Big Names, Short Stories, Mixed Results

Stephen King & Stewart O’Nan/Richard Chizmar, A Face in the Crowd/The Longest December

Dean Evers, an old New England widower in Florida, has become a reluctant Tampa Bay baseball fan. He whiles away lonely hours, largely estranged from his only son and with few surviving friends, by watching the Rays and reading. One hot afternoon, watching a low-stakes game, he sees a familiar face in the stands. A face from his personal past, which shouldn’t be possible, as its human is long deceased.

I can’t tell how much of “A Face in the Crowd” Stephen King wrote, and how much Stewart O’Nan contributed. King’s short fiction, unlike his novels, follows a reliable trajectory, building not toward some jump scare or twist, but toward a sense of inevitability. Characters see themselves as participants in events, until discovering that they’re mere passengers. Who knows if King wrote this story, or if O’Nan borrowed King’s vibe.

However, King and O’Nan aren’t this book’s star performers. Not only is their page count barely sixty percent of Richard Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” but their story is much more widely spaced and set in a larger font. Cemetery Dance Publications, Chizmar’s indie imprint, presumably put King and O’Nan on the cover to sell Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” which is more thematically ambitious but, ultimately, disappointing.

Bob Howard’s comfortable suburban Maryland life gets upended one snowy morning when local detectives appear at his neighbor’s door. A just-the-facts investigator informs him that his sweet, avuncular neighbor, James Wilkinson, has bodies under the floorboards. Bob finds himself beset on all sides, by suspicious neighbors, greedy reporters, and fair-weather friends. Everybody wonders what Bob knew, when. Then the midnight hang-up calls start.

This story differs from the other by rejecting a reliable beat sheet. Sadly, without a comfortable outline, Chizmar seems uncertain what story he wants to tell. Is this an amateur sleuth mystery in which a neighborhood family man must uncover deep secrets? A satire of the media circus following lurid crimes? A lone man’s descent into madness as the pressures of maintaining middle-class respectability crumble around him?

Yes, all this and more. Chizmar has selected an ambitious slate of themes he wants to address, backed by his admitted fondness for Twilight Zone-inspired narrative, but he seemingly doesn’t know how to keep all the balls in play. He gets just enough of one theme going to wet his readers’ whistle, then caroms onto another. It almost feels like he doesn’t know how to carry the themes forward once he’s introduced them.

As an author, I enjoy writing short stories because they let writers do something novels never permit: they let authors focus on character and plot, and politely ignore backstory. In full-length novels, the physical mass simply demands the author explain everything, or nearly everything, because there’s room enough. But short stories make no such demand. The brevity permits that, sometimes, things simply happen because they happen.

For instance, Dean Evers doesn’t need to ruminate on deeper themes of his buried past suddenly appearing on the Jumbotron. It simply happens because it happens. Evers tries to fight the inevitable but, like Oedipus Rex, his resistance becomes part of his breakdown. Yes, observant readers already know where his story is headed, and everyone except Dean realizes he can’t fight the tide. What tide? Doesn’t matter, the story’s over.

But Bob’s story, simply because it’s longer, has room to address the questions it raises. It just doesn’t, and one wonders whether Chizmar has started something he doesn’t know how to finish. The swarming, shark-like media frenzy gets introduced, then gets forgotten. Similarly, the pressures which the investigation puts on Bob’s ability to do his job, which is high in pressure but low in prestige. And the psychological toll on his family.

Indeed, in the final resolution, I find myself wondering why it stops there? Bob’s story not only isn’t done, but the “conclusion” actually opens more cans of proverbial worms about his family, his past, and his mental health. One wishes Chizmar took some guidance from King, whose notoriously long, family-oriented conclusions at least give readers some sense of where our protagonist now stands in a world forever changed.

These stories are arranged back-to-back, with two front covers, in the style of the old Ace Doubles that kept pulp classics in print during the 1960s. They feature two stories that go in different directions and ask different questions, but appeal to the same thriller audience. Both feel like good narrative introductions. Sadly, both also feel like something the authors intended to finish writing later.

Crime News is Bad News

Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

I’d bet you a ham sandwich that, if you surveyed a reasonable sample of Americans, most would agree that we expect too much of the police. We expect them to investigate violent crimes, enforce traffic laws, provide crisis intervention, control wild animals, protect the environment, and safeguard private property. It’s unreasonable. Yet after the 2020 George Floyd protests and “Defund the Police,” most metropolitan police departments are even more overfunded and expected to perform miracles.

American police critics often say “copaganda” to describe mass media entertainment, particularly police dramas, that make law enforcement look both more necessary and more effective than they are. Defense attorney Alec Karakatsanis shifts focus onto mainstream journalism, which he accuses of papering over not only the police, but also any reasonable alternative suggestions. Our news media have the ability to decide what facts their audiences know, and what ideas the public considers “acceptable” or “mainstream.”

Why, Karakatsanis asks, do news outlets consistently lead with murder, sexual assault, and robbery? Police spend less than five percent of their time and budget on these crimes. Journalists regularly omit reporting on tax evasion, wage theft, or environmental degradation, which are crimes. But scary stories of violence sell precious ad space and keep audiences glued. Police know this, too; many PDs, hungry for voters and resources, have vastly increased public relations budgets since 2020.

Growing police budgets direct resources away from tools to address the root causes of crime. Attempts to redress poverty, housing scarcity, structural racism, and collapsing communities, seem abstract and squishy when crime leads the headlines. Indeed, many news consumers don’t know such attempts to redress even exist, because journalists cover them superficially, compared to the in-depth analysis that street crime regularly receives. What journalists bother to cover, winds up being what lives in audiences’ minds.

Karakatsanis sees three fundamental problems with crime reporting. First, journalists report words from politicians, police spokespeople, property owners, and other defenders of the status quo without meaningful analysis. Second, use of weasel words and deflections conceal the writers’ opinions behind seemingly neutral language. Third, news consumers lack critical reading background necessary to spot the first two problems. This leaves a voting populace frequently unaware that alternatives to the status quo exist, and have been tried.

Alec Karakatsanis

Scholars write extensively about law enforcement, and its alternatives. Karakatsanis describes many approaches to addressing crime without involving what he calls the “punishment bureaucracy.” (He finds the phrase “criminal justice system” falsely anodyne.) Some alternatives are strictly hypothetical, while others have been applied, mostly with success. But newspaper readers or basic cable watchers seldom see them. As Karakatsanis writes, “The news consistently fails to explain the substance of legitimate critiques of police, prosecutors, and prisons.”

Some readers might expect Karakatsanis’ analysis to have a partisan bent. Republicans have persistently made bank with “tough on crime” posturing. But journalistic defense of police has a bipartisan history. Nominally progressive politicians, and the reporters who support them, often use police to bolster their legislative bona fides. At least on “law and order” matters, there’s little daylight between the two major parties. Despite this, journalists frequently present any alternative as a Mad Max hellscape.

Worst, the problem is circular. Journalists lead with crime reportage, even now, when crime statistics are at near-record lows. Which crimes reporters consider worth covering, become the crimes politicians campaign and legislate on. The public’s perception of crime, irrespective of real-world conditions, justifies draconian police interventions, which wind up contributing to further crime. The statistically meaningless incident becomes the justification for crackdowns. Or, as Karakatsanis puts it, “Bad curation of anecdote leads to bad policy.”

These outcomes aren’t inevitable. Karakatsanis makes suggestions for how journalists could better handle volatile stories, though he admits that’s unlikely to happen under the current system of perverse incentives. Until then, Karakatsanis describes a more engaged, critical approach to news consumption. That includes a better understanding of the language, sourcing, and references which journalists use, and a willingness to seek what the current story omits. It also means asking who’s helped by the current framing.

