In Dispraise of Realism

George R.R. Martin

A confession: I have only watched a few episodes of Game of Thrones, and none of its spinoff, House of the Dragon. I tried reading George R.R. Martin’s novels, and couldn’t. Nothing against either Martin’s writing, which has a strong voice and command of nuance, or the adaptation’s execution; I particularly like how they took Peter Jackson’s LotR ethos and made it sootier. Martin and his adapters work well.

Rather, I’ve struggled with the underlying ethic. Martin is probably the foremost proponent of a fantasy subgenre called “grimdark.” This neologism is sloppily defined and, like porn, we know it when we see it. Rather than having parameters, grimdark fantasy has a core interpretation of humanity defined by pessimism, and a petty, captious interpretation of human nature. Grimdark writers read humans as base, vile creatures, and depict this belief luridly.

Martin’s tone isn’t unique. Writers like Genevieve Valentine, Glen Cook, and Joe Abercrombie presume similarly that humans lack core values, honor doesn’t exist, and the best we can expect is to find the least awful antihero. Grimdark often exists in direct rejection to J.R.R. Tolkien, who aggressively rejected religious interpretations of his novels, but who nevertheless wrote from an essentially Catholic belief that justice must ultimately prevail.

This pessimism often gets characterized as “realism.” Both inside and outside literature, many people who pat themselves on the back for their supposed clear-eyed ability to see the truth, actively seek the bleakest, most hopeless interpretation for everything. Recall Tolstoy’s famous thesis statement of realism in Anna Karenena: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Then he sets out to prove it.

Similarly, in politics, “realism” often justifies history’s worst atrocities. Otto von Bismarck pioneered realpolitik, a PoliSci thesis contending that everybody’s a bad actor, and the wisest course is to destroy other nations before they destroy you. It’s easy, with historical hindsight, to draw a straight line between Bismarck and two world wars. Today, American politics is tainted by “race realism,” a primarily conservative principle that race-based conflict is inevitable.

J.R.R. Tolkien

It strikes me, however, that Tolkien and his weird shadow, C.S. Lewis, weren’t ignorant of the worst possible interpretations. Tolkien fought in the trenches at the Somme. Lewis’s allegorical Pevensie family stumbled into Narnia while literally fleeing the London Blitz. Tolkien and Lewis lived through the Twentieth Century’s most ignoble and hideous moments. And despite that, they believed goodness, Christianity, and capital-T Truth still existed.

Lewis himself, in describing Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, noted that Chretien set his stories in a distant land, at a distant time. (Chretien was French, but in the 12th Century, overland travel was ponderous, and undertaken only with great purpose.) Because, Lewis writes, true virtue is always in another land, at another time. Historically, fantasy has shared that belief, whether Tolkien’s iron-age severity, or Lewis’ playful mythic candyland.

Contrasting the sociopolitical forces that steered Tolkien versus Martin, I notice two divergences. First, though both men were baptized and confirmed Catholic, Martin lost his faith moving into adulthood. He stopped believing that capital-T Truth existed, or at least was knowable. But no substitute source of moral confidence took Christianity’s place. Faced with a panoply of philosophical and theological moralities, Martin essentially surrendered to indecision.

Meanwhile, as Martin lacked any moral compass, he also lacked urgency in context. Lewis and Tolkien were shaped by literal war, with fascism, which was itself the final instaur form of imperialism. (America take note.) Martin and his grimdark cohort, by contrast, grew up amid the Cold War. They didn’t have the option to win or die trying. Instead, they lived beholden to powerful governments that were deaf to the people’s entreaties.

Actual violence, actual war, convinced Tolkien and Lewis that truth claims matter, and virtue exists. By contrast, the lingering threat of violence, with the pervasive reality that they could neither join in nor flee, convinced Martin et al. that nothing really matters, and humanity is necessarily execrable. It seems belief in truth and virtue emerges, butterfly-like, from the need to act. But the persistent inability to resist evil starves virtue.

And in both cases, True Believers cast their belief in virtue, or lack thereof, onto a distant land unreachable across countless miles and centuries. Because closer to home, we have to acknowledge that neither virtue nor vice are absolute. Real life is sloppy, and doesn’t move according to theory. In either case, Christian idealism or agnostic pessimism, the truth only exists in a mythic land.

