I am Garheld Stine, the last in deserted Iconi City. I've devoted my endless nights and days to seeking out the writings of the vacated architect. These essays are scattered by nature, forgotten in arcades or left between pages of library books. No matter. What I find, I will collect here. Welcome to the Uncurrent Dispatch.
Help! (1965) is a gateway album, an attempt to duplicate the success of A Hard Day’s Night (1964) that becomes something more as the band brushes with Bob Dylan, new forms of instrumentation, and marijuana (Dylan supplied weed after mistakenly hearing the lyric as “I get high” in “I Want to Hold Your Hand”). The Fab Four’s previous release, Beatles For Sale, had suggested the first crack in the Beatlemania veneer. The record, sleeved with the “for sale” Beatles dressed in black and looking weary, kicked off with John’s morose “No Reply” and maintained its mopiness through songs like “I’ll Follow the Sun” and “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party”. For Sale departed for American western, while Help! more subtly integrates American folk (and the band’s gloominess) into British pop. Country angst like For Sale’s “Baby’s in Black” and “I’m a Loser” make way for radio-friendly pop pining in songs like “Help!” and “Ticket to Ride” as the band has one last go at covers and Beatlemania before fully entering their psychedelic middle period with Rubber Soul. Here’s the breakdown.
“Help!” - John
“The Night Before” - Paul
“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” - John
“I Need You” - George
“Another Girl” - Paul
“You’re Going to Lose That Girl” - John
“Ticket To Ride” - John
“Act Naturally” - Ringo (cover)
“It’s Only Love” - John
“You Like Me Too Much” - George
“Tell Me What You See” - Paul
“I’ve Just Seen a Face” - Paul
“Yesterday” - Paul
“Dizzy Miss Lizzie” - John (cover)
So who wins the album?
John.
It was a risky gambit to become moody and reflective in the throes of Beatlemania, but thanks to fatigue and Bob Dylan’s stash, John was feeling rebellious. Pop music was supposed to be fun and fictional, and John’s music stopped being either. As with “A Hard Day’s Night”, John’s title song set this movie soundtrack’s tone, but while “Hard Day’s Night” encapsulated an unquenchable lust for life (and other things), “Help!” captured the band’s new milestones and tensions: Individual voice vs group harmony (figuratively and literally); catchy pop vs experimentation; Paul’s commitment to “silly love songs” vs John’s painfully autobiographical songwriting. John had discovered a propensity for self-examination that would peak in 1970 with Plastic Ono Band, an album Elvis Costello would decry for making every artist’s “authenticity depend[... on] baring their souls for public scrutiny” (x).
But in 1965, long before Plastic Ono Band and the White Album served as public therapy sessions, the other Beatles pull against John’s angst, and sullen songs like “Help!” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” get by with a little help from his friends’ chipper call and response. “Lose that Girl’s” moodiness is offset by the other Beatles’ energy, and the result is the split personality of a narrator bemoaning a friend’s neglected relationship even as his inner monologue celebrates the opportunity to make his move. The big question is whether “Lose That Girl’s” narrator is grateful for the assist or resentful of the other Beatles butting in. It’s a debate that carries over to Rubber Soul songs like “Nowhere Man” (“somebody else lends [John] a hand” as Paul and George’s harmonies uplift their nowhere man) and “Girl” (where the duo’s piercing “tit-tit-tits” make light of John’s pining pubescence). “It’s Only Love” sets the stage for the pending angst of “Girl”, with the guitar capo deliberately raising the key to strain John’s voice in perfect adolescence. But instead of “Girl’s” teasing, Harrison here offers sympathy with a fluttery tremolo effect recalling stomach butterflies. The playful tremolo contrasts the band’s first-ever use of a manual volume pedal on “I Need You” and the way its slow weepy swells grieve with George’s narrator.