The situation is indeed bleak. Karakatsanis makes a persuasive case that we have an incomplete, blinkered understanding of our justice landscape. The stories which define our knowledge and explain our opinions, are frequently slanted or poorly representative. But beneath it, he maintains an optimism that conditions could change, if we, the masses, consume our news more critically. We aren’t beholden to the news industrialists who distribute our stories. We can take control, if we want.

A Very Proper and Decorous English Heist

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 54
Charles Crichton (director), The Lavender Hill Mob

Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) is the epitome of the postwar British nothing man: firmly middle class and middle management, he has little to show for his life. He’s spent twenty years supervising gold bullion shipments for a London commercial bank, handling money he’ll never be allowed to touch. One day his bank announces plans to move him to another department, and Henry decides to act. He’ll never see such money himself unless he steals it.

For approximately ten years after World War II, Ealing Studios, Britain’s longest surviving film studio, produced a string of comedies so consistent, they became a brand. They mixed tones throughout, shifting from dry wordplay and dark sarcasm, straight into loud, garish slapstick, often in the same scene. They shared certain general themes, though, especially the collision between Old Britain, wounded by the war, and a chaotic, freebooting new culture that hadn’t quite found its identity.

When Henry discovers his neighbor, Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), owns a small-scale metal foundry, the men decide to collaborate on Henry’s hastily considered heist. Through a caper too silly to recount, Henry and Alfred recruit two small-time hoodlums to perform the actual robbery. This union of jobs, classes, and accents makes a statement about Britain in 1951: the old divisions between castes are melting away. Something new is arising, and that something is probably criminal.

Besides their themes, the classic Ealing comedies shared other traits. Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway were two among a rotating repertory company appearing in several movies. Films were shot in real-life London streets, and in studios built in repurposed wartime aircraft hangars. The movies’ design bespeaks a Britain that existed only briefly, during the decades between Churchill and Thatcher: hung up on propriety and dignity, but also suddenly young, history bombed away in the Blitz.

The robbery is plucky, entrepreneurial, almost downright admirable. Henry’s crew execute a slapstick heist so silly, the Keystone Kops would’ve doffed their hats. But having done it, the crew find themselves actually holding a vanload of gold bullion, in a country still cash-strapped and suffering under wartime rationing. Gold is worthless, they discover, unless they can sell it. Which means smuggling it out of the country under the Metropolitan Police’s watchful, but easily distracted, eye.

Like in all Ealing comedies, indeed most of 20^th century British comedy, much of the humor comes from watching pretentions disintegrate. In another Guinness starring vehicle, The Man in the White Suit, this disintegration is literal, as conflicting sides tear the title character’s newfangled fabric to shreds. Here, it’s more metaphorical. The more our protagonists’ suits become rumpled, the more their hats fly off in frantic pursuits, the more they escape their prewar class roles.

Alec Guinness (left) and Stanley Holloway in The Lavender Hill Mob

This movie culminates in the police pursuing our antiheroes through London streets. This was seventeen years before Steve McQueen’s Bullitt made car chases a cinema staple, so Henry and Alfred make their own rules: frantic but dignified, they never forget their place. They use police tactics to distract the police, turning British decorum against itself, but their insistence on such polite observance eventually dooms them. These sports can escape everything—except their own British nature.

Alec Guinness plays Henry Holland with a gravitas which exceeds one character. In later years, he would become famous for playing implacable elder statesmen in classics like The Bridge on the River Kwai and the original Star Wars. This character has seeds of these more famous roles, but Guinness survives indignities we can’t imagine Obi-Wan Kenobi facing. Henry Holland goes from clerk to mastermind to goofy fugitive, all with seamless integrity. Guinness’ decorum never cracks.

This movie is worth watching in itself, but it also introduces the whole Ealing subgenre. It showcases the personalities, themes, and storytelling that made Ealing a classic. Most Ealing comedies were American successes, and repertory actors, especially Guinness, became American stars. But the genre lasted only briefly; the BBC bought the studio in 1957, and attempts to recapture the Ealing magic failed. Tom Hanks took Guinness’ role in a remake of The Ladykillers, and tanked.

Put briefly, the category is a surviving emblem of a time, place, and culture. Like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, or Douglas Adams’ Arthur Dent, Guinness’ Henry Holland is a British man in a time when being British didn’t mean much anymore. This movie, with its postwar man struggling for dignity amid changing times and a mobilized proletariat, couldn’t have been made any earlier or later than it was. Watching it is like a time machine.

The Other Side of the California Dream

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 52
Carl Franklin (writer/director), Devil in a Blue Dress

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins only wanted to earn an honest dollar and pay his mounting Los Angeles mortgage bills. Not many Black men own their own houses in his city and time, after all. So when a hulking White man in a flashy suit offers Easy straight cash to find a missing White girl who enjoys visiting Black jazz clubs, it feels like a welcome payday. That us, until leads Easy questions start turning up dead.

We generally don’t associate the Left Coast with the pervasive “color line” that divided many Twentieth Century American cities. But in the years surrounding World War II, California had every bit the segregated culture and bigoted tendencies. Black Americans from Texas and Louisiana came to La-La Land for the same reasons they settled in Chicago and New York, because the big cities offered work. But as elsewhere, what one hand offered, the other took away.

Easy finds himself managing the tension between two communities while seeking his target, Daphne Monet. White people need information from the Black community, and having aggressively built segregated institutions, they cannot cross the borders they’ve created. Black people need White money, and also White tolerance, both of which they can purchase if they’re willing to sell their integrity. But once the two start mingling, the implicit violence that keeps the communities divided starts becoming explicit.

This slow, thoughtful neo-noir already appeared like an artifact from another era when it appeared in 1995. Director Carl Franklin overexposed several key shots to create California’s sun-streaked postwar fatigue. In Franklin’s distinctively dated cinematography, Easy is proud of owning his single-family home with lawn and picket fence, but that house looks slightly singed, with dust permeating every crevice. L.A. is a city of promise, but to Franklin, that promise has already started wearing thin.

As crimes start accumulating, people on both sides of the color barrier consider Easy a trustworthy source. Though hired to find Daphne Monet, she quickly finds him, begging his help negotiating her return to her fiancé. But that fiancé, in whose name Easy has been seeking Daphne, appears never to have heard of Easy. Who, then, sent flashy DeWitt Albright into central L.A. to find Daphne? And how does this affect the L.A. mayoral race?

Franklin’s storytelling deliberately channels previous Southern California noir thrillers, like Double Idemnity and Chinatown. Unlike the French movies that originated the smog-shrouded noir genre, L.A. noir is notable for its unrelenting sunlight, making warmth and visibility feel as oppressive as European mist. This movie appeared around the same time as other neo-noirs, like L.A. Confidential and Mulholland Drive. But its specifically Black sensibilities set it apart, emphasizing those neglected by California’s booming postwar bonanza economy.

Jennifer Beals and Denzel Washington in Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress

Cinematography emphasizes this movie’s oppressive ethos. Franklin shoots many scenes from a low angle that places the horizon above the midpoint, placing the viewer below the characters’ eye level, making us feel low to the ground. Although Franklin has few scenes of out-and-out violence, those he does have distinctly lack glamour and grace. Fighting, for him, is a clumsy enterprise; none of that “gun fu” that would start infecting Hollywood soon after, with The Matrix.

Against this visual austerity, Franklin contrasts a lush Elmer Bernstein score. The sound reflects a changing attitude in jazz: though the musician favor traditional instruments and rhythms, their compositions are altered by electronic amplification and a harder, more aggressive backbeat. Bernstein judiciously mingles his own compositions with period icons like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, and in the noir style, he leaves several key scenes silent, letting character, dialog, and action convey the thoughtful story.

