B and I went to Moneyball last night, which was the best movie I’ve seen at the theaters in a while. School has been especially frustrating this week, and I really needed some Puerto Rican food, a good movie and to win two free games at Rollarcoaster Tycoon pinball in the theater arcade.

Moneyball isn’t a typical sports movie. But I appreciated that it refrained from oversimplifying the story about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. It was a very subtle screenplay. It’s so rare for dialogue in movies to ever sound really genuine, and here it did. But more than that, I think the real triumph is that here is an entertaining Brad Pitt movie about baseball stats— no love interest, no climatic home run moment. Just a GM who never takes his team to the World Series.

p.s. The cherry on top? Snagged some chartreuse Anthro latte bowls for 75% off.

“My teenage angst bullshit has a body count”:
How Heathers Redefines High School as a Gothic Space

Perhaps there’s something about the closing of a century that makes people unusually inclined to contemplate their inner demons. Gothic culture saw its first major popularity boom towards the end of the 1700s, but also major revivals at the close of each proceeding century (even Chanel sent grungy, spiderwebby looks down the its runway in the 1990s, suggesting that even the most stubbornly dignified of fashion houses was confronting its own existential qualms). The Gothic space of the late 20^th century didn’t necessarily reflect the horrors conjured two centuries prior, but the essential characteristic of Gothic was present: a contemplation of society’s deepest fears, creatively buffered by the supernatural and extreme. If the Gothic genre exists as a fictional arena to test our own inner demons, it hardly seem surprising that over three centuries the imagery has evolved to suit social context. Werewolves can be seen as the literary, emotional response to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution; Matthew Lewis’s The Monk addresses contemporary fears about church corruption. Among the major social upheavals that shaped society at the close of the 20^th century is the rise of teenage of culture, itself a response to the prosperity and baby boom that followed World War II. Suddenly, the interim stage between childhood and adulthood was extended enough to warrant its own name, identity and, more definitively, its own marketing angle. Today, pop culture targeted at the teenagers, and their disposable cash flow, is ubiquitous; everything, from movies like Grease and Clueless to Katy Perry’s saccharine single “Teenage Dream,” seems detirmined to gild the teenage years. So it is hardly surprising that adolescence, and its ocean of angst, would crop up as part of the Gothic psyche. Perhaps the most incisive film to explore the darker side of adolescence is Michael Lehmann’s Heathers, a 1989 black comedy about teenager Veronica (Winona Ryder), who is convinced to stage the suicides of her popular “frenemies,” by a tall, dark and black-leather clad stranger named J.D. (Christian Slater).  The film is named for the trio of girls named Heather who, along with Veronica, rule the school through intimidation, sex appeal and emotional sadism.  Heathers is Gothic’s response to the rise of adolescent identity; it skewers John Hughes-style, rosy visions of high school and plays on society’s collective fears of and about teenagers.

It was Tim Burton, perhaps the most notable Gothic pop culture figure of the late 20^th century, who introduced Gothic motifs to the U.S. suburbs, with the macabre fairy tale Beetlejuice (1988) and kicking off a series of end-of-the-decade, Gothic teen comedies. Both Joe Schumacher’s Lost Boys (1987), which depicts vampires as a fringe gang of teenagers, and Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990), a hybrid of Bildungsroman and ghost story, are Gothic parables that turn fantasy creatures into symbols of social otherness.  This association between youth counterculture and Gothic imagery is even more pronounced in Heathers, which exaggerates already-despised high school archetypes. Thus, it compels viewers to reject conventional characters and to empathize with its unorthodox heroine and the alternative to the high school status quo that she represents; in fact, it is Veronica’s dissatisfaction with the status quo that is at the root of all the film’s violence. After a confrontation with queen bee Heather Chandler at a party, Veronica retreats to her diary, writing, “Tomorrow I’ll be kissing her aerobicized ass, but tonight, let me dream of a world without Heather, a world where I am free.” Outwardly, she is a social insider, but internally, she is an outsider who has learned to manipulate high school politics to her own benefit, since her popularity equates to social power and, therefore, social safety. Hours after writing the journal entry, she commits her first, albeit accidental, murder, killing Heather Chandler by serving her a cup of liquid drainer; J.D. hijacks her original intention to “see Heather Chandler puke her guts out.”  But the attempt to humiliate Heather, and the resulting murder, derives from Veronica’s belief that stopping the high school’s queen bee also means endings its oppressive social mores.

