visceral realists are, it isn’t something that you get.

Six Months and a Day

Six Months

Opening the Savage Detectives

If you like the old joke that life is just the way that DNA make more DNA — and I do like that old joke — then maybe it would be fair to observe that Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives sees poetry mainly as the way poets make more poets. Which is to say, there’s a stunning absence at the center of this book about poets talking about poetry: poetry itself.

I don’t mean, of course, that there is no poetry in it — there is some — but take, for example, this bit of description from pages 6 and 7:

“The end of class was surprising. Alamo dared Ulises Lima to read one of his poems. Lima didn’t need to be asked twice. He pulled some smudged, crumpled sheets from his jacket pocket. Oh no, I thought, the idiot is walking right into their trap. I think I shut my eyes out of sheer sympathetic embarrassment. There’s a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter. But as I was saying, I closed my eyes, and I heard Lima clear his throat, then I heard the somewhat uncomfortable silence (if it’s possible to hear such a thing, which I doubt) that settled around him, and finally I heard his voice, reading the best poem I’d ever heard. Then Arturo Belano got up and said that they were looking for poets who would like to contribute to the magazine that the visceral realists were putting out. Everybody wished they could volunteer, but after the fight they felt sheepish and no one said a thing. When the workshop ended (later than usual), I went with Lima and Belano to the bus stop. It was too late. There were no more buses, so we decided to take a pesero together to Reforma, and from there we walked to a bar on Calle Bucareli, where we sat until very late, talking about poetry.”

The lines “reading the best poem I’d ever heard” and “talking about poetry” leap out at me in their unfinishedness. What was said? What made the poem so good? And compare the incredible deft sensitivity that the novel brings to bear on the ways people (who happen to be poets) interact with other people (who happen to be poets) to foreclosures like this; there’s a world in the paragraph, a rich sketched-out world of human sociality for which “poetry” is more or less the incidental catalyst. The entire book seems to follow that pattern, circling endlessly round and around its principle characters, without ever settling on the thing that brings them together, or rather without the thing they use to bring themselves together ever becoming a settled thing.

I’m still thinking this through; I’m not finished with the book, and a lot is still fairly opaque to me. But the poetry of this novel is a very different thing than the monuments of a certain literary tradition; the poems written by these people seem so fundamentally occasional that the idea of a completed corpus — a poetic body to represent the living one – is not merely absent, but basically refuted. One writes poetry, as someone for N+1 put it, because “[a]t one point you started and now you can’t stop; it’s become a habit and an identity.” But I wonder if this might be no more a cause for despair than is our exploitation by our DNA for its own selfish purposes. After all, Lima’s might be the best poem Juan has ever heard, but he will live to hear more and better ones, and maybe even write them, too.

On the Perniciousness of Analogy

At Obsidian Wings, Publius wrote that the unfolding clusterfuckery in Iran

“make[s] me grateful for the stability of our own government.  In America, our political fights — which can get quite nasty — take place upon an invisible foundation of legitimacy and stability.  We have the luxury of ignoring this foundation and pretending it doesn’t exist.  Politics is a fight for power, always — but we are fortunate enough to fight things out within an underlying structural framework that enjoys widespread acceptance.

I suppose. But he can have the comfort of that analogy the same way the CEO of (insert huge multinational corporation here) can thank his lucky stars that he doesn’t live in the grinding poverty that his employees are lucky enough to enjoy. Which is to say, drawing this kind of analogy is a way of making the relationship between its objects (and the consequent chains of causality) disappear: capitalists believe that the “free market” is a level playing field, because if they had to confront the ways their success is predicated on other people’s failure, it would be more difficult to disclaim responsibility for other people’s suffering. But because the analogy stages the comparison between two objects not as a historical one, but as presumes their fundamental distinction, any relationship between tends to remain un-thought. 

The same general point needs to made in the international arena. After all, why does Publius think Iran’s governance is so fucked up? Are we merely lucky to enjoy something that the fates have declined to provide to the unlucky residents of that unfortunate country? Iran is very far away, is it not?

Cadmus sowing the dragon's teeth

The CIA didn’t think so when they engineered the coup in 1953 that overturned Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister. When the Shah’s secret police crushed dissent for decades, the USA not only looked on with approval, but we actively enabled them to do so; it was in, they thought, the best intersts of the United States to do so. And when in1979, the Shah’s government was facing a political Islamist revolution, Jimmy Carter assured the Shah of American support (making him all the more intransigent to reform) while his state department actively worked to support and establish ties with Khomeini’s government.

These are simple facts; they’re not even that controversial. Which is not to say that the Americans who did these things had a full sense of what they were doing; they didn’t. They had no idea in 1979 who Khomeini was or what he would become, and so they were shocked, shocked, when he turned out to be all the things he had been saying he was for decades. Which is exactly the point. Why didn’t they know? Why were they so stupid? Why couldn’t they see what was right in front of their eyes?       

Marx wrote that capital comes into the world dripping blood and dirt, head to toe, from every pore, and he thought long and hard about the ways we have learned, out of a need to maintain our own high opinion of ourselves, to forget about it. If we had to know the extent to which our own wealth is produced not by the stand-alone virtue of our own actions, could we live with ourselves? But the same is true of “political stability.” If we had to think about the extent to which the Islamic Republic was sown with the teeth of American dragons, could we so blithely thank our lucky stars that we are so fortunate not to live there?

Forgetting the Apatovian

I think Forgetting Sarah Marshall might be my favorite of the Apatow genre, surprisingly. Surprisingly both because I forgot it even was a Judd Apatow joint and also because the preview made it look sort of stupid: the protagonist, a sad-faced straight man played by Jason Segal, needs to “forget” Sarah Marshall (Kristin Bell) after she dumps him for Aldous Snow, an amazing send-up of the cheesy British rocker stereotype, and so he goes to Hawai’i to try to get over it with the zany help of a zany collection of zany characters. On the surface, thus, a bro-comedy that puts the type in typical, a sequence of jokes and caricatures strung into a plot reducible to the preview’s abstraction: dude gets broken up with by his bitch of a girlfriend and needs to get over it by finding true love with a differently hot babe.

