Dale Peck the novelist keeps digging in, but Peck the critic is backing off the fight for literature’s soul. The 36-year-old author has written three well-reviewed, ambitious novels, a handful of short stories, and a new “fictional memoir,” “What We Lost,” about his father’s wretched childhood. But he’s better known lately for his long, savage book reviews, particularly one in the New Republic in June 2002 that began, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.”
Peck charges on for almost 6,000 words from there, flogging every misused dash and antecedent-less pronoun in two paragraphs from Moody’s memoir “The Black Veil”; calling the book “lies” and “criminal,” and then extending his fuck-you to the horse Moody rode in on. Peck lashes Moody together with Davids Foster Wallace and Eggers, Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, and assorted other Lit Boys as “heirs to the bankrupt tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is ‘Ulysses’; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov … the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis … wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s … and the stupid — just plain stupid — tomes of DeLillo.”
“Hatchet Jobs,” a forthcoming collection of Peck’s critical flayings-cum-manifesto, will be Peck’s parting shot. He’s quitting reviewing in part because he hasn’t gotten the response he hoped for. After years of reviews just as withering, the Moody piece for some reason inspired a burst of articles in places like Salon, the Believer and the New York Times. The writers of the “think” pieces for the most part passed up the opportunity to debate the canon or the state of the art, poking instead at nonburning side questions like whether harsh reviewing is nice, or fair, or civil, or appropriate, or hurtful — or just good fun.
“They just quote the zingers,” Peck complains. “I’m quitting because there’s no point; I’ve become this class clown, the guy who hates everything.” In the thumb-suckers’ defense, it’s not always easy to pry Peck’s diagnosis of literature’s ills from the rhetorical flail of his essays — he conflates conventional apples like Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides with unreadable oranges like William Gaddis and John Barth; he embraces, denounces and mischaracterizes modernism and postmodernism; he cops out in the afterword to “Hatchet Jobs” with unelaborated pronouncements like “the heart of the novel … is a diffuse locus of ideas and ideologies loosely tethered to a set of individual visions and personalities” and “literature is an act of revenge that aspires to elegy.”
But he’s right to lament a certain chilly remove in much serious contemporary literature, and in our interview, he succinctly names the problem as “books that point to other books rather than real life.” Literature has gotten insular; the brilliant literary tool of irony has been dulled to a nihilistic-yet-wimpy “whatever”; and too few books, as Peck puts it, “work toward a goal of rendering the truth of human experience rather than the truth of aesthetic expression.” He may even be right that a rude and aggressive gay man who grew up in a trailer home gets shut out of “a publishing context that’s quicker to embrace [Franzen, Eggers, Wallace, Moody et al.] than it is to embrace me because their message is more palatable.”
His strategy of denouncing the competition and the system, however, may backfire onto “What We Lost.” Not only has he alienated potential blurbers and reviewers in the cozy literary world; worse, he’s misrepresenting himself as a writer. The quality of his fiction is a pleasurable shock if all one’s read is his criticism. Moving, as I did, from the confused and nasty reviews (which he writes on a computer) to the clear, taut novels (composed in longhand) is like leaving a clanging boardwalk arcade for the roar and whisper of waves on sand. Peck’s fiction writing is visceral, risky yet controlled, lyrical and — especially in “What We Lost” — enormously compassionate.
Peck and I spoke in his East Village apartment on a rainy afternoon in November. It was the day “What We Lost” was being released, and he was understandably nervous about revenge-by-review. As it turned out, Andrew O’Hagan’s Nov. 16 review in the New York Times Book Review did stink of chickens coming home to roost. O’Hagan bizarrely asserted that “When gay men write about fatherhood, they are often ruminating about manhood,” because they won’t have children themselves, and then added that “it is not a book about his father’s farming episode [the book's ostensible subject] at all, but a rather oblique account of Dale Peck’s grapplings with the notion of male authority.” Unsupported by anything in the text or even Peck’s readily available biographical info (the subtext is certainly Peck’s own childhood, not that of his unborn sons), O’Hagan’s was not so much a hatchet job as a self-directed hand job. It was as if Peck hadn’t written a book: He’s gay, so his subject must be childlessness.
To write “What We Lost,” Peck interviewed his formerly violent, alcoholic father, Dale Peck Sr., about the older man’s childhood, which was even worse than the childhood he in turn inflicted on his own children. “What We Lost” is a generously embellished account of a year-and-a-half-long reprieve Peck Sr. had from the one-room house on Long Island he shared with seven siblings in two beds, along with a father who passed out in his own piss almost every night and a mother who hated her third son with a terrifying focus. She regularly beat him with a hose, kept food from him and, when a younger son was killed in an accident, told Dale, “It should have been you.”
One morning in 1956, Peck Sr.’s already-drunk father dropped off “the boy,” as he’s called in “What We Lost,” at the dairy farm of an uncle he’d never met. He worked the farm with his uncle and started running track at school, missing his brothers and sisters but enjoying the freedom from his mother’s Olympian spite and his father’s degradation. The boy is just unclenching, starting to trust in order, responsibility and the kindness of his aunt and uncle, when he’s abruptly returned to the chaos back home. There’s a harrowing scene of the boy and his big brother stalking the drunk “old man” through the pine barrens to lift his paycheck for the family. The story then leaps to 2001 and the trip Dale Sr., 10 years sober, and his 34-year-old son Dale Jr. make to the dairy farm.
What’s left out is the years in between. They’ve been covered before: Episodes of drunken cruelty bob to the surface of Peck’s three novels like a corpse carried down a river. Fifty pages of autobiography explode from the middle of his second novel, “The Law of Enclosures” (1996), where Peck repeats his suspicion, also hinted at in his debut, “Martin and John,” that his father struck the blow that ultimately killed his mother. Peck Jr. was almost 4 when she died, and three stepmothers followed in quick succession. Peck Sr. brutalized all of them, with the second getting it the worst. His father once dragged Dale Jr. and his sister Dalene out of bed to make them watch him put a gun to his third wife’s head and then to his own, before finally passing out. In that household, as Peck writes in “Enclosures,” “everything flew … her body, eight and a half months pregnant, over a chair — that was the morning she gave birth to her son — and her son’s body, across the dozen feet of the room we shared.”
The new book, with its tender portrait of the 13-year-old Dale, strikes me as a Jesus-caliber act of forgiveness. Peck says, “It may have taken my father 60 years to fix himself, and it’s ongoing, but I think he did. That’s what made me want to write ‘What We Lost,’ an acknowledgment of his ability to be true to his nature, which is a loving nature … In my fiction, there’s a divided aspect. I have to write the book where I go after my father’s jugular ['The Law of Enclosures'] and then I have to write the book where I lionize him. It’s very hard to put those two things together.”
Peck says he had a head start on the interviews he conducted with his father for “What We Lost” because “I knew a lot of this stuff from growing up.” He’s already told me that his father, a plumber, is “not a therapy type,” so I ask about the context of those first tellings.
What happens next on Peck’s living room couch is an eerie channeling. Peck grabs his empty coffee cup off the table and throws his head back and sucks at it. He slams the cup down and pokes his finger into my leg so hard it hurts for 10 minutes. His eyes narrow and he yells in an angry slur, “‘You fink you got it bad? I had it bad. My muvver used to beat me wif a rub-ber hose!’ That was the context,” Peck continues, his voice staying loud and furious. “Over and over again. ‘I’m going to get drunk and tell you why I’m such a bad father.’”
Peck says he and his sister were only badly beaten themselves once each, Peck for a “faggy haircut,” but they saw their stepmothers beaten whenever their father drank. Peck conjectures that “my father’s violence was as much a correction by example as it was punishing his mother — keeping your woman in line. If his own father had kept his mother in line, she’d never have done those things to him. My father was never as incensed with my stepmothers as when they disciplined me.”
