Reality is a Punchline

One can only see what one observes.
                                         -- Alphonse Bertillion

Some call it sick, but I call it weak.
                                        --- Don Henley

My dictionary defines reality as "the totality of real things and events." As definitions go, particularly of somewhat ineffable concepts, that's not too shabby. At least on the surface. But when you think about it, "the totality of real things and events" is not strictly what we mean by reality. The connotation is different from the denotation. "Reality" to most people is truth. It is the inescapable, the unavoidable, the inarguable, and more often than not, the unpleasant. When we tell someone to "come back to reality" we mean the world as it actually exists. The world of our senses, foremost among which is sight.

Beauty comes in at the eye; so does reality. The phrase "what you see is what you get" is for human beings quite literally true. To us, sight is the means by which we make contact with the thing we call reality -- the denotation of reality and the connotation of reality. When we come out of a daydream, we abandon the mind's eye for the two plugged into our brain, but in both cases we are seeing. Our experience of the "real world" generally begins with what we see.

Not long ago I was watching, or rather re-watching, Carl Sagan's Cosmos, when I was reminded of an interesting but seldom-reflected upon fact. Gamma Rays, X-Rays, Ultraviolet, Infrared and Radio Waves are all different kinds of light. The human eye can see only that which which exists between the ultraviolet and the infrared -- what we refer to as "the visible spectrum", which is in fact only one sixth of the total spectrum. So what I am seeing right now as I type these words is in essence only a fragment of what we might call True Reality.

Put another way, what we see is not what we get -- not by a damn sight. Our concept of reality is imprisoned within our senses, and our senses are incomplete and shallow. What we see -- and what we hear, taste, smell and touch -- is not True Reality. And this holds true of other animals as well. Sharks have poor eyesight but possess “mechanosense”, the ability to "see" the electrical impulses generated by living things. Rattlesnakes hunt by seeing heat; bats by sonar, which is another way of seeing sound. For these creatures, "reality" is quite different than it is for us, but not necessarily more accurate. They interpret the universe through the senses they possess; and their view of the universe is shaped by those senses. Who is to say that a mole sees the world more rightly or more wrongly than an eagle? Is not each creature's view of reality simultaneously incomplete and valid? Is what the spider sees somehow more "true" than the vision of the fly?

Taken at its most basic level, The Killing Joke is not a clash between combatants but between reality systems, world-views, philosophies of life; what the Germans call Weltanchauung. The three principal players in the drama all interpret reality in a different way, and each one believes the views of the others to be wrong. The superficial question posed by the graphic novel is whether The Joker or The Batman is "right" in their particular interpretation of the world. A much deeper and more important question is whether or not True Reality might not encompass all three beliefs. But to even attempt to answer that question we must first take a look at the three antagonists and their ideas of what is inescapable, inarguable, unavoidable...or in other words, true.

The Joker's outlook is perhaps best described as a kind of train-wreck of existential nihilism, absurdism and chaos theory. His belief-system attacks all other belief-systems by its very nature. To him, the whole of existence is a joke, a sort of seething mass of absurdities thinly crusted by the delusion that life makes sense, that there is justice in the world, and that people and their actions are firmly rooted in sanity. Though viewed as delusional by others, the Joker maintains quite the opposite; he and he alone gets the joke, and everyone else is simply kidding themselves. Perhaps tired of being viewed as "community of one", he makes a vicious and extremely well-planned attack on the sanity of Jim Gordon, repeating his theory that "one bad day" is all that separates the ordinary man from the insane one. Indeed, the Joker by his very existence is a kind of attack, not on sanity but on security. On meaning. On the belief that, well, life makes sense, there is justice in the world, and that sanity reigns. In that sense he stands somewhere between the Jewish interpretation of Satan and the Norse god Loki; he stumps for everyone who struggles not to burst out laughing when confronted with horror or tragedy, and if he were a song lyric he would probably be, "I wanna cry, but I have to laugh."

The Batman is often presented as the "flip side of the coin" in relation to The Joker. He had the "one bad day" the Joker refers to, one which clearly effected his sanity and shaped his personality, but is outlook on life is exactly the opposite of the Joker's in every other respect. Although he employs brutal violence against his enemies, he never intentionally takes life; whereas the Joker leaves corpses everywhere he goes, often in great profusion. (Bruce Wayne values human life too much to commit murder, whereas the Joker uses murder as the ultimate expression of contempt for the so-called "inestimable value" of that life.) Most importantly, the Batman believes that justice is obtainable; indeed, his every action is in essence a violent attempt to impose order upon chaos. But it is not the order of a police squadron but rather a disciplined vigilante mob. In this respect he is the straight man to the Joker's anarchist clown; the grim, dour, unsmiling son of a bitch who refuses to admit that life is a pointless, existential farce, and will always be there, bucket in hand, to douse whatever flame the Joker has kindled in Gotham City.

Jim Gordon is the third picture in the triptych. Although much closer to Batman than to the Joker, he nevertheless sees the world somewhat differently than Bruce Wayne. For Gordon, justice is not the final object, but rather the imposition of law, which of course is not at all the same thing. Although he uses the Batman freely, the decision to employ a vigilante is one of pragmatic desperation rather than sympathy; he has never personally adopted the Batman's methods for himself. His crust of "delusion" -- in other words, his grip on sanity -- runs all the way to his center; deeper, in fact, than even the Joker's worst atrocities can penetrate. And presumably deeper than Bruce Wayne's, who after all spends half of his life swinging around town dressed as a giant bat. When confronted with the "one bad day" Gordon wavers, but does not crack. Indeed, his devotion to the law is such that one can legitimately wonder if he isn't, in his own way, every bit as crazy as The Joker.

Here are three particular points in the spectrum, each adjoining the other and to some extent overlapping, yet each also distinct and separate: the anarchist, the vigilante and the cop. Who can honestly say that he does not possess some measure of each within him?

Everyone feels, from time to time, precisely as The Joker does, i.e. that life itself is a joke, and that attempts to impose order and discipline on it are futile. At the same time everyone also has outbursts of vigilantism within themselves -- impatience with the law, a desire to inflict vengeance personally even if it conflicts with the letter of the law. Somewhere in between is the need for consistency, for order, for obedience to the rules, for the things which allow civilization to exist – the Jim Gordon personality. And indeed, all three viewpoints are to some extent validated by existence. Not a day can pass when we don’t see absurdities, when we don’t feel a need for justice, when we don’t take comfort in the existence of law. There is, however, a fundamental difference between The Joker and his two counterparts, and the difference is much more significant than one of method.