The movie makes a lot of hay by exactly this narrative. It is this story, basically, because those things happen in it. But there’s also a moment in this movie that brought me up short, that made me think more about how self-conscious the Apatovian might actually be, how much work — as opposed to pandering — it actually does, and how well it might actually understand that work. It happened during a confrontation between the protagonist and his evil bitch of an ex — one of the first times they actually talk — when he suggests, in a kind of passive aggressive way, that if only she could have tried a little harder, maybe things could have worked out.

She pulls him up so very, very short. “Try?” she hisses through tears. “Don’t you dare tell me I didn’t try; I did, you were just too stupid to notice.” She’s shaking, but steady as an iceberg. And when she relates the many things she had done to try and save their relationship (a variety of self-help classes and therapists), it isn’t so much the list as the sudden blast that her icy seriousness casts over the entire movie as we’ve so far learned to watch it. I’m serious; this overturns the entire Sarah Marshall narrative as it‘s been presented to us so far: not only does she turn out to be a real human being, but suddenly and dramatically dumping her pain on the screen reveals to him (and to us) what a child he (and by extension we) have been, how willing he‘s been to allow her to simply exist as a cliché, a stereotype, and an abstraction, anything but a human being. He’s unwilling to bend, yet, but also silent, unable to respond. He retreats to lick his wounds. The scene ends.

The movie, I think, is different after that point. Nothing, after all, has encouraged or allowed us to think of her as a real person so far; the comedy has been on his pain, his dramatic, over-the-top (and funny for that reason) masochistic revelry, and she has correspondingly been — exactly as things like the preview have lead us to expect — the caricature of the bitch girlfriend that takes off with the caricature of a crazed hedonistic rock star. That’s how he’s read the situation, and that’s how — through his eyes — the movie has shown us how to read it. But there is nothing to say to this, for him or for us, and since nothing has prepared us for her as a real character, it calls a great deal of what we‘ve seen and felt into question: suddenly, all the laughs and wallowing in self-pity we’ve shared with Segal stand accused of the same lack of seriousness that had made her such an alien creature to him. Like him, we failed to see because we weren’t looking, and now, suddenly, we have to look at our own blindness.

We thought this movie was just a comedy. But this is exactly the point: Jason Segal couldn’t notice that she, with all her faults, was a person, because he could see her only by reference to the Apatow comedy that his life already was. In such a comedy, women have their choice of whore or Madonna (if translated into a new millennial idiom), and so, discovering her to be no Madonna, damned her for the whore she was stuck being. But when she makes him look into her depths, he has nothing to say.

After all, while she does leave him for a hilarious caricature (which proves to be as disastrous a rebound as his were), it is significant that she leaves him for a real musician. As we come to realize, she was right to do so. Jason Segal isn’t a real musician, and he isn’t even as much of an adult as Aldous Snow: because he’s unable to move on from the safety of the crappy job he hates, and is unable to recognize and act on his own neurotic passivity, he poisons their relationship drop by drop by drop. And while he was rottin happy in a rut, she struck out and grabbed at what she though would make her happy, and why shouldn’t she? He couldn’t seem to do that; he just wanted to stay in his man-cave, eating cereal and doing a job he hated, piling everything on her, even while refusing to admit that he was really with her (it’s significant, for example, that her entrance in the first scene has to be preceded by him hurriedly cleaning up their apartment: when she’s not around, that he makes a mess when she’s not there to tell him not to because that’s what he really wants; they share a space not as a couple, but as little boy and mommy telling him to clean his room). But until she says so, and until his silence confirms her, we never understood that the joyous cereal-eating vision of pre-lapsarian boyhood in the first scene was the poisonous stew that rotted their relationship. In other words, the man-cave boy fantasies that come back in I Love You, Man (a massively more insubstantial movie than this one) are shown — as they were in The 40-Year Old Virgin — to be a trap. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend your life playing in your cave and eating cereal? Maybe not, for it is exactly this infantilization that — as the seven-days in the apartment sequence shows — causes him to lose sight of her, if he ever did see her at all.

In this sense, there’s something quite eloquent in his silence to her sudden invocation of personhood, which speaks to both the strengths and limitations of the Apatovian genre. The movie’s excellence, I think, comes from the fact that it points outside of its own Apatoviosity, but it also doesn’t quite actually transcend it. It’s still not a movie that has room, after all, for a female character that has actual depth, and the bulk of the film is still the effort to milk the boy-cave fantasy for all that it’s worth (even Mila Kunis’ character only tells us about her pain while Jason Segal’s we experience). But, that said, it’s also a movie that understands its own limitations enough to make them the focus of the narrative: Jason Segal’s problem is that he’s living in a comedy, but he doesn’t know how to laugh at it.

Which is to say, this isn’t so much a comedy about pain as an exploration of how we hide our pain behind the comedy, how a certain kind of joy becomes a way of protecting ourselves from having to grow, and as such, a performance of its own dilemma. This is why, for example, the movie has to be set in Hawai’i: Polynesia has long served as a metaphor for forgetting the traumas of modernity since at least Melville’s Typee, and ostensibly shallow comedies from Ford’s Donovan’s Reef to Adam Sandler’s 50 First Dates have continued to play with the theme. In the south pacific, we awake from the nightmare of history to the primal reality of human sensuality. Etc. This is movie, however, which not only recognizes the falsity of that vision, but thinks about what kind of dream that is, where it comes from, and what it does: Jason Segal has gone to an island, but as Bell later tells him, this was exactly his problem before: “you wouldn’t get off your little island,” she reminds him, instead doing things like wearing sweat pants for a week and eating cereal all day.*

In any case, while the idea of “forgetting” is the very fantasy he’s trying to sell himself, it’s also the last thing he actually wants to do: he goes to Hawai’i to get away from her, to forget, but he also goes there because he wants to revel in his pain, going not simply to Hawai’i but to her particular resort (leading to the zany set-up of “accidentally” ending up at the same resort as his ex). It’s no accident, in other words; as the changing backgrounds on his step-brother’s computer nicely reflect, the act of getting away to Hawai’i has done nothing but change the background while leaving the basic picture the same (changing the background, in fact, precisely so that the picture can remain the same).