Peck says, his voice back to chatty, “All that chaos had a very progenitive effect; it’s like atomic energy. It made me a writer. I’m not that creative, I’m analytic, not in a logical way, but I’m always trying to put together extremes, to see what they generate. I don’t think I would have had the temperament or desire to turn real things into fake things if I hadn’t had such a complex set of things to reconcile.”
That reconciliation has produced layers of complexity in Peck’s fiction, but it may have clouded his judgment as a critic. It’s funny and touching how disappointed he is that his reviews didn’t spur more literary discourse: Part of him meant those outrageous, often cruel attacks as tough, and toughening, love. “I think I read more closely than 90 percent of the critics working,” he says wistfully. Later, he adds, “Jeffrey Eugenides was the only one who responded to anything I said.”
He calls his critical method “aggressive misreadings” à la Harold Bloom. “That’s how Bloom says literature grows,” he explains. “The anxiety of influence produces misreadings which in turn leads to this desire for differentiation that produces new kinds of literature.” I’m not sure if this is how Bloom meant it, but Peck’s suggestion, from his review of “Infinite Jest,” that David Foster Wallace “shut off his goddamn word processor and try to find someone who would passionately shove a dick up his ass” certainly qualifies as aggressive, and is not a reading that ever occurred to me, even when I was most annoyed by Wallace’s infinite footnotes.
Another reason Peck expected more literary back-and-forth is that he takes criticism of his own novels very seriously, adjusting when he agrees with a review. His first novel, “Martin and John,” came out in 1993 and was widely hailed for its “beauty,” “wisdom,” and “mastery of literary form … that belies [Peck's] 25 years.” Edmund White called it “the best book of the year,” and Michael Cunningham declared the “launch of an important career.” The book is a succession of linked stories told about Martin by John, who grows up on a farm with an alcoholic father, Henry, and battered mother, Bea, before moving to New York.
Young Peck focused not on the praise, however, but on the censure, and accordingly reshaped his second novel, which he already knew he wanted to be about a “long, unhappy marriage.” “‘Law of Enclosures’ was responding to my critics, who said the marriage in ‘Martin and John’ was very black and white,” Peck says. “The reviews said the father was this demon and the mother was this victim … The marriage hadn’t gotten the full complex treatment it deserved. I said, ‘They’re right,’ and I tried to rectify it” in his second novel, which also featured Henry and Bea.
When I ask why he’s so anxious that his possibly murdered mother not come off like a victim, Peck says, “I think one of the way we perpetuate our hurts is by not looking at the context in which they were produced. One reason my father was so violent is that he could only see how he was wronged and he was going to make other people see that, even if he had to hurt them to do it. When you put things in a larger perspective, you see that the things that happened to you happened in a bigger context.”
This echoes what Peck says about postmodernism, which he embraces despite his loathing of postmodern fiction writers like Barth, Gaddis and Pynchon. “The incredibly difficult but I think profound gift of postmodernism is that there’s no aspect of human knowledge or existence that can ever be fixed, except that phenomenologically we know we exist,” he says. “What postmodernism taught us to do — and that’s why I love Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel ‘Everything Is Illuminated’ so much — is to locate ourselves in context, not how the realists did or how the modernists did with their stream of consciousness. Rather than looking inward and trying to find out who I am, which is impossible, because we can’t see ourselves without prisms of language and culture, you can set up points of reference, maybe through refraction. But your points will constantly change and you have to, too, and that’s very real.”
I can’t help it; I go all Oprah on his ass. Perhaps, I venture, he learned about changing reference points earlier than most people, from a series of mothers and from a father who became someone else when he drank and from the early entwining of love, hate and fear.
Peck replies breezily, “Love and hate and fear are equally intertwined for all people, but I’m very fortunate because I have very vivid stories to dramatize that.” He says later, “I write my books in a series, and I’m placing the character of John in greater and greater contexts,” he says, perhaps to get to “something more positive.” This really is a man writing, as the cliché has it, for his life: Domestic violence is a gift and postmodernism is the religion through which he interprets it.
Late in the afternoon, Peck is raging, not for the first time, about Joyce and DeLillo’s bad, aesthetics-over-experience “message,” and I ask him, “OK, so what’s your message?” He’s tired by now from my badgering and the rain and the worry about how “What We Lost” will be received. He sighs. “When you talk about fiction themes you’re reduced to statements that are trite or simplistic but true, and my fiction’s message is, ‘We are all suffering and in our suffering we seem to like to make others suffer too and maybe there’s a way around that.’
“What’s my message?” The hatchet man shrugs. “‘Can’t we all be nicer to each other?’ But how do you make that true and believable?”
Anthropologist Katherine Frank spent six years stripping and interviewing 30 of her regular customers to research her book “G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire.” Adapted from her Ph.D. dissertation, it’s an academic yet accessible exploration of the exchange between the naked lady on the platform and the man who keeps returning to tuck money in her garter.
Frank discusses with equal ease the bounce/rump-shaker move and the self-reflexive nature of the post-tourist, and her experience reflects less mind-body dissociation than one might expect. She created a set she calls her Ode to Baudrillard at one of the clubs, stripping off layers to songs (one from “The Matrix” and one by White Zombie) that reference the philosopher who argues that reality — sorry, “reality” — has become indistinguishable from its representations, or simulacra. (Had she not retired to academia, I would suggest that Frank add Hole’s “Doll Parts” with its Baudrillardian refrain, “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.”)
Frank worked in several clubs in a Southeastern city she calls Laurelton, a mecca for strip club enthusiasts. In the huge, upscale, mostly white Diamond Dolls, 200 to 300 “girls” danced on stages and moved through the crowd selling $10 table dances to individual customers. Upstairs were private rooms that cost between $100 and $500 an hour and $200 an hour for dancers. Celebrities would often go straight upstairs, and rumors flew about orgies in there — rumors, Frank points out, that were neither true nor squelched. She also worked at Tina’s Revue, a smaller, cheaper, mixed-race club where the fantasized activities were drug dealing and prostitution. In both places, men could and often did pay dancers to sit and talk with them.
Among Frank’s well-argued conclusions are that the “touristic gaze” is more relevant to the strip club experience than the “male gaze.” The strip bar isn’t home or work; it’s a place where men can vacation either as high rollers or bold explorers of a seedy underclass — without any risk. She also found that men were obsessed with the authenticity of their interactions with the dancers (“that guy over there is deluded, but she really does like me”). The dancers exploited their customers’ longing for “realness” by giving fake real names and fake home phones (cellphones devoted to regulars who considered themselves friends). And in a fascinating chapter called “The Crowded Bedroom: Marriage, Monogamy, and Fantasy,” Frank counters the charge that strip bars erode men’s abilities to achieve intimacy with a girlfriend or wife and argues that the strip club forays actually held together the marriages of many of her interview subjects. Frank spoke to Salon from her home in Virginia.
Your book is incredibly sympathetic, in contrast to things I’ve heard about strippers hating men. How did your feelings about men change during the six years you worked in the clubs?
I think I became much more sympathetic. When I was an undergraduate I was an anti-pornography feminist. I read Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon and thought they had some good points. But talking to the guys in the strip clubs, I realized that they were damaged by the sexist culture, too. They felt repellent, that their wives and girlfriends could never accept their desires and that they could never ask advice about sex because they were supposed to somehow know everything. These guys were struggling with how to deal with what they saw as women’s conflicting demands for both traditional masculine traits and more emotional presence. They were also confused by women’s desire to be called beautiful but not be objectified.
That said, I also came to appreciate that men still have so much privilege and they should realize it. Their stigma for going to the club is nothing like the stripper who’s trying to get her next job and can’t say what she’s been doing for the past four years. Dancers make a lot of money compared to women working in some other low-skilled occupations, but they are downwardly mobile: Women can’t do this much past their mid-30s.