Like the Walter Mosley novel upon which it’s based, this movie was an experiment, to determine whether the market would support a franchise. The novel launched the Easy Rawlins franchise, and helped elevate Mosley to the first tier of commercial success. Despite a star cast and critical praise, the movie failed to recreate that success, barely breaking even at the box office. Denzel Washington’s performance was iconic, but only to those few who saw it.

Too bad audiences missed it, though. It provides a view into the institutions that enforced the color barrier during a time that California tried to romanticize itself, selling the “California dream” to anyone who could afford it. Easy shows us the unromantic side, the side that didn’t profit from postwar excess. He shows a man, dragged into the institutions of power, who grows into his role, becoming the defender his people never knew they needed.

Confess Your Crimes in Sand and Blood

Eric Jager, The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial By Combat

One rainy afternoon in January 1386, a crime transpired in the undefended castle overlooking the sleepy French hamlet of Capomesnil. Exactly what happened, and why, jeopardized the French legal system. Jean de Carrouges, a knight with a reputation for stroppy behavior and no aptitude for court intrigue, claimed his rival invaded his mother’s nearly abandoned château and savaged his wife. The rival, Jacques le Gris, a talented courtier and squire, denied everything.

UCLA medievalist Eric Jager stumbled upon the Carrouges casewhile researching another project. It struck his imagination because Carrouges’ accusations against le Gris escalated into violence. Not Red Wedding-ish violence that pulls audiences into mass media, but France’s sluggish late-medieval justice system. Carrouges, a minor aristocrat himself, believed his feudal liege ignored the crime for reasons of court politics, and appealed for a rare option: a “judicial duel.”

Jager reconstructs the events preceding this exceptional outcome—which would, though nobody knew this then, be the last trial by combat authorized by the French monarch. He also provides a guided tour through a distant nation that, if any ever has, deserves the name “foreign.” Though Jager name-checks places you could visit today, like Paris, Bordeaux, and England, the standards and traditions circumscribing everyday life differ wildly from ours.

Jean de Carrouges was an accomplished warrior, descended from accomplished warriors, amid the interminable slog of the Hundred Years’ War; he was knighted for distinguished combat services. But he proved a lousy courtier, ill-suited for house politics and prestation. Carrouges ascended quickly through the court of Count Pierre of Alençon, then fell equally quickly. His easily bruised honor required frequent satisfaction, and he burned bridges faster than he built them.

Jacques le Gris lacked Carrouges’ pedigree, but proved more adept at court politics. He and Carrouges began as allies, but as le Gris out-earned Count Pierre’s favor, Carrouges felt himself slighted. The two squires (before Carrouges’ knighthood) intermittently fought and reconciled. But by early 1386, Carrouges discovered his newly-minted knighthood meant nothing at court, and the courtiers found themselves irreconcilable. LeGris swore revenge on Carrouges’ household, and targeted his wife.

Eric Jager, Ph.D.

Reading this book, it’s impossible to miss how Carrouges’ world differs from ours. The government received its power from inheritances, not merit, and lesser courtiers received advancement based on personal connections, not competence or hard work. (Okay, maybe not so different from ours.) Because King Charles VI supposedly received his crown directly from God, “justice” meant whatever dribbled from the king’s lips, which immediately became holy writ.

Carrouges’ world turns on two liabilities: war and distance. Kings fight other kings, not to achieve any advantage, but because it’s what they do. Lesser nobles gain whatever limited fraction of power they possess by furthering that goal. Meanwhile, before motor vehicles and mass transportation, distances were truly huge. Twenty miles is an arduous overland slog which, depending on weather, requires a commitment of days; even light war requires months.

Therefore, Carrouges’ decision to appeal his lawsuit to Paris is no small obligation. But rape, it seems, was no small accusation, either. Despite the recent trend in “grimdark” medieval fantasy pitching rape as banal in feudal society, Jager notes that it remained a capital offense, at least among the nobility. Violating a titled lady’s virtue jeopardized the assurity of legitimate offspring, which threatened the entire system of male agnatic primogeniture.

Feudal hierarchies, in Jager’s telling, appear remarkably brittle. The state remains stable only while lords and vassals accept their place in the hierarchy and serve the aristocratic state. Therefore, whatever happened in Capomesnil in 1386 threatened the entire social order, since someone transgressed their roles. This is the archetypal “he-said, she-said” case, as nobody but le Gris and Lady Carrouges (and le Gris’ man) saw what actually happened.

When logical arguments fail, two trained warriors resolve their differences with weapons. But again, in defiance of paperback fiction, this is hardly an outburst of premodern savagery. A judicial duel required ceremony and strictures that make today’s courtrooms seem loosey-goosey. When we discuss modern courtrooms as “level playing fields,” we copy the rules of the dueling ground, tightly controlled to ensure nobody but God granted either combatant an advantage.

History records who, exactly, won this duel (though Jager plays coy). What matters more, in Jager’s telling, is reconstructing the world in which this event occurred, a world where invested noblemen believed their battles bespoke God’s favor, and might literally made right. A world where justice is both necessary, and costly. A world violently different from, yet also surprisingly much like, our own world.

The Power Politics of Fairyland

Sarah J. Sover, Faed to Black (Fractured Fae Book Two)

Gwendolyn Evenshine is settling uncomfortably into her role as the fairy kingdom’s first and only licensed private investigator. But a mysterious stranger appears in her office with the magical world’s equivalent of chloroform, and Gwen wakes up trapped inside a box. A little tense log-rolling reveals that Gwen’s been kidnapped by her own family. Because Gwen’s secretly no mere PI; she’s a runaway member of fairyland’s ancient aristocracy.

It’s hard to imagine a second series novel which departs more abruptly from the first. Sarah J. Sover’s first Fractured Fae novel followed the time-honored pattern set by Jim Butcher or Laurel K. Hamilton, a crime novel set against a background of creatures from myth and folktale. But just as protagonists Harry Dresden and Anita Blake have secret birthrights, so does Gwen Evenshine. Sover just skips the several-book buildup.

Exactly who kidnapped Gwen, the mystery that dominates the first few (very short) chapters, gets resolved quickly. The more important question becomes why. Gwen abandoned her aristocratic birthright years ago, and resents getting dragged back. Meanwhile her friend and business partner Chessa, having determined who nabbed Gwen, taps some old allies to mount a rescue mission. She apparently thinks it’ll be easy to spring a prisoner from Avalon.

Yes, that Avalon. Gwen and Chessa’s fairy lineage descends from the enigmatic kingdom that brought King Arthur and Morgan le Fay to power. The first novel occurred in the fairyland corresponding with Boston, and the Revolutionary heritage that city contains, but this second goes back even farther, to the English-speaking world’s pre-Christian heritage. Fae can survive for centuries of nothing kills them, so their grudges can last equally long, apparently.

Sarah J. Sover

Sover’s prior novel was a conventional PI story, like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler wrote. A protagonist with internal scars chases a deeply personal definition of justice, although “justice” doesn’t necessarily correspond with “law.” This novel swerves into Ian Fleming or John le Carré territory. It continues the notion that justice and right are ad hoc creations without conventional morality. But rather than crime, it focuses on politics and world affairs.

Or anyway, the first half does. Sover initially focuses on the enemies of free society, and the lies and backroom deals that society conducts to preserve freedom. How free are we, she asks, if our leaders must engage in skullduggery to conserve that freedom? Then, somewhere around the halfway mark, Sover swerves again. She abandons the pretense of James Bond-ish subterfuge, and pushes her characters into a full-on insurgency.

The parallels with current affairs are inescapable. In the war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of fairy, Sover presents the Unseelie as amoral, reveling in cruelty and sacrificing innocent civilians to their power schemes. Yet the Seelie, supposedly just and liberated, are obsessed with forms of order, unaware that the world has changed without them. The Unseelie are evil, but successful; the Seelie are benevolent, but aloof.