The movie is written full of light touches like that — who knew Jason Segal had it in him? — and another favorite of mine is the scene, an early one, when Jason Segal first really notices Mila Kunis’ character, when the movie starts to become the comedy we knew it was going to be. She’s been very nice to him again and again — though simply sympathizing with another wayfaring pilgrim in the storm — but when she welcomes him into the hotel restaurant, he tells her with a distinct tone of sudden recognition in his voice, how pretty she looks or how nice her dress is or something. What he says, though, is not the point: he’s signaling to her that he might like to be with her, and by this, he means he would like to have sex with her. Not that everything is reducible to sex, of course; in fact, the movie has established that sex is exactly not what this is about, a point it continually hammers home again and again through the character of Aldous Snow (for whom all life is a metaphor for fucking). And the movie has already had some fun with the unspoken open secret of sex banter, in the earlier scene where he tells two women that he’s just met that he would very much like to have sex with one of them and this line — by its unexpected honesty — actually succeeds. And she, at this point, is only interested in him as a sad case in whom she recognizes, I think, a similar kind of pain as her own.

But complementing her on her dress manages to be completely true (she does look great) only by indexing the myth that’s being sold: as the scene progresses, we see that every single hotel employee is wearing the same dress. On Hawai’i, the fantasy of amnesia is already always part of a package being sold to its customers, and Segal is only the latest customer. He — and we — haven’t realized it yet, but we’re beginning to.

Similarly with the idea of music in the movie. One narrative in the film is the self-serving one Segal sells himself: while he has a secret musical opus within him, Bell doesn’t understand him, and therefore she’s a terrible bitch who’s wrong for him. Now, this narrative is partly right: when he plays his Vampire song to her, she tries but does not understand it, and this is central to why they have to break up. It shows that they are wrong for each other. And it’s also true that Kunis is right for him precisely because she listens to his vampire song and responds in the right way. But the problem exactly in Sarah Marshall: she doesn’t understand his music, but she is also quite correct not to understand it, because it isn’t real, because it’s a fucking musical about vampires. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and when he plays the song for her — Dracula wailing in a ridiculous East European accent — she’s exactly as baffled with it as any normal human being would be. It’s preposterous, yet he seems to be serious. Any sane human being would be exactly as bemused or confused as she is.

Kunis, on the other hand, shows herself to be “right” for him because she helps make his music happen, but she does this precisely not by understanding it, but by showing him what’s wrong with it: when she laughs at it, she shows him that his melodrama isn’t tragic, it’s comedic, and for the first time he starts to understand why. Sarah Marshall couldn’t do that for him, and that, it turns out, is what he needed; the neurosis may have been his, but she (an overdramatic actress with the same problem, I think) simply wasn’t the person to help him get over it. Kunis, on the other hand, came to Hawai’i for some random reason, but she understands the myth for what it is now, and is thus able (in a way Bell wasn’t) to show him that being funny is funny, but it isn’t real, and that he needs to be real.

The variety of ridiculous bros that populate the landscape serve this same function, their ridiculousness becoming increasingly apparent to Segal as he comes closer to seeing (through them) his own ridiculousness for what it is. Paul Rudd’s character, for instance, shows us a dark side of the fantasy of amnesia; he’s forgotten everything (he too is running away from a break up), but he’s taken it much too far: since memory is how we function, he can’t function. And when Aldous Snow does gets Segal’s music, we suddenly realize that getting his music wouldn’t be a good thing, that self-important reveling in pain is a pretty stupid thing to do (and the idea of “getting my music” as a metaphor for real connection is repeatedly skewered by the waiter character, who desperately lusts after Aldous and tries to connect with him in exactly this ludicrously flawed way).

Aldous Snow, after all, is hilarious because he’s a walking cartoon and he’s that because he’s utterly humorless about it: as has Segal, he performs comedy without realizing it’s funny, and as such, is trapped within the joke. So when Segal accidentally puts his fantasy of violence into action, surfing over his rival and knocking him out, he both realizes what he’s done (and has become) and takes steps, for the first time, to undo it: fishing his rival out of the water and carrying him to shore is a metaphorical step out of his self-created womb. But he actually comes to escape his own narrative (“ helpless bro being saved by love of a good woman from the tragedy of having been dumped by a bad one”) by laughing at it. On shore, for instance, after having pulled Aldous out, he cries out that the piece of coral in his leg is “rapin’ my leg” and Segal smiles a little. The guy is ludicrous, after all (and the line is just one more of his constant sexualizations of everything), but until now, Segal has been unable to see it, because he sees the world the same way. But this (since Aldous is a dream worked self-image) is the first smile of the movie that’s a real laugh at himself, and it signals a profound sea change in his ability to stand aside and ironize his own failings and fears. As the movie continues, he creates increasing distance between himself and Aldous, separating himself from the boy-child for whom relationships are reducible to sex (which is where he started) to the point where he can have his own kind of personal triumph: he quits his job to put on his Dracula musical, but he does it as a puppet show and a comedy. Once he realized it was funny, in other words, that he could separate himself from his pain by laughing at it, he can move on, and does. And this makes him, for the first time, an object not of pity and sympathy for Kunis, but a human being worth spending time with.

