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The Rosebud Roundtable:
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Rosebud: Does Evil Play a Role in Popular Culture Today? Baxter: Yes, but it almost always shows up in a cartoon form, at least in contemporary mass-market entertainment. You get the outward trappings of evil without the substance, semi-comic riffs on the subject like Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate or Gabriel Byrne in End of Days or Al Pacino in the movie whose title I’ve forgotten about a lawyer who sells his soul to the devil. I remember Mickey Rourke in another movie playing Satan in New Orleans. It’s ridiculous. Nobody means it; its use is ironic. In music you get people, like Marilyn Manson—an intelligent man—who don’t actually believe in what they’re doing except as a performance of a sort that’s meant to scare and entertain adolescents (who do, often, have a real feeling for the mythological and for good and evil), like a side-trip through the House of Horrors. All of these productions are, in one way or another, cynical, i.e., humorously intended, travesty art, meant to be visited but probably not truly inhabited. Speaking of The Ninth Gate, however, which was directed by Polanski, the one recent mass-market movie I can think of that really specified a particular kind of evil and its consequence and was not ironic about it was Chinatown, which Polanski also directed. In that movie, Noah Cross’ greed and acquisitiveness is utterly plausible and horrific and, finally, unknowable. He’s an interesting kind of satanic figure. He goes beyond bad behavior to a much higher level of malevolence. The script (by Robert Towne) suggests that there’s something impenetrable about actions on that scale. The metaphor of the title is meant to suggest that. The movie is also about an actuality, too: land development and water rights in southern California during the 1930s. There have been some good movies about racism and sexual violence and terrible criminal behavior. But evil, in the sense that the question suggests, does not seem to be their subject. But I may have missed something. Hamilton: It’s funny, that in one of the more cartoonish depictions of, if not evil, then very misguided and bad behavior— our friend the Grinch is now depicted in the movies with a backstory, I believe it’s called, to explain his warped psyche. It’s all mom and dad’s fault! (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to but they do.”) I loved the film Dancer in the Dark in part because there was no explanation for Bill’s evilness. He simply was the genuine article. It was not important to know anything about him because all of the action pointed to Björk, pointed to the one moment when she could give perhaps the only response to evil—to sing your lungs out until you’re extinguished. In this way the movie has a bit of the feel of ancient Greek lit.—the characters have their roles at the onset, and they can do nothing but live out their fates. As for popular culture, ours is a culture that produced, for one, (to beat a dead horse) Monica Lewinsky. She is the fully ripened fruit of our culture, she with her voluptuous vacuousness. (My favorite moment in the Barbara Walters interview is this one: Barb says, “Did you come to Washington because you were interested in politics?” And Monica laughs down the scale in her Valley speak, “Noooooooooo-aaaah.”) She is not evil herself, and neither of course is Bill, and neither are we, watching with apparently insatiable curiosity. But the threads that run through the story, ignorance, buffoonery, arrogance—handmaidens to evil—are woven together to make a great vein of pernicious stupidity, all of which have the general effect of a blight. In this way, evilness can have a softness and move in slow time, and does not have to be a great big thundering character such as Iago, Ahab, Bill Sykes, etcetera. Rosebud: Are there still characters today who personify evil like Iago, Ahab and Dickens’ Bill Sykes? Baxter: They’re there, but you have to look for them, and besides, readers are skeptical and generally don’t believe in personifications. As a form of characterization, it’s antique. I ran into this trouble with my character Schwartzwalder in Shadow Play. We have come to feel that evil is other-worldly and monstrous and cannot be explained. But because ours is a culture of explanation (sociological and psychological), we generally feel that anything and everything can be explained and accounted for. When you explain something, its scale diminishes. It gets down to the human scale and is therefore sanitized. As Andrew Delbanco (The Death of Satan) says, “The very notion of evil seems to be incompatible with modern life, from which the ideas of transgression and the accountable self are fast receding.” In English departments, “transgressive” is a common term but is used as a praiseworthy feature of a work. Also, because we enjoy irony and use it constantly as a cultural safety-valve, we tend not to be believers in absolute categories. The word “villainy” has an antique ring also. It’s uncool. We shrug it off as slightly silly. We tend to think that every action is probably forgivable, sooner or later. But evil, if you take the concept seriously at all, probably involves a category of unforgivable actions, and that’s hard to accept for many people. Even Fundamentalists believe that most actions can be forgiven eventually. Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter is creepy and horrible, but Harris seems to be winking at us, as if we’re meant to enjoy Lecter’s misdeeds, at least to an extent. We become slightly complicit with him. Contrast this with Robert Musil’s serial killer, Moosbrugger, in The Man Without Qualities. There is something unknowable or unthinkable about Moosbrugger, and I do not imagine that we’re meant to enjoy him, or his actions, at any level whatsoever. We’re not invited to understand him, either. We’re meant to be appalled. Pynchon actually seems interested in villains on a large scale, but his characterizations always involve a certain amount of cartooning. Roth has gone at this subject in books like Sabbath’s Theater, but I think that book is about soul-sickness, not evil. Coover was obsessed with Nixon, Heller with Kissinger, as model for bad behavior on a grand scale. Toni Morrison illuminates the evil of racism. Gunter Grass dealt with the Nazis, and Michel Tournier creates a great monster in The Ogre. Coetzee is interested in the evils of apartheid but does not personify it in single characters, which would seem naïve. Evil, if we are to believe it in our time, usually appears to be collective, not individualized. But