The man may think he’s giving money to this woman who’s “captured his heart” so she’s got the power, but it’s entertainment money to him. Sometimes a guy will spend $500 on a dancer: I can’t imagine having that kind of money to spend on top of rent, groceries and bills.
How did you become a stripper?
I started working for liquor promoters when I was 24 to pay for grad school. Have you ever seen the Bud Girls? We were like that: We wore skimpy outfits and we’d go out in teams to different bars and sell shots. We did some promotions in stripper bars and I started talking to strippers and liquor models about body image and identification and decided to study that in school. As an anthropologist, I was interested in doing ethnography — not writing about people from a detached stance but actually becoming a part of what I wanted to study — so I started working as a dancer in an upscale club. I realized quickly that the women were doing it for the money, so I turned my questions to the customers.
Did you worry about the stigma?
It was a risky project. Other academics were saying things like, “Are you ever going to get a job if you take a job as a dancer?” But I think the timing was right; a few people had come out but nothing like it is now.
The ivory tower has been stormed by sex workers since then?
It’s certainly more accepted now. A book came out while I was in grad school called “Whores and Other Feminists”; a lot of the writers were grad students and other public intellectuals and they’d worked in the sex industry. During the late ’90s, it still felt like doing this project was going to expose me to some judgment and stigma. [Frank is now a Social Science Research Council sexuality research fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in the department of sociology and has taught at several other colleges.]
How did stripping affect your body image?
I had really positive experiences dancing. I learned that men have a much more varied perception of what sort of bodies are beautiful or sexy than a lot of women think they do. The upper-tier clubs had less variety than the lower-tier clubs. But even in the upscale clubs, you’ll see more variety of shapes and sizes than you’d see in a Cosmo or a Maxim. I had stereotyped men as wanting something narrow, when in fact they have a wide variety of tastes.
Really? When I went to a strip club, the dancers all looked generically flawless.
If only a black light could follow me around everywhere! Those lights make you look tan, they make your skin look perfect, hide your cellulite and the red bumps from shaving your pubic hair.
In the dressing room you’d see what people really looked like. But yeah, there are some parameters: Youth is a big thing, and the short-haired girls quickly realized they had to wear long wigs to get any tips.
What kind of money did you make?
I’ve made over $1,000 in a night, and I know dancers who made over $3,000, but both of those figures are way above average. The busier clubs you work in, the more expensive dances are, the more you’re going to make. But I could never work more than four nights a week because it’s physically really hard. You’re in high heels, it’s late, it’s smoky. It’s a working-class job, hard labor. You’re wearing a nice dress instead of coming home covered in ketchup, but you’re still using your body in a difficult job.
Did the guys ever creep you out?
Men in groups are different from men alone. Men in groups talk more, compare women’s bodies more blatantly, are more critical of their wives’ or girlfriends’ bodies. I didn’t like working Saturday night — bachelor party night. When I started stripping I thought it would all be groups, and I was really pleased to find out that a lot of it was sitting and talking with an individual guy.
You give a concise definition of the male gaze in Chapter 1: “In a society such as our own where there are distinct gender inequities … ‘looking’ becomes a form of domination and visibility a form of oppression. The gaze becomes a disciplining force when it is internalized.” You then dismiss that pretty quickly, but isn’t it central to the strip club experience?
Yes, the men are looking and the women are being looked at and that’s one important aspect of the experience, but that’s not the only looking relationship that’s going on. Men are looking at each other, watching each other spend. Women are looking at each other; women are looking at the men, sizing up who’s a big spender. The assumption is the man looks and he sees what he’s looking for, but the dancers realize they can show their body and not reveal their subjectivity.
Context is a big part of it. Say you’re walking down the street and someone yells, “Nice ass,” you may feel exposed because you weren’t expecting it. But if you’re exposing your body for money, that’s in the context. In the strip club, nudity is a costume. Some of the quest for authenticity that the customers were on was a result of this — they wanted to see that final costume drop away.
I guess playing the male gaze and the touristic gaze was your job. Did you exploit the class biases — dress trashier for the guys in the lower-tier clubs or more glamorous for the high rollers?
The clubs are so stratified — ranging from high-end gentleman’s clubs to smaller neighborhood bars or red-light district venues — and the men choose where they go because of the meanings that those differences already had for them. Men came in with so many preexisting beliefs about what women were like in each club that I didn’t feel like I had control. Even if you tried to dress like a biker chick in an upper-tier club, the guys would think, Isn’t that cute, this nice girl is pretending she’s a biker chick. Or a really thin girl: In the upper-tier club they’d say, “Oh, look, a ballet dancer.” The same girl in the lower-tier club they’d be like, “She must be a heroin addict.”
Being interested in and able to talk about news, current events, politics or the stock market would give you more appeal for certain clients. Knowing how to dress, accessorize, apply makeup and that sort of thing helped along the fantasy that they were with a middle-class girl if that’s what they wanted.
Did you change your “look” much?
We didn’t have that much leeway. In upper-tier clubs, the manager would do a full body check before you went on the floor. You had to have fingernails and toenails painted, three accessories — a long gown counted for two but in a short dress you’d need, say, a boa and gloves. No chunky platform boots, it had to be thin heels. They wanted a put-together look.
What were the rules about pubic hair?
In the bottomless places, a city law said you couldn’t be clean-shaven, I suppose because that would be like fetishizing pedophilia. So if you didn’t have enough, the manager would say, “Pencil some in.” Some dancers wouldn’t shave because that’s a fetish; there’d be enough men who liked that look to support maybe one completely unshaved dancer a night.
Did men seem to prefer the fantasy that you were an exhibitionist or that you were a “nice girl” and it was hard for you? Did anyone get off on the fantasy you did it against your will?
They liked both of those answers — the trick was figuring out which answer a specific customer was going to prefer! While I was doing the research, I was always upfront about the fact that I was dancing as part of my research project, though, and there were certainly customers who got off on that as well.
Had your interview subjects all put money in your garter? How did it feel to turn the tables and study them?
Yes, all of the men that I interviewed I met working in the club. I definitely liked being a dancer studying the customers since the dancers are always studied — people say, “What’s wrong with these women that they would take up such a job?” Why all the attention to the dancers? Why not look at the men who actually fund this kind of entertainment? I liked the idea of being a dancer studying up.
And I felt lucky to talk to so many customers. It made me a better dancer, better at the job, which is pleasing them; I was thinking all the time about what do these guys want, why are they here? I was really interested in their lives and their work. I got to see how a transaction actually occurs, how a sale happens. I learned things that I never would have considered if I’d just been sitting in the corner with a notebook. And I think it has helped me to understand sexuality better in general as well.
Can you expand on that?
Working in strip clubs dramatized for me the fact that fantasies can be experienced as very personal yet widely shared or cultural. It also let me think through how this happens, and especially how fantasy is so influenced by other social positionings, like social class. Since writing my book, I’ve gotten lots of e-mails from guys saying, “Oh no, I am just like the other guys. I’ve said all of those quotes in your book!”
Your subjects were almost all married and most said they were in love with their wives and wanted to stay married. How did they square this with coming so often to the clubs?
For the men who said that they were in love with their wives and wanted to stay married, what happened in the clubs was transgressive and real enough to be exciting, but was still a fantasy. In the chapter “The Crowded Bedroom,” I really wanted to question the whole idea of true intimacy. What does that even mean? Lots of couples hide things from each other, from negative everyday thoughts to really serious sexual or emotional entanglements with other people. My current research project is actually looking into this more in depth — the whole relationship between secrecy, intimacy, sexual exclusivity and marriage.
You picked up on a pattern of men saying, “It would hurt my wife if she found out” they went to the strip clubs, but they go anyway. You explain that with object-relations psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg’s theory that aggression is an integral part of marriage that couples should accommodate rather than deny. Can you say a little more about his theory and why you subscribe to it?