As my telling of it illustrates, this is still a story about men in which women are the stage dressing used to show us something about men. Most of the time, they don’t exist as characters; the ocean-as-womb metaphor that pervades the movie, after all, isn’t even about real wombs (or the human beings that happen to possess them) but, rather, about the experience and the problem of being male which used women as its vocabulary. And while every male character in the film is a different dream reflection of the protagonist’s fantasies and fears and fears about manhood,  the women in the film largely signify as black boxes. But what saves it for me — as with a novel like Heart of Darkness — is that it knows this and makes this black boxedness its subject: the main character grows up precisely by coming to realize the seductive danger of the fantasy he inhabits.

Marlow never sees outside the Heart of Darkness, of course. Conrad shows us his blindness as a way of thinking about the limits of human understanding but he does so — as Achebe famously complained – at the cost of re-instating the idea of Africa as unknowable for readers who didn’t care to note his excessive subtlety. In a way the same is true here; it’s quite possible to continue blissfully through this movie without noticing exactly where the narrator’s transformation comes from. It is possible to think, for example, that Jason Segal simply went to Hawai’i, was reborn, met a new girl, and got a new job, thereby locating the original problem securely outside of himself. But it is to the movie’s credit that it’s smarter than that. And at the very least, this is a movie that (unlike Conrad’s ultimately pessimistic vision) can at least imagine its epistemic black boxes as people too.

After all, while Kunis’ role in the movie is, on one level, to be Jason Segal’s savior, to be the new girl that will make him forget his pain, she is also the person who refuses to simply kiss him and make it better. She is the person who tells him that he needs to get himself correct first, that he simply can’t be with anyone until he’s figured out what he needs to figure out. She’s right. And she’s right because she has her own back story, her own story of pain and growth, a story which exists in subtle counterpoint to Segal’s.

I want to close, then, with a pair of twinned scenes late in the movie that help to show how this counterpoint works. The second is the surfing showdown between Segal and Snow (the conversation they have before the accident), and this is, ostensibly, the payoff scene, the protagonist’s turning point. At first, the men are completely unable to confront each other except through the mis-vocabulary of romantic comedy: while Segal sees Aldous Snow as a villainous rival of the sort Hugh Grant played in Bridget Jones, Aldous is completely oblivious to everything (he seems to think he’s Segal‘s buddy). The asymmetrical rivalry then turns into an opportunity for reflection on obliviousness: when Segal realizes how blind Aldous is, he realizes how blind he’s been; by gazing at an external version of himself — and laughing at it — he’s suddenly able to externalize that part of himself that he needs to see outside of.

But the first scene, which ostensibly sets this one up, is interesting in its own right. We see Kunis and Bell confront each other in the hotel lobby, and in sharp contrast to the way the man-children struggled to even find a point of reference to converse, the women’s conversation is deeply structured by a variety of unspoken but completely clear subtexts. They are respectful, sympathetic even, but they are not warm: like opposing gunfighters who have everything in common but where they stand, they size each other up with both sympathy and a consequent recognition of their necessary enmity. This is interesting, in other words, because they are neither sisters of pants (traveling or otherwise), nor “frenemies,” nor are we seeing a girl fight: they are playing a game with each other that both thoroughly understand, meaning they both understand each other and understand their difference from each other. Aldous Snow doesn’t exist for Segal except as a dream/fantasy reflection of his own desires and fears, but these women both are people and see each other as people, having a simultaneous lack of desire to cause unnecessary harm to anyone they can sympathize with and no inclination to sacrifice their own interests in the name of that empathy. They have full willingness to use every ounce of psychological leverage available to them, but it’s leverage they acquire precisely from understanding how they are alike and how they are different.

Their meeting, in other words, is a duel, and a duel between equals; when they comment on how pretty each other is, the antipathy is delicious precisely because the statements are both true and beside the point. You are beautiful, bitch, but I will fucking kill you. In other words, it might as well be John Wayne commenting on the size and caliber of his opponent’s gun in Rio Bravo, or (perhaps more familiarly to you, you philistines) the scene where Omar and Brother Mouzone confront each other in season four of The Wire. Pelecanous consciously reflected the Leone trope of “nice gun you got there” when he made the two in The Wire comment on each other’s pieces, and it does the same work as it did for Leone or Wayne: by comparing their phallus substitutes, they both acknowledge their similarity by analogy (we are both men) and trace out their difference in reality (we are pointing these guns at each other because one of us is going to shoot the other), the difference between similitude in analogy and the basic irreconcilability non-identification of an understood otherness. In other words, it’s a conversation structured by the acknowledgement that other people exist, people who are like you but are not you: both might be men, but (unlike Segal’s conversation with Alsous, in which neither can acknowledge an “other”) Omar and Mouzone are different men. The same is true of Bell and Kunis: both are women, but they are different women, individuals, and their differences signify not types of commodity (as the blonde-brunette distinction, for example, becoems legible in commodity market terms) but the profundity of consciousness, the fact that being me means not being you and vice versa.

All of which is to observe one thing: while this a movie whose narrative is myopically fixated on the transformation and growth of a man, and it makes “woman” the catalyst for that growth (as the genre demands), it also locates in particular women the actual knowledge that Segal so painfully struggles to acquire. In other words, while it is interested in how men make women into black boxes, as Conrad was with respect to Africa (and as such, is located in the consciousness of the blind), it also wants to understand and address what Conrad never did: the knowledge of blindness possessed by those who are not seen.

* In that “seven days of sweat pants” sequence, for instance, the final day is Jason Segal wearing a mockup costume he’s made for himself and replaying, for the camera, Gandalf’s confrontation with the Balrog in the Lord of the Rings: “You Shall Not Pass!” Exactly right: while at this stage of the movie, he’s refusing to move forward, denying himself the ability to grow up by retreating into cinema, the Gandalf character in that scene will, shortly, be killed and resurrected, exactly as Jason Segal later will.

Christ in Gethsemane: The Young Mr. Lincoln as Prequel

My chair broke while I was writing the last post. This is a picture of it.