If pressed, both Bruce Wayne and Jim Gordon would probably confess to moments of sympathy with the Joker’s point of view. Every man is occasionally beset by doubts even of his most fundamental beliefs, and indeed, in a certain way, Bruce Wayne’s decision to become The Batman is partially rooted in an acceptance that order, fairness, justice and so forth are unobtainable in life without taking extreme measures. However, both men reject the Joker’s philosophy whenever they are directly confronted by it. When they are pressed, they cling more tightly than ever to their fundamental beliefs – this is evidenced in Gordon’s case by his refusal to let the Batman take vengeance on the Joker despite the terrible thing he did to Gordon’s daughter.

The Joker, on the other hand, seems to harbor a deep inner doubt as to whether his philosophy is actually valid, or simply a reflection of his own weakness…the failure of his pre-insane personality to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. One of the most common devices of narcissists and egocentrics is the insistance that because they failed, everyone must fail; because they were inadequate, everyone else must be inadequate too. It is a common failing to mistake one’s own decline or downfall with the downfall of the world, and The Joker, though he has forgotten most of his former life, seems to be haunted by its persistent echo of the man he once was. When The Batman taunts him by saying that it is not everyone who is “one bad day” away from being insane, but rather only The Joker, the normally impreturbable psychopath reacts with uncharacteristic outrage and anger – perhaps even panic. What if he really is a weakling who took refuge in madness because he wasn’t man enough to stand up to the unfairness of Life? What if the absurdities and chaos of that Life are not its defining quality but simply one facet of its jewel? Wouldn’t that invalidate his point of view? Wouldn’t it, in fact, make a joke of the Joker?

We are all to some degree vested in our view of reality. Just as human existence is governed largely by the way we interpret reality through our senses, our religious beliefs, political opinions and our outlook on life shape the way we see that life and how we interact with other human beings. A shift in the spectrum would cause extreme disorientation, perhaps even madness. But it does not have to cause madness, and this is the fact The Joker is desperate to contest. Bruce Wayne’s view of reality changed when he saw his parents murdered; he saw that life was unfair and that justice was not forthcoming without a shove, and he took radical measures to ensure that shove was given and given repeatedly. But he did not lose the essence of himself, simply because he now saw Life in a broader and darker spectrum. Bruce Wayne changed, but he remained Bruce Wayne; the man the Joker had been was obliterated so thoroughly we are fated never to know his name. Deep down, the Joker senses and despises his own weakness almost as much as he fears that his view of life is wrong.

It’s not that Batman doesn’t get the joke. He just ain’t laughing.

Wouldn't you like to be a killer, too?

"Killing is just murder without a license."
                                         ---- Charles Bronson, The Mechanic


Many years ago the socialist poet W.H. Auden, writing appropos of the Spanish Civil War, penned the following lines:

Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
          Today the expanding of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

Auden was in these verses contrasting two sides of a revolutionist's coin; banality and brutality. Handing out pamphlets and attending dull Party meetings on one side; cold-blooded killing of enemies on the other. Both integral, Auden suggests, to the life of a revolutionary. But although Auden's contemporary, George Orwell, enjoyed the poem -- calling it "one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish War" -- its particular phraseology annoyed him. In his essay "Inside the Whale" he explained why:

"But notice the phrase 'necessary murder.' It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men -- I don't mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means -- the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells...Mr. Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot....Warmongering...[is] largely based on a sense of personal immunity."

Orwell's irritation with Auden is both unfair and completely understandable. On the one hand he is criticizing Auden for having the audacity to write about a subject with which he has no firsthand experience -- rather a cheap-shot to take, when one considers that such disparite but classic works as The Red Badge of Courage and Lord of the Rings were also written without "firsthand experience", and that Auden's "Spain" is less an attempt to exploit the revolutionist's experience than simply to comment upon it. On the other, Orwell served five years in Burman with the Imperial Police, and some months in Spain as a foot-soldier on the Republican side. As a police officer in a half-savage colony he became intimately acquainted with murder; as an infantryman during a hard-fought civil war he was shot through the neck and killed at least one man in battle. He knew more about murder and killing and bloodshed than most men, and took umbrage at those who understood them only in the academic sense.

I can relate. In fact, I have always viewed myself as a kind of feeble Orwellian echo. Like him, by virtue of a unusual childhood and an unsuitable but deeply affecting profession, I have acquired life-experiences which make it difficult to witness or read about certain subjects without bristling like a riled-up junkyard dog. In particular I find myself irritated by people who, like Auden, choose to view murder as merely a word; who are elsewhere when the trigger is pulled; who film or write the most explicit violence while at the same time harboring that sense of personal immunity which I no longer possess.

When I think of Jack Ketchum, I don't think of Joyride or Red or The Girl Next Door; I think of a black-and-white picture of him which shows him head-down, a cigarette between his lips and the collar of his heavy overcoat turned up, apparently against the rain. It's a Noirish picture, darkly romantic, tough somehow, and very appropriate when you consider the subject matter of his novels, and I can't help but think, seeing it, that this is probably how he sees himself -- as a literary tough guy not afraid to take a long walk in the dark, and to navigate hell by the light of a Marlboro. Unfortunately, I cannot see him that way. The things he dreams about, broods about, writes about, are things that I know in a way he probably cannot begin to understand.

Like Orwell, my conception of what murder means -- especially casual murder, random murder, "spree killing" as the newspapers inevitably call it -- is different from the average person's. I have stood in pathology labs and watched skulls cracked open like crab claws, watched brains diced by carving knives, watched internal organs yanked out of body cavities in bloody heaps; I have wiped away gore from my own face when the pathologist's assistant became too enthusastic with the circular saw; I have spoken with victims of rape and attempted murder whose scars are still pink upon their flesh; and I have, on one occasion, felt a bullet pass by my own skin. I don't profess to be an expert on these things; I merely state that I have experienced them. I don't know much, but I know that fire is hot.

As an examination of the spree killer, the man who, after years of banal below-the-radar existence, or perhaps after a lifetime of minor and seemingly harmless eccentricity, erupts in murderous violence and takes the lives of half a dozen, a dozen, twenty people before being brought down by police bullets or -- less satisfyingly -- putting a final round in his own brain or ushering himself meekly into custody, I'd say Joyride is pretty effective. There is a flat, tinny, existential quality to the type of killer that Wayne Lock represents; the sense that we are dealing with a man so unjustifiably self-involved that like a black hole, he is defined by the effect he has rather than what he is. A two-dimensional mediocrity in his own life, he assumes a temporary outsize importance by taking the lives of others -- power in its simplest and stupidest form. And like a good existentialist, he leaves just enough survivors to ensure that the effect of what he has done will linger on for years and decades after he himself is food for the maggots -- immortality at its ugliest and most unimaginative. The selfish, lugubrious character of the killer seem appropriate, fitting, realistic. Because let's face it, the motives of such people usually are quite boring; they exist in rude counterpoint to the spattering frenzy that marks their final hours.