mostly we just don’t believe in “large” characters anymore in fiction and we don’t grant them a sense of scale. But there are exceptions here and Rosebud: Have you ever experienced anything personally that you consider evil? Hamilton: My first memory of evil: I was a ballet fanatic. I got to Grant Park in Chicago with my big sister at eight in the morning and staked out a place near the front, in anticipation of Gelsey Kirkland and Edward Villella dancing at eight that evening. We sat all day long in the hot sun. I was seven or eight years old. Throughout the day the place filled up. At 7:50 pm a woman who looked like Margaret Hamilton’s fat sister, along with her two helplessly unhappy grown daughters, crowded us out of our seats. She had an umbrella. She poked, she scolded, she shouted, she stared through her fierce little eyes. She scared the daylights out of me; she was, I thought, meanness and greediness incarnate; she made me weep with desperation. This is not so bad, in the scheme of things, of course, no holocaust experience, but it was an acquaintance with a form, an acquaintance I have never forgotten. Baxter: Yes, I have experienced something personally that I would consider evil, and the odd thing is, I absolutely do not want to talk about it. Rosebud: What does art accomplish with regard to evil? Baxter: The most literature can accomplish is to dramatize it, to create plausible situations in which people behave in almost incomprehensibly terrible ways. Which is to say that it can provide negative models of behavior. Hamilton: Literature too can show the reader what choices there may be in the face of evil. A person can go down singing (especially if you’ve got a voice like Björk, and can make up songs on the spot when your head is in a noose). In the same vein, there’s a heartbreaking scene in Gitta Sereny’s book Into That Darkness, about the commandant of Treblinka, in which a witness observes a father and ten-year-old son about to go into the gas chamber, the father with his hand on the son’s shoulder, speaking to him calmly, lovingly. Science fiction shows us another response: Sci-fi has always appealed particularly to teenagers who are fresh enough to believe in the power and nobility of the hero, the person who refuses to sing or go gently, but puts up his dukes in the face of unbeatable wickedness. The more realistic, disappointing but all the same thrilling—heroes are those, like the early Roman rulers who, in an attempt at social justice, gave the plebes land and money, and were killed for their efforts, one after the next. (Karen Silkwood was killed for her defiance. Erin Brockovich, a more modern gal, perfectly suited to our happy-ending culture, not only doesn’t die for her knowledge and chutzpah, she gets rich.) Against evil should one fight, sing, carry out justice although death is certain, or hide, suck up, or shut one’s eyes? Evil, I suspect, is more brutishly stubborn than goodness. And while literature often explores evil in its various dimensions, this exploration necessarily goes hand in hand with human frailty. Evil, I’d wager, does not exist in a pure form out in the universe, but is the tragic consequence of human relationships. To grossly paraphrase Willa Cather, in life, it is often useful to have an enemy so that one does not have to look too far within and make oneself the villain. Baxter: We need some “conceptual means for thinking about the universal human experience of cruelty and pain,” to use another phrase from Andrew Delbanco, but I am uneasy with this question’s assumptions about redemption and sin and whether fiction writers should get mixed up with it at a conceptual level. Hamilton: I agree, too big a question. Martin Buber should be consulted. Rosebud: Isn’t there a recurring theme in literature that makes the woman evil and the woman-shy man a hero? Hamilton: I don’t know, but I love Margaret Atwood and Francine Prose in particular for creating sublimely wicked female characters. What’s always fascinating is trouble. Not necessarily evil, but good and/or weak people beset by a situation that is a tiny bit beyond their ability to cope. Or so they think. Baxter: Oldtime traditional Western misogyny, and patriarchy, that’s what it’s all about. Satan tempts the woman, she falls, and the woman tempts the man. These stories are hard-wired into us, and you have to work to get them out of your system. Rosebud: Do you agree with C. S. Lewis when he said, “Bad persons are always easier to portray than good ones, for, although none of us knows anything much about men who are better than we, yet on the other hand evil is always faithful to us, always at our elbow, always below us; to characterize a bad man we have only to release our own bad passions, hatreds, suppressions and confusions.” Baxter: I have never liked C. S. Lewis’ ruminations on this subject. He “sounds” authoritative. But what his authority rests on, I have very little idea. He’s a moralizer and sometimes sounds priggish. I don’t think it’s true that “none of us knows anything much about men who are better than we…” That’s nonsense. Of course we do. Young people often try to find models of behavior, both good and bad, and it’s not uncommon to continue to go around looking for those models when you’re older, especially if your life is in a shambles. As for characterizing a bad man, when I do it—for example, the Bat, in The Feast of Love, I have to start by making him understandable and then make the badness flow out from comprehensible motives. Sometimes they’re mine—loneliness, pain, etc., and I put those demons to work. Rosebud: If art no longer reconciles God and evil, have we eliminated its urgency in our lives? Baxter: When was art more “urgent” than it is now? Hamilton: And any art worth its salt generally has an ambiguous resolution. Baxter: I feel as if I have gotten myself into a bind, because these issues are of great importance, but for that very reason, I don’t feel that they can be answered easily or quickly. The one thing you can really do to diminish these questions is to be glib or facile about them. The truth is, I don’t know the answers to these questions myself, try as I might to think about them. Like evil itself, they exist somewhere in the realm of the unknowable. How do we think about the unknowable? To answer with “conversational” “specific” “everyday” examples is already to diminish their scale and to suggest the form the answer should take, as if evil, for example, can be made into an everyday phenomenon. But what if it can’t be? There’s something about evil, real evil, that is not everyday. Lets end with that, at least for now. |
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