The contrast is stark when the other Beatles abandon John for “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”. For this reason, the tune feels more like Beatles for Sale’s unfiltered Bob Dylan inspiration, but the layout and instrumentation shift away from John’s Dylan period songs like “I’m a Loser”. “Hide Your Love Away” follows verse-chorus protocol until the bridge section, which proxies for Dylan’s harmonica with doubled flutes before abruptly ending. Despite cribbing his first stanza from Dylan’s “I Don’t Believe You”, this song’s subject matter is pure John, possibly on hiding his marriage to Cynthia Powell, manager Brian Epstein’s closeted homosexuality, or even John’s own budding bicuriousity. (He had incited much speculation after joining Epstein on a Barcelona vacation in 1963).
Even “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”, the time-tested filler formula of John hollering a cover song in the vein of “Twist and Shout” and “Money” is groundbreaking not as a first, but as a last. This would not only be the last cover song in the Beatles catalog (forget “Maggie Mae”), but the last time John would enjoy his youthful howl. Starting with Rubber Soul, any belting John does is detached and processed with studio effects (“Tomorrow Never Knows”; “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; even the clenched-teeth seething on “Run for Your Life”). Then, after Epstein’s death in 1967 ends the Beatles psychedelic phase, John’s outdoor voice resurrects as a painful wail (“Yer Blues”; “I’m So Tired”; “I Want You”) and reaches its peak three years later as John and Yoko undergo primal scream therapy while recording Plastic Ono Band (“Well Well Well” and “Mother’s” outro). “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” is the last time John screams about being happy and the last time he sounds happy to be screaming.
“Ticket to Ride” is one of Help’s most groundbreaking achievements, but the victory isn’t John’s alone. The song owes its futuristic syncopation to George: The mournful drone on the A chord and its suspended forms, further complicated by the use of a 12 string guitar (on which a standard guitar’s six strings are doubled or paired with an octave, as on a sitar) simulates a sort of Zen “Aum” that foreshadows what Harrison would soon pull from Eastern instruments (tabla on “Love You To”; sitar on “Within You Without You”), then more traditional psych-rock instruments like guitar feedback and electric organ (“It’s All Too Much”; “Blue Jay Way”). George utilizes the same A chord drone on “I Need You,” and the result is just as wretched and tender as “Ticket”. The Loner Beatle starts songwriting in earnest for Help!, after 1963’s lone filler track “Don’t Bother Me” had discouraged him for two years. His middle-child status in the Beatles serves as a lyrical motif throughout his catalog, from “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (to which the other Beatles were apathetic) to “Only a Northern Song” (voted off Sgt Pepper’s) to “Not Guilty” (vetoed entirely). “I Need You” and “You Like Me Too Much” have the tentative tenderness of Harrison’s constant rejection and his need for the band both emotionally and financially. Both songs explore the uniquely George dynamic in which someone is emotionally dependent on an apathetic partner. While lovers in Lennon/McCartney songs routinely come and go, George’s lovers are stuck in a perpetual state of ambivalence.
While John and George raced into the band’s burgeoning psychedelic phase, Paul’s wheels spun in the mud. A crowd-pleaser who routinely played it safe, Paul was consistently the last Beatle to experiment in both music and drugs, and he was perfectly content trying to duplicate Hard Day’s Night’s frenetic partnership with John’s songs. The Cute Beatle offered staunch competition on that album: “And I Love Her” was as dusky and ethereal as “If I Fell”, and “Can’t Buy Me Love” rivalled the pulse and energy of John’s title hit. But Paul couldn’t keep pace for Help! “The Night Before” and “Another Girl” offer weak A-side competition against John’s four game-changers, and “Tell Me What You See” is fourth quarter filler that Paul would supply again on Rubber Soul in the form of “Wait.” Where John and George show vulnerability, Paul displays only a persistent bubbliness as he falls for someone (contrast “I’ve Just Seen a Face” vs “It’s Only Love”), falls for someone different (“Another Girl” vs “Lose That Girl”), and even loses someone (“The Night Before” vs “I Need You”).