The Dark Side of the Street, Part 2

This essay is a follow-up to The Dark Side of the Street.

Catriona Ward

In Catriona Ward’s novel The Last House on Needless Street, major protagonist Ted Bannerman is abjectly terrified of “Mommy.” Ted tiptoes around the house, afraid of transgressing Mommy’s many unwritten rules, or damaging anything that belongs to Mommy. Though he assures us that Mommy’s wrath is sudden and direct, he also doesn’t describe her actions; he only reports her dialog through the filter of carefully edited memory.

So be warned, this commentary will include spoilers for The Last House on Needless Street.

Ted Bannerman draws immediate comparisons to another notorious mama’s boy, Norman Bates. Like Ted, Norman performs elaborate rituals to appease his mother, whose love is contingent on Norman remaining permanently childlike. For Ted and Norman alike, adulthood and the outside world is frightening and uncertain; staying home is infantilizing, but at least it’s reliable. So both accept their mother’s violent control as the adequate compromise.

Cultural critic Sady Doyle writes that mothers frequently get blamed for sons’ violent behavior. Besides Norman Bates, Doyle cites evil mothers in the Texas Chainsaw franchise, the X-Files episode “Home,” and real-life weirdo Ed Gein. Unlike evil daughters in franchises like The Exorcist, who are presented as solely culpable for their own actions, evil sons are ostensibly molded by their mothers, who are responsible for their sons’ choices.

Doyle wrote before Ward published her novel, so I’m left to speculate how she’d handle this “evil mother” fable. Considering how Ward demonstrates familiarity with horror standards, and subverts them to serve her own mission, she probably wrote the Norman Bates parallels deliberately. We watch Ted struggle to refer to “Mommy” using adult language, despite his age, and we’re coached to expect a Bates-like snap in Ted’s psyche.

Alfred Hitchcock (working from Robert Bloch’s novel) presents a mentally ill man as a ticking time bomb, a perpetrator of violence who leaves a carefully orchestrated trail of bodies behind. Sixty-two years later, I’m probably breaching no confidence to reveal that the “Mother” Norman constantly appeases, lives entirely inside his head. He’s created an entire secondary identity, and invested it with his own insecurities and terrors of the outside world.

Sady Doyle

Catriona Ward has done something similar. “Mommy” lives entirely inside Ted Bannerman’s head, reinforcing his fears. But Ward subverts that paradigm twice. First, from the beginning, first-person narrator Ted acknowledges that Mommy isn’t present. He knows already that her persistent voice is a self-made delusion, one he attempts to control with pharmaceuticals and beer. Mommy’s exact whereabouts are one of the novel’s lingering mysteries.

Second, Ward acknowledges something other writers either don’t know or don’t admit: the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Both Alfred Hitchcock and, more recently, M. Night Shyamalan have presented mentally ill people as incipient monsters, who assuage their tortured inner lives by inflicting that torture outward. Ted, by contrast, desperately wants to be normal. He just doesn’t know how.

American culture shuns mental divergence. While Hitchcock and Shyamalan have presented people with mental disorders as violent masterminds, our mental health community has long marginalized even minor mental illnesses. As Oliver Sacks writes, in the 1960s, simply admitting to “hearing voices” was sufficient legal grounds to forcibly institutionalize people—even though most people hear disembodied voices occasionally.

Meanwhile, a growing body of Americans, fueled by what’s derisively called “mommy blogs” (paging Sady Doyle!), have avoided vaccinating their children. Their stated motivation is avoiding autism, a poorly understood developmental disorder. These parents, derided as “mommies,” have permitted recent recurrences of polio and measles, diseases once nearly extinct, to recur in modern America. Sure, the diseases are real, but the conflation of mental illness and mother-phobic language is concerning.

Ted Bannerman demonstrates how mentally ill people are regularly acted upon by a world that fears them. Rather than monsters and manhunters, the mentally ill are usually traumatized, and that trauma usually happens in childhood. In the final reveal, we discover that Mommy has done literally every crime for which the world blames Ted. Mommy is crafty, capable of elaborate planning and terrible violence. Ted is small, weak, and traumatized.