Spurred by success of Heather Chandler’s murder, Veronica and J.D. plot revenge on a pair of archetypal jocks who have been spreading sexual rumors that destroy Veronica’s reputation and social standing.  Again, J.D. diverts Veronica’s humiliation plot and shoots the line backer and quarter back in the woods behind the school. The incident is presented so hyperbolically, even humorously, that one might easily forget the subject matter is disturbingly fresh. The first documented incident of student-on-student shooting violence in the United States took place in August of 1966, when a student at the University of Texas at Austin killed 16 and wounded 32 others, shooting the 29^th floor observation deck of a university building. It would be a full ten years before another student shooting incident occurred, this time at California State University, Fullerton, and another three years after that for the violence to spread from university campuses. In January 1979, 16 year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire on the elementary school across from her house, wounding several children, killing two administrators and making grim history as the first teen “school shooter.” Since 1979 and Heathers’ 1989 release, school shootings happened with increasing frequency, with incidents occurring in 1982, 1983, 1985 (2), 1986, 1988 (3) and 1989. School shootings would become even more common as the century closed (the 1990s would see a total of 29 school shootings, including the Columbine high school massacre, and the 2000s would count in at 53), but even by 1989, student-on-student gun violence had made its definite ascension into the American consciousness (Stevenson). When J.D. shoots Ram and Kurt in the woods (or even when he fires on them with blanks in the school cafeteria early in the film), Heathers expresses the impact of the rise of school shootings on the American psyche. A terror that had not existed fifty years earlier had become the darkest incarnation of high school.

As much as Heathers is a product of the escalation of teen violence, it is a product of the relatively early days of school shootings.  The hyperbole in Heathers offers an emotional disassociation that makes its subject matter palatable, but the realities of the Columbine high school massacre outdid Hollywood’s exaggeration. (Ironically, many who sought simplified explanations for the Columbine horror blamed Gothic subculture, a testament to the power of Gothic imagery as a symbol for social deviance.)  It is interesting to contrast Heathers with Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), a film about a schizophrenic teenager whose prophetic Doomsday visions trigger a sequence of events that challenges the limits of time and space. Donnie Darko includes a student shooting and similar, characteristically Gothic, themes— social isolation, rejection of the status quo, even juvenile delinquency— but without the campy aesthetic of teen outsider movies from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.  Instead, the post-Columbine Donnie Darko distances itself from such potentially representative imagery and plunges its protagonist deep into the depths of science fiction to achieve emotional separation from the realities of teen violence.

Perhaps more than the rise of teenage identity, it is the rise of high school, a vaguely autonomous training ground for adult social skills, that offers tailor-made-for-Gothic material. The capacity of the young for cruelty is disturbing, because it is a reminder that inexperience and innocence are not synonymous.  It is nice to suppose that children are exempted from the cruelty that adults are capable of inflicting upon one another, but the vague social autonomy of high school can rapidly devolve into a Lord of the Flies situation.  Without adults to enforce childlike innocence, adolescents are quick to mimic the social behaviors of the “real world.” Or, as J.D. sums it up in a final soliloquy as he plants a bomb in the school’s boiler room, “People are going to look at the ashes of Westerburg High and say, ‘Now there was a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t care, but because the school was society.’”

So far my autumn to do list includes mastering German pretzel baking, sleeping a lot, knocking out several of the stalled out novels on my nightstand and visiting some old friends in Los Angeles.

Also, this bird is me.

Just watched Before Sunrise and it was good, pretty good.  The dialogue was mostly really cheesy— pseudo-philosophical Ethan-Hawke-baring-his-inner-soul sort of banter.  But that corny dynamic made it genuine because it sounded like the kind of exchange that people who have seen movies like Before Sunrise, and consider it singularly philosophical, would have. It was accurate because it was the same exchanges people repeat out of movies and accept as deep connection. That might be too meta for the screenwriter though. Navel-gazing stars aside, the concept was important, in that it captured that feeling of not wanting to say goodbye, and yet, not wanting to ruin the moment by drawing it out too long. I liked when Ethan Hawke asked,”Why do you think everybody thinks relationships are supposed to last forever anyways?” I like the idea of being okay with bodies being transitory.