The Star Trek movie re-captured my imagination yesterday for several reasons, but the one that was not Millicent’s observation that that the entire movie is a sequence of variations on the theme of woman-as-absence was a more general interest in the idea of prequels, which came as the confluence of three factors. First, having been monumentally disappointed by Terminator Salvation, which was, I maintain, a steaming pile of suck. Second, my friend the dial-a-Marxist was musing the other day about when the tide of prequels would begin to ebb, noting both the built in economic reasons for it (guaranteed sales without much risk) and the consequential tendency for these movies, as in Terminator Salvation, to be steaming piles of suck. Finally, after re-watching Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (which I first posted about, somewhat differently, here), I sent a triumphant text message to Scrimshander to the effect that this was fucking how you do a prequel. Fucking Hell, I thought to myself. Fucking Hell.

Young Mr. Lincoln is one of the three movies John Ford made in 1939. It’s a movie about Lincoln and the Civil War, of course, because even if though it begins and ends during Abe’s time as Springfield lawyer, the anachronistic term “prequel” is appropriate for the ways those later events structure the narrative of the film retrospectively. Precisely because we know what will eventually happen, the film’s plot is never in doubt as such; we know that Abe will become a lawyer, we know that he will win his court case, we know that he will eventually best Stephen Douglas in the  famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, that Douglas will hold his hat while he is inaugurated, and that he will eventually be shot in Ford’s theatre, etc.

There is therefore no narrative suspense, nor does the movie try to cheat and create it. Instead, there is a profound sense of doubt in an experiential sense, and the incredible pathos the film manages to refract through the great Henry Fonda’s depth of affect is both absolutely stunning and an opportunity to reflect on the difference between the uncertainty of a faked narrative suspense and a doubt that becomes existential (and much more interesting) precisely because nothing is in suspense.

After all, the thing about Fonda’s Lincoln is that he, far more than anyone else in the movie, knows exactly what his destiny is.* This is a subtle point, but it’s all over the movie, and has to be the first thing we take into account in making sense of him, since, in my view, the entire movie is one long Christ-in-Gethsemane story. The opening titles, for example, are the imagined questions Lincoln’s mother would ask from the grave: “How is my son?” she poignantly begs; “How did he get on?” And in 1939, the “we” who would be watching those titles in a movie theater would have been well trained by the vast Lincoln-as-Martyr genre of hagiographic movies to know the answer more in terms of human tragedy than simply in political triumph. Just as Lincoln shares with “us” a knowledge that he will one day be great, I think he also shares the knowledge that he will pay dearly for it. Lincoln could be, as was Christ, the one perfect actor in the story exactly because he was the blameless innocent; or, rather, he could be the carrier of the community’s sins because he was blameless. And he understands this, from the beginning.

To put this another way, while he is free to fall, he is also sufficient to stand, and knows that he will. Which means that this Lincoln is more like the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ (or Sam, in Zelazny’s Lord of Light) in that he both knows himself to be human — and humanizes himself — by his fear to be what he is, and by his cynical understanding that his skill as an actor can substitute for the functionality of the character, in every important sense. Again, this is a subtle distinction, but important: he can be Lincoln, is smart enough and capable enough to fool a world into thinking he is a saint — in fact, he genuinely will play the role of a saint — but he isn’t, deep down, a saint. He is simply a human being, a tremendously gifted one, but human. The point, then, is that he realizes that this will never matter: the fact that he is not as moral, as honest, and as “of the people” as even he himself would like to be is irrelevant to his ability to play that role in practice, and “in practice” is what matters. Because he has the ability to play the role to absolute perfection, it doesn’t matter that his true ruling trait is ambition; he might as well be the real thing, and for all extents and purposes, he is the real thing.

And so, under the guise of an awesome aw-shucks folksiness, which he both employs cunningly (watch how ruthlessly he manipulates everyone else in the film) and uses as an alibi to hide from his destiny (in his early dialogues with Ann), we see a man who’s not only unspeakably ambitious, but whose honesty inheres in seeing that because his ambition is really what drives him, the only way he can be what he has the capacity to be (and what the world needs him to be) is to keep that fact to himself and to live a lie.

And since he wants so desperately to be simply a humble man of the people, the movie is, in part, one long demonstration that no such thing as “the people” exists. In contrast to Lincoln‘s own idealistic pronouncements, the America of this film is a country run by the stupid and the mean, democracy revealed to be a sham. Lincoln would like to believe in the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian mythos, of course, but he cannot, any more than Ford could: instead, Lincoln comes to realize, the responsibility of America’s great men is not to inspire the better angels of our human nature (because we don’t have them) but to manipulate us, against our will, into doing what needs to be done.

Among the panorama of spiteful  fools and vengeful simpletons who populate Springfield, then, only Stephen Douglas is worth taking seriously, but even he is only in the movie as a representative of the smarter and more powerful class of opponents in high politics with whom that Lincoln will one day cross swords. In this sense, while Lincoln bests him in the courtroom (by proxy), the stakes are negligible precisely because we are in a backwoods: Douglas’ reappraisal of his young political opponent is that of a chess player who has given away a pawn to test his opponent’s mettle, and therefore, perhaps, actually won the exchange. Douglas is not of Springfield, but is a different caliber of opponent precisely because he is of Washington. In Springfield on the other hand — metonymic of the “real” America — we see nothing but rubes and fools, authentic folks whose authenticity is a function of the naivete and vulnerability Lincoln does not share with them (making him, ultimately, able to represent them only to the extent that he is not representative of them).

This, anyway, is Ford’s cynicism, as I would dare to claim after having seen, now, forty-one of his movies (suck it, Scrimshander!). Occasional forays into populism like The Grapes of Wrath notwithstanding, Ford had a gentle affection for ordinary people — and never contempt — but he was haunted by an inability to believe in their common divinity in the ways that the Steinbeck of Grapes did. How Green Was My Valley therefore shows us the delusion of thinking it so, or Tobacco Road shows us the comedy of human frailty because the tragedy of it could never be fathomed by its own protagonists. And even movies like Doctor Bull or Judge Priest are drenched with the sense that the community has to be saved from itself (and, again, by a folksy con-man smart enough to know his own human frailty, and, therefore, to do what needs to be done in spite of it).  