I suspect Sady Doyle wouldn’t appreciate the stereotype of shifting blame onto Mommy. In our post-Hitchcock era, that smacks of laziness. Yet Doyle might appreciate how Ward subverts that stereotype by using it to demonstrate the consequences childhood abuse has on actual children. Unlike Norman Bates or Ed Gein, Ted Bannerman reflects how the outside world continues repeating the adult child’s trauma. Unlike Norman, Ted Bannerman just wants to heal.

The Dark Side of the Street

Catriona Ward, The Last House On Needless Street

Ted Bannerman lives alone with his daughter and his cat, craving the ordinariness of small-town life. But his past won’t let him be ordinary. Eleven years ago, the police tore Ted’s house apart looking for a little girl who disappeared at a nearby tourist trap. Years later, that little girl’s sister hasn’t relinquished the search, and that search brings her to Needless Street, and the Pacific Northwest forest just beyond.

Sometimes I wonder what consequences M. Night Shyamalan has wrought on art. Genre audiences have come to expect twist endings and jolting revelations as their due. We (and this includes me) read or watch distractedly, browsing ahead to claim we accurately anticipated the twist. American-born British author Catriona Ward apparently knows this, and writes with the expectation that readers want a twist. Then she turns that smug expectation against us.

From the beginning, Ward dribbles out cues that horror readers have been carefully programmed to anticipate. We notice which information our unreliable narrators omit, and what inconsistencies they include. We notice, for instance, that Ted lavishes affection upon his daughter Lauren, but she doesn’t live with him full-time. Where does she go when she isn’t with him? Why does she swing abruptly between childlike glee and violent outbursts?

Ward’s story alternates between three viewpoint characters, and the world they describe is inconsistent. Ted is sweet and sympathetic, a big-hearted man-child who simply wants to love and be loved. But he also uses alcohol and pills to quiet a gnawing darkness, and hides indoors to avoid snooping judgment. He’s haunted by his absent but nagging mother, whom he still calls Mommy, despite being in his middle thirties.

Meanwhile, Ted’s cat Olivia wanders the spacious halls of Ted’s Victorian wedding-cake house. Her absolute, undying love for Ted isn’t merely sweet: Olivia believes the Lord commissioned her specifically to provide Ted the care he needs, though Olivia’s actual responsibilities are weird and contrary. Olivia reads her Bible and believes she has everything figured out, until she begins hearing a desperate voice calling from beneath the kitchen floor.

Catriona Ward

Outside Ted’s narrow world, Dee has spent eleven years seeking her missing sister Lulu. Her sister’s disappearance cost everything: her art-school scholarship, her parents’ marriage, and eventually, her father’s death. Finding Lulu has become Dee’s only mission, and her mission brings her to Washington, to Needless Street, to Ted. She’s convinced Ted knows more than he’ll admit. But discrepancies start creeping into Dee’s almost-religious narrative.

I’ll admit something: I almost didn’t finish this book. Indeed, I almost flung it aside early on, when Ted began describing “going away,” an apparent fugue state where hours, even days, disappear from his memory. The correlation of horror and mental illness is a shopworn tchotchke beloved by genre authors. But Ward presents Ted as so heartworn, almost loveable, that I felt compelled to see how this resolved itself.

I’m glad I did. Ted’s illness—given Ward’s storytelling approach, I don’t think revealing Ted’s illness counts as a spoiler—is subverted in ways that prove both sympathetic and insightful. Ted proves capable of both intense love and intense wrath. But exactly who receives Ted’s wrath matters, in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious at first. Ted apparently operates under deeper directions, and his anger serves specific psychological ends.

Because ultimately, Ward uses psychology to tell a complex, humane story. The world Ted, Olivia, and Dee share appears inconsistent to us outsiders because these characters lie to themselves so often, so persistently, that reality has become a footnote. Sure, Ward couches these lies in Jungian archetypes which horror readers will find familiar. But their lies matter less than the truths they strive, and fail, to conceal.