I wouldn’t say I subscribe to it in whole, but his primary idea that relationships involve and re-create past object relations [primarily with one's parents] and that they involve more than just positive emotions is one that I think deserves careful consideration. I think most of us can think about our own relationships and recognize times when we’ve been nasty to the person supposedly closest to us. The question is where this hostility comes from and what we can do about it. What appealed to me about Kernberg and other object-relations psychoanalysts was the attempt to look at this hostility as something that inevitably arises but that does not necessarily destroy the passion that two people have for each other.
I hate to be such a square, but how would you feel if your husband went to strip clubs regularly?
Honestly, I wouldn’t like it! For me, a lot of it is about the money — I don’t have the disposable income to spend on that kind of entertainment, and if he did have that kind of extra money, I’d want it to be fair. Maybe if I could spend dollar for dollar somewhere else, but unfortunately, there aren’t yet places where women can go pay hot young men to stroke their egos. That may come in the future.
My assignment: Report on Web site Third Age for singles 40 to 60. My status: Single. Age: 41. I’m not thrilled to join this demographic army, but since I have, I’m more than an observer tagging along. I hope to get in bed with a source.
We’re all the same when we’re filling out our online dating profile; it’s a democracy of self-display in the little boxes for favorite books and movies, hobbies, pets, political affiliation. For “Body,” I check “Slender,” “Athletic,” “Muscular,” “Average” and “Could Lose a Few Pounds” to communicate the static of womanhood in America and still seem hot. My mature dream guy will get the joke. He’ll also get my screen name: “barely legal.”
I end “What I’m Looking For” with “Divorced, kids OK,” which is actually an understatement. I love children, and I’m not driven or wealthy or brave or selfish or selfless enough to have one by myself. So I’ve pretty much bid adieu to my nubility (which spell-check wants to change to “nobility.” Fuck you, Microsoft).
Sometimes I fantasize that the window’s not really shut. I could conceivably meet Mr. One tomorrow and instantly establish our trust and life commitment and mutual desire for children. I could get the painful shots in my ass and have fertility-drug twins cesareaned out of me by, say, age 44, then spend the next 18 years in the terrified vigilance of parenthood. Then I could decline and die just at the point my kids, assuming they don’t have Down syndrome, have had enough therapy to forgive my selfish, set-in-her ways.
Or I could shop for retreads. Divorced or widowed dads offer advantages beyond off-the-shelf kids. I know they’re not all Eddie’s Father, but the minimally decent ones have loved and empathized and comforted; they’ve transcended the cool selfishness of the long-term dater. (They may retain tiresome bargaining and arguing habits learned in deteriorating marriages, but at least they engage.)
These dads have usually hung in with a romantic partner longer than I have and are often ready for something more independent and low-key than their marriages. A long-term bond with a man and child(ren) that’s less pressured than wifehood and motherhood seems ideal. A cry of low self-esteem or hipster alienation perhaps, but to be second or third or fourth in a man’s affections seems ideal for a longtime singleton. Intimacy without suffocation, some relational slack, kids I can enjoy and nurture without full responsibility.
But it’s distressingly clear after a few clicks that my funny, smart, evolving, same-wavelength guy with the cute spawn is not on Third Age. I thought I knew the terrain, but all I know is Nerve.com (artsy, intellectual, semi-naked pictures) and Match.com (unpretentious, sincere, pictures with dogs). Both sites have reliably yielded pretty good dates with way-above-average men, because of the enormous numbers. On Nerve.com, for example, a search of taller-than-me 37- to 48-year-old nonsmokers who live within 50 miles conjures 350 bachelors who’ve posted or updated their ads in the last four days. Most single people I know have tried Match or Nerve, and several smart, fussy, overachieving 40-ish girlfriends found life partners in these online catalogs of love.
Third Age is more like a cable shopping channel. The clichés that the Nerve.com-ers tweak for their ads (“Tall dork, handsome”; “plays well with Other”; “unrequited self-love”) are the lingua franca of Third Age. The lack of quote marks is disturbing around such self-portraiture as “professional into fine dining … looking to get the most out of life with a special someone … easy on the eyes and seeking same.” These men “want to share a zest for life.” They are “a gentleman seeking a lady,” “an average-looking male,” and an “owner of co. Extreme romantic.”
I try to parse this: “I consider myself a great guy seeking same in female”: He wants a female who also considers him a great guy? He wants to be a great guy inside a female? Equally confusing is, “At 29 years old I am over 6 feet tall.” And still growing? And what are you doing on the geezer site anyway, sonny? I was so desperate to engage that I briefly wished for enough fur to answer this individual: “HAIRY WOMEN are BEAUTIFUL; Very INTELLIGENT, INTERESTING, White Male, Seeks Female LifePartner/lover/friend, 20′s to 50′s; with at least HAIRY FOREARMS.”
And these are the wordsmiths. The vast majority leave all the blanks blank and don’t post pictures either. One guy’s screen name was Brooklyn; the only information about him was “within 10 miles of Brooklyn.” How borough-driven can a woman be, dude?
Why would someone, no, not someone, pretty much everyone on this site, take the trouble to join and not even try? I had paid my $20 (for a month; Nerve charges for each contact like a subway fare card). Frustration was making me mean, so I started flaming. To a businessman “seeking a well rounded, sensitive, intelligent, spiritual, educated female who will complement my unique profile,” I kvetched, “What unique profile? You didn’t even fill in any blanks.” Another one had checked “Other” for “Body,” so I wrote him, “What are you, a spirit?” After a few hours wading through prose worthy of a pharmaceutical ad, I went back and reinstated on Nerve, where I overreacted to basic literacy and humor by answering eight ads in a row; five in their 30s, three in their 40s.
I have dated a bit younger the last few years because of supply, not ageism. Evidence from Third Age notwithstanding, not everyone starts talking like a Stepford husband when he hits 40. I like my fellow end-of-the-baby-boom hipsters. My guys are less cynical than the younger ones (I don’t trust a man for whom Pavement or Elliott Smith might have spoken) and less sexist than the older ones. I’m happy to be part of the generation shocked that A) Ramones keep dropping dead at 50 and B) we now consider that “young.”
I also like seeing how people handle 40, when many are hit with what Philip Roth called “a desire to deepen one’s life.” That deepening, unfairly belittled as a “crisis,” manifests as career changes, spiritual searches, divorces, and other, smaller struggles, all preferable to not feeling or acknowledging the push to grow. I recently saw the boyfriend I turned 30 with; he’d stayed shallow into his 40s. He seemed sad and sleazy, like a tired salesman running on the fumes of bravado. He kept looking for my angle.
Nerve.com has a space for “most humbling moment,” and while the over-40s don’t detail their thickening waists and slackening jaw lines, they generally answer less flippantly than the youngsters and use words like “frequent” or “constantly.” The humbled men appeal. To date confidently into middle age, a woman has to believe that one’s male cohort is at least trying to laugh at the sags and slowdowns of all our bodies and is excited enough about the rest of experience to want to share it. Men who have discovered the limits of arrogance make better company: You notice more when you’re not running around imposing your will on everything.
To foster this belief in unshallow maturing men, it helps to avoid magazines that identify by gender. The women’s mags generally ignore single ladies over 40, while the men’s magazines ignore and loathe us. The once great Esquire in particular is now a glossy primer of middle-age terror, packaging Viagra and Rogaine ads with drool pieces on daughter-age starlets, offhand revulsion for menopausal women, and confused longing for some Hefneresque never-never land where the right cuff link wins the girl in the rumpled pajamas. (Esquire-ish age rage also stunk up Steve Martin’s hosting of the Oscars: With every envious dig at a young cute actor or sneering leer at a cute young actress, he seemed more like a sober Dean Martin.)