As with Will Rogers’ incarnations in those movies, then, Fonda’s Young Mr. Lincoln is also a folksy con-man. But he is also more: as a Christ figure, he is a Calvinist or Catholic one and his grace is given to a community that cannot deserve it (or even understand it). But unlike Doctor Bull or Judge Priest — who live more peacefully with their own imperfections — Abraham Lincoln is called to actually be perfect. And so, his is ultimately a different kind of tragedy, a different kind of pathos. A fraudulent Jesus, but a necessary one, he realizes that he can play the role only by making the deception so perfect that he loses himself in the role, a different kind of martyrdom, in which he ceases to be a human being by becoming a myth.

* * *

This is all why I think the movie is great, which is to say, I believe that this reading of the film is at least partially a necessary one. Literary “readings” exist can be seen as either relativistic or empirical — even if, like the light as particle/wave problem, it is only useful to pretend that they are — and so the preceding has been my attempt at something like a claim for what the movie is in a objective sense.  I believe that the movie I’ve described is one that most viewers will see, if they look for it.

But to step back from that appeal to objectivity, I would like to also offer a more subjective reading of the movie by framing it, anachronistically, as a prequel, like Star Trek. This is an anachronistic move. As the dial-a-Marxist presumed in using the term, the idea of the “prequel” is a structuralist one: we understand what it is by reference to the economic and cultural forces into which it is integrated and which it articulates, in this case, the fact that cannibalizing old franchises is cheaper and more profitable than taking the risk of trying to build new ones. From such a frame of reference, therefore, we should be able to clearly see that Young Mr. Lincoln is not a prequel for a franchise but rather a stand-alone entity. But using that idea to make an analogy between Ford’s movie and Abram’s Star Trek can also be instructive, if only in a purely subjective way. And, I would observe, not only are both movies premised on a young man who will someday become great, they both begin with the event of dead women.

In Star Trek, it is the deaths of Nero’s wife and Spock’s mother that jump start the plot. But while the first reel sees Lincoln lose his mother and his first love, Ann Rutledge, these losses cause nothing. They are not, in fact, events at all in any narrative economy; they happen and Lincoln suffers, but his suffering is neither ennobling nor redemptive, nor do these loses shape him. He already is who he is, and it’s quite important that Ann Rutledge is the only person in the entire film who not only sees through him, but to whom he can openly admit to being the kind of fraud he is. In this sense, while these are light touches, they are incredibly important: it is she who tells him in the early minutes who he has the potential to be (and forces him to admit to the corresponding ambition), and it is only to her that he admits — albeit, in a dialog with her gravestone — that he has not so much allowed to destiny to choose him as he has, subtly and invisibly, allowed it to appear that way, the way you used to have to run for president by getting someone to nominate you and then pretending to be surprised.

In other words, absence is not a part of any kind of narrative economy at all, but is, rather, and quite simply, the opposite of value. While Star Trek makes of dead women a kind of unmoved mover for everything that happens in the world by transforming their absence into the only presence that seems to matter, Lincoln’s losses are simply the experience of anyone who loses a loved one, simply painful and without any rationale the mind can accept.

It is important, then, that we never learn how or why they died: to a griever, only the fact that they did is important, and — as such — these deaths have almost nothing to do with any problem of causation. Instead, as meaningless and unnecessary deaths, they represent the fact of a reality that will never live up to our idealized hopes for it. The fact that loved ones can die for no reason is, therefore, precisely because there is no reason to it, a way for the film to show Lincoln grappling with the nihilism and despair that such a meaningless universe could imply. If death can exist, he might have decided, what else could matter?

He will eventually choose, of course, to embrace the lie that the universe is meaningful, that all events are necessary, and he will do so because that lie has value. That lie will make him the savior of a country, the Great Emancipator. And that lie will make his martyrdom, ironically, come to mean something. But the movie shows us, with some of the darkest cynicism of Ford’s career, what kind of a deception it is: because it reminds us that those people were never quite the ideal versions of themselves that they came to represent — the “saintly mother” or the “lost first love” — they were, instead, simply human beings who lived and died like human beings do, with all the senseless horror of a life that is, in a general sense, petty, mean, and short.

You could say, I guess, that it’s hard to be a misogynist when you’re already as much of a cynical misanthrope as Ford was. And I think that’s true. But another way to look it at is to note that while the logic of Star Trek is to reinvest ourselves in conservative mythologies that posit reality as its own justification — a reactionary posture which regards any effort to make the world a better place with the same hysterical activism that Republicans decry anyone else’s activism — Ford is interested in how we make meaning even where there is none, both a hope and a fear grounded in experience and pain. As a prequel, therefore, Star Trek cannot afford even the idea of introspection or self-doubt, and we must be shuttled from action scene to action scene to prevent us from having even a single meditative moment; after all, if we had time to think, we would realize how under thought it all was, how underdetermined the myths we are being told to believe really are. In contrast, then, it is the very fact that nothing matters and nothing happens in Ford’s movie that means we can think about why things that happen matter, and why when people die, it is as human beings rather than as metaphors. It is in grappling with meaningless that meaning becomes useful.

* There is actually a scene in the original script in which Lincoln has a conversation with his disembodies destiny. For reasons of dramaturgy, Ford was certainly right to cut it, but it does confirm my sense that Lincoln already knows who he is to become.

The Underdetermined Death of Uhura

I was more or less flippant in saying that Kirk and Spock in the Star Trek movie are Bush and Obama. It was true, I thought, but probably only in a kind of collective unconscious way, an expression of a particular way our society mediates some of the contradictory ideas it manages to hold in its pretty little head — in this case, a simultaneous investment in multiculturalism and in majority culture (white) supremacy — that takes on different forms in different contexts: the movie on the one hand and, on the other, the political fact that Obama’s “multicultural perspective” has to be reconciled with the political reality of a nation quite comfortable with lawless lynching of people unblessed with the markers of majority.