What's more, Ketchum seems determined from the outset not merely to recount the doings of Lock but to examine to some extent the very concept of murder itself.  Even when the act itself is recognized as murder and not killing -- the death of Howard, for example -- Ketchum allows for the idea that murder, like evil, can come with both a capital and a lower-case version. Like Thomas Harris, who closed out Red Dragon with the words: "There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us", Ketchum is unafraid to tackle rather stark fact that murder, when you get down to it, is simply a word to describe the unsanctioned killing of a human being. Howard Unruh, the real-life mass-murderer on whom Lock was partially based, was a highly decorated veteran of World War II; a man who had done his share of sanctioned killing before he infamously went on his rampage of the unsanctioned variety. Indeed, when the aptly-named Rule is bulleting down the highway at the story's opening, he reflects on the insects dying quick ugly deaths against his windshield -- against the impossibility of going through life without killing. This is a theme that recurs so often in everything from religious ceremony (Bhuddists, for example, apologizing for the bugs they have stepped on in the course of the day) to speculative science fiction (the pacifistic Spock commenting in Star Trek that "In a sense we all feed on death, even vegetarians.") that one wonders why it never seems to break the surface of ordinary conversation. The answer to that is of course that in a civilized society and form of killing beyond the pulling-up of weeds or the swatting of a mosquito is looked upon with disgust. A person loading their shopping cart with beef is about as likely to make the mental connection between those plastic-sheathed styrofoam containers and a cow having its throat slit as they are between the ribbon on a soldier's chest and the heap of corpses that ribbon may represent. We have built a wall, albeit an artifical wall, between ourselves and the fact that our reality is to a certain extent supported on bones -- bones of people, bones of animals. Joyride's opening lines demolish that wall. Rule lets us know in no uncertain terms that to kill is to live, and to live is to kill.

And yet I can't shake the feeling that in this novel, as in several of his others, perhaps, Ketchum is playing with fire. Poking a stick into a raw nerve to see what effect it produces, without, as it were, having to actually listen to the screams. It is all well and good to detail the casual murder of a couple of young students, even going so far as to explain the murderers' joy in the taking-away of the the potentiality of their lives, and knowing precisely the shock effect it will have on the reader; it is quite another to be unable, as I am unable, to view the description of such killings as mere words. I have no sense of personal immunity; I do not want a sense of personal immunity. When I write the death of a character, even a throwaway character, I am fully conscious of the heat of the flames. And this brings me to my main point, which I think was quite aptly summed up by one review of the novel I read online, which said:

"What Ketchum does, he does very well, but what he does is often brutal, nihilistic, and ultimately so without hope or optimism...and Joyride is no exception...it's also so grim and hopeless that the cumulative effect can be hard to take, and in the end, there are legitimate questions about whether the books are confronting evil or reveling in it."

Indeed there are, my friend. And this question really must be levied at many people who claim, with varying degrees of apparent sincerity, that they are simply examining violence and not shaking pom-poms at it. 
Filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Michael Haencke, Sam Peckninpah and Quentin Tarantino are all people who have made me suspect that if caught watching porn, they would go into a lengthly diatribe about its value as a barometer of human sexuality rather than simply admitting they like jerking off to it. You like watching a woman beaten and raped, you like seeing people set on fire, you like hearing some poor kid slobber unsuccessfully for mercy, have the guts to admit it and don't waste my motherfucking time with pedantic-sounding excuses. And please for Christ's sake don't drag "art" into it, as if the mere invocation of the word were some kind of ghost-shirt that rendered the wearer immune from attack. As Orwell himself said, appropos of Salvadore Dali: "What the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws which are binding on ordinary people." He goes on, "One ought to be able to hold in one's head the two facts that Dali is at once a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate, or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing we demand of a wall is that it should stand up. if it does it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separate from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, 'This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.' Unless one can say that...one is shirking the implications that an artist is also a citizen and a human being."

Allow me to example. Some years ago, either during or immediately after I resigned from my job as an investigator for the District Attorney, I began a short story called "Identity Crisis." I was unable to finish it because the climax of the story, as I had unwillingly envisioned it, involved a mass murder carried out by the anomie-riddled antihero. The story worked, but it seemed to have no real purpose, no real moral; and I couldn't escape the feeling that I was somehow glorifying -- or at least tacitly endorsing -- the actions of the villain. Later I altered the story so that the character, who as the title suggest suffers from a persistent and ever-growing feeling that he does not exist, accidentally blows himself up en route to his massacre, and being charred beyond recognition is logged by the coroner as a "John Doe." When I finished the re-write I was delighted to see that this one-killing story was not only more effective than the high body count version, it was, oddly enough, possessing of greater impact. Somehow the attempt of the antihero to make himself visible achieving the exact opposite resonated more than the slaughter I'd originally planned; but I only got to that point because of my instinctive reluctance to spill blood simply for its own sake. It wasn't enough to talk, I had to say something.

Don't misunderstand here. Nearly everything I write contains bloodshed, some of it quite horribly explicit, and if Orwell were alive and persuaded to read some of things I've written I've no doubt whatever he would hurl more than one piece into the same bonfire he intended for Dali's 'Mannequin rotting in a taxicab.'
The module I taught at my last residency at SHU was called, quite simply, "Writing Violence", and it wasn't for the faint of heart. I did my double-damndest to make an art of that particular science and I trust I came within screaming distance of succeeding. So you could say with some accuracy that I am not only being unreasonable but also a big-ass hypocrite for condeming a horror-writer simply because he has probably never seen somebody with a half-healed gunshot wound. This is a valid point, but so is the last one I'm about to make, which is that an analysis of murder -- and I think Joyride qualifies -- has to take the final step and make a conclusion. Ketchum is obligated to tell us whether he is confronting evil or reveling in it, examining the motivations of Wayne Lock or simply working up a sex-sweat writing about them.

Life is Noir

The apocalypse. You're soaking in it.
                                           -- Lindsey MacDonald


I know I've said this before,but I'm the world's biggest sucker for atmosphere. The more and the darker the atmosphere, the better. For just this reason I've often found the noir films of the 40s and the 50s to be irresistible. There's just something about unshaven, neon-lit private detectives, sitting at their desks in the dark, crushing out Lucky Strikes in dirty ashtrays while nursing straight whiskey, that appeals to me. And while this type of movie is largely finished as an active subgenre of film, it does make the occasional and glorious reappearance. Angel Heart was onesuch cinematic moment; Se7en was another.