“I’ve Just Seen a Face” is mostly noteworthy as a more democratic vision of what genre-bending could have looked like for the band compared to “Yesterday”. All four Beatles share in the stripped-down instrumentation, with Ringo on percussion and the others strumming away on acoustic guitars. The result is lively and full, thanks to a balance of power (and the power of the band’s balance) that recalls the traded guitar solos on “The End”. McCartney’s infusion of British pop into American folk pastiche makes this track more listenable than the straight-forward cover of “Act Naturally,” which adds little to Buck Owens’s original beyond the pleading texture of Ringo’s strained baritone. Ringo’s love for country music meant he spearheaded the band’s 1965 American folk departure in each album’s “let Ringo sing one” throwaway. He sang Carl Perkins’ “Honey Don’t” on Beatles for Sale and would get an original tune with Rubber Soul’s “What Goes On” before reverting to an English folk feel for 1966’s “Yellow Submarine”. (Though his country/western phase would return with a vengeance on the White Album’s “Don’t Pass Me By”, a Ringo original the other Beatles had been suppressing since the drummer joined the band in 1962.)
Paul’s biggest triumph on Help! is “Yesterday,” because he unwittingly beats John at his own game. Though John was leading the band’s charge to speciate into unique personalities and writing styles, “Yesterday” is the first recording to feature only its writer, and during live performances Paul would swap his Hofner for an acoustic guitar while the other Beatles left the stage. The song was so revolutionary that it was passed over for A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles For Sale and, even after Help’s release, was vetoed as a potential single in the UK by the other Beatles. It’s ironic that the “All Together Now” Beatle— the same Beatle who pushed the mourning band onto the Magical Mystery Tour bus to unite them after Epstein’s death, the same Beatle who brought in cameras for Let It Be to recall Beatlemania days— unknowingly took the first step toward the band’s disintegration. “Yesterday” foreshadows years of disunity within the band, from Paul’s follow-up solo performance on Revolver’s “Eleanor Rigby”, to Ringo’s transition to what he felt was basically a studio drummer, to the White Album’s separate Beatles in separate recording studios, to John pulling away for his solo career even as he consistently recruited Ringo and George. “Yesterday” is a complex milestone for the band that John would describe years later as “beautiful— and I never wished I’d written it,” at one point even making a bizarre parody of the song: “Suddenly, / I’m not half the man I used to be, / ‘cause now I’m an amputee.”
At the end ATWQ, *SPOILERS* do you have any thoughts on why, in-story and writing/meaning reasons, the Associates reject Lemony at the end? Is it because he became an adult or was becoming an adult as conceptualized in the story? Or was it something else?
Whether or not Snicket became an adult is a complex question. His “apprenticeship [is] over” (4.291), but the last thing he tells anyone before disappearing is that he’s “not old enough” (4.288), an assertion laden with irony and a callback to the Bombinating Beast not attacking him in SYBIS because it’s “not old enough” (3.221) to harm anyone. By the end of ATWQ both the Beast and Snicket have aged out of this inability and Snicket has fulfilled his destiny of becoming Hangfire’s disciple. Hangfire, ATWQ’s largest-looming embodiment of adulthood, may look “peaceful” and “as if something at last was his” (4.252) during the Beast’s siege because he’s completed his true objective of passing on his legacy. In SYBIS, the “box of matches in [Snicket’s] pocket” implied his potential to turn into an adult arsonist like Hangfire, and he’s held back only by childish beliefs like “adults should[n’t] be encouraged to smoke” (3.27). In the climax of WITNDFAON, Snicket now likens Hangfire to his “teacher” (4.245) and credits him for instruction on how to “play” (4.248) the Beast statue and unleash his potential for destruction.
I’ve always held it as a weak deus ex machina that ATWQ’s master of treachery could be defeated with a deception as plain as “what’s that behind you”. I can only justify it as the metaphorical gateway into Snicket’s “wild, lawless” place, that he commits a sort of ur-deception or “very old trick” so archetypal that, like “the old myths and superstitions” (4.246), its recounting requires the Association of Associates to recite it like a Greek chorus outside the derailed train. Snicket’s apprenticeship in Stain’d-by-the-Sea ends not just because he murders Hangfire, but because he tricks Hangfire with malicious intent, because he summons the Beast, and because he reveals previously suppressing Hangfire’s identity. Eve’s original sin wasn’t a magicked apple but the indelible knowledge that she had the ability to disobey and, what’s more, to lie about it and to implicate others.