In the final reveal, we understand that Ward has concealed these truths through a certain amount of polite hand-waving. To overextend the Shyamalan metaphor, she’s used camera cuts and restricted POV to withhold information from us, the audience. But again, Ward realizes we readers expect that from our authors, and utilizes that expectation to tell a story that, eventually, exceeds the perceived commercial limits of her genre.

Some potential buyers may be asking themselves whether the book is scary. It’s marketed to horror audiences, after all. Yes, it has the gripping, nuanced dread of masters like Lovecraft and Hitchcock. Ward kept me up past my bedtime. But she also asks what monsters we’re willing to live with, in order to avoid bringing new monsters inside. These characters live with demons, sure. But who, exactly, invited them in?

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

When I was a kid, I was afraid of the dark, as kids frequently are. My father sneered at this fear and refused to give me a nightlight. “There’s nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the light,” he declared, insisting this ended the discussion. I asked him to prove this; he did so by turning on the light. The disjunction there apparently never occurred to him.

Back in 2019, short-story writer Amber Sparks wrote an engaging essay about the recent rise in credence given to magical thinking, particularly among women. If astrology, divination, and Wicca aren’t more popular lately, they’re certainly more talked about. To Sparks, scientistic thinking is an outreach arm of the patriarchy. Magical thinking may not necessarily be “true,” but to Sparks, it empowers the chronically disenfranchised, and that’s what matters.

Thinking about fear of darkness, I see a more literal manifestation of this exact premise. Fear of darkness is common among those who lack power in our society. This may mean metaphorical power: children and the poor, for whom being out of sight of others makes them vulnerable to abuse. I’ve also seen paralyzing fear of darkness among well-off adults who’ve been subject to violence, especially relationship violence.

But absence of power can be more literal, too. Without electric light, the night swarms with forces eager to kill you, or anyway cause you harm. Ordinary able-bodied humans receive the largest fraction of information about the world through our eyes, which don’t work in the dark. Without light, the night could be riddled with wolves, bats, bears, and more. Campfires aren’t only for warmth; they keep predators away, too.

Amber Sparks (see also)

Think about it: fear of darkness is most aggressively sneered at by people with access to light. Adults subject ourselves to degrading work conditions to keep the electric bill paid. City dwellers flood every corner of their communities with light. We frown-ups punish children for being afraid of the dark, but permit darkness into our lives only under controlled circumstances; I can’t rise to pee at midnight without turning numerous lights on.

Amber Sparks notes accurately that, for most people, most of the time, scientific truths don’t matter much. “Knowing about how a hand moves doesn’t stop it from covering your mouth.” The same applies to darkness. I know, intellectually, that darkness doesn’t invite monsters into my closet. But only shining light into dark corners proves that definitively. My father turned on the light to prove darkness wasn’t scary, apparently without irony.

Because, seriously, maybe there’s nothing present in the darkness that isn’t there when you turn the light on. But without light, how would you know? Even inside my own house, with modern central climate control and light, I’ve ventured out without turning the light on and stepped on prickly burs, cat barf, and a garter snake that got inside somehow. Darkness didn’t put them there, but it caused me to find them with my feet.

Modernist thinking tells us that science, reason, and limitless electric light have banished fears of darkness, fears they call superstition. Neither the wolves of the primordial forest, nor the demons of medieval folklore, can withstand modernity and its intellect. If we simply swallow our base animal fears, and live in the glorious light of modernity, we have nothing to fear. Wisdom, reason, and manmade light rebound everywhere.

Except we know that modernity’s benefits haven’t been distributed equally. Modernism has traveled hand-in-glove with patriarchy, racism, and war. The German pogroms in Poland, and Soviet pogroms in Ukraine, demonstrate how those who think of themselves as thoroughly hip and modern are willing to inflict massive devastation on poor and powerless peoples in order to continue propagating their diseased vision of modernity.

Nearly three years ago, I spent one night trapped in darkness and cold beside a rural Nebraska highway. Afterward, I waxed rhapsodic about my various insights, because I had nothing but my brain for company. But then, I returned to modernity, to electric light and central heat, and within days, forgot nearly everything I’d learned. I resumed abasing myself before my boss, to avoid spending another night in the dark.