On some level, mass-market fiction is always about its audience. Sover shows how the twin idols of power or morality blind authorities to the common suffering outside their doors. Gwen and Chessa serve the Seelie Court, each in their own way, and therefore the forms of order, and they’re shocked by the Unseelie’s casual cruelty. Yet the streets of Avalon teem with fae whose lives are neither cruel nor orderly.

Gwen abandoned the Seelie Court, with their hoity-toity ways and cold politesse, years earlier. Her one regret was that her abandonment forced her to leave her brother, a bright-eyed and optimistic kid. The intervening years have seen Gwen become independent, but poor and plagued with second thoughts. When politics reunites her with her baby brother, she sees that Liam’s gone the opposite direction, becoming a creature of order and bureaucracy.

Any readers who fail to anticipate that Gwen’s reunion with Liam will ultimately result in disappointment, are probably new to paperback fantasy. The only question is what form that disappointment will take. As the stakes continue to increase, and Gwen must relearn the methods of power politics she once rejected, she finds herself willing to countenance many kinds of disappointment.

If anything, this second novel in Sover’s Fractured Fae novel is better than the first. In the prior volume, Sover experimented playfully with the conventions of the urban fantasy genre. Here, Sover throws the conventions into a blender and spreads them around ecstatically, more in love with her characters and story than her marketing niche. The result is fast-paced, breathtaking, and feels much, much shorter than it actually is.

Cat & Mouse, and 90s Movie Cheese

L.R. Jones, You Look Beautiful Tonight: a Thriller

Meek Nashville librarian Mia Anderson has the life she wants, with a decent job, comfy apartment, and narrow network of good friends. It isn’t glamorous, but it works. But her BFF, who really is glamorous, pushes Mia to join a dating app. Online, a charming civil engineer named Adam makes it his personal project to uplift Mia and unlock her hidden potential. Too bad Mia doesn’t want unlocked, because Adam is willing to kill.

L.R. Jones has purportedly written several bestselling “dark” novels, but I can’t find them; this is apparently her first under this byline. This novel feels like the big-screen thrillers Joe Eszterhas wrote in the 1980s and 1990s, with hard-bitten characters pushed into corners and forced to reveal their secrets. Jones is less libidinous than the notoriously salacious Eszterhas, but she recaptures his texture. This is both good and bad.

Someone starts tucking anonymous notes for Mia under her morning latte, and in other places that show her secret admirer is close. This gives her conflicting impulses. She knows she ought to feel “stranger danger,” but the unanticipated attention also makes her feel validated, assured that her actions matter to somebody. She starts adjusting her behavior to receive her secret admirer’s approval. Her admirer, unfortunately, misreads Mia’s intentions.

Here’s where experienced thriller readers start compiling a suspect list, and testing it against the growing weight of evidence. But Jones offers us a cornucopia of possible suspects. Mia’s two best friends have begun acting squirrely, for instance, each in their own way. Mia also has two bosses who each conform to different stereotypes of why you can’t trust management. An enigmatic stranger has begun watching Mia at work.

Then there’s Adam. Mia hasn’t actually met him yet, only interacted with him online through the dating app and social media. He begins the relationship with the pickup artist’s trick of negging her. Mia initially sees through that. But Adam responds with an eloquent spiel about how he, too, was once chronically overlooked in today’s fast-paced and deeply inauthentic society. He only wants to help her escape her self-imposed shackles.

L.R. Jones

If this seems like a confusing cast of thousands, I won’t argue. Introducing all the moving parts in Mia’s life takes forever, giving this book an extremely long first act. Only somewhere around the halfway mark does Jones quit clearing her throat and begin the thrilling part of this supposed thriller. Though in fairness, once Jones begins moving, she begins moving hard. Her villain, once introduced, plays Mia like a fiddle.

Jones provides Mia with a remarkable antagonist. The enemy claims to value Mia’s well-being, and targets villainy at whatever prevents Mia living to the fullest. But the enemy also gives conflicting cues. “I want you to assert control in your own life,” the villain tells Mia, while simultaneously literally picking Mia’s wardrobe and scripting Mia’s interactions with the various people controlling her life.

We readers with our suspect lists start getting confused. The antagonist is intimately aware of Mia’s daily activities, and provides running commentary, while remaining strangely invisible. How, we wonder, can somebody be seemingly as close as Mia’s elbow in her workplace, social activities, and home, while remaining wholly unnoticed? Don’t worry, Mia notices this too, and her trajectory moves from horror to determination to paranoia.

Remember the Joe Eszterhas comparison? I don’t make that lightly. Jones creates a multi-layered story of distrust so complete that, like Eszterhas’ most famous movies, the resolution is almost certainly disappointing. It relies on characters keeping secrets, but not the ones they’ve let us believe they’re keeping. And, I cringe to write this. It relies on conflating mental illness and trauma with moral weakness.

I’m trying not to reveal too much because, when Jones’ narrative works, it works well. Audiences who love character-driven thrillers will appreciate plenty herein. But in the final resolution (and extremely talky denouement), Jones reveals an Eszterhas-like belief that humans will inevitably repeat the mistakes of their past, unless compelled to change through violence. Jones hints at that in earlier chapters, but her resolution makes it explicit.

Again, the right audience will appreciate Jones’ story. It’s character-driven rather than shocking, and nearly all the violence occurs offscreen. The appeal isn’t violent horror, but the paranoia and self-doubt Mia experiences as she, like her audience, struggles to reconcile the conflicting evidence. But the culmination is so thoroughly unmoored from anything that came before, that I fear experienced readers will sit in disbelief and, like me, throw the book.

“Mean World Syndrome” In Modern Culture

Ralph Yarl

This week’s news hit so rapidly, it became incomprehensible. On Monday, America learned of Ralph Yarl, a Black Kansas City teen shot by a White man when he rang the wrong doorbell. (The shooting happened the prior Thursday, but details emerged on Monday.) Then Tuesday hit with Kaylin Gillis, murdered in upstate New York for turning into the wrong driveway, and Payton Washington, a cheerleader critically wounded near Austin for trying to get into the wrong car.

We’d barely grasped these assaults when Wednesday provided a one-two punch. First we learned about a mass shooting at an Alabama Sweet Sixteen party that left four youths between ages 17 and 23 dead, and thirty-two injured. Thirty-two! Before I’d even processed that, in Nebraska, where I live, the state legislature passed a controversial “constitutional carry” bill, a shitty Orwellian euphemism for basically allowing anyone, anywhere, to carry live firearms without a permit.

Basically, after three days of national news coverage driven by armed individuals—mostly older, mostly White, and entirely male—shooting strangers on lousy pretenses, the Nebraska legislature decided we needed even more of that. Okay, sure, the Nebraska Unicameral didn’t actually say they wanted more shootings. But what other outcome did they expect from authorizing more unrestricted carrying? They know at least the potential definitely exists.

Exactly what motivated the Alabama shooters remains murky as I write. They’ve been arrested, but more details aren’t currently forthcoming. But Andrew Lester, the 85-year-old White man who shot Ralph Yarl, explicitly said he was “scared to death” by a Black youth’s presence at his door. And Kevin Monahan, the 65-year-old man who murdered Kaylin Gillis, was apparently famously incensed at “trespassers,” like an unnamed character from Deliverance.

Both Lester and Monahan perceived themselves under threat within their own houses, and apparently kept weapons ready. Lester’s own description of the incident features him answering the door already carrying a gun, which indicates that he perceived the mere presence of unannounced company as a mortal threat. And Pedro Tello Rodriguez, Jr., who shot Payton Washington while she was running away, apparently had a gun in his car.

Kaylin Gillis

Normal, healthy people don’t answer the door carrying heat unless they expect to need it. And they don’t expect to need a firearm unless they already perceive themselves as under threat. These people apparently see their worlds as so chockablock full of menaces that their only response is to kill the other guy before the other guy kills you. Private firearms are the chosen weapons in a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes.