I originally watched Se7en with only a vague understanding of exactly what it was about, but I do remember that I knew that the plot as I understood it -- cops on the trail of some fiendishly clever and inventive serial killer -- was already showing signs of fatigue even in 1995. I also knew that it was directed by David Fincher, who I wrongly held responsible for the shovefulful of shit that was Alien 3, and was understandably wary. Sure, there were a few moments in Alien 3 that showed an understanding of stylistic principles, but that didn't make up for what I regarded as the ham-fisted butchery of a beloved franchise. So I guess you could say that I was prepared for disappointment.

When I emerged from the theater a few hours later, I felt as if I'd been struck over the head with a stainless steel meat mallet. Not only had I just emerged, gasping, from a stormy lake of glorious noir cliche, not only had I been thrashed senseless by a diabolically clever plot, I had also been subjected to that most brutal of Hollywood treatments -- I'd been made to care about characters and then forced to watch them suffer agonies I'd scarcely wish on my worst enemy. Some movies are so forgettable that within hours of seeing them, you literally don't remember being in the theater (Hideaway, a 1995 horror flick with Jeff Goldblum and Alicia Silverstone, was like this). Others stay with you like the imprint of a red-hot brand. Se7en was one of these.

If I had to sum up why I liked it so much, I would point to one seemingly nondescript sequence which occurs between Detective Mills (Brad Pitt) and Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) in a bar. The two men have been working together a short while at this point, and Mills has been trying fairly hard to ingratiate himself with his partner. Hence the drinks. But as they share a beer together on yet another rainy evening in the nameless city, it becomes clear that the philosophies of the two cops are irreconcilable, and Mills has had quite enough of this gloomy, defeatist, all-knowing man.

Somerset: I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue.
Mills: You're no different. You're no better.
Somerset: I didn't say I was different or better. I'm not. Hell, I sympathize; I sympathize completely. Apathy is the solution. I mean, it's easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life. It's easier to steal what you want than it is to earn it. It's easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs: it takes effort and work.
Mills: I don't think you're quitting because you believe these things you say. I don't. I think you want to believe them, because you're quitting. And you want me to agree with you, and you want me to say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. It's all fucked up. It's a fucking mess. We should all go live in a fucking log cabin." But I won't. I don't agree with you. I do not. I can't.
Somerset: Oh, wait! You care?
Mills: Damn right.
Somerset: And you're going to make a difference?

I think it was at this point, during my original viewing of the film (Christ...was it sixteen years ago?), that I realized I was not in the safe and familiar land of buddy-cop convention. These two dicks, despite fitting on paper the same descriptions as, say, Riggs and Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, were more like oil and water than peanut butter and jelly. Somerset viewed Mills as hardheaded and naive, unwilling to bow to his superior professional and life experience; Mills saw Somerset as a burnout and a quitter, someone who had confused his own personal decline with the decline of the world around him. And while they later warmed up to each other, thanks in large part to the efforts of Mills' wife, each retained their distinct philosophy right up to the end -- where, one imagines, Somerset's views were merely affirmed and Mills, insomuch as he was capable of anything at that point, had probably come to agree with him...but I'll come back to that in a moment, because it's at this point that I'd like to talk about why this movie resonated with me upon my more recent viewing in a distinctly different manner than it did back in good old 1995

At that time, I was quite on the other side of the majority of experiences which presently define me as a man, but there were a few essential similarities. Like Somerset, I had developed, thanks to what might be called an unhappy formative period, into something of a cynic about human nature, human behavior -- human beings generally, I suppose. And Se7en played to a certain extent into my notions of how the world worked. From the ages of roughly ten to fifteen, which have an influence grossly dispreportionate to their actual sum of days, life showed me no mercy. It seemed to me that the passage Orwell wrote about his school life in "Such, Such Were The Joys" was not so much an observation as an unalterable law:

"That was the pattern of school life  -- a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning. It consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people -- in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly."

Long after my life become enjoyable again I retained this view of existence, simply removing the word 'school' from the opening sentence. Like the character of Christopher Hart in Piece of Cake, I thought the world divided between bastards and suckers, and felt I had to make a choice between the two -- that there was no third option. I'm not sure I thought this so much as felt it instinctively, but the fact remained that while I had a burning desire, even a need, to see justice done, I did not actually believe justice was obtainable. Even when justice prevailed, when the good guys notched one, it always struck me as ultimately irrelevant. History, of which I was an avid student, was crammed too full of cases where the bad guys won. No matter how hard Howard Fast tried to uplift the ending of Spartacus, I could not escape the story's unwilling moral -- that being in the right is no guarantee and being utterly defeated.

Watching Se7en, my worldview was largely affirmed. David Mills struck me as the epitome of the good guy caught in the gears of the way the world works and left crushed, mangled, beaten and bleeding, with all his good intentions blown to smithereens. Steady old Somerset, on the other hand, who started his battle against life by surrendering and then choosing to continue the fight, was more in line with my Hemingwayesque take on reality. He knew it all had to be done, but he was actuely conscious of its futility.

Two years later I entered law enforcement. It was probably a gargantuan mistake for someone with such a cynical attitude to do such a thing, but I seemed to gravitate toward it naturally. And in all the years that came, I saw over and over again that Somerset's remark that "apathy is the solution" was by and large true. The firebrand-types around me, the naive yet purposeful men-and-women-on-missions, the folks that believed they could "make a difference" nearly always burned out, and with remarkable swiftness. Those that did not quit within a year or two often became profound cynics, or, to once again quoteth Orwell, "did their jobs without believing in them, like the Antionine Emperors." People who could do twenty or thirty years in the Satanic mills of law-enforcement while retaining their Academy zeal were not unknown, but they were few and very far between. A great deal of the philosophy of the movie is summed up by the exchange between Mills and the sleazebag who works the door at the massage parlor:

David Mills: Do you like what you do for a living? These things you see?
Man in Massage Parlour Booth: No, I don't. But that's life.

And yet, watching Se7en again after all these years, I have to wonder about the atmosphere of the film -- not its physical atmosphere, for which I will never have anything but affection, but its emotional atmosphere. It's moral surround, one might say. And despite everything else that happens in the film I keep coming back to that tete-a-tete in the bar, that little philosophical set-to between the young firebrand and the old stalwart. Why do I find it so compelling? Here, I think, is the answer. This is not an argument between two men or even between two disparite views on life. It is an argument between two points of view existing within all of us. On the one hand we have passion and zeal and naivete, and on the other apathy, weariness, wordly cynicism. On the left is the Bastard and and on the right, the Sucker, and as usual they are in a clinch, punching the shit out of each other until the canvas beneath them looks like the porcelain sink by a dentist's chair -- and in mid-root canal, no less. In most of us, no one gets the upper hand for too long. The most sarcastic of us can be moved to tears by the beauty that life offers, just as the most cheerful optimist can be driven to weep at the meaningless cruelty of it all. Just when we've got our boxing shoes set in one position, Life chuckles at our arrogance and throws us a liver shot.