After Snicket’s misdeeds culminate in a literal trainwreck (in the shape of “a dead serpent” [4.259] that recalls Eden’s lech), Snicket finds that “friend or enemy, associate or stranger, [everyone shrinks] from [him]” (4.258) like he’s “a moving shadow, casting darkness over everyone” (4.286). In essence, he’s like Armstrong Feint. Note the lone cross in Seth’s opening illustration to chapter thirteen, after Snicket reflects that Hangfire was the only person “brave enough to face the beast directly” and who Snicket classifies among “heroes [and] villains” (4.252). It’s uncertain whether Snicket views himself as more “like Armstrong Feint, someone once kind and gentle who lowered himself into treachery, or more like a mysterious beast, hidden in the depths and summoned to wickedness” (4.290), but he now empathizes with both figures. Daniel Handler and I are technically Jewish, but feel free to interpret Hangfire as a Christ figure martyred by his inability to overcome humanity’s disbelief in his message, and Snicket as his reluctant disciple as he records the man’s story in a tetralogy mirroring the four gospels.
The series ends with Snicket’s coat housing the Beast statue (and presumably the same box of matches) even as Snicket muses that “long ago, [he] had made a promise to return the statue to its rightful owner” (4.289). Snicket told Theodora in WCTBATH that the Beast “has been associated with the Mallahan family for generations” and that they’re likely the statue’s “rightful owners” (1.93-94). But Snicket doesn’t give the statue to Lady Mallahan’s only competent descendant, nor would Moxie likely want something she now knows brings with it only destruction and covetous frenzy reminiscent of the Maltese Falcon. Despite his misgivings about alienating his friends, Snicket never offers up the totem of chaos, and alongside his warped notion that he “think[s he] kept [his] promise” (4.277) to help Ellington find her father by unmasking and killing him, it’s quite possible Snicket also believes he’s fulfilled his promise to find the statue’s rightful owner: Himself. A statue only capable of chaos would “rightfully” belong to someone capable of chaos, and by tricking Hangfire with malevolent intent, Snicket has wrested ownership of the statue from Hangfire like Malfoy wrested ownership of the Elder Wand from Dumbledore. Even the Beast, raised and nourished by Hangfire, recognizes Snicket’s authority over the hand that fed him; Hangfire points uselessly at Snicket when he speaks his last words, but the Beast only obeys Snicket’s wordless pointing to leave, after looking over “[Snicket and] the statue in [his] hands” (4.254).
As discussed in my earlier essay, Snicket never shakes the feeling that he, like Ellington, will always be an outsider to the residents of Stain’d, Associates included. Snicket’s not surprised in the climax that “the Mitchums of the world just bicker” while ignoring evil, or that Gifford and Ghede think it's “not [their] job” to intervene in a wrongful arrest. What ultimately drives Snicket from Stain’d is alienation from his friends. The Association is horrified by Hangfire’s murder because, unlike Snicket, they had only learned his identity moments before his death—And his identity is that of the absent parent, a specter that haunts each Associate. The Association relies on hope, but Snicket quietly believes that “Moxie’s mother [will] never send for her” and “Pip and Squeak's father [is] gone forever” (4.288). That said, the Association’s schism isn’t about Snicket’s deviation from the group’s strict moral code. Moxie laments that Snicket “didn’t have to feed [Hangfire] to that creature” (4.270) while simultaneously dismissing Feint’s orphaned daughter as “deserv[ing] to be in a prison cell” (4.279) for a murder Ellington didn’t commit. Snicket is ultimately as repulsed by the Associates’ hypocrisy as they are by his.
