If it hasn't already, Halloween is becoming the most celebrated event on the calendar. Sales of costumes and spooky paraphernalia are skyrocketing. We can count on the beastess and the ghoulles showing up at the fuel desk and the grocery store, and ordinarily sedate folks are given an invitation to let their inner outlandisher shine. We can be creative with Halloween in ways we cannot with Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Halloween's burgeoning popularity can be explained in several ways, but I think the most compelling is its embrace of the unsettling subtext of our common existence: the evil and chaos and macabre we think so far removed from the routine of our lives is actually with arms reach, much, much too close for comfort. Victor Turner figured this out several years ago with the publication of The Ritual Process: societies and cultures seek equilibrium by controlling this subtext by surfacing it and turning it into a ritual. Trick or treat ...?
Fiction and film are replete with this theme: witness the remarkable insurgency of vampire and werewolf flicks and books in the last five or six years. But of all the brilliant expressions in the media of the close proximity of evil and chaos to our ordinary existences, I think the most compelling was in a film that contained no creator-killing monstrosities, bloodsucking fiends, or alien invaders. I am referring to the final scenes of The Silence of the Lambs.
Agent Starling knocks on the door of an ordinary house in an ordinary town and encounters what seems to be an ordinary guy living an ordinary life. But when the moth flutters into view, Clarice realizes that she is a long, long way from ordinary. What follows will cook your hash, no matter how many times you've seen it. The basement contains horrors that stagger, and our heroine cannot see the malevolent presence though she can hear and feel his breathe.
The bringers of chaos, death and destruction are far closer than we think. Economic collapse and terrorist threats are the larger items dwelling in the basement we can feel and sense but often have difficulty seeing until a disaster occurs or a bottom is hit or a retirement account goes up in flames. But the smaller and subtler players can be just as frightening: the rages that produce words which cannot ever be retracted and leave ruptured relationships in their wakes; the despair and isolation that results in suicide, or, sometimes, homicide; the soulless conflicts of election-year politics that distance us even further from the civil public discourse that once was deemed mandatory.
Clarice had to rely on her instincts to survive the horror in the basement and to emerge alive on the other side of the terror. On what shall we rely?
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Postmodernism and Rasslin'
Somehow three boys from Arkansas ended up renting a house together in Durham, NC in 1981. Ralph Smith, Mike McDonald and I christened our home on Iredell Street "Toadsuck East." The last time I was in Durham for the Duke Divinity School Convocation sometime in the early nineties, I was surprised to hear a div school student who was driving me to my hotel casually mention that he lived with two other guys in an old house over by East Campus called Toadsuck East (!).
Toadsuck was the sight of various mild debaucheries including a near arrest on our front porch in the wee hours of the morning when a group of young male seminarians rendered their falsetto version of "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman," and the regular theft/kidnapping of the concrete lawn toads that flanked the front steps known as "Sonny and Cher." It was a fairly ... unstructured ... environment.
But there was one weekly event on the calendar set in stone. At 4:00P.M. every Sunday afternoon, we would gather in front of our television and tune it to TBS out of Atlanta for Georgia Championship Wrestling hosted by Gordon Solie. GCW in those days had no entry music or fireworks or bimbos or people named McMahon. It was a simple testosterone-charged soap opera populated by guys like Dusty Rhodes, Ole and Arn Anderson, Jack Brisco, Tommy 'Wildfire' Rich, Ivan Koloff, the Funk brothers, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Koko Beware. The personas and story lines were there, but in an earlier and much more modest and benign form. There was never a moment's doubt about who the good guys and bad buys were, and when a wrestler crossed-over from one side to the other, the impact was thunderous. It was pure theater in tights and beer guts. There was a high degree of moral certainty and absolutely no ambivalence. The objects of our deepest love and darkest hate were clearly marked.
As the school year deepened Toadsuck was becoming something of an off-campus student center and others began joining us for our Sunday afternoon ritual. I recall waking up one Sunday afternoon in the spring having slept all morning and most of the afternoon following one of my third shift jobs, walking out in the living room, and seeing no fewer than a dozen seminarians - Duke seminarians - screaming, cheering and yelling as Dusty Rhodes dropped an Atomic Elbow on some hapless Somoan guy. I thought to myself, "How did this happen...?"
I was taken to task by one of my blue-blooded classmates that year who found this fondness for rasslin' to be a disgusting and pointedly egregious crime against Good Taste. Defensively I countered that in a time witnessing the rise of relativity and the erosion of absolutes, we damn well better have something that clearly delineates good and evil, the heroic and the villainous. He stared back at me stricken - probably not from the shrewdness of my retort but from its sheer ridiculousness.
It was ridiculous. But I had a point.
"Postmodernism" is a term not much in currency during my academic years, but from what I gather it refers to a very large, very general, and very non-specific trend in culture, politics, and art away from objectivity to subjectivity, from global narratives to multiple narratives, from absolutism to relativity, and from community to individuality.