Obviously the Esquire man self-selects out of dates with left-wing spinsters like yours truly. Still, I was pleased that my five mystery dates — one 52-year-old from Third Age, and men 45, 40, 39 and 38 from Nerve — all seemed unvain, curious, engaged, kind and dismayed by the war in Iraq. None spoke of women as aesthetic objects or an exotic species — and men let this kind of thing slip more than they realize. All surprised me in some way, from the gentle engineer who advocated the military overthrow of the government to the public interest lawyer who graciously suggested we switch our status to “comrades” to the writer who almost argued me out of my diagnosis of narcissism (“I was married to an actress, for chrissake! It couldn’t possibly always be about me!”).
Judging by the way other women characterize dating as a circle of hell between job interviewing and that dream where you’re not prepared for the test that’s in Swedish and you’re naked, I think I have an unusual nonaversion to single life. Loneliness can curl me fetal on a bad day, but I also like the ritual of the date, the possibility, the permission to ask a total stranger personal questions, to learn about someone’s apartment deal or weird freelance gig or romantic history. I’ve gotten good enough at reading the personals to sidestep nightmarish encounters: The worst is “no chemistry.”
My five engagements ranged in length from one lukewarm date to two passionate weeks, the latter my first experience of the blitzkrieg woo. This cuter-than-his-picture, unpretentious intellectual dreamboat — let’s call him Benedict — declared “Eureka!” at the end of our first date, then called every day, introduced me to his friends, and generally acted like my boyfriend. The sex was sweet as well as hot, and he said the four little words women want to hear: “We need bigger condoms.”
Then Ben declared his panic over “the sudden intimacy” and dropped me as fast as he’d swept me up. I realized later my job was to slow it down and keep him grounded, but I was enjoying it too much. My friends, many of them veterans of such carpet-bombings, had warned me, but I was deafened by self-esteem issues: “Yeah, it’s fast, but why wouldn’t he be excited? He found me.”
Benedict was the two of a one-two body blow that first dented my single equanimity, then eventually buoyed it up. The first, harder hit came from a single dad I was set up with last year — by friends, not my computer — much too soon after his wife left him. This relationship lasted longer and cut deeper than any e-courtship has, which may not be a coincidence. I know I just said it’s fun to meet new people, but high-volume dating can also feel like a frantic marketplace. The overwhelming choice and snap decision-making exacerbate insecurities about age and looks and success levels, and those worries lead you to cast a correspondingly cold eye on your dates. You dismiss them faster because you hate them a little for making you loathe changes you know you should be accepting healthily instead of researching chemical peels and the kiwi diet to stay in fighting shape.
“Ozzie” was a veteran of a 16-year marriage, not the marketplace. He didn’t know he was supposed to make me wonder if he liked me; he just told me so and asked if we could be exclusive after two dates. My swinger’s hackles rose instinctively, but I had to admit it would be a relief not to wonder if he (or I) would sleep with someone else while we got to know each other. Ozzie’s even-keeled affection made the stormier dramas I’d been in seem noisy and self-indulgent. I started to relax, to trust him.
We interviewed each other like anthropologists. He couldn’t imagine being alone at a restaurant or movie, or any number of things I consider the luxuries of single life. I grilled him about how — and why, beyond children — one sticks with a marriage that’s not fun or affectionate anymore. He answered, often, “Love doesn’t make commitment, commitment makes love,” which twisted my bachelorette brain like a Zen koan. Then how do you know to whom to commit? How long do you tolerate nonenjoyment of a relationship? Where does happiness fit in? There was something grim in his dogged determination to mate for life, but I also wondered if that’s as close as adults get to unconditional love.
Alas, we were not to explore these paradoxes as a couple. I was sad but not (too) angry or hurt or surprised when Ozzie jettisoned me to “learn how to be alone.” (At least he got out under shrink’s orders. When Benedict broke up with me, I asked what his therapist said, and he told me she was on vacation. I whined incredulously, “You’re dumping me unilaterally?!?”) Ozzie’s and my breakup was the friendliest of my life. We stayed in daily touch for weeks and co-counseled each other through our separation, my e-dating, and his crash course in solitude.
I wish I could give Ozzie alone lessons. I wish I could understand his suffering, but I can only try to imagine an emotional life so Siamese-entwined with another’s that his rejection could rupture my whole self. The wounds Ozzie inflicted on me, on the other hand, were shallow enough to leave me hopeful (and probably more vulnerable to Benedict). I glimpsed something I’d forgotten in the last few years: that love can be a refuge, not always a tempest.
And once love is revived, it spreads and mutates unpredictably. At the end of an affair, it often shrivels into bitterness, but things never turned mean with Ozzie. In his absence, what I felt for him expanded into something more peaceful and hopeful and independent of any One.
I still wish I had a boyfriend, and it wasn’t great getting dumped twice in a long, cold, war-poisoned winter. But it’s finally spring, and the energy of those affairs — and even of the dates with my fellow lonelyhearts seeking love on the computer — has been transformed. They’re all there in this newest burst of dumb hope, lust, curiosity, vague spiritual hoo-ha, and random affection for humanity. Wherever that sap flows from and whether or not you call it a form of love, I’m grateful for it in my constantly humbling life.
It’s not nostalgia that makes me love the Mekons; it couldn’t be. I didn’t find them until 19 years after art students Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh started their punk band in Leeds. I was clueless then that the legendary Brit-punk class of ’77 — the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, the Damned, Wire, the Jam, X-Ray Spex, Billy Idol, Siouxsie Sioux et al. — was bursting onto the scene, as the Mekons never would. In 1977 I was 15, and the Ophelia revival tent in my bedroom starred ’60s British Invasion bands, Dylan, Patti Smith and anything swaggering: preferably sexual, but martial worked too. I didn’t mind that my heroes weren’t my d-d-demographic, and neither did my geeky gang of ’60s re-enactors: We’d scare ourselves silly spinning the “White Album” backwards, knowing that Paul wasn’t dead because we just saw Wings at the Cap Centre.
Twenty-five years later — who’da thought? — as many classic rock boomers as punks are on oldies tours. For a few C’s, I could watch the Stones twinkle in a logo-draped stadium, playing songs that stopped being about anything around (their) age 30. I’m glad Dylan found his grizzled voice, and wearing that wig and fake beard to Newport was genius, but his songs have narrowed to either nostalgic Americana or curmudgeonly bordering on nihilism. I love that Patti Smith is playing rallies against Bush’s fall-winter product line (Manifest Destiny is the new black), but as Jon Langford boozily pontificated at the CBGBs merch table, “she hasn’t made a good record in 20 years so she can fuck off.”
The Mekons are the only middle-aged band I went to see in 2002 (other than Mission of Burma and that was more to cruise the age-appropriate guys in leather jackets). The 25th-anniversary Mekons tour was spread over three nights in three relatively tiny New York clubs a few weeks ago: 1977-1983 at CBGBs on Thursday; 1985-1992 at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J., on Friday; and 1992 to the present at the Mercury Lounge, back in Manhattan, on Saturday. Had the Mekons ever reached an audience beyond the rock press and a few fanatical others, their three-chapter Stroll Through History could have looked grandiose and not like a joke. Surprisingly, though, they sold out all but the CBGBs show. A second Mercury Lounge show was added, “by popular demand,” Langford marveled from the stage, “something we’re almost completely unfamiliar with.”
Unlike most of the touring oldies, the Mekons are peddling a new album utterly unlike its predecessors, the strange and wonderful “OOOH! (Out of Our Heads).” More than any long-timers I can think of (discuss among yourselves), the Mekons’ career reflects aging as an evolution rather than just a waning of youth. Instead of plundering trends, like well-preserved chameleons David Bowie and Madonna, they stay relevant by setting songs in the actual world of work and friendship, Thatcher and the Bushes and Tony Blair, military adventuring and corporate ravening, art movements and literature and religion, sex, disillusionment, courage, I can’t go on, I must go on. They’re working-class intellectuals and very, very funny. I’m surprised to still have such a relationship to a band, but the Mekons help me make sense of my life now the way the classic-rockers helped me assert — or at least stand up straight — at 15.