This brings Snicket to his second epiphany, that not only has his apprenticeship ended, but it’s now his responsibility to document its events. This is a postmodern concept of penance, to make amends not to the man Armstrong Feint (by, for example, rescuing his daughter) but to Feint’s story, lest he be erased a second time. Handler distinguishes between signifier and signified several times in the denouement: The town’s ink becoming “weaker and fainter” made the facts it represented appear “less certain” (4.263); Moxie equates Snicket “destroy[ing]” Hangfire to destroying a book and its “important secrets” (4.269); the Beast’s and Snicket’s actions have erased Hangfire’s meaning like “spilled ink across paper” voids the meaning of the words (4.249). Feint and his words “have vanished,” and though Snicket “wish[es]” his actions would too (4.254), he knows these actions obligate him to record his wrongdoing. Snicket ends WCTBATH with “practically none of” its events entering his official report (1.252), and this pattern persists through the second and third books. It’s only after “destroying” a man that Snicket pledges to revive Feint and his story in a fragmentary plot for the librarians. After all, “paper will put up with anything that’s written on it” (4.272), whether it’s spilled ink that destroys important secrets or words that resurrect a dead man “the way an idea moves from a book to your mind” (4.248).
I find it interesting how in All the Wrong Questions, ?4, Lemony enters into a forest at the end, symboling his new path. Didn’t someone else say Olaf was also off exploding a forest? Do you find this significant? Also, how do you feel the moral themes of the book and perceptions of adulthood, from a writer who is already an adult? As an adult reader, I found myself sympathizing and relating to the child characters, as I have also suffered from incompetent adults even as a young adult.
I was so scandalized by the idea of “Beatrice [...] accompanying Olaf” anywhere that I didn’t consider the “strange forest” could be Snicket’s own clusterous labyrinth (4.281). It’s striking that the mysterious future Snicket enters at the end of ATWQ may literally contain his adulthood’s closest companion and greatest enemy respectively.
I’ll avoid waxing philosophical on Snicketverse morality, but it’s interesting how Handler’s kid characters toggle maturity. When my hunger for education the year after college snuck me into a UW Milwaukee classroom, one English class taught me how all the urchins surrounding Oliver Twist speak in mangled vernacular (“Yer don't know who I am, I suppose, Work'us?”) but Oliver himself speaks in “proper” English that Dickens’ upper-middle class readers would have unconsciously recognized as their own. In the same way Oliver uses upper-middle class English, all my favorite kid characters articulate themselves in the syntactical and emotional language of adults: Calvin and Hobbes, Lisa Simpson, and of course, Lemony Snicket. It’s not hard to be young at heart; what makes Handler exceptional is that he understands writing like a kid isn’t the most convincing way to write a kid.
“Will they tell your story?”: Power and Complicity through Hamilton
I know Lin-Manual Miranda and Hamilton have fallen out of favor. The Trump era’s disenchantment with the quintessential Obama era musical coincides with a disenchantment with the Obama era itself, as we realize that black and orange presidents alike can create ICE detention centers (x), send the National Guard to protests (x), remotely bomb civilians in the Middle East (x), deploy troops to the US-Mexico border (x), etc. I support the Hamilton backlash and would love to read Ishmael Reed’s Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. That said, I think it’s valuable to examine how Hamilton calibrated its message for the white world of theatre in 2014.
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In the last year of Obama’s presidency, I saw Penumbra Theatre’s Milwaukee production of Fences. The direction was solid, the actors were talented, August Wilson’s script still smoldered 30 years on. None of these elements is the reason I considered the evening a failure. The fault lies with why I’ve given up on theatre as both an audience member and degree-holding actor: The theatre world is perpetually shaped by and for middle class white liberals, a demographic that resists self-scrutiny at every turn. The Milwaukee Rep’s crowd let loose like a studio audience. Whenever Lyons entered to ask for money, we cracked up like a funky 70’s sitcom bassline had played him in. Rose’s tearful monologue was greeted with sassy whoops of “Tell him, sister!” And after the show, we poured onto the streets of America’s most segregated city, a city that would see a racial uprising three months after the production’s close, to laugh about how good the show was while circumventing homeless people of color with a practiced blindness. This ostensibly progressive audience turned Fences into white savior back-patting reminiscent of To Kill A Mockingbird, in which comfortingly familiar black characters struggle against comfortingly familiar black problems like poverty, infidelity, and a carefully ostracized racism the white audience needn’t examine itself for.