Still unclear? Yea, me too, but haven't you noticed that in the movies the characters who used to be the good guys now aren't all that good, and the bad guys, with some exceptions, are not all that bad? No more black hats and white hats - they are all wearing gray. Marketers and advertisers used to exploit our desire for whiter teeth, bigger cars, sexier legs and cleaner floors, but now are going after our lust for 'personal choice' ("have it YOUR way ..."). The most interesting characters in our novels are not caught up in the simple decisions between right and wrong, but between wrong and wrong. Institutions from our churches to our schools to city hall to the White House are universally held in suspicion, and stuff we used to hang our hats on and could count on as sure things .. aren't. The center, alas, is not holding.
Sociologists adopted a French word for this cultural malaise: anomie. Another good French word for it is ennui. And it spawns some really nasty stuff from the more vicious forms of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism to Joe McCarthy to the Ku Klux Klan to the John Birch Society and its bizarre grandchild The Tea Party. It has been, and will continue to be, exploited ad infinitum by office seekers and various cultural pundits. It has turned Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin into significant power brokers and millionaires, and led Glen Beck and many of his followers to believe he is a messiah of some kind.
And you thought rasslin' was bizarre.
Toadsuck was the sight of various mild debaucheries including a near arrest on our front porch in the wee hours of the morning when a group of young male seminarians rendered their falsetto version of "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman," and the regular theft/kidnapping of the concrete lawn toads that flanked the front steps known as "Sonny and Cher." It was a fairly ... unstructured ... environment.
But there was one weekly event on the calendar set in stone. At 4:00P.M. every Sunday afternoon, we would gather in front of our television and tune it to TBS out of Atlanta for Georgia Championship Wrestling hosted by Gordon Solie. GCW in those days had no entry music or fireworks or bimbos or people named McMahon. It was a simple testosterone-charged soap opera populated by guys like Dusty Rhodes, Ole and Arn Anderson, Jack Brisco, Tommy 'Wildfire' Rich, Ivan Koloff, the Funk brothers, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Koko Beware. The personas and story lines were there, but in an earlier and much more modest and benign form. There was never a moment's doubt about who the good guys and bad buys were, and when a wrestler crossed-over from one side to the other, the impact was thunderous. It was pure theater in tights and beer guts. There was a high degree of moral certainty and absolutely no ambivalence. The objects of our deepest love and darkest hate were clearly marked.
As the school year deepened Toadsuck was becoming something of an off-campus student center and others began joining us for our Sunday afternoon ritual. I recall waking up one Sunday afternoon in the spring having slept all morning and most of the afternoon following one of my third shift jobs, walking out in the living room, and seeing no fewer than a dozen seminarians - Duke seminarians - screaming, cheering and yelling as Dusty Rhodes dropped an Atomic Elbow on some hapless Somoan guy. I thought to myself, "How did this happen...?"
I was taken to task by one of my blue-blooded classmates that year who found this fondness for rasslin' to be a disgusting and pointedly egregious crime against Good Taste. Defensively I countered that in a time witnessing the rise of relativity and the erosion of absolutes, we damn well better have something that clearly delineates good and evil, the heroic and the villainous. He stared back at me stricken - probably not from the shrewdness of my retort but from its sheer ridiculousness.
It was ridiculous. But I had a point.
"Postmodernism" is a term not much in currency during my academic years, but from what I gather it refers to a very large, very general, and very non-specific trend in culture, politics, and art away from objectivity to subjectivity, from global narratives to multiple narratives, from absolutism to relativity, and from community to individuality.
Still unclear? Yea, me too, but haven't you noticed that in the movies the characters who used to be the good guys now aren't all that good, and the bad guys, with some exceptions, are not all that bad? No more black hats and white hats - they are all wearing gray. Marketers and advertisers used to exploit our desire for whiter teeth, bigger cars, sexier legs and cleaner floors, but now are going after our lust for 'personal choice' ("have it YOUR way ..."). The most interesting characters in our novels are not caught up in the simple decisions between right and wrong, but between wrong and wrong. Institutions from our churches to our schools to city hall to the White House are universally held in suspicion, and stuff we used to hang our hats on and could count on as sure things .. aren't. The center, alas, is not holding.
Sociologists adopted a French word for this cultural malaise: anomie. Another good French word for it is ennui. And it spawns some really nasty stuff from the more vicious forms of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism to Joe McCarthy to the Ku Klux Klan to the John Birch Society and its bizarre grandchild The Tea Party. It has been, and will continue to be, exploited ad infinitum by office seekers and various cultural pundits. It has turned Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin into significant power brokers and millionaires, and led Glen Beck and many of his followers to believe he is a messiah of some kind.
And you thought rasslin' was bizarre.
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