In Se7en, the motivation of John Doe is exposed near then end, when he is provoked out of his cool killer's repose to respond to Mills' comment that he, Doe, is a murderer of ' innocent people.'

Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that's the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore.

You can call Doe what you want -- loony, psycho, serial killer, studendous egotist -- but you can't call him apathetic. The respect which Somerset shows his then sight-unseen antagonist as the story progresses is largely a reflection of this. It is interesting that Mills, who treast Doe with angry contempt, refusing to acknowledge his abilities and determination, is actually quite similar to him in basic motivation. Both men want to make a difference, and both men are willing to put their lives on the line to see that difference made. It is merely their choice of methods that differs. In Red Dragon, Hannibal Lecter insists that Will Graham caught him not because of any deductive genius on Graham's part, but because they are just alike. And at the end of that book, Graham, lying in his bed of pain, acknowledges this is partially true. He has the capacity to "make murder", but unlike Lecter, he has the capacity -- and the desire -- for mercy as well. Mills' decision to murder Doe at the end of the story is a victory for Doe's method, because, in the last analysis, it worked. He got what he wanted out of the entire scenario. But in another sense, not quite as completely as intended. For it is implied that Somerset's commitment to fighting evil on his own terms, which has burned down to embers as the story opens, is rekindled by this confrontation with a new type of evil. He has recognized that retiring will change nothing. Quoting Hemingway, he says that while he doesn't believe the world is a beautiful place, he does believe it is worth fighting for, and he will continue the fight -- alone.

But what about the argument? Who is right and who is wrong? I can't answer that question, of course, and neither can you. But in the original draft of the screenplay, the author, Andrew Kevin Walker, does attempt an answer. Mills, having blown John Doe's brains out, sends a note to Somerset from his holding cell which reads:

YOU WERE RIGHT.  YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.

Really?

I flatter myself that up to this particular moment in world history, my blogs have been thoughtful, sober, and even-handed. Where I have encountered a book which did not really live up to my expectations (Psycho) or which I thought wasn't always quite up to snuff in the prose-writing or pacing departments (The Church of Dead Girls) I have elected to look past those flaws and concentrate on what I thought was effective. I fancied that like the reformed Scrooge, I should be quick to see virtue and slow to reprove fault. That I should be as good a man as the old city knew. Should give half-crowns to scampering Cockney kids and send enormous Christmas geese to the Crachit family so Tiny Tim could walk again. Should frolic among the isles of Barnes & Noble scattering pixie-dust upon row after row of books that whose contents would in most cases have better been utilized in toilet paper. Should settle rose-colored glasses firmly upon my nose as I gallop about the East End on my unicorn, singing "Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast The First Stone."

Then I started The Sculptor.

Suddenly the happy-go-lucky version Miles Watson, do-gooder and literary Freemason, screamed in agony. Falling to the floor, he writhed as his nervous system exploded into one immense threadwork of fiery pain. And when the spasms of pain wracking his body finally passed, he crawled to a mirror and, pulling it down to his own debased level, saw in the reflection not his own ruggedly handsome (ahem) face, but the hideously villainous visage of Mr. Hyde. And Mr. Hyde wasn't just the Mr. Hyde of Dr. Jekyll but a hybrid of that deformed goon and Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb from The Silence of the Lambs. In other words, a pissed-off psycho who throws shitty novels down a dry well and then tells them to put the lotion in the basket while sharpening his triple-edged bayonet.

This book sucked.

It sucked so badly, in fact, that trying to criticize any one point of it reminded me of a line I heard in a movie about Vietnam. The character played by Fred Ward is tired of listening to complaints from two of his men, played by Willem Defoe and Gregory Hines. He says: "Here we are in a sewer, surrounded by shit, and you two are complaining about every little turd!" There literally wasn't a single thing about this book that I liked, except one, and even that made me angry for petty personal reasons I will disclose later. But since I'm bound to carry out my assignment of reviewing this book, I will review it, in the manner of a Roman lanista "reviewing" a disobedient gladiator with a nine-headed iron whip.

On the macroscopic level, the book suffers from crap-itis of the prose. Gregory Funaro may be whatever you like -- diligent researcher, lover of Rennaissance art, all-around nice guy -- but to quote Harlan Ellison, he can't write for sour owl poop. Nearly everything he attempts to do from a purely aesthetic, stylistic standpoint fails. But unlike some bad prose-writers, who have a certain charisma to their writing, so that even when you know you are reading crapola you kind of nod and smile along with it as you would to a guilty-pleasure pop song, Funaro's prose is simply lifeless, unimaginative and boring. As Jenn Loring pointed out in her own merciless review, the author's descriptions are utterly unevocative. George Orwell would have had a field day wrenching examples of stale, hackneyed, or simply boring word choices from the pages of this novel. Likewise, his dialogue, to quote Harrison Ford, "has the cadence of the typewriter." It simply clanks along, looking like DIALOGUE and sounding, insomuch as it can be described, like ten pounds of panther shit in a five pound bucket. I realize that not every novelist chooses to use realistic-sounding dialogue -- indeed, many authors revel in stylized dialogue which bears no relation to how people really talk. But the operative word there is stylized. Possessing style. Funaro's dialogue is without style to a degree that would make the writer of a technical manual hang his head in teary-eyed shame. C3P0...no, Artoo-frickin'-deetoo spoke with greater humanity than the clanking cacophony that is Sam Markham. I honestly question whether he was really speaking, or just unwinding enormous amounts of paper-tape out of his gob like a fucking 19th century stock ticker.

Then we come to the characters. Let's shove aside the Sculptor himself. Another well-heeled genius serial killer blah blah blah bippitiy boppity boo. Howzabout Special Agent Markham? I think he's meant to impress the reader, particularly the female reader, with his combination of intellectual-physical prowess and square-jawed good looks and ooooooh, his tragic personal history. If so, how effing stupid does he think his female audience is? This man has all the depth of a bas-relief carving of Dudley Doorite and about as much charisma. Just a tired heroic cliche. Likewise, Dr. Hildebrandt is, save for her mixed-race ancestry, utterly unorginal, a FEMALE LEAD right out of Central Casting. Indeed, the decision to make her biracial came off to me as a gimmick rather than part of an organic process. The Koreans possess a very complex culture and, traditionally, some very definite views about racial identity; making Cathy half-Korean was a perfect way to introduce depth and flavor to this character. She might have possessed some insight into the Sculptor by way of understanding what it is like to exist in two worlds without belonging strictly to either -- like Spock in Star Trek, or Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But it never really happened. The opportunity was wasted. As were so many others.