Enter Hamilton. Just as Fences capitalized on the Reagan era white savior complex that spawned Live Aid and “We Are The World,” Miranda’s hip-hop musical hit white Obama era liberals right where we were vulnerable. But 35 years on, white theatre has defanged Fences’ deeper implications to provide the audience an easy pat on the back for supporting black art. Instead of telling a comfortingly familiar non-white story to a white audience (or, like Wilson’s later plays, steeping it in unapologetic blackness at the cost of mainstream success,) Lin-Manuel Miranda took one of America’s whitest narratives and colored outside the lines. Such a maneuver would be unthinkable in a more conservative lower-class medium like television: Take the 2008 episode of 30 Rock in which Tracy Jordan proposes to play Thomas Jefferson in a movie. The idea is shown as laughably idiotic even though Jordan is genuinely inspired by the discovery of his ancestry to Jefferson and, like Miranda, desires to reclaim the nation’s founding with a non-white lens. Hamilton calculates for white theatre’s resistance to scrutiny by embedding its central message in a Trojan horse of non-white culture that white liberals want to coopt.
That message, the one our demographic constantly resists, is that even the most passive and well-intentioned observers are complicit in the narrative they’re observing. Hamilton challenges a “color-blind” audience that favors itself free of implicit bias by demanding constant scrutiny of the show’s storytellers-- who are themselves actors of color portraying America’s whitest figures. Caricatures like King George embody the obvious bias white liberals scapegoat to avoid their own culpability (i.e. Bob Ewell or southern conservatives). But even likable and seemingly reliable witnesses like Eliza and Angelica invite scrutiny when “Satisfied” pulls the rug out from what the audience accepted as true in “Helpless.” Hamilton also demonstrates how much an observer reveals without discussing themselves, a point proven by Leslie Odom Jr beating Miranda for the Best Actor Tony in a musical that could just as easily be called Burr.
Miranda worries about Alexander Hamilton’s likability as much as he worries about the musical’s veracity-- which is to say, only insofar as being seen to possess both those things helps to deliver the show’s actual message. Cherry-picked blunders like the Reynolds affair mainly serve to draw attention to the power of the storyteller. Up to “Say No To This,” Burr has been Hamilton’s biased but faithful narrator, but when his enemy makes his first fatal error, Burr demures to “let Alexander tell it.” The audience loves to see Burr hate Hamilton, but even Hamilton’s lifelong foe recognizes the injustice of denying someone their own voice: If Burr sang the events of “Say No To This” in third person, his narration would garner far less sympathy than Hamilton’s. The show again emphasizes the importance of controlling one’s own narrative a few scenes later when Hamilton elects to “write his way out” rather than letting someone else spin the facts. If after all this the audience finds homewrecking Hamilton likable, Miranda’s succeeded-- Not in redeeming the Founder’s infidelity after 216 slutty slutty years, but in demonstrating the power of someone controlling their own story.
The musical is built from these parables on narrative. Getting the audience to like and believe Hamilton (both the man and the musical) is merely one necessary step toward Miranda’s central objective of exposing his power as a storyteller and the audience’s power as observers. Miranda fills the show with cherry-picked inaccuracies and biases (including his own) because he’s not contrasting truth with slander, but representation with anonymity. Thomas Jefferson is Hamilton’s arch-enemy but always gets to represent himself (as in the “Thomas claims” section of “Room Where It Happens”), while John Adams never speaks for himself and is dismissed by the audience as a completely forgettable part of America’s narrative. Audiences love or hate Jefferson, but Adams is consigned to apathy, the worst possible fate for any figure hoping to remain a part of an historical narrative.
Hamilton is designed to deliver its postmodern point by not just lecturing the audience on their power, but getting them to demonstrate it. The larger the figure of Alexander Hamilton becomes in 21st century America, the more white liberals are proving Miranda’s central message-- even if they don’t know it; even if they don’t believe this message; even to people who haven’t seen the musical. The Hamilton revolution demonstrates the immense power of observers over the historical narrative: Will they tell your story?