My message being: fear of darkness is natural, even good. Just as Amber Sparks claims magical thinking empowers women amid patriarchy, fear of darkness empowers the poor. Those who would chastise your fear, are the same people who’d demand your subservience to capitalist hierarchies, and that isn’t coincidental. Fear is your source of power; don’t let “them” steal it.

Digital Art and Human Development

Art produced by Dall-E (my collection)

Friends widely embraced the Lensa AI art app this week for one simple reason: it could create faces. This year has seen remarkable advances in computer-drawn art, beginning with Dall-E, which took social media by storm this summer. But Dall-E couldn’t draw faces. Human likenesses came out pinched, distorted, with nightmarish proportions. Dall-E’s immediate successor, Midjourney, did better faces, but they were cartoon-like and whimsical.

Lensa, by contrast, could read users’ selfies, and the program could return artistic renderings. Though the pictures aren’t yet realistic, the computer was capable of making value choices which presented finished portraits that emphasized certain features like trained artists would. My friends uploaded their selfies, knowing they were relinquishing rights to a massive AI clip-art pool, because the reward was painterly renderings of themselves as wizards, spacemen, and cats.

Pushback began almost immediately. Not only did Lensa pinch your uploaded images, the claims read, but it also pinched legitimate artists’ hand-made work. The app created painterly renderings because it modeled itself on actual painters, the techniques they used, the decisions they made. AI programs are already putting human artists out of work, though not yet in huge numbers. The ethics were already creating headaches, and it’s likely to get worse.

I’d like to focus on a different ethical consideration. Yes, the human economic challenge is serious: just as American industrial jobs moved to Japan and China, where labor was cheaper and supply lines were shorter, AI art is likely to displace human artists because the renderings are nearly instantaneous. People are unlikely to pay more for slower human-made art just because doing so is right. But the problem begins much earlier than the point of sale.

Art produced by Midjourney
(Wikimedia Commons)

Many schools begin teaching art in preschool. We teach children to draw with charcoal and Conte crayon, to play “Alouette” on a plastic recorder, and to sing in unison, because these represent important developmental milestones. Art and music teach children important skills of hand-eye coordination, the ability to sit still, and patient dedication to tasks where the reward isn’t always immediately obvious. Children need all these skills in multiple disciplines.

As I’ve gotten older, though, and spent time on both sides of the classroom, I’ve realized students learn even more from art. When drawing, students learn what to include, and what to omit. The entire process begins by reducing the forms we’re rendering—landscapes, buildings, human bodies—to a few essential lines. Then the artist makes choices about which shapes, colors, and textures to incorporate. These are important value choices.

Anybody who’s witnessed the products of a freshman life-drawing class knows that a roomful of art students will produce very different images of one model. Photographers may get slightly different images from the same model, depending on choices like shutter speed, angle, light saturation, and Photoshop aftereffects. But human artists, looking at the same model, can produce wildly divergent paintings of the same base human form.

These choices are subjective, but not value-neutral. The proportions of the human form, like the proportions of musical notes in a composition, have mathematical relationships, and artists make choices about how much they value harmony, synchrony, and continuity. These choices speak to the artist’s inner process. But they’re also external, and speak to what kind of reaction the artist hopes to produce in the chosen audience.

Art produced by Lensa (promo image)

Someone must make similar choices with AI art. The person writing Lensa’s prompts, of course, chooses whether they like the image produced. But some programmer deep within the bowels of a Silicon Valley industrial park also chooses what proportions, textures, and colors the program will emphasize. That programmer made these choices months, even years, before the artwork was produced. But that person made these choices, on your behalf.

We already know that recommendation algorithms on streaming services like Netflix and Spotify both empower and circumscribe our choices. We receive access to more musicians and filmmakers whose work we might never have discovered. But we also wind up encountering fewer kinds of artists, and wind up watching or listening to the same genres repeatedly. Our tastes become deeper, but narrower.

If programs replace artists, which seems likely, these AI art generators are likely to have similar effects on students’ ability to make choices. As art becomes instantaneous, and not a process, students are likely to truncate their ability to even see the choices being made, much less implement them in their own work. Their worlds will become narrower. If choices are instantaneous, why make any choices at all?