The Mekons’ original incarnation, of which only Langford and Tom Greenhalgh remain, were Class Clowns of ’77. Their first single, “Never Been in a Riot,” made fun of the Clash’s “White Riot,” and “Where Were You?” used the punk template of breakneck tuneless shouting to ask adorably untough questions of a girl who didn’t show up: “I was standing in a queue did you see me? I want to find out about your life do you like me?” Their first album, in 1979, has the best cover of all time, a monkey at a typewriter over the title: “The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen” (sic).
Thursday, the Early Years, was my first time ever in punk temple CBGBs, and it was surreal to see an aging band that wasn’t the Ramones, Television, Blondie, et al. within those oft-photographed graffiti’d walls. Langford, gray-haired and bullishly stout, did the old punk-rock head-hammer and one-legged lunge like it came from muscle memory; pogoing alongside was his long-ago ex Sally Timms, the sexily weathered, sarcastic heartthrob of many an aging fanboy. They wore tight new CBGBs T-shirts; 50ish accordion player Rico Bell’s sartorial nod to the era was a choker of duct tape and a blazer with no shirt.
Further warping time was opening band the Sadies, younger than Rico Bell’s kids, performing only Mekons covers, so the history lesson was repeated twice. The Sadies joined the Mekons’ encore, and Langford gleefully announced in his r-rolling Welsh burr, “The farrrm team! We’re calling up new Mekons.” Looking up at the lanky kids, he added, “We got them especially to make us look short. And fat. And old.” As he exhorted people to come out to Maxwell’s the next night, he babbled, “the Stones will be there, and Marianne Faithfull and Wire, and we’re younger than all of them so they can fuck off!”
The punk years were not the band’s finest; some say they didn’t bloom into true Mekonhood until they added violins and accordion and women. In 1985 the group released its country-experimental-punk masterpiece “Fear and Whiskey,” which was my Mekons conversion experience (11 years behind the curve). First a cheery violin, then a cracked English voice (Greenhalgh) slogging through half-remembered shame. The man howls like a pained parody of backup singing — were these drunk old men in a pub or inept teenagers? — then a martial drumroll picks him up and dusts him off. He shoulders on. “Fear and Whiskey’s” got a bent-arm-swinging protest song for a miners strike, psychosexual spoken-word shit, sputterings-out and in-jokes, torrents of rain, and a Hank Williams song. It’s a wobbling glass raised to the nobility of even self-imposed struggle. Widely considered the genesis of alt-country, it sold about 4,000 copies upon release.
The tumbling “Rock and Roll,” a 1989 radio-ready attack on the rock business, should have been their “Nevermind.” Their first record on a U.S. major label and one of their best, it’s the type of ain’t-broke hard rock periodically fixed and sold as new. (On Saturday, Langford cracked, “The Strrokes. I like their earrly stuff.”) The beautiful, quavering voice of Timms turned up on “Rock and Roll” to complement Langford’s exhausted shout and Greenhalgh’s without-a-net imploring (uniquely and bizarrely suited to lines that don’t scan). In “Empire of the Senseless” Greenhalgh taunts censors that “this song promotes homosexuality/ It’s in a pretend family relationship with the others on this record/ And on the charts and on the radio.” But the song never did crash those bigger parties; it sold about 23,000 copies in the U.S., and A&M dropped them.
That was the closest they got to Mekons livelihood. They’ve scraped by with part-time jobs, government and spousal assistance, and other music gigs and scattered to Chicago, London, New York, San Francisco and Leeds. Part of the pleasure of a Mekons show is the reunion of old friends, both in the crowd and onstage. Before Friday’s show, Timms explained their un-American version of success: “We have longevity because we’ve never thought it was about money.”
The core Mekons are the same now as in the mid-1980s: Langford, Greenhalgh, Timms, Bell, bass player Sarah Corina, drummer Steve Goulding, violinist Susie Honeyman and guitarist/oudist/cumbusist Lu Edmonds. (Edmonds split before New York to play on Billy Bragg’s tour; Honeyman was replaced for this tour by Jessica Billey.) Over the nine albums since “Rock and Roll,” they’ve collaborated with novelist Kathy Acker on an opera about horny female pirates in 1996; made a techno concept album about porn and advertising in 1998; and descended into the subdued gloom of crumbling cities in 2000′s “Journey to the End of the Night.”
The darkness is relieved by a chunky dub rhythm here, a startling shout by “deputy” Neko Case there, but there’s little cheer in “Journey’s” bleak soundscapes, its scratchily recorded autoharp and self-loathing lyrics — it sounds like the empty parking lot after Tom Waits’ circus has pulled out. The old outrage is there in “Last Night on Earth,” but also a new hopelessness: “Robber barons roam/ Collecting their debts and filling up death row,” but “they can’t hurt you now/ Last night on earth.”
It’s a midlife crisis album, and it beat me to it by about a year. I turned 40 a few months after the planes hit, and I’m still waiting to snap back or maybe forward into the next chapter. I don’t know if the darkness and doubt following me about is standard-issue middle-of-life dark woods, brain-chemical spill, or an appropriate response to these times we live in. Swagger isn’t inspiring anymore, but some of 40′s questions remind me of 15′s: What does a person hang onto? When is resistance to the way things are integrity and when is it time to grow up out of that? As the rich get richer and the hatreds more bloodthirsty, belief in political progress can look as dreamy as religion.
And, lo, unto the confusion of 2002, the Mekons deliver a gospel album for unbelievers. They croon hymns of religious paradox and shout apocalyptic warnings like mad friars in Sherwood Forest. The relationship to the good fight, and of rebellion to resignation, is muddled. On “Hate Is the New Love,” Sally Timms sings with incomprehensible clarity, “There’s no peace/ On this terrible shore/ Every day is a battle/ How we still love the war.” The words warn of “dangerous bibles” and exhort to “Take His Name in Vain,” but the old forms still comfort — unison singing and swaying rhythms and lullaby violin.
I congratulated Tom Greenhalgh on making the best Sept. 11 response album. “We’ve been getting that quite a lot,” he said gently, “but the songs were all written by March 2001.” “OOOH!” was actually inspired by records of Appalachian church-singing and books about William Blake and William Morris and radical Christian sects like the Muggletonians and the Levellers, leftist church history that Greenhalgh and Langford say, darkly, “has been covered up.”
The Mekons were tired by Saturday, but they still let me tag along to the homey gathering in the Mercury Lounge dressing room, where wives and friends and Mekons compared childbirth stories. Asked why atheists would make such a religious album, Langford said, “When you look around the world and you can’t find any meaning, you look at more things.” (He added in an e-mail, “Socialism in England came from the Bible more than ‘Das Kapital’ and is possibly better and richer for it.”) But still, it’s Christianity. Is he seeking what religion offers without, say, Christ? “Absolutely,” Langford declared, hastily adding, “but not like a hippie or anything going off to search.”
Another struggle for those of us who came of age during punk: balancing the pride in our edge against the nagging sense that love and hope probably will take us closer to where we want to go. That tension dissolves for a happy moment in the music on Saturday during the bouncy reggae “Tina” from “Journey to the End of the Night.” Fans of several generations are dancing side by side, and Langford’s singing with his eyes closed. “And I want nothing/ It’s what I’m trained to believe in/ But I can still dream of things/ That have never been” and then a line that veers dangerously close to hippie, yet feels earned, maybe even tenable after 25 years of small-label soldiering: “But someday will be.”
Alchemy seemed unlikely. A Bruce Willis action flick based on a French film made of still photos. A serious rumination on love and fate by the guy who, a few years earlier, had made “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” one of the memorable bombs of Hollywood history. A time-travel thriller that dares to compare itself to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” But this 1995 holiday-season release finds a profound poignancy in its sci-fi premise and actually pays back its debt to Hitchcock in a scene so layered it spins a new twist into his bottomless spiral of a movie.