But, now, having imbibed much more commentary on the film (Abigail’s is a good overview, and Adam and Millicent are the more specific provocations for this pose), I want to up the ante on the vitriol. This movie is genuinely odious.

For a start, while the commonplace that women exist in cinema to serve as growth charts for the male leads is commonly true, there’s something particularly attenuated about this phenomenon in this particular Star Trek. As has been pointed out elsewhere, women are important primarily as absences, even — to put it more strongly — legible only as traumatic representations of absence. While Spock and Nero, for example, have highly developed narratives which spool out their characters by reference to their loss of mother and wife, post-infant Kirk has no apparent mother at all, an absence from the narrative necessitated by her actual presence in his life. In this movie, only dead women are real and reality is a function of dead women.*

This is, I think, much more insidious than the movie’s more obvious — because thoughtless — expressions of its own white masculine ego ideal, things like the mini-skirts and Iowa Elks club feel of the federation as a whole. Uhura’s presence in the plot is stupid, too, but like the mini-skirts, there isn’t much more to say than to observe that what was at least a well-intentioned gesture towards gender and racial equity in the sixties (a black female bridge officer, albeit without pants) has become, precisely by its faithfully replication, a step backward; in a franchise which has already seem both a black captain and a female captain, Uhuru’s presence in the narrative (as the only non-white male character of any importance at all) just illustrates how unconcerned the creators of the movie are with the forward progress narrative of liberalism.

Need they be? Myself, I’m pretty down on the entire progressivist narrative as a framework for understanding the universe, but I think this would be how you would mount a defense of Star Trek as a franchise if you wanted to: it does believe that humanity is gradually becoming more humane, and every stage of the show’s development attempted to measure this progress by reference to greater and greater inclusion. The original series might have been content with having some helpful women and ethnics around, for example, but the Next Generation had the idea of incorporating non-white males in less subservient capacities (a female Chief Medical Officer, a Klingon Security Officer) as well as making the captain bald, old, and British to make him as specifically not the White Male ego-ideal represented by Kirk. You still had Riker to displace that Kirk figure onto, of course, and the important non-white-males were still somewhat circumscribed by their ethnic or gendered specialty: the Klingon (as scary black guy) can only be in charge of violence while the important women characters are limited to the nurturing roles of psychiatrist, doctor, and mother (and lets not forget Whoopi Goldberg to provide super duper magic). I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Tasha Yar, the original security officer, was female, though her swift elimination from the cast (like that of the original female Number One from the original series’ pilot) would seem to indicate less comfort with the idea than the daring move of putting her there in the first place would suggest.

In any case, while one can quibble with how well it was done, the fact that the franchise’s continuity was a grand narrative of steadily increasing progress-through-diversity has to be acknowledged, and while I never watched Deep Space Nine or Voyager, they did add to the larger narrative of the franchise a sense that even in Star Trek’s particular version of the future perfect, perfection was seen as continuing to be redefined in practice. So, points for that; if the idea of progress is a fiction, as I think it is, it is at least a fiction whose political power is, most of the time, a force for better than worse. If the current incarnation had chosen to take up this legacy, it could, for example, have created a homosexual character, and that would have been, if not all that daring, still completely in the spirit of Roddenberry’s articulation of the show’s ethos (as Adam puts it).

Which is why I want to flag this movie’s crimes not as the kind of thoughtless racism or sexism that the previous incarnations were often guilty of, but as a more active and reactionary intervention. While the old versions of the franchise could be blind to the beams in their eyes because they were so focused on their neighbor’s motes (or just self-satisfied), the new movie strikes me not only as harboring a basic nostalgia for the sins of the first series (which the later incarnations had “corrected”) but also as rewriting the narrative of the franchise as a conservative project of maintaining those characteristics by undoing their corrections.

After all, as much as I admire the cleverness of the time-travel plot — since it does allow a much more satisfying “reboot” of the series than any other return-to-origins narrative would — there’s something about it that’s a little too close to being the 1984 fantasy of going back in history and retelling the history of the present as it should have been written. As in totalitarian “official” narratives, the basic story doesn’t really change since the present is always whatever it is (rewriting history doesn’t actually change the present, so all the characters have to end up where they’re supposed to be) but creating a different back story for that present is not totally unlike the desire to write a new history of the Soviet Union with Trotsky airbrushed out, or whatever.  In this sense, we have the past we want: Captain Pike makes it from the pilot — even given a central role to play — but his Number One is completely absent (with Majel Barrett herself only being represented by an offhand reference to Nurse Chapel). And most damningly, while Uhura occasionally aspired to being more than a token in the old series, she isn’t even that here, as being a “token” would imply a desire for increasing diversity that it strikingly absent from the movie (I would even suggest that her “green” roommate is a way of making her fail to signify as black in anything but the most empirical sense). And there aren’t even any other tokens.

In this sense, I have two slightly different j’accuse’s. The first is simply a kind of lazy bad faith we are all pretty familiar with, the kind of desire that a show like Mad Men seems to represent: reveling in nostalgia for the sins of the past because we desire them but cannot openly admit it. Yet this, too, can simply be a product of self-satisfaction, the way the sense that we are now post-racial can be a fiction enabling a kind of complacent embrace of our worst angels. My second thesis nailed on Abrams’ church door, however, is deeper: rather than simply being the conservative tendency to imagine that racism or sexism just isn’t that big a deal (but at least admitting that it was or would be a bad thing), this is a movie which is actively hostile to everything the old franchise attempted to stand for, and which actively sets out to erase it, the way there really is a substantial wing of the conservative movement that stands, openly, for white supremacy. This is an important distinction, I think, because while the original Star Trek at least thought it had solved inequality — with a well meaning naivete that makes me want to pat it on its head and send it on its way — this movie is actively hostile to the very idea of multiculturalism, the existence of women, and the narrative of progressive inclusion which the franchise has, up until now, articulated.