It has been pointed out that Funaro isn't exactly into the "off-screen killing." I could bash him for his lack of subtlety -- refer him, for example, to Red Dragon, which when it comes to gruesome detail is really an extended strip tease -- but my punching arm is getting tired. Suffice to say that writing good horror is a lot like playing poker. You've got to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. Stephen King, in the Danse Macabre I love to quote so much, tells us that there are three kinds of scary entertainment: terror movies, horror movies and gross-outs. The last of these is the easiest to achieve. In The Sculptor Funaro, when you blow aside all the psycho-forensic-art-historical smoke, aims more or less for the gross out. That Gregg Olsen would mention this book in the same breath with The Silence of the Lambs is to me like comparing the fingerpaintings of a drunken Sumatran rat-monkey with the paintings of, well, Michaelangelo.

Coming back to the villain, I was embittered by the fact that Funaro chose a crazy artist who uses human beings as material for his works. For some years I've been toiling off-and-on with a short story called "Medium" in which the main character does just precisely this -- although unlike Funaro, most of what he does to his victims happens "off screen." Now, reading this travesty of a horror-thriller, I am reluctant even to bother trying to finish it. If some editor tells me that I'm ripping off The Sculptor, I'm liable to get stabby on his punk ass.

Now, because I really have to end this ranting at some point, I'd like to point out that the endings -- yes, endings -- of this novel are appallingly predictable and cliched. We have seen the last minute rescue of the damsel in distress and the missing body ruse a million Goddamned times. At least in Dragon the false ending is followed by one which is utterly decisive. In this case we get a hackneyed open-door finale right out of one of the later Friday the 13th films. Gee, I wonder if we'll see the Sculptor again? Well, actually, in my case, I won't, because I'd rather be hurled into a wood-chipper than go through the Funaro Treatment again.

I realize that by now I have probably offended the hell out of everyone who liked this book. If so, I crave your pardon. I realize that all literary taste is subjective; some of you disliked Red Dragon, which I would place at or near the top of the greatest novels I have ever read or hope to read. It probably would have been sufficient for me to say you say tomato I say tomato and call the whole thing off; but in this case I just couldn't keep my knife in its scabbard. I honestly thought this book a walking, talking case for a complete moratorium on the writing of serial-killer books for a period of ten to twelve years. A season of rest during which this increasingly played-out and exhausted subgenre could renew itself. And thus inflamed, I'm not the type to keep my mouth shut, though the good gods know many would be happier if I did.

In closing, I well and truly dislike potshotting other authors, and I think my previous blogs show that I'd rather be the reformed Scrooge or the philanthropic Dr. Jekyll than the "are there no workhouses, are there no prisons" Scrooge or Mr. Hyde. But sometimes I read a book whose mediocrity just pisses me off. And this one did.

Misery Loves the Company of Dreams

Somewhere in Danse Macabre, Stephen King tells the following story about a recurring nightmare of his:

"I'm writing a novel in an old house where a homicidal madwoman is reputed to be on the prowl. A door on the far side communicates with the attic, and I know -- I know -- she's in there, and that sooner or later the sound of my typewriter will cause her to come after me....At any rate, she finally comes through the door like a horrid jack in the box, all gray hair and crazed eyes, and weilding a meat-axe."

These words were published in 1981, but King dates the dream as originating from a date roughly ten years earlier -- more than a decade and a half before the publication of Misery in 1987. And while it might be an oversimplification to say that the novel draws its plot from this nightmare, it certainly seems to find at least part of its inspiration therein. So if I may, I'd like to depart from the standard formula of simply reviewing the novel in question to addressing the issue behind the novel -- the nightmare that I believe drove it.

Everyone has conscious and unconscious fears. Misery is, in my estimation, a sort of tour-de-force of both as they exist, or existed, within Stephen King when he wrote the book. All the themes -- destructive compulsion, slavery to deadline, adoration turned to hatred, wretched helplessness, the perversion of the nurturing relationship, the degradation of torture -- are primal and visceral in nature. They strike not at the complex areas of the human mind but the simplest. Anne Wilkes attacks Paul Sheldon psychologically as well as physically, but the overall atmosphere of the book is of a child's nightmare made into flesh. That is to say, primitive. Sheldon, weeping with terror and pain but also with powerlessness, is a frightful figure, an animal tormented into making particular sounds for the pleasure of its master. Clearly this image resonates with King; it is his idea of hell, perhaps, made all the more frightening by the knowledge that he has many "Number One Fans" in real life, any number of which would be only too happy to give him a hobbling. It is in the end a courageous book, because King is not merely trying to scare us -- he is clearly trying to scare himself -- and probably succeeding.

I dream quite a bit, and my dreams, in addition to being quite vivid and colorful, often follow something akin to a plot or storyline. This is quite the double-edged sword, because when I have a nightmare it is a real sonofabitch. In 1993 or so, I had a particular nightmare that I have never forgotten. Everything was blackness, absolute blackness, but I knew that I was someplace icy cold and remote -- Alaska, perhaps, and in the dead of winter. I must have been in some kind of vehicle, because at some point I switched on a spotlight which made a perfect circle of light in the ink-black night. In the light were several burned-out, abandoned police cars sunk to midwheel in thick, densely packed snow. On the snow were the largest, most vicious-looking wolves you can imagine, feeding hungrily on a human corpse. Their eyes blazed yellowly like lamps, their gray coats long and winter-thick, and their jaws were smeared and slathered with blood. They looked fearlessly into the light -- at me -- with their gory fangs gleaming. Looking at them I knew, with that peculair certainty common to dreams, that civilization had been destroyed or destroyed itself, and I was looking at the successors of mankind. When I awoke, it was not with the usual gasp and pounding pulse that a nightmare brings, but a kind of dread, a feeling that I had been given a glimpse into the ultimate fate of my species.

I've yet to write anything about this dream, but sometimes I think about the interesting one-two punch that it dealt me. On the one fist was the primal fear of being hunted and eaten -- probably while still alive -- by a merciless predatory beast. (At night, no less; and in the snow -- one of the least hospitable elements for human beings.) On the other fist was the presence of the police cars. One doesn't need to be a genius to see the symbolism there -- the complete collapse of human authority and power. I don't like to read too much into dreams, but I think there was a strong psychological element to this nightmare, something which spoke directly to my own fears -- however subconscious they might be. Maybe I won't produce a Misery from it, but perhaps it will yield at least a nasty little short story.