That scene falls toward the end of “12 Monkeys,” which is, like “Vertigo,” a love story between a damaged detective and a dead beauty. Willis’ James Cole, sent from the 2030s, hides out with his psychiatrist, kidnap victim and lover, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), in a theater where “Vertigo” is showing. It’s late 1996; a viral plague will kill her and 5 billion others in a few weeks. On-screen, Kim Novak’s first incarnation explains her bogus “past life” to Jimmy Stewart, pointing to the dated rings in the trunk of a fallen redwood. “I was born here, here I died.”
“I saw this movie when I was a kid,” Cole remembers. He was 8 when the virus was released — now, in other words — and was among the handful of survivors who went to live underground. Evidence has just forced Dr. Railly to believe him, and she’s finally stopped calling his apocalyptic warnings “a meticulously constructed fantasy.”
A meticulously constructed fantasy — like Kim Novak’s preposterous impersonation in the first part of “Vertigo” and like Jimmy Stewart’s crazed makeover in the second. As the 1990s lovers watch the older film, Cole marvels, “The movie never changes. It can’t. But every time you see it, it’s different, because you’re always a different person.” As Jimmy Stewart never does, Cole grasps the futility of trying to relive a moment locked away in time.
“12 Monkeys” constantly refers to movies, and its looping structure suggests the cinephile’s obsessive return to certain films. Cole’s remark certainly reverberated with my “Vertigo”(s): The first six or so times I saw the Hitchcock film, I agonized along with Jimmy Stewart at his inability to go back and save his partner, and his inability to see the real Kim Novak instead of the fake. But on the seventh viewing, I saw a movie about being an actress. Novak’s frustration at being a cipher, at being loved for one particular presentation of self, is more universally resonant than a cop’s guilt for deaths not prevented, which was obvious to my later but not my former self.
“12 Monkeys” created yet another “Vertigo” for me, partly because its lovers share a conviction held only, in real life, by street people, fringe Christians and New Yorker cartoons: The end is nigh. In this light, and from a fin de siècle where shared sexual fantasies are discussed, accepted, even expected, Stewart and Novak’s inability to line up their delusions becomes all the sadder. Stewart ends up not just crazy and betrayed but utterly alone, cut off — twice! — from the woman, or the piece of her, that he loves. And she loves him and is just as willing to bend reality to accommodate him.
In “12 Monkeys,” the hero can’t go back and “fix” the past any more than Stewart does. But light enters the closed room of predetermination when Cole connects with the woman in his dream.
“12 Monkeys” opens with the dream, which we will see over and over in slightly different form until the end, when we loop back and arrive at its source. A little boy’s blue eyes (the shot that opens and closes the film) watch a man get shot in the back at an airport. He tumbles to the ground; a blond woman races to him and screams “No,” dropping to the floor to embrace him. “12 Monkeys” is quite faithful to its source, the 1962 short “La Jetée” by experimental filmmaker Chris Marker, which is a concise, post-apocalyptic loop that also begins and ends with an airport shooting.
Husband and wife screenwriters David and Janet Peoples, whose credits also included “Blade Runner” for Ridley Scott and “Unforgiven” for Clint Eastwood, elegantly fill out the spare structure of “La Jetée.” Cole is a violent convict who gets “volunteered” by his sinister jailers to scout the past — not to change history but rather to find the virus in its pure form so a scientist can be sent to study it and create an antidote.
The painterly lighting and set design help us understand why Cole eventually chooses a doomed past for his present. “Topside” is shot in cool blues, starting with an eerily empty Philadelphia, in which Cole pads around wearing a huge space suit: The earth’s surface is no more habitable than the moon’s. The underground city, meanwhile, is greenish yellow, with ominous smoke and clanging pipes and stabbing white spotlights. The scientists who zap Cole around the space-time continuum are director Terry Gilliam’s standard leering grotesques, shot in hideous fisheye and ominous zooms familiar from his earlier (and overrated) “Brazil.” But here the frantic din below serves to frame the quiet, nuanced love story in the air above.
Cole is first shot accidentally to 1990 Baltimore and is promptly locked in a mental institution, where his doctor is Railly, a dark-haired beauty. She first sees Cole in a cage, rocking on his haunches, in restraints, Thorazine drool streaming from his mouth. His ravings about the end times sound like those of many other patients, yet she’s oddly tender with him. She tells the other doctors she feels like she’s seen him before.
Also in the loony bin is Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the rebellious, eco-warrior son of an eminent virologist. By the time Cole is re-shot to November 1996, a week before the plague is unleashed, Goines has moved to Philadelphia and formed his Army of the 12 Monkeys, a group of hilariously petulant animal activists who have no idea what Goines is up to. Clues indicate that the bumbling “army” is/was behind the viral terrorism. After stumbling around 1996 Baltimore a bit, Cole hides in Dr. Railly’s back seat and abducts her as she is coming out of her lecture on “the Cassandra complex.” He forces her to drive him to Philadelphia to track down the virus.
“12 Monkeys” is at its best inside a car, which is peculiar in A) a sci-fi special-effects epic and B) an ecological cautionary tale. Looking forward at the road, Cole and Kathryn’s faces can register what they might not if they were facing each other. Years fall off the middle-aged Cole as he sucks in air, shouting happily with his huge bald head thrust out the window. He begs Kathryn to crank the car radio, bouncing on the seat like an 8-year-old. He exults, “I love the music of the 20th century,” and the music on the radio is self-consciously “nostalgic”: Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, Link Wray.
Stowe’s beautiful, expressive eyes show fear, doubt, respect for the integrity of Cole’s delusion, an exasperated affection. As they grow closer, the radio bulletins on “eminent psychologist kidnapped by the dangerous mental patient” seem further and further from what’s unfolding in the car.
Cruising north up I-95, she explains how snippets of reality form his delusion. Meeting Goines in the hospital six years earlier, she explains, has placed him at the center of Cole’s conviction that he’s about to destroy the world. But when Cole tells Kathryn he thinks she’s in his dream, she’s more rattled. “No, James, I’m just in the dream now because of this situation,” she answers, gulping nervously. He answers — what else? — “No, it’s always been you.”
Pulpy dialogue that makes literal sense is one of the many ways “12 Monkeys” savors its own movieness. Cole, battered, bald and confused by all the time changes, is stripped of all frills, sort of an exaggeration of Willis’ action persona. He looks like a malevolent turtle. When Railly protests his stomping to death a man who is preparing to rape her, he bellows, “All I see are dead people” (an odd pre-echo of “The Sixth Sense,” just as Brad Pitt’s babbling hippie previews Tyler Durden, his “Fight Club” anti-consumer). The impending death of everyone on earth does give Cole a sort of moral pass for all the people he smashes up as he tracks the virus and flees the police, who are after him now for the rapist’s murder as well as Railly’s kidnapping.
Stockholm syndrome evolves into trust as James and Kathryn move across the gulfs of kidnapper and victim, doctor and patient, Cassandra and doubter and, of course, time. The last time Cole is shot back to the future, his present, he’s decided to believe Dr. Railly that he’s crazy. “You’re not real,” he moans to the creepy scientists who control the time machine, finally convincing them to send him back. Kathryn meanwhile comes across incontrovertible evidence that Cole has been in different times, and they finally arrive where same-dimension lovers do: They accept, and inhabit, each other’s version of the world.
And they are both right; the plague will (almost certainly) happen, but Cole’s dream does change with his circumstances. Once Brad Pitt appears in it, instead of the blond, pony-tailed man who really has the virus — a Hitchcockian McGuffin in dream and reality.