Worse, this isn’t new. Sociologist Barry Glassner wrote over twenty years ago that older Americans, flooded with constant images of crime, violence, and terror, come to believe the world is more violent than it actually is. Glassner cites media researcher George Gerbner, who described the “mean world syndrome,” wherein people who stay indoors and watch copious television believe that murder, violence, and crime are more prevalent than the evidence indicates.

Wednesday’s blanket legalization of permitless carry in Nebraska isn’t coincidental. Former state legislator Suzanne Geist, currently running for mayor of Lincoln, has anchored her campaign to claims that crime has become more common under the incumbent Democratic mayor, a claim that’s just not true. A candidate is willfully creating the “mean world syndrome” among Lincoln voters, while her legislative colleagues authorize more unlabelled guns.

American violent crime statistics have trended downward for over thirty years, notwithstanding the occasional limited uptick. We’re currently more threatened by wage theft than auto theft, and our life savings are more jeopardized by banks than by bank robbers. But prime-time television, a medium mainly supported by older audiences, continues churning out crime dramas, while the 24-hour news cycle lives and dies by dramatic crime narratives.

Payton Washington

Therefore, older Americans are likely to believe they’re in significantly more danger during routine interactions than they really are. The presence of a Black youth—the coded enemy in many crime dramas—is enough to make older people feel threatened, and react accordingly. Thus we witness the underlying flaw of the Castle Doctrine: just because you feel threatened doesn’t mean you are threatened.

I realize “the plural of ‘anecdote’ isn’t ‘data.’” These four shootings aren’t necessarily representative. But in some ways that doesn’t matter: Andrew Lester perceived himself as threatened by a Black youth existing, and Americans perceive ourselves as surrounded by guns, just waiting to see who draws first. In that environment, paranoia is the smart decision, even if that environment only exists in your head. Or in campaign ads.

Law & Justice in the Other New York

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 49
Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, Brother’s Keeper

Sometime in the small hours of June 7th, 1990, poor dirt farmer William Ward died in his bed. He was 64 years old and had been in failing health for some time. Police initially accepted this as just something that happens. But a hotshot medical examiner soon found slight irregularities in William’s remains and proclaimed foul play. Police quickly arrested William’s youngest surviving brother, Delbert, charging him with “mercy killing.”

Documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky built their career around following people that the media world gawks at without bothering to understand. They created a trilogy of documentaries surrounding the West Memphis Three, the poster children for the 1980s Satanic Panic. They also worked extensively with the rock band Metallica. After Sinofsky’s passing, Berlinger directed Netflix’s highly controversial Jeffrey Dahmer biopic, continuing his love of spectacle.

Berlinger and Sinofsky were attracted to William Ward’s murder, and Delbert’s trial, not because of events themselves, but because of the media circus surrounding them. The four Ward brothers farmed their ancestral patch outside Munnsville, a central New York village that (to judge by this film) has few residents younger than forty. The Wards themselves had lived their entire lives on the farm, with electricity but no running water.

Our filmmakers struggle to let the Ward brothers tell their own stories. Problem is, the Ward brothers aren’t very helpful. While Berlinger and Sinofsky’s interview subjects mostly interact well with the camera and explain themselves in measured tones, Delbert Ward and his brothers, Lyman and Roscoe, are visibly uncomfortable. The documentarians have to leave their questions in the edit, because the Ward brothers consistently give uncomfortable one-word answers.

Much media speculation around the Ward murder, as recounted in this documentary, centers on the Wards’ simple lifestyles. Slick-suited downstate journalists loved to interview the brothers, and their neighbors, keeping them centered on camera so the world could hear their regional accents and see their paucity of teeth. None of the brothers ever married; though they seem amiable with Munnsville women, there’s little evidence any has ever had a relationship.

By contrast, Berlinger and Sinofsky aim their cameras at the journalists and their polished crews. While urbane news crews in fashionable late-eighties businesswear get multiple takes to perfect their location shoots, they let Delbert Ward ramble incoherently, and broadcast the first take. Berlinger and Sinofsky show the contrast between supercilious journalists, and the way Munnsville’s people close ranks to protect Delbert Ward, whom they consider a neighbor.

Delbert Ward (right) and his attorney, as they hear the verdict

Unfortunately, Munnsville’s attitude toward the Wards proves as patronizing as the city slickers. Several Munnsville residents give on-camera interviews, but fumble through their cliched, condescending narratives of “neighbors” they clearly don’t know well. Several Munnsville residents spin fictional justifications of why Delbert couldn’t possibly be guilty, or why he is, but it’s secretly okay. Many describe the Ward brothers as simple-minded, rusticating, and possibly mentally disabled.

That last characterization proves prescient when Delbert’s defense attorney deploys it in his opening argument. Ralph Cognetti literally claims Delbert couldn’t have murdered William because he’s too simple-minded—the same argument the nameless defense attorney uses in Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying. Delbert’s attorney, his neighbors, and distant supporters defend him using the same accusation the state uses: these are just hill people, with all the stereotypes.

New York state police based their entire argument on two facts: William’s body had petechial hemorrhaging, and Delbert signed a confession. (They also claim they found semen on William’s corpse, a lurid detail presumably used to bait the media, since it’s never pursued further.) The problem with Delbert’s signed confession is, by his own admission, Delbert can barely read. His entire understanding of justice comes from watching Matlock.

Berlinger and Sinofsky follow the Ward brothers and their Munnsville neighbors through the months preceding the trial, and the trial itself. Their depiction of a murder trial is chilling. Stripped of Dick Wolf’s beloved melodrama, the process appears degrading and spiteful. Lyman Ward handles cross-examination so poorly, I briefly thought he’d died on the stand. It’s enough to make one wonder whether trials are about justice at all.

It spoils nothing to admit: Delbert is acquitted, but not exonerated. This movie isn’t about the outcome anyway. It’s about the conflict between outsiders and the community, the way downstate police and prosecutors (and their media allies) hunted for a murderer before proving a murder actually happened, while the working-class community closed ranks to defend their own. The product is chilling, an indictment of the justice system itself.

Southern Comfort and Down-Home Injustice

Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South

If your loved one was murdered in Mississippi sometime between 1980 and 2010, chances are their postmortem was conducted by Dr. Steven Hayne. That alone should give you cause for concern. But if Dr. Hayne spotted any unusual marks during the autopsy, he would’ve called in Dr. Michael West, the state’s foremost bite-mark expert. Between Hayne and West, there’s an appalling likelihood that the wrong suspect got railroaded.

Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington have strong professional investments in Hayne and West, from their different perspectives. Balko, a journalist with ties to the libertarian Cato Institute and Reason magazine, has written extensively about an American law enforcement apparatus that’s long since parted company with justice. Carrington, an Ole Miss law professor, moonlights as head of Mississippi’s Innocence Project, and has faced down Hayne and West in many a contentious courtroom.

This story begins with two gruesome murders, a sure hook for today’s audience of true-crime podcast listeners. Two very young girls were sexually assaulted and murdered in rural Noxubee Country, Mississippi. Despite the murders’ similarities, investigators rushed to identify men inside the victims’ homes. Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, who apparently didn’t know one another, were quickly singled out, and police, aided by Hayne, began assembling evidence.

Even though both girls’ bodies were submerged in water for hours or days, Hayne found suspicious marks on them, and called in West for bite-mark analysis. Here’s where things become significant: neither Hayne nor West identified new suspects, or excluded existing ones. Both “experts” found evidence inculpating the men police already wanted. Both Brooks and Brewer were convicted, Brewer sentenced to die, with no physical evidence except those bite marks.

Our authors aren’t satisfied with naming and shaming two “expert” witnesses who, by the time this book debuted, were already considered discredited. Their target is larger: they expose a political system that made this injustice possible. That means not only identifying the people who railroaded two innocent men, and almost certainly did likewise to others. They must also unpack how we got here, and where the problem still exists.