Not all prequels have to be retrogressive exercises in nostalgia, of course; in fact, I maintain that the James Bond reboot, which I posted about here, is a impressively thoughtful effort to grapple with the series’ entrenched misogyny. The reason the old Terminator movies were so much more interesting than Terminator Salvation, too, is that they functionally were prequels, starting from an already told future and then using the prequel form to un-think (or at least inadvertently trouble) conservative givens about how gender and reproduction work. In the new Star Trek, on the other hand, it is the very specific way the movie intervenes into that continuity, as a prequel, that makes it such a conservative film.

For example, not only does the plot begin and end with a giant Vagina Dentata time-warp — though it does do that — it also completely fails to exist as a movie without it. If we want to get all Lacanian, in other words, we could note that the specter of a carnivorous maternal phallus isn’t just the defining feature of the plot, it’s also the condition for the movie’s own existence: the narrative conceit that allows it to be a prequel is 100% a function of a visual metaphor for misogynistic fear of women. And not only visually: the alternate time narrative that gives the movie an identity, after all, begins with Nero’s loss of his wife, an event produced by Spock’s use of the red matter, which he got (presumably) from Old Spock in the past after it had been used to destroy his mother. This movie is a pearl whose irritant is fear of the vulnerability that women represent to it.

Now, you can easily quibble with my recreation of these chains of causation — I see you coming a mile away, Seafan – but you shouldn’t: they don’t make sense and that’s the point. Rationality is the enemy! While many time travel narratives (like Back to the Future, for example) often pretend that everything adds up and makes sense (Fritz Leiber delightfully parodied this tendency in “Try To Change the Past,” for example), it is exactly because it’s not one of those movies that makes it so reactionary, in every sense. As in the first two Terminator movies — where John Connor gets born only because the Terminator tried to prevent him from being born –  teasing out chains of determination only illustrates their fundamentally underdetermined nature. But while the Terminator franchise did this as a way of calling into question everything you might think you know about what is natural, the recursions of this movie have become an anti-rational object of desire in its own right, a spectacular fear of women which produces the spectacle of women as fear which produces spectacular fear of women, etc. And as a Pavlovian pleasure-through-stimulation device, it teaches us to take pleasure in the manner in which it signifies; after all, if our enjoyment is a function of seeing action, isn’t it significant that all action is reducible to either causing or being caused by the death of women?**

* Anyone want to take bets on whether Uhura survives the next Star Trek movie?

** Seriously, any takers on whether they kill off Uhura in the sequel? Anyone? If it’s by the same writers, I’ll give you odds.

Everybody Knows the Sound of a Train in the Distance; Everybody Knows its True

Love Songs and Patria

Before I talk about Vusi Mahlasela, I want to talk about Billy Bragg.

I remember reading some newspaper reviewer claiming that the ultimate Billy Bragg lyric is this one: “that brutality and the economy are related now I understand,” from “Valentines Day is Over,” a song about domestic violence. That seems more or less right to me, as far as it goes, and though it’s hard to show in writing how catchy, how sing-able, that line is, take my word for it that it is, which is another very Braggy thing: chewing up multisyllabics and singing out pop songs. But what’s really characteristic about it is that it combines the two overriding themes in his lyrics, love and leftist politics.

The interesting thing, though, is how they are combined. For one thing, they are rarely yoked together so snugly as in that particular song; just as often, the two themes are explicitly in conflict, as in the chorus to “New England,” which proclaims that “I don’t want to change the world, I’m not looking for a new England, I’m just looking for another girl.” Yet what the newspaper guy was flagging is still present even there, for whether in conflict or synthesized, what we see is a desire that they become the same, that patriotism and patriarchy be things which can go together.

I’m thinking of these terms (as he is) in their better senses, which they are rarely allowed to signify: patriotism as Mark Twain has it (“Love your country always and your government when it deserves it”) and patriarchy as the kind of responsible love that a parent (male or otherwise) has for family. And the very terms I’m using in making that distinction illustrates my point: as attachment to locality becomes a desire for better governance (implying political activism and solidarity) it resembles love; as love becomes an attachment to relationships, it more and more implies a responsibility that is not so different from what public service is supposed to be, the selfless assumption of power that would, for that reason, not be abused.

The fact that practical experience teaches us how rarely this actually occurs does not necessarily contradict its value as an ideal point of reference, and this is, I think, the desire at the heart of both songs: to understand public roles by reference to the what is seen in the best in private, and vice versa, to think through a better masculinity against the backdrop of failures of it. Which is why the dissonance between “Valentines Day is Over” and “A New England” doesn’t so much represent distinct competing perspectives, but rather the desire for their dialectic synthesis: “Valentines Day is Over” wants to argue the interrelatedness of love and economy by reference to their breakdown in domestic violence (the absence as trace of the absent) while “A New England” foregrounds the distinction against the background of an essential continuity.

In both, the key is that patriarchy and patriotism are more complicated than their dumbest meanest versions, even if (since they name the problem that needs to be overcome) those connotations can’t be simply put aside either. He wants the terms, in other words, to be plastic: precisely by emphasizing the violence of patriarchy, he seeks to emphasize a form of masculine responsibility that would not be so; by keying in on an ambition to change the world (that his disavowal only emphasizes), he attempts to imagine romantic love as a sublation of that desire. In other words, he tears the terms apart as an effort to revive them, locating the problem in specifically bad patriotisms/patriarchies as a way of distinguishing, implicitly, the good versions that get buried beneath. “Valentines Day is Over” is interested in the ways that bad public life (“the economy”) destroy private lives, in this case by making an (unemployed) boyfriend into an abuser, with the silent implication that a new England would produce another guy. And “A New England” keys in on the difference between the romance conventions of a pop song (“looking for another girl”) and the new England of the title as a way of transcending it, of making patriotism the highest expression of love, or love the best articulation of patriotism.