It’s kind of like how I prefer to think that ScarJo and Bill Murray don’t fall in love, or necessarily ever see each other again, in Lost in Translation. It’s usually better not to try and recreate a good thing.

I read The Road— which I flew through in a day, dragged forward by its tension and horror— and put it down, disturbed, but not affected or impressed. It’s clipped, sparse prose felt more like hack than style. Is McCarthy leaning on a syntax crutch? But maybe that’s not really McCarthy’s fault— maybe it’s affection of post-modern literature in general.  The lack of punctuation. The overuse of dialect. The undeveloped ideas masquerading as intentional ambiguity.

But McCarthy is supposedly one of modern fiction’s heavy hitters, so if I’m trying Toni Morrison again, for Chrissakes, I rationalized that I’d better give McCarthy another chance. Rationalized while the drunk side of buzzed, while standing at the top of a ladder, in Treehorn books. So I impulse purchased All the Pretty Horses.

And, truthfully, it has forced me to reconsider McCarthy. Actually, since I started this post, I finished the novel, and it’s a beautiful thing, about realism and romanticism and the decline of the American West. When his grandfather’s ranch is sold to an oil company, John Grady Cole and his buddy Rawlins, both just teenagers, set out for Mexico to find a wild west that more clearly resembles the one in their imaginations.

From the beginning, poor, anachronistic John Grady is on the verge of adulthood, and yet utterly unfit for the modern world. He’s the ideal cowboy in a world with no use for cowboys.

But there were two things that they [John Grady and the Mexican rancher] agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.

John Grady and Rawlins get knocked around brutally in Mexico, and the desperate way in which they cling to the romanticized honor code of the American cowboy becomes both their undoing in brutal Mexico; and yet, in some small way, that same idealism is John Grady’s salvation. His illusions are destroyed and yet, he never quite slips in nihilism. Even at his lowest moment.

The wild and frantic band of mustangs that circled the potrero that morning like marbles in a jar could hardly be said to exist and the animals whinnied to one another in the dark and answered back as if someone among their number were missing, or some thing.

There are only two people in the world that I particularly feel like talking to these days… and they might both just be creations of my own idealized projections.

I want the harmony of river life. The calm, meditative nature of making my life according to the water, when faces and days start to run together and slip through my fingers. I want the river to open my life up again. But I’m edgy. I don’t really ever feel like myself in the month of June.

I’m waiting to be wild.

Richard Muller’s testimony at the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing on “Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy” this last week turned out to be a landmark moment for climatology when he diverged from the farcical, climate-change denial script, and presented study results that confirm the warming trends demonstrated by NOAA, NASA and HADCru[1]. Muller is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley and has been a prominent skeptic of climate change and critic of climate change methodology, so his public statement is interesting (especially given that his study opened with the specific intention to challenge prevailing views on climate change).

But if his testimony feels a little bit like a triumph of science over political agenda, it is a limited triumph. In fact, it’s troubling is that Muller was including as a witness on a stacked panel of “experts” for hearing in the House, when his study’s single biggest private backer was the the Charles G. Koch Foundation, which donated $150,000 (Koch Industries is a major American energy conglomerate; not a disinterested party by any stretch of the imagination). And for that matter, it’s bad scientific form to present finding before they have been published (and thereby vetted by professional peers). New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted,

For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage. But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence.[2]

In other words, constituents have a right to politicians who treat serious issues with open minds, rather than reductive reasoning.  It isn’t an issue of left or right politics, but of corporate money dictating agenda.

Which makes this a perfect opening topic for this blog, since this issue highlights anti-intellectualism as one of the major political barriers to environmental policy. There is no reason for global climate change to become a divisive party issue, and yet climate change denial has become right wing dogma (which raises red flags about the implications of corporate campaign donations) and bleeding-heart liberal fodder. Which begs the question, can we discuss climate change response unencumbered by party politics? This blog is going to try.