Most Americans probably don’t know the difference between a coroner and a medical examiner. The words are used interchangeably in the media where most Americans learn about law enforcement: TV crime dramas and detective novels. But they’re very different positions, with very different responsibilities. Start with the fact that coroners are elected, and therefore beholden to voter sentiment, not necessarily the facts. That should scare you.

Radley Balko (left) and Tucker Carrington

County coroners regularly hired Dr. Hayne, a private pathologist, to perform autopsies, especially in rural counties with limited forensic resources. At his peak, Hayne performed eighty percent of Mississippi’s autopsies, at a breakneck pace of six per day—while maintaining two full-time hospital jobs and giving testimony. Not surprisingly, obvious errors crept into many postmortem reports. Yet Hayne, often with West, remained indispensable to prosecutors for decades.

Exactly why Hayne and West remained popular isn’t difficult: they delivered convictions. Amiable and charismatic on the witness stand, the men charmed juries while baffling them with barrages of medical jargon. Faced with defendants who mostly couldn’t afford competitive attorneys, their bullshit went substantially unchallenged. Hayne and West gave lip service to justice and evidence, but built their careers carrying the prosecution’s water, and got paid well for it.

Balko and Carrington describe a death investigation system driven by convictions, not justice. Most coroners, prosecutors, and (in Mississippi) judges are elected, not appointed. Therefore being perceived as “soft on crime” can kill otherwise promising careers. Prosecutors choose expert witnesses based on their ability to deliver convictions, not their dedication to truth. And if those convicted are disproportionately Black, well whoopsie-daisy, I guess.

Worse, these problems aren’t limited to Mississippi. The lingering legacy of tough-on-crime politics has provided defendants with limited recourse at the federal level. Even when persuasive evidence exists that exculpates those found guilty, judges often feign helplessness. This means the innocent remain imprisoned, but equally awful, the guilty go unindicted, and often, as in Brooks and Brewer’s case, are free to kill again, because the justice system just stops looking.

These authors tell a gripping story of two innocent men, two charismatic experts, and the fatal dance tying them together. But it also describes a justice system that, in many ways, has advanced little. Expert witnesses serve the same role in modern trials that theologians served in colonial witch trials. The outcomes are heartbreakingly similar for those who believe that justice exists, and we have a duty to find it.

“A Kinder, Gentler War on the Poor”

1001 Books to Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 111
Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing

Since the middle 1960s, America’s catchall solution for gangs, widespread homelessness, sex work, and drugs has been more police. But has this solution accomplished anything? It’s certainly created entire classes of people guaranteed to spend part of their lives in jail. But sending police into poor communities for mass drug sweeps, roundups of street hookers, and to rough up street hoodlums has arguably not made Americans any safer.

If you’re like me, you never heard of sociologist Alex S. Vitale until Senator Ted Cruz waved his most influential book around on the Senate floor. Professor Vitale’s principles have been widely known in activist circles for years, and motivated the Black Lives Matter movement. His precepts, however, require a level of nuance not easily distilled onto cardboard protest placards or 240-character tweets. Thus, his words have been widely misconstrued.

Periodically, America convulses with anger because police officers somewhere did something awful, usually to someone poor or Black. These outbreaks lead to incremental reforms, like mandatory body cameras or inherent bias training, and the energy for protest dissipates. Yet these reforms seldom result in better outcomes for the poor, marginalized communities where police presence is most prevalent. The problem recurs, but America’s motivation for reform has been diminished.

The problem, Vitale says, stems from a fundamental conflict between these reforms, and the police’s underlying mission. Our society trains and authorizes police to enforce order, not justice. The police fundamentally serve the economic system, not the citizens, and will protect the former at the expense of the latter. Humanizing the police won’t fix that; as Vitale writes, “A kinder, gentler, more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.”

Vitale breaks this claim down into its most important components, and justifies his claims with evidence. Intensive police actions haven’t diminished America’s problems with drugs, homelessness, or sex work, because these problems aren’t motivated by mere criminality. They’re driven by economic factors, and will persist until economic destitution is eliminated. Police drive homeless people and hookers out of sight, but the need for money and shelter remains.

Alex S. Vitale

Worse, a willingness to delegate responsibility for economic inequality onto police and prisons, empowers organized crime. Not only have intense police crackdowns failed to eliminate gang activity, they’ve taught many poor Americans that only gangs provide them protection from intrusive police. The problem becomes circular: poor Americans need gang protection from police, while middle-class Americans need (or anyway want) police protection from gangs.

Every dollar spent on police crackdowns, Vitale writes, takes money away from social workers, mental health professionals, and other skilled workers charged with providing ways out. Yet that’s consistently America’s response to social unrest. From union organizers in the Gilded Age, to BLM protesters today, both major parties answer every demand for change by plowing more money into police and prisons. Funny enough, nothing ever gets much better.

America’s unwillingness to subsidize even rudimentary alternatives has costs for our poor. For many, the only reliable way to achieve mental health treatment, diversion from gangs or prostitution, or inpatient drug rehabilitation, is to first get arrested. O. Henry wrote, over a century ago, that hobos and other homeless could only find reliable winter shelter in prison. Arrestees, sadly, have lifelong criminal records that impede their job and housing prospects.

Professor Vitale addresses America’s most high-profile problems individually, though he acknowledges they’re often deeply entwined. He demonstrates how the popular rhetoric surrounding “crimes” like drug abuse and prostitution are driven by moralistic outrage, not measures of harm. Treating people who need pain control, or are willing to trade sex for money, as criminals, doesn’t fix the underlying problems; it just makes the problems less visible.

Every chapter ends with two sections: “Reforms” and “Alternatives.” In the Reforms section, Vitale breaks down what attempts America’s politicians have made to hold police more accountable. He credits those reforms where they’ve worked, but they haven’t always worked, certainly not reliably. The Alternatives section proposes ways governments have reallocated police responsibilities onto civilian groups, or could. Because fundamentally, this isn’t about fixing police, it’s about fixing culture.

Moving away from police-centered approaches to handling disorder will mean leaving the map, Vitale acknowledges. That’s scary even under ideal circumstances. But the existing map has proven unreliable, and has served to deepen rather than redress the inequalities that drive people to crime. Broken-windows policing has made life quieter, but not necessarily safer. It’s time to abandon America’s addiction to order, and try techniques that serve to broaden justice.

As One Under the Law

P.J. O’Rourke

I first read P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious political screed Parliament of Whores in 1991, aged seventeen, and frequently didn't grasp what I was reading. Oh, I got O’Rourke’s unsubtle jabs at George H.W. Bush’s frequent ineloquence, his dismissive attitude toward bureaucracy, his open derision at how elected officials often mistake parliamentary log-rolling for work. But repeatedly, O’Rourke uses subtext I completely missed, often lacked the vocabulary to understand until years later.

O’Rourke’s chapter on American drug policy, for instance, features him joining a Washington, DC, police patrol on a narcotics sweep. The operation nets a camera-friendly arrest, O’Rourke writes, but the suspect was strictly nickel-and-dime. The arrest did nothing about the underlying condition. Frustrated, O’Rourke, an economic libertarian, questions a police officer whether cracking down on drugs has accomplished anything worthwhile. Would legalization maybe make better economic and strategic sense?

The policeman pointed to the crowd on the other side of the windshield [on a chilly DC midnight]. “We’re talking scum here,” he said. “Air should be illegal if they breathe it.” (115)

As a good Republican teenager and certified graduate of Nancy Reagan’s many in-school Just Say No campaigns, I completely misread that exchange. I assumed the officer meant that drug users, having dirtied themselves, subsequently dirtied everything they touched, and they needed removed from society before their pollution became widespread and intractable. On a conscious level, maybe that policeman even believed that, maybe. Humans can convince ourselves of anything.