Take This Badge Off Of Me

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 47
Sam Peckinpah, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett (James Coburn) swaggers into the old Spanish mission where the outlaws congregate, showing off his newly minted badge. Not long ago, he was one among this anarchic bunch, but the territorial government has empowered him to bring law to the frontier. Garrett warns his old friend William Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) that the government wants Garrett specifically to bring down Bonney. Here’s your first and only warning, Garrett says: get out or get killed.

I remember first watching this movie as a teenager, impelled by the reputation of director Sam Peckinpah, and by this movie’s famous soundtrack, composed and recorded by Bob Dylan. The classic “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” comes from this movie. As a kid, I was appalled by this movie. I watched as it ticked down a list of traditional Western character tropes, all of whom died in the kind of bloodbath for which Peckinpah is famous.

What I didn’t understand, watching it with a kid’s wide-eyed situational ignorance, was the context in which this movie was made. Peckinpah himself had become an unlikely countercultural hero. Though twenty years older than his principal audience, he understood their Vietnam-era malaise. He also understood the self-destructive violence which drove characters in mercilessly explosive classics like The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, as he feuded with production houses and self-medicated to control his bipolar disorder.

William Bonney, good-looking and rife with charm, ignores his friend’s warnings. He came west to escape Back-East law, and reinvented himself as Billy the Kid. For him, outlaw status isn’t a failure to obey the law; it’s an act of obedience to his truest self. He believes the frontier myth of complete autonomy; he sees the West as Rousseau’s “state of nature.” Billy scorns Garrett, leaves the mission, and returns to his career of rampage.

But if Billy has become the amoral extreme of libertarian thinking, Garrett has become the opposite. By accepting a badge, he also accepts the Back-East government’s strict Calvinist interpretation of law. Humankind, he now believes, is irredeemably sinful, and must be restrained by law. As a lawman, his right to enforce order upon everyone else is absolute, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in pursuing that goal. Law is Garret’s goal, not a means.

Kris Kristofferson (left) and James Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Here’s where my teenage self reacted with initial revulsion. Raised in an atmosphere of country music, John Wayne movies, and Zane Grey novels, I believed American Western myths of hard-bitten individualism and frontier pluck. Peckinpah chooses the most extreme versions of that mythology: the strict lawman who believes the frontier must be tamed, and the wild-eyed outlaw who glories in the absence of law. The two must fight, and destroy everyone who comes between them.

I failed to understand the context. Peckinpah released this movie in 1973, the same year America’s involvement in Vietnam juddered to an unsatisfying halt. The American myth had devolved into extremes, not dissimilar to those depicted onscreen, and likewise destroyed everything that came between them. Even Bob Dylan’s involvement, as both composer and strange, enigmatic character, served to repudiate the entire previous decade. He’d been reduced to “Alias,” a character with no name or loyalties.

And yes, Peckinpah destroyed every Western stereotype. I saw that correctly, but utterly misinterpreted it. In one memorable scene, veteran cowboy actor Slim Pickens plays a sheriff conscripted into Garrett’s posse. A gunfight ensues, and Pickens is gut-shot. The camera lingers over him trying to hold his entrails in, eyes wide, while his wife tries to comfort him. The iconic Western character is dying, and knows it.

Pickens would parody this trope the next year, in Blazing Saddles.

Unlike in Peckinpah’s earlier films, made when he was relatively sober, these characters have limited motivations. Unlike, say, David Sumner in Straw Dogs, Billy and Garrett don’t learn or change with the story; they simply possess absolute morals, and kill to support them. But like jazz, this movie isn’t about what it’s about. Billy and Garrett don’t learn, but everyone caught between them certainly does. The lessons are cold, and usually final.

I misunderstood this at 17, because my upbringing strictly refused to accept the lessons of the post-Vietnam era. Worse, looking around today, watching my country getting shredded by a similar adherence to absolute morals, I see I wasn’t the only one who didn’t learn. Today’s moralists even use the same cowboy imagery I grew up with. And now, like then, those who follow absolute morals aren’t hurt, but those caught between them are getting killed.