"Do you like what you do, Lemony Snicket?": Ethics and Adulthood in All The Wrong Questions
This essay contains spoilers from All The Wrong Questions as well as Lemony Snicket’s real name, which I know isn’t really a secret. I think people who use his real name have no sense of wonder. But since AtWQ is Snicket’s memoir, I had no other way to differentiate the author’s intent from the protagonist’s.
All the Wrong Questions shares Parks and Recreation’s liberal values in an absurdist universe, believing the world’s incompetent masses constantly undercut their own best interests and that every responsible citizen must save the population from itself. Snicket espouses that “hungry people should be fed” and commandeers Hungry’s “private property” (3.150) to feed the penniless Bellerophon brothers. Educational institutions like the press and public library consistently help the Association of Associates and are targeted by adults wanting Stain’d-by-the-Sea to remain ignorant, including ostensible helpers like Theodora and the officers Mitchum. Daniel Handler sets education in opposition to authority, with City Hall held up by “two big, crumbling pillars” (2.91) representing the library and the police station that occupy separate halves of the building (“Literature and the law don’t always get along” [13SI.149]). Handler also challenges the authoritarianism of the school system, which values obedience and conformity over independent thought. The malignant Wade Academy keeps its student body ignorant and incapable, but even the town’s public school offers nothing to the Associates, none of whom are the worse for never attending. Trapped in the confines of Wade Academy, Snicket analogizes that “people cry at silence or at violence, at a graveyard or a schoolyard” (3.174), implying violence at a school is as inevitable as a graveyard’s silence.
Instead, Handler celebrates self-sufficient activities that the father of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes would refer to as “building character.” Like Watterson, Handler uses the guise of a child to push young readers toward activities like cooking, reading, and self-educating. Snicket constantly defines words and recommends other books (i.e. Charlotte’s Web, Wrinkle In Time, and of course, Wind in the Willows). A child’s lens also provides a safe distance to critique the hypocrisy of the adult world. Snicket describes children and adults “in entirely separate boats [that] only drift near each other when we [children] need a ride from someone” (1.114). Of course, Snicket himself gets his rides from the Bellerophon children, who are making up for their own parents’ absence. Handler’s protagonists are all kids who have vowed to atone for what “everyone’s parents did”-- that is, “nothing” (3.205)-- by feeding and transporting each other while attempting to inform and redeem their town. Symbolizing a new generation’s climate anxieties, Cleo Knight hopes to save Stain’d-by-the-Sea and her parents’ legacy by replacing octopus ink (a thin metaphor for fossil fuels and their environmental damage) with the ethically generated renewable resource of invisible ink.
In Snicket’s world, children are victimized not only by the absence of adults, but by their presence. The only child in town with two physically and emotionally present parents is Stew Mitchum, who seems to be wicked not in spite of this but as a direct result. Stew watches his parents argue like a “shark [...] circles a tank while schoolchildren tap on the glass,” patiently awaiting the day he will “no longer be trapped [... but] will be in the open water, right where you’ll be swimming” (2.88). This is why Snicket chose to apprentice for the least capable chaperone, one whose first name is implied to be “Solitude” (4.289). The more absent the adult, the more autonomy provided the child. The wickedness of aging is most apparent in the town’s largest-looming threats, Hangfire and the Bombinating Beast. The Beast refrains from attacking Ellington and Snicket only because, as Hangfire’s daughter instinctively knows, “it’s not old enough” (3.221) to hurt people yet. Hangfire’s ability to “imitate the voice of anyone” speaks to a base childhood fear that adults are not who they say they are or “might not [even have] a real voice” (3.138) or identity anymore. Snicket, as a child character written by an adult, has a complex relationship with these villains and the dual apprehensions that “every adult [does] something terrible sooner or later [...] and every child [...] becomes an adult” (2.176). Snicket has “a box of matches in [his] pocket” but lies about it to Hangfire because he “[doesn’t] think adults should be encouraged to smoke” (3.27). Snicket literally carries the hidden potential to turn into a wicked fire-wielding adult like Hangfire, but is held back by a youthful idealism about resisting bad habits.
