Under the Stars

One of my collages.  It's directly linked to a couple of the stories in Next to Nothing.

This week a really nice reporter from Cincinnati Magazine called me up to do a short interview about my book that's about to come out in March (from Lethe Press, thank you LA Fields and Steve Berman), Next to Nothing.  It was a pleasure to talk to someone so kind and sensible about the stuff I write.  A lot of people, at least in the past, have not taken too kindly to my stories and what they mean and do.  That's not patting myself on the back or anything, just the way it is.  I mean many people get it of course and I'm grateful, but when they don't get it boy it's hurtful, as in your day job being threatened, etc.  The main reason many people have turned up their noses at my oeuvre is because the people I focus on are poor working class trash who also often happen to be gay, and they are living in situations and places that are not conducive for the "coming out" story or even hopeful tolerant little ditties about "fitting in."  I mean they "fit in," but often times they fit in with people who are "morally objectionable" as well.  And by putting air-quotes around "morally objectionable," I'm stressing the fact that every person I concentrate on in the fiction I write helps me at least question what that term means.  And then I usually go back to that epigram I'm always tossing about, the Flannery O'Connor one that actually starts off Next to Nothing:   "It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” 

 

I centralize freaks in a way that doesn't allow codes of morality to interrupt their transmissions.  And for me at least that's one of the most moral actions to take.  Sounds self-aggrandizing, but that's it. 

 

Next to Nothing is a drastic, off-kilter parade of homosexuals, alcoholics, pedophiles, philanderers, adulterers, robbers, wife-beaters, transvestites, foul-mouthed kids, and so on.  It is also a Wednesday night after work where everyone is too tired to breath, some going home and feeding the kids, others having a drink, others going to their part-time jobs as caregivers at the group-home.  Some are getting ready for Wednesday night services at church and others are bracing themselves to ask other relatives for some cash till pay-day and still others are hoping their cars are going to start tomorrow morning and a few more are doing laundry, watching HBO, taking the garbage out.  It's that mix of "morally objectionable" parade and the mundane everyday where I find meaning, and even grandeur, in lives that often don't mean shit to others, and when I write those stories I don't feel anything but a connection, a direct link, to both myself and to others. 

 

We are all sinners, and we all sometimes bounce checks because we wanted to buy really good Christmas presents.  We all are evil, and we also help the old lady get her groceries into her car. 

 

By foregrounding lives that are not heroic or even upstanding, but just there, I can mitigate the need to judge and forgive, and find a place to examine my own shortcomings, my own stupidities and my own goodness.

 

I just finished reading The Great Gatsby again, which is a much more elegant and brilliant book than I will ever be able to write of course, but still it has always informed what I want to do.  Gatsby is the freak here.  He is all desire and lies and crimes, and yet he is the central figure of Nick's displacement, and ours.  "Morally objectionable," Gatsby owns a different metaphysical space, an ethereal world of wishing and hope that's completely tainted and diffused by the means he has gone to attain what he wants.  And yet he is better than most people we will ever know.

 

One of my favorite moments in the book happens toward the end, when Gatsby is summarily banished from the Buchanan household, but he still waits to see when or if Daisy will come to the window to let him know she loves him.  He is an outcast on the edge of his own paradise, and Nick is leaving after hanging out with him out of pity.  It's nighttime in West Egg, that blue-gold glow Fitzgerald loves to conjure, and Nick shouts across the lawn on his way to his train:  "They're a rotten crowd.  You're worth  the whole damn bunch put together."

 

That shout always makes me cry. 

 

Look:  God knows I'm no Fitzgerald or O'Connor, but I do have a reason to write, and it's probably linked to those two great American writers' needs to not only stylize life into a form they can create from, but also their needs to find morality outside of the "hive mind," outside of the "crowd."  Both of these canonized geniuses found ways to canonize freaks, to displace us from ourselves for a little while so we can know our own shortcomings, and understand our place under the stars.

 

  

Number One Freak

 

 

Melissa McCarthy's performance in Identity Thief made me cry.  I wasn't really prepared for that kind of response.   Almost every review I read about the movie panned it, although almost everyone praised McCarthy's chops, as well as the chops of Jason Bateman, her co-star.  Identity Thief is truly a piece of crap, a retread of all kinds of comedy tropes (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, What about Bob, anything with Adam Sandler and/or Kevin James) that finds endless merriment in the overly obvious juxtaposing of freak and non-freak.  The premise is uptight family guy gets his identity robbed by a morbidly obese sociopath who wears tacky clothes.   These two opposing forces are forced together on a road-trip in order to prove something or other.  Truly the whole plot is preposterous (you keep wanting Bateman's character to just say fuck it and call his bank and do what anybody else does when this happens:  cancel his card and move on), and the machinations and motivations become so muddy you can't really tell what is what after a while. 

 

And yet there's McCarthy making me cry. 

 

I think it has something to do with how gungho she takes this character on.  The titular identity thief is a total concatenation of stereotypes, a fat, lonely, greedy, mentally-ill hoarder who likes to punch people in their throats when they get in her way and who has a sadsack back-story that may or may not be true.  McCarthy gives this cartoon a shadow-life with her eyes and her way of moving through space gracefully and authoritatively, as if she is dancing her way past the movie's cheap laughs in order to find a way to destroy your heart.  This happens most intensely in a couple scenes for me -- one in which Bateman catches her holding his daughter's hand, and in another when we first meet up with her at a bar where she's buying everyone drinks.  In both scenes, which bookend the movie, McCarthy conveys a sort of innocence that's based on an understanding that no matter how stupid the movie gets the main character she's playing is for real.  McCarthy makes this freak a transcendent freak, a full-fledged heart-broken criminal trying to steal her way out of herself.  In other words, McCarthy plays the character as a stand-in for all of us, so that Bateman's upstanding citizen seems like the cipher, when probably the movie itself was constructed to do the opposite. 