But O’Rourke, an ex-hippie and antiwar activist before finding Jesus and the Republican Party in adulthood, probably meant something different. Given the time and place, “the crowd” milling aimlessly “on the other side of the windshield” was probably mainly or completely Black. O’Rourke, fearful of needlessly racializing things, probably took the “colorblind” approach beloved of White people everywhere, and omitted any mention of complexion, assuming his world-wise readers would know.

Michelle Alexander

The drugs O’Rourke’s ride-along buddies busted were mainly crack. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander has written, the crack “epidemic” and the Reagan Administration’s draconian response hit America just as the last dregs of manufacturing—one of the few employment fields available to Black men without diplomas—was leaving American cities. Many African Americans faced the social uncertainty of leaving home to pursue work, or the economic uncertainty of staying put.

Many Black Americans turned to crack, not because of any underlying moral failure (Nancy Reagan’s rhetoric notwithstanding), but because there was nothing else. But the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 disproportionately targeted crack over powdered cocaine, despite crack being cheaper and less concentrated. As O’Rourke mentions elsewhere in his book, President Bush the Elder used his Oval Office pulpit to inveigh against crack’s evils in terms that were unambiguously racial.

When that unidentified policeman said “Air should be illegal if they breathe it,” he didn’t mean damaged people damaged the air. He meant The Other is inherently criminal, so anything The Other did should be automatically criminalized. I didn’t understand this until well into my thirties, and feel ashamed admitting that, but American justice presupposes that some people are inherently criminal, and passes laws to make this status enforceable.

Not only drugs, though. As Matt Taibbi writes, entire categories of law exist that White people mostly never know about. Anti-loitering laws, invented in New England to prevent Native Americans from lingering in White settlements, now get deployed mostly against Black and Brown Americans (and the occasional White trash), often on demonstrably specious grounds. Black Americans are way more likely to face rinky-dink traffic stops than honkies like me.

Matt Taibbi

Like millions of suburban White kids, I grew up never understanding these facts. I assumed, because that’s what 11th-grade American Civics taught me, that legislatures identified problems, like disorder and violence, and passed laws consummately. I was well into adulthood before I realized our laws create our definitions of crime and disorder. And our definitions inevitably serve to calcify our lopsided and frequently racist definitions of good and bad people.

O’Rourke, a libertarian Republican, tried to warn me thirty years ago. But because he used polite, White-friendly language, I missed the significance. And because I, individually, didn’t see the injustice being perpetrated, I made elaborate excuses why it didn’t exist, or anyway wasn’t important enough to care about. Only with the weight of years did I understand the unspoken suppositions underlying American justice. In the meantime, I became complicit.

That’s why, no matter how “not racist” anybody is, our opinions don’t matter. Because the law definitely is racist, and we’re under it.

David Tennant in: Cash-and-Carry Justice!

Dean Devlin (director), Bad Samaritan

Feckless young stoner Sean Falco (Robert Sheehan) parks cars outside an upscale Portland, Oregon, restaurant. But that’s a side gig: once customers trust them with their keys, he burglarizes their homes while they’re dining. He’s gotten good, too, at selecting subtle loot that nobody misses. Until the day slick, upscale Cale Erendreich (David Tennant) gives Sean his keys, and Sean discovers a battered girl chained in Cale’s home office.

Only Dean Devlin’s second directorial outing, Bad Samaritan opened to lukewarm reviews and dismal receipts. Those who saw it, gave it somewhat warm, but not overwhelming, reviews; but not many people saw it. This isn’t entirely unfair, given its straight-to-DVD characteristics: much action is squarely centered and unsubtle, like the director expected audiences to watch with one eye, while cooking dinner. This isn’t cinema as high literature.

But within that limit, it nevertheless makes an interesting commentary on American justice and unequal economics. Cale Erendreich has everything Americans have learned to expect from prosperity, including a glamorous house, numerous girlfriends, and virtual impunity. He also tortures and kills women. Sean Falco is poor, strung-out, and a petty criminal, but as the only witness to Cale’s depravity, he’s desperate to be perceived as honest.

Sean attempts to report Cale’s crimes to Portland PD, twice. And twice, the fuzz disbelieves him. One detective even sits at Cale’s kitchen island, drinking coffee and chatting amiably, while Cale lies like a rug. Worse, returning to the station, the detective threatens Sean, based on his prior history for broken-windows offenses. Apparently, Sean’s vandalism arrests and other petty convictions rank worse than Cale’s disdain for humanity.

Women everywhere can probably sympathize.

Once Cale recognizes Sean’s intrusion into his carefully controlled world, he organizes ways to control and dominate Sean. He gets Sean’s parents fired from their honest, blue-collar jobs, demolishes Sean’s relationship with his out-of-his-league girlfriend, and destroys Sean’s half-restored vintage car. Piece by piece, he dismantles Sean’s life, leaving him alone and defenseless against a city that doesn’t care.

Here’s where this movie earns some of its harsh criticism. Cale’s deconstruction of Sean’s life follows, almost note-for-note, the pattern described in Blake Snyder’s screenwriting guide, Save the Cat!. Though Sheehan, Tennant, and a sterling supporting cast of inordinately good-looking performers give their all, and Tennant maintains a remarkably good American accent, we quickly realize, the story is beholden to a beat sheet. The characters are simply carried along.

David Tennant sadistically enjoys toying with his prey in Bad Samaritan

However, in parallel to this beat-sheet story format, one character stands out. Character actor Tracey Heggins, as a young FBI agent eager to break her first case, chooses to ignore her superior officers’ advice and take Sean’s accusations seriously. She admits his story doesn’t sound altogether plausible, but it at least remains consistent, which sets him above the run-of-the-mill crank. She doesn’t necessarily believe Sean, but takes him seriously.

Desperate to protect his loved ones, Sean pursues Cale using any tools available. He believes the entire law-enforcement establishment opposes him, and knows both the law, and criminals far more skillful than him, will demolish him should he falter. That doesn’t matter; he only knows there’s a helpless girl, a family who doesn’t understand, and somebody who takes pleasure in others’ suffering. He only wants to put things right.

Cale openly boasts that his money makes him immune to consequences. Throughout most of this movie, that’s true. I cannot help comparing this movie to another socially motivated horror thriller, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, in that it foregrounds a White villain whose wealth distorts the value of justice. Where Peele makes his story about race, Devlin makes his about wealth. The difference probably doesn’t matter much to the desperate protagonists.

Audiences can probably perceive this movie one of two ways. The cat-and-mouse suspense narrative definitely leaves something to be desired. As stated, it follows the beat sheet included in a mass-market screenwriting guide. Tennant, as Cale, comes across as a poor man’s Hannibal Lecter. Sean is no Clarice. It’s not boring, but it does play by the numbers, reaching through standard confrontations, toward a conclusion we feel is probably inevitable.

Simultaneously, the movie makes clear comments on whom the law actually serves. At multiple points, it reminds us how police obey when rich people call, yet reflexively consider the poor untrustworthy. We watch Sean desperately telling the truth, while the “justice system” sweeps real, substantive crimes under the rug. As a thriller, this movie is okay, but not groundbreaking. As social commentary, it has something to say about cash-and-carry justice.

Do School Resource Officers Do Any Good?

On April 9th, 2019, a St. Lucie County, Florida, sheriff’s deputy rushed a sixth grader outside his school, lifted him overhead, and body-slammed him to the pavement. Another student, safe inside a school bus, captured the incident on his smartphone. It took five days for the story to reach me, a white guy in the hinterlands. And now I find myself wondering what we have public schools for.

Sheriff Kan Mascara of Ft Pierce, FL says the school resource deputy, who lifted an 11 yr old Black student in the air and body-slammed him on a sidewalk, did not use excessive force.