James and Kathryn briefly hide from the police in a pay-by-the-hour prostitute hotel, the perfect spot for entering someone else’s “meticulously controlled fantasy.” Standing meekly before Kathryn, Cole professes, “I want this to be the present. I want to stay here with you,” and he’s every lover who wants to freeze the moment (which leaves out very few — why else are weddings so heavily photographed?). They slip off to buy disguises, then into the theater that’s showing “Vertigo,” where he puts on a wig, mustache and Hawaiian shirt as she goes into the ladies’ room.
When he emerges from the theater, she’s a blonde, and he says, “It was always you.” She touches his hair and says, “I remember you like this,” and then we do, too. It’s the tumbling man. They decide to spend their last week on earth together at the beach and head to the airport.
The final, “real” version of the dream unfolds to elegiac string music, all our previous glimpses of the scene piling up to a scene all the more tragic for its inevitability. The lovers spot the maniac with the virus and try to change history after all. Cole runs after the mass murderer and is shot from behind by the police. The virus makes it onto the plane. Kathryn, cradling the dying Cole’s head, looks up straight into the eyes of 8-year-old Cole, burning the scene into his head, ensuring that this is not the end of the loop, that his life will continue on again through the apocalypse.
A glimmer of hope appears on the plane — a scientist from the future is on board — but in all likelihood, the hero doesn’t save the day and never will. Unlike Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo,” though, he does get to share the doomed world, if only for a stolen moment. That has to be enough, and it is.
Should sex offenders be deprived of legal rights that the rest of us enjoy? Yes, says the state of Kansas. And the U.S. Supreme Court has supported this point of view. In a landmark 1997 case, Kansas vs. Hendricks, the high court ruled that it is not unconstitutional to confine sex predators in mental institutions after they have served their prison sentences — if state officials can prove the inmate “is unable to control his dangerous behavior.”
Now Kansas officials want to make it even easier to extend sex offenders’ incarceration, requiring only that the prisoner be deemed “dangerous” and have “a serious mental health problem,” rather than be “unable to control” his behavior. One offender, Michael Crane, who was confined to a Kansas mental institution after completing his prison term, is now challenging the state’s practice. And for the second time in less than four years, the Supreme Court will decide whether Kansas is going too far to protect its citizens from sex criminals.
Crane was twice convicted of sex crimes, exposing himself to a tanning salon attendant in 1993 and more recently, aggravated sexual battery (attack without penetration) on a video clerk. “Proof of dangerousness … linked to a serious mental problem” is enough to meet the standards set by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997, insist Kansas officials.
But how effective is Kansas’ program of enforced hospitalization? Not very, says Dr. Robert Miller, a professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Colorado Health Science Center and adjunct professor of law at the University of Denver. Miller, who has treated sex offenders, thinks Kansas “just pays lip service to treatment.”
“I am massively opposed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Hendricks and to the courts pretending they’re providing treatment. Under the Kansas law, treatment isn’t relevant, because even if they’re deemed untreatable, they can still be locked up.” He added that the places prisoners are sent are “called mental health facilities, but often they’re really just warehouses.”
As thoroughly unsympathetic as sex criminals are to just about everyone — including other prisoners — constitutional experts are still shocked that the high court agreed to hear the Crane case. Lisa Nathanson, legal director of the ACLU of Kansas and western Missouri, calls it “amazing that they’d hear another case out of Kansas” that tries to go even further than the 1997 Hendricks ruling, which caused a national stir. The Kansas ACLU intends to seek permission from the court to file a friend of the court brief in Crane, as it did in Hendricks.
“It violates basic constitutional principles,” says Nathanson. “There are huge due process problems with locking people up again after they’ve been sentenced.” Her remarks echo those of Crane’s attorney, John Donham, who said last week that if the high court rules for the state, “all they have to prove is that he’s done it before and he’s likely to do it again. That’s certainly not sufficient to commit somebody to a mental hospital.”
Nathanson says, “I just have to put my faith in the U.S. Supreme Court that it will say this time that the Kansas authorities have exceeded their rights.” Nathanson’s faith in at least one Supreme Court justice, Stephen Breyer, is probably well placed. In his Hendricks dissent, Breyer noted that locking up sex offenders after they’ve done their time violates the constitutional prohibition against extending a prison term after sentencing. Breyer also pointed out the inconsistency in the state’s actions: Though Kansas called sex offender Hendricks’ condition “treatable,” it did not make arrangements to provide him with treatment after he was committed to the mental hospital. Breyer further asked: If Kansas really was concerned with the prisoner’s mental illness, why didn’t it diagnose his illness earlier and treat him in prison?
Kansas assistant attorney general Peggy Graham maintains that the state is committed to providing treatment but says prisoners can’t be forced to receive treatment they don’t want. Graham also observes that there are not enough clinicians to treat all the state’s sex offenders, a category that includes an estimated 20 percent of all male inmates. Dr. Miller agrees there’s a shortage of clinicians in the prisons and that many of them “don’t think of [the offenders] as patients but as monsters that society must be protected from.”
When Kansas sex criminals are about to be released from prison, Graham and other members of a review board decide whether to file a case on them. If they do file, the prisoner undergoes a “commitment proceeding” in which he is entitled to pit his own mental health experts against the state’s. Graham points out that in this proceeding, “they’re not being retried for their crimes; it’s being studied why they [were committed] with mental evaluations … People coming out of prison bring their mental experts, we bring ours and the judge decides.”
All 62 of Kansas’ reincarcerated sex offenders are held at the Larned State Security Hospital, which employs behavior modification therapies. The state does not use any chemical techniques because, according to Graham, “with pedophiles in particular, it’s about control. It’s more a psychological than a physical condition.” She disapproves of the use of chemical castration with medroxyprogesterone acetate, which six states currently allow.
Miller agrees that “there’s no indication [chemical castration] will work,” but he has had some success with other chemical therapies. “Maybe 10 percent of sex offenders have a greatly increased sex drive — I had one patient who masturbated 40 times a day. Provera, a female sex hormone, works well.” Miller also points to recent success with Prozac and other antidepressants for helping sexual compulsives.
The bulk of Miller’s work with sex offenders, however, is also behavioral. “Most child molesters are extremely immature individuals who are uncomfortable around adult women. They don’t see themselves as hurting the kids; it’s like two 10-year-olds playing with each other. There are behavioral techniques to keep them from being aroused by little kids. We teach them to couple, say, an image of a little boy with the judge’s gavel coming down or the jail door slamming shut.”
Miller says “Clockwork Orange”-type aversion therapy doesn’t work: “As soon as you stop the pain, the behavioral patterns come back.” He says a far more effective technique is “masturbatory satiation” — which sounds much more humane than electric shocks and eyedrops. “Show the guy a picture of an appropriate sexual object, usually a female around his own age, and have him masturbate to ejaculation. Then immediately put the inappropriate image, the little boy or girl, in front of him, and he can’t masturbate.” Miller emphasizes that child molesters, unlike rapists, generally don’t want to hurt and humiliate their victims. Pedophiles are often of below-average intelligence and are genuinely surprised to hear that fondling children can damage them. “I can’t tell you how many of them say, ‘I never hurt anyone’ or ‘But she jumped into my lap,’” says Miller.
Miller says trained clinicians can tell with some accuracy who has been successfully treated. Speaking of a Wisconsin sex offender program he supervised, the physician says, “The guys we wanted to let out had five-year recidivism rates of 11 percent. For the guys we had to let out because of the law, it was 44 percent.” Miller argues strongly that trained clinicians should be in charge of screening, treating and discharging sex offenders. But “states don’t want to spend that kind of money. They just want these guys to disappear,” he says.
The numbers in Kansas bear out Miller’s cynicism. Of the 62 predators who’ve entered Larned since 1994, one has been granted transitional release, where he’s constantly monitored, and one is in conditional release, where the monitoring is slightly less constant.
Clearly Kansas has succeeded in separating more of its sex predators from their potential victims. Whether they have made any progress in treating these people, however, is extremely doubtful.