 

Kathy Bates did the same thing in a movie called Misery back in the day.  She invested all her abilities in making a fat, lonely, creepy, backwoods kidnapper/torturer into someone you could connect to on the most beautiful levels.  I remember when I first saw that movie I was devastated, not because in the end she was vanquished but because her vanquishing seemed morally wrong.  The plot of that flick is a Stephen-King potboiler about a romance writer imprisoned by his biggest and craziest fan, played by Bates.  James Caan plays the writer, and he is intended as the movie's central figure, representing good common sense.  So when Bates' freak takes a sledgehammer to his legs you're supposed to feel completely violated.  However Bates does the sledgehammer scene, and all her other scenes, with such verve and attentiveness and truth you feel connected to her need to smash knee-caps.  That's the common sense in this moral universe:  kneecap smashing.  Her transgressions became the norm, not because the movie wants it that way but because Bates does it that way.

 

The same thing happens in Identity Thief.  And it's a joyous experience.  Not because the movie is great, but because someone in it is greater than she should have been.   



 

Gleaks

The pleasure of watching Fox's Glee is witnessing a group of outcasts form their own unique society through an interest in performing and using that performance as a way to seek glamorous revenge on those who have consigned them to the status of "freak."  Every week the Gleeks get victimized:  the stridently talented girl-singer is egged in a parking lot, the gay kid is thrown into lockers, the pregnant teen is ostracized by her once tight network of cheerleader friends, the guy in the wheelchair is pushed down the stairs...  And all this humiliation is answered through heartfelt, intense performances of pop songs.  The catharsis comes through karaoke, only it's not mimicry the Glee cast is indulging in:  it's reinvention through pop, self-acceptance channelled through a song on the radio.  The pleasures Glee offers all of us losers are intensely satisfying because we have constant access to both sides of the equation in our daily lives:  we all get treated like crap, and we all crank up the radio in the car when Lady Gaga belts one out.    

It's the same beautiful vengeance you feel at the end of Carrie when our pig-blood-covered teenaged heroine finally lets loose the hounds of hell at prom; only with Glee it's a really splendid rendition of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" that does it for us.  Carrie is performing her pain in that famous horror movie scene, but remember:  she is the Queen of the Prom and the Queen of the Night combined in that image, and her power not only comes from what has been done to her, but also from her own glamorous transformation from dowdy girl in the gym showers having tampons tossed at her by mean girls to this figure of both horror and transcendence at the end of the movie:  the center of attention, a centrifugal force of teenaged pain and telekinesis not singing her way out of outsiderdom, but burning the whole stupid joint down just because she can.

Hallelujah.

The connection between the pain of daily humiliation and the release of a triumphant performance, between being bullied and glamorously confronting those bullies in show-tune showdowns, is palpable especially now because of the media coverage of gay teenaged boys killing themselves after being tortured by classmates.  The fury that comes from knowing this is happening is always quivering under the surface now.  And it's not just a pop-song we're talking about here, but still Glee provides a public service:  it allows us to know the truth (the gay kid getting thrown into lockers and worse) and the beautiful fiction it takes to transform and survive (that same gay kid singing a song from Victor/Victoria and all the other Gleeks clapping amazed and stunned by his talent).  Without fantasy, without music, without performance, the torture becomes an unbearable malignant force.

Watching Glee, I keep thinking of Todd Browning's 1932 controversial masterpiece Freaks.  Freaks is a revenge-fantasia concerning sideshow freaks taking revenge on the "normal" people who are trying to trespass into their own happy society.  The freaks in the movie (people with disabilities ranging from microcephalia to leglessness, a bearded lady, midgets, conjoined twins, etc.) survive through performance:  they use what is seen as "wrong" with them as a way to make a living, strutting their stuff inside tents and cages to suckers who pay to see them.  But the movie never catches that gaze:  it's interested in how freaks live and survive and flourish behind the scenes, and it is that society that both Glee and Freaks tap into, that cultural creative diaspora that allows groups of people often consigned to "outsiderness" to reinvent what it means to be "real," what it means to be alive.  

The penultimate, most gorgeously hilarious and strangely heart-warming scene in Freaks happens a little past midway in the movie, when the Freaks gather for an acceptance dinner.  The circus' beautiful trapeze artist has agreed to marry the leader of side-show performers, the midget named Hans.  The trapeze artists is not a freak, and she has secret plans of killing Hans after their wedding in order to get his inheritance.  At this dinner all of his sideshow friends (not knowing his betrothed's evil plans) pass around a goblet filled with wine, everyone taking a sip from the loving cup while chanting, "Gobble, gobble, we accept you, one of us."  Over and over the phrase turns into a beautiful song.  The camera lovingly pans from sideshow freak to sideshow freak, everyone happy and free and enjoying each other's company (kind of like the choir-room in Glee). 

"Gobble, gobble, we accept you, one of us!  Gobble, gobble, we accept you, one of us!"

But the trapeze artist is not amused.  She just can't take it anymore.  She turns on the chanting folks and screams, "Freaks!  Disgusting freaks!"

There is a moment in this scene of pure guttural rage flowing through the shot-down happiness of the party.  The bully here is outnumbered however.  The mob has switched from chasing the monster to being chased:  the monster now is the mob.  The freak controls the room.  This morality changes the atmosphere.  There is a close-up of the trapeze artist's face.  She is dumbfounded and horrified and amazed.  Freaks are people too, she seems to understand.  But it's way too late for sorry.

Glee captures this same shift in the moral code, only in slightly less horror-movie terms of course.  But the sentiment is there:  freaks shall inherit the earth.  Now let's all break into a song.