My point here -- yes, I have a point -- is that horror is a nebulous term, laying somewhere (if I may paraphrase King) between terror and the gross-out. It involves a certain level of fear but also a certain level of repulsion, and it is an intensely personal feeling, never exactly the same for two people. Yet because all humans are related, our fears are related too -- and our nightmares. King's nightmare resonated with him to the point where he felt compelled -- or inspired -- to spin it into a novel. He not only confronted but exploited his fear, and in the "Number One Fan", the axe-wielding Anne Wilkes, created an iconic horror villain. The ability of a writer -- not merely a horror-writer but any sort of writer, for we are writers before and after we are stuck with the genre label -- to do this is, to attack head-on the thing head-on that they most dread, is, I believe, an ill-discussed and ill-examined facet of our craft. Indeed, it belongs perhaps not to the craft side of writing but to the artistic side, because it involves moral courage. Anyone can write a "shocking" book by smashing someone else's religious or moral or sexual or psychological taboos; not many have the stones to attack their own. But King did. And that's why the axe of Anne Wilkes cuts so deep.


 

Lecter vs. Lecter: or, Why I Didn't Care For "The Silence of the Lambs"

Let me begin by uttering four words we've all heard a million times before:

"The book was better."

It's become something of a cliche, hasn't it? Sort of the antidote to "I'll wait 'til the movie comes out." You, the gentle reader, buy a novel, and within a matter of days it becomes your favorite, or at least takes a place among the pantheon of your favorites. You read and re-read it until you know it by heart. Then, one day, usually years later, you see that "they" are making it into a movie. Half of you trembles with anticipation. The other, wiser half, trembles with fear, because you are wondering, if only to yourself:

How bad do you think they'll fuck this up?

Red Dragon was the seminal novel of my formative years. When the sequel, The Silence of the Lambs came out, it disappointed me on only one level: there was no Will Graham. Other than that I thought it a masterpiece, quite on the level with the former book, and arguably better as a pure thriller. Several million other people agreed with me, and so the movie became an inevitability. But this presented me with a problem. Hollywood generally Fs up its interpretations of novels. Not always, of course, but enough so that anyone emotionally invested in one of those novels goes into a flood sweat thinking about what "they" will do to it. And when I saw the movie version of Lambs, I realized that while "they" had not exactly F'd up, they had made some mistakes which Michael Mann, who had handled the movie version of Dragon, had not made. (Mann, for the record, made different mistakes.) I won't go into all of what I think those mistakes are, but I will tackle the two I consider the most egregious.

In Manhunter (a.k.a. Red Dragon), Mann made the choice to cast the veteran Scottish character actor Brian Cox, who is best known to Americans for his work in Braveheart, Rob Roy, and the Bourne films, as Hannibal Lecter. In Lambs, Johnathen Demme chose the better-known Welsh thespian Anthony Hopkins. Both men are superb at their craft, but it was not the actors themselves so much as the interpretations they put on the roles -- most likely in consultation with the directors -- which go to the heart of Hollywood's problem, and mine.

Cox handled the role of Lecter like a straight-pipe exhaust. That is to say, his take on the doctor was very close to the way "Hannibal the Cannibal" is portrayed in the book. In conversation with Will Graham, he betrays no obvious, outward sign of insanity or villainy. If this version of Lecter lived or worked next door to you, it's doubtful you would have thought him odd. Stiff, perhaps; pretentious, certainly; intellectually vain and perhaps unlikeable. But not threatening. He is courteous, if cool, and even when he tries to loosen the screws in Graham's head, he has a certain clinical detachment. Once in a while his sense of humor, dark and subtle, glimmers in our vision; and every now and again, such as when he remarks about how Officer Stewart left the police department with emotional problems "after seeing my basement", the sadism that drives him; but for the most part he remains enigmatic, the unknowable, self-contained Other, unconflicted, bored by his captivity but completely at ease with his own nature, precisely as Harris wrote him in Red Dragon. 

Hopkins' take on Lecter was quite different. From the very first moment we make eye contact with him in his cell in Lambs, it's obvious that there is something deeply wrong with this man. His vocal intonations, facial expressions, unblinking stare, chilling smile and hideous parody of intimacy -- the way he insists on using first names ("Clairisssse"), for example -- all fairly jangle with creep and menace. It's a brilliant and effective portrayal of controlled insanity, far more frightening than Cox's portrayal, but it lacks his subtlety and the subtlety Harris worked so hard to engender in the character. If this Hannibal lived next door to you, and were arrested for murder and cannibalism, how surprised would you be? If you were Will Graham, would it take your empathic gifts and forensic brilliance to capture a man who practically walks around with a sandwich board that reads, I AM A SERIAL KILLER.

One could argue, of course, that Hopkins had no choice but to take the interpretation in a different direction than Cox, against whom he was certainly competing in his own mind. Also, that Hopkins (and Demme) wanted the audience to be scared shitless of Dr. Lecter from the git-go and didn't have any interest in subtley. But for me, the blatancy of it undermined the film. Lecter is too obvious a boogeyman.

Another problem I had with Lambs was the virtual elimination of Jack Crawford from the storyline. His teacher/father/mentor relationship with Clarice Starling is one of the critical story devices in the novel; it serves as a counterweight to the evil influence of Lecter, who also acts, albeit in a different way, as Starling's teacher, father-figure and mentor. Indeed, the whole book is something of a proxy-struggle conducted between Crawford and Lecter, with Clarice acting as intermediary and, in a strange way, pupil, of both men. In Lambs, Crawford is reduced to a mere facilitator of plot; he puts Clarice on the case, and thereafrer largely fades from sight. As a screenwriter of sorts, I can understand the decision to do this from a technical standpoint, but it was a convenience and not a necessity. Cleverer writing, or more economical writing, could have salvaged some of Crawford's moments. No one would argue that Manhunter lacks plot intricacies or larger-than-life characters, but Crawford manages to impose himself in that story despite the presence of Graham, Lounds, Dolarhyde and Lecter. In Lambs, considering the short shrift given to Mr. Gumb in favor of Clarice, Chilton and Lecter, I think Crawford could have been mined more effectively.

Don't misunderstand me. I don't hate Lambs. I don't even dislike it. Hopkins is, to use a phrase from my childhood, one creepy-ass mo-fo. If I may continue my vulgarisms, I don't think Demme fucked up the film at all. But I do think he chose the path of least resistance. Hollywood has a history of shallow interpretations of complex works; part of this is the inevitable result of transferrng an inherently complex medium (the novel) to an inherently simple one (the screen). But Manhunter, whatever its other flaws, does not lack for depth. Lambs may be a more satisfying film, but it doesn't go nearly as deep.