Of course they are referencing alleged former behavior to justify obvious police brutality. pic.twitter.com/8FtdiZLcxN

— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) April 12, 2019

News reports of the incident describe a child behaving in an oppositional-defiant manner, disregarding instructions and disrupting classroom activities. They don’t, however, describe a child engaging in violence. Quotes from the incident report describe the youth as “agitated,” as “punching his fist into the palm of his hand.” But they also describe him, as the video shows, as trying to walk or run away. Nothing describes him as a threat.

Therefore, I question the response: not just the school resource officer’s actions, but the school resource officer’s presence. Enough stories like this have emerged in recent years, about adult police officers using extreme physical force on children, mostly children of color, to make me question whether keeping police in schools does any good. These individual anecdotes aren’t data, certainly, but when enough accumulate, a pattern emerges, and that becomes evidence.

Sociologists have spilled copious ink about how most people, including Black people, perceive young Black men as older than White kids the same age. More recent research has determined this is also true about young Black women. From an earlier age, Black youths are perceived as more mature, more sexual, stronger, and more culpable for their actions, than White youths.

To this deputy, this also apparently means an 11-year-old’s body is more capable of withstanding a body slam.

Do I even need to say the follow-up? But they’re not. Not only will body-slamming a child, regardless of race, cause potential lifelong injuries and pain, it also has maladaptive effects on brain development. This youth, this child, will more likely fear interactions with authority figures, and will therefore behave in more oppositional-defiant ways, making future violent confrontations more likely. He’s also now at greater lifetime risk for addiction.

As a once-and-future academic myself, I have many schoolteachers among my friends. They describe incidents like the one which got this student suspended happening increasingly often: as more parents work longer hours, children start having their adolescent rebellious phase earlier and earlier. This child engaged in the most rudimentary form of in-school resistance: refusing to sit still or follow instructions. It sounds downright boring.

Once the Dean got the school resource officer involved, though, it changed the entire tenor of the event. It went from being a case of routine, if unusually early, adolescent insubordination, to a confrontation between the law and a suspected criminal. Any involvement from school resource officers turns any prosaic administrative action into a potential criminal case. That’s exactly what happened here: a trained cop treated a stroppy kid like a hardened violent felon.

The now-notorious image of a school resource officer flinging a teenaged girl
for failing to get off her cell phone, in 2015

Americans accepted the everyday assigning of police officers inside schools because we wanted to protect kids against outsiders entering and committing crimes. They’re notoriously pretty poor at doing this, though. To cite only one noteworthy example, the armed, uniformed school resource officer failed to enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while an active shooter was inside. The officer’s inaction probably contributed needlessly to the body count.

Rather than preventing outsiders from committing crimes inside schools, the primary stories we hear emerging regarding school resource officers involve them treating students (and, less often, teachers) as suspects. This gets especially compounded when working with children, who haven’t learned to internalize social norms yet. Incidents which teachers would, or should, see as opportunities for instruction, police will see as crimes that need stopped.

I’m glad my high school didn’t have a resource officer. My peers and I sometimes engaged in behavior that was technically illegal. However, we didn’t need busted; we needed patient adults to explain right, appropriate, socially standardized behavior. When you treat children like children, they have opportunities to correct their actions. When you treat them like criminals, you harden them against the future.

If you send trained police into any situation, they will look for crimes. Just like if you sent carpenters into schools, they will find repairs that need done, police will find laws that need enforced, because they’re trained to see that. Presumably that’s what happened in Florida last week. But children aren’t criminals, they’re children. At least, they are until they have a record.

Edit: after publishing this essay, a classmate contacted me and informed me our high school actually had a resource officer. In those pre-Columbine days, he mostly conducted drug enforcement, and little of that; being a resource officer back then wasn't exactly a hardship assignment. The fact that I was free to not know about this makes me feel about the Whitest I've ever been.

Paying the Monster For His Monstrosity

Jon Finch (left) and Francesca Annis in Roman Polanski's Macbeth

Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is among my favorite movies. I owned it on VHS, and now I own the DVD. The way Polanski preserves Shakespeare’s poetic language while abolishing academic theatre’s false decorum makes it a classic, and his seamless integration of bloody tableaux reminiscent of the Manson Murders that took his wife, Sharon Tate, make it intensely personal. I’ve shown it to friends with the same pride as Casablanca and Butch Cassidy.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, I could overlook Polanski’s history as a confessed, convicted child rapist, basically because everyone else did. Polanski continued winning Oscars even after admitting kiddie diddling in court, because his movies remain among the best cinema ever made. But our standards shifted in the 2010s. Critics and film scholars have become less willing to separate art from artist. Older audiences, like me, become, to an extent, accessories after the fact.

I recalled this while reading Caitlin Flanagan’s The Art of a Monster, examining whether audiences can still enjoy Michael Jackson’s music, knowing he was a sexual predator. Flanagan says yes. Even with the increased scrutiny following HBO’s Leaving Neverland documentary, Flanagan writes: “Art isn’t something mere; it doesn’t exist as the moral bona fides of the person who made it. That person is a supernumerary.” To Flanagan, art, including Jackson’s, provides its own moral justification.

Yet I cannot overcome nuance, for one reason: as long as Jackson’s work remains under copyright, his estate continues drawing royalties from its distribution. When he was still alive, this payment subsidized his bizarre kid-centric love nest; now, it probably goes toward the out-of-court settlements he doled out like autographs. Which means, if I download his albums, I’m probably paying the longstanding cost of his known predilections. Doesn’t that make me part of the problem?

Nor, anecdotes suggest, are Polanski and Jackson alone in this. Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, and David Bowie all had known taste in underage women. Bill Cosby and R. Kelly have been charged and/or convicted of rape; Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, and Ben and Casey Affleck remain uncharged but publicly accused. Until recently, the “casting couch horror story” was one of Hollywood’s acknowledged career speed bumps. We simply used to take that shit for granted.

Left to right: Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, and David Bowie

I dare not create an itemized list of these legitimated accusations; not only is it too long, it’s morally degrading. It’s natural for America’s culture industry to take stock as we approach the ten-year anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death this summer. Yet the longer the self-scrutiny continues, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion: creative men (and I do mean men) are damaged people who, as damaged people do, inflict their damage on others.

And, as long as their work remains under copyright, any transaction on some level subsidizes their damage. It’s too late to avoid giving Roman Polanski money; I already bought my DVD, and he already received his royalty (which, for my purchase, probably totalled about a dime). But what if I want to watch The Pianist? Chinatown? Rosemary’s Baby? Caitlin Flanagan can reassure herself that Michael Jackson is dead, and therefore not profiting. Polanski soldiers on.

That doesn’t even account for artists who, themselves, did nothing wrong, yet became collateral damage. As I wrote nearly a year ago, Harvey Weinstein’s public implosion took several striving young artists with him; I singled out actress Paige McKenzie simply because I know her work. (McKenzie later tweeted me that her experience was “more of development hell, less #metoo, Thankfully.” That’s reassuring, but still means she had dreams within her grasp, then ripped away again.)

Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, David Bowie, and Roman Polanski created art that changed the world, arguably making life somewhat better for their having been in it. Caitlin Flanagan assumes art justifies itself, separate from the artist. After some initial resistance, I must concede she’s right. These awful human beings created transcendent art distinct from themselves. But even if the art doesn’t justify the artist, it does subsidize the artist, which carries its own moral weight.

For economic reasons, I cannot reconcile great art with the flawed people who create it. Or, more accurately, with the people who perpetrate their flaws upon others. The issue, fundamentally, isn’t moral, it’s economic: every dime given to Polanski is another dime keeping him unaccountable for his crimes. Because art, ultimately, is also a commodity, and our appreciation is their paycheck. We can enjoy a monster’s art, but can we, rightly, subsidize a monster’s monstrosity?