The Red Dragon Is A Lifelong Stand

One day I last year I was toiling on some minor assignment for the show CSI: New York -- researching burns, or somesuch --when I realized something quite odd. The only reason this show existed, the only reason I was getting paid to look at pictures of disgusting third-degree burns and print out the results on ridiculously expensive photography paper, was due to a book I'd first read in high school called Red Dragon. Turning my attention away from the picture of a human arm covered in hideous yellow pustules, I drew something in the margin of my notebook that looked like this:

Red Dragon (1981) - Manhunter (1986) - The Silence of the Lambs (1988) - Profiler (1996) - CSI (2000)  - CSI: NY (2004) = my paycheck (2010).

Call it "six degrees of separation", but when Thomas Harris released Red Dragon in 1981, he was doing a whole helluva lot more than putting out one of the outstanding novels of all time. He was, from a creative standpoint, tossing a lighted torch into a gunpowder magazine roughly the size of New England. The explosion set off by the release of Red Dragon, or perhaps I should say the series of explosions which followed, is still going on today, like an endless chain of firecrackers. When I get invited to go see Gary Sinese's band play on the CBS lot, and briefly feel important as a result (don't worry, it fades quickly), it's a direct, if unimportant, result of that original bang.

You see, while there had been novels about serial killers before -- Lawrence Sanders The First Deadly Sin comes to mind -- and while the idea of solving crimes via forensic investigation alone was hardly new (Quincy did it all through my childhood), it wasn't until Harris introduced us to Will Graham, Jack Crawford, Alan Blood, Bryan Zeller, and the rest of the bloodhound gang over there at the FBI's Behavioral Science division that the genre of "forensic crimefighters" (and its favorite subgenre, "forensic crimefighters vs. brilliant serial killers") was truly created.

Switch on your television. What do you see? CSI, CSI: New York, CSI: Miami, NCIS, Profiler, Criminal Minds, Crossing Jordan, Bones, Cold Case, and various others, all over the guide. Go to Borders (if it hasn't closed yet) and look at the shelves: they're crammed with books like The Sculptor and Along Came a Spider and Sleepyhead and Compulsion. Serial killers are everywhere; and hot on their trails are forensic investigators, following hair and fiber and blood evidence like breadcrumb-trails, or trying to get inside their heads using sophisticated psychological techniques. It is no less popular in “reality” format; shows like Forensic Files, The New Detectives, Cold Case Files, Extreme Evidence and Medical Detectives examine the work of real-life psychiatrists, psychologists, ballistics experts, crime-scene investigators and forensic technicians as they used their highly specialized skills to hunt down fugitive criminals, break cold cases, and most famously, trap serial murderers before they kill again. So prevalent are books and TV shows and movies in this theme it’s hard to imagine a time when none of this existed, or that, in absolute terms, it’s actually a recent phenomenon, and that Thomas Harris is largely responsible for it.

Which belatedly brings me to the book, and why it's so damned good. I suppose I could examine the obvious reasons -- Harris' meticulous research on every aspect of forensics, psychology, law-enforcement produre, etc., his brilliant use of the Iceberg Theory as a stylistic tool, the terrifying vividness of the two villians, Dolarhyde and Lecter, his relentless pacing, or his unusual prose style, which might be described as Hemingway on intellectual steroids -- but I'd rather concentrate on the aspect I find most interesting; the protagonist, Will Graham.

I use the word specifically. Wounded and world-weary, plagued by doubts and terrors, walking a tightrope between the supersanity of a scientist and the madness of a murderer, Graham is far from the Hollywood archtype of a hero. When Crawford tries to mollify Molly by telling her "it's his bad luck to be the best", he isn't referring to Graham's skills as a forensic investigator. Graham is very good in that regard, but as we discover, there are others just as good. What Crawford wants from him is the intangible "gift" that Graham possesses, the ability to assume the viewpoint of anyone he encounters. What heroic qualities Graham possesses reside largely in his willingness, however grudging it may be, to put on his badge one last time to hunt the Dragon, knowing as he does the psychological torment the hunt is going to inflict upon him.

Graham is extraordinary as a detective in part because of its inability to separate himself from his cases. This may be commonplace now, but it has not always been so. Novels, TV shows and movies have traditionally assumed that a detective with an extraordinary ability, such as Sherlock Holmes, will naturally embrace that ability. They rarely if ever explore the idea that gifts such as Graham's can be a curse as well as a blessing. Dr. Bloom scolds Jack Crawford with the words, "You wouldn't like it either if you had it (the ability of pure empathy and projection), Jack." He also reminds Crawford that Graham is a man flooded and inundated by fear -- hardly a typical characteristic in a hero. Graham uses a form of self-hypnosis to distance himself from the horrors he has to crawl through, literally on hands and knees; it takes the shape of pretending that the manhunt is an exercise in pure forensics, a kind of logic problem that he, Graham, is particularly good at. When Graham can achieve this distance, he's happy -- or at least content. But the harder he works a case, the less possible this distance becomes. The sense of simpatico he achieves with the murderer "spreads in his head like a spill." Over the course of the novel we come to realize that Graham is in a certain sense insane, and within his head lurks the same madness he hunts in others. He differs from his quarry mainly in his unwillingness to let the madness dictate his actions, but even this requires a certain amount of denial. When he reunites with Lecter in the mental hospital, the doctor quips, "Do you know how you caught me, Will? Because we're just alike. If you want the old scent back, smell yourself."

Great detectives are often seen as men apart. They view the unraveling of a mystery as a purely intellectual exercise. Sherlock Holmes occasionally took to task his friend and chronicler, Watson, for the sensational way in which Watson recorded Holmes' exploits. In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" he says: "You have erred perhaps in attempting to put color and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing..Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales." Edward X. Delaney, who caught two serial killers over the four Deadly Sin novels, actually remarks in the last of these novels how interesting the counterpoint is between the frenzied, hot-blooded passion of the killer and the cool, unemotional, methodical actions of the detective who hunts that killer. Both men view their detective work as a professional exercise. Graham, with his blessing-curse of "pure empathy and projection", cannot. How he would love to possess the icy detachment of Sherlock Holmes, who actually lamented the death of his opposite number, Professor Moriarty, because of the challenge he presented! Alas, for Graham, the Hobbs, Lecters and Dolarhydes of the world are not the opposing queens on a chessboard, to be forced bloodlessly into concession. They are monsters, and sometimes monsters bite.