Nevertheless, Snicket ultimately turns to “a wild, lawless place” on a divisive “night [...] different from all other nights” (4.247). The titular question of Snicket’s final chronicle is itself a reference to the Jewish tradition of Ma Nishtana and is typically asked by the youngest member of a Seder so adults can “fulfill the [...] obligation to tell the story to one's children [and …] pique a child's curiosity,” just as Handler (who was raised Jewish) strives to pique curiosity in his young readers. Snicket saves Stain’d-by-the-Sea from Hangfire, but Hangfire posthumously claims Snicket’s integrity, having lured him out of a morally sound childhood. Snicket’s last words before walking away from his friends and colleagues are “I’m not old enough” (4.288), a callback to Ellington’s explanation for why the Beast didn’t attack them. Snicket’s claim is wrought with irony and denial, as he and the Beast had both just exhibited the “wild, lawless” nature of adulthood by killing Armstrong Feint. (You can read my dissection of the ending here.)
This is why Snicket reflects on Ellington as a “line [...] right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days” (4.161), a fact Handler had foreshadowed from her introduction. Snicket’s first impression of the femme fatale includes the distinctive line “green eyes she had” (1.131), a reference to Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King when Arthur first sets eyes on the beautiful and dangerous Guinevere: “Green eyes, she had, with a kind of cruelty deep inside them. [...] If you can master me, that look seemed to say, then you can master whatever else this wicked world might bring” (Cornwell 183). Ellington and S. Theodora Markson are the town’s only other outsiders, which is why the two share “Solitude” as a musical motif and first name respectively. Snicket befriends several locals, but only Ellington can commiserate over something as specific and foreign as “blueberries picked in a field at the height of summer, miles and miles and miles from anywhere this train will go” (4.158). Snicket defends Ellington to the Associates because their xenophobic mistrust recalls his own cold reception in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, where locals like the officers Mitchum are only too eager to connect “the arrival of two strangers” and “the town experienc[ing] a crime” (1.90).
The critical difference that makes Snicket and Ellington opposite sides of the same lonely coin is Ellington’s resolve to put family before “anything and everything” (1.140) while Snicket feels obligated to help the town before his sister. Finally embracing Ellington’s code of “anything and everything” forces Snicket to relinquish the idealistic “training of his childhood,” including his promise to reunite Ellington with her father, and the ironic result is Armstrong Feint’s murder. Ellington’s wild, lawless philosophy effectively ends Snicket’s apprenticeship and childhood, bringing him to the literal “territory of the rest of his days,” the Clusterous Forest that swallows him up in the story’s final pages.
“There comes a power into this scattered kingdom”: Metaphor and Apocalypse Philosophy in Station Eleven
For Kirsten and the reader, Arthur Leander’s death represents the start of the apocalypse. His last thought of cradling a dying bird recalls the dove God sends to symbolize the end of Noah’s flood, another world-ending event Arthur’s son later references. Arthur’s death symbolizes the end of the dove’s peace and the return to an extinction event.
Unlike the seven billion people about to perish by Georgia flu, Arthur dies of natural causes. Ignoring the fact that Arthur having the Georgia flu would be logistically tricky for Kirsten’s and Jeevan’s survival, Arthur’s heart attack casts him as the personification of contemporary Western civilization, with his death foretelling the ensuing structural collapse. Like Western society, he’s lived in a blaze of thoughtless excess, which he now wishes to “repent” (327) by leveraging his assets for a life in Jerusalem and the spiritual redemption it symbolizes. But, like cities banning plastic straws in the midst of a global climate crisis, Arthur’s attempt at penance is too little, too late. He’s spent too long chasing “money[,] fame [and] immortality,” and in his final moments he thinks of his son, the new generation who can carry on and potentially redeem Arthur’s legacy.
These musings recall King Lear’s vain wish for his kingdom’s survival, as well as Frank Chaudhary’s observation that celebrities “want to be seen” and ultimately “remembered” (187). Arthur gets his wish in life and death, endlessly perceived by Miranda, Clark, Jeevan and later, Kirsten and other post-apocalypse tabloid collectors. However, Arthur only leads his narrative in the final section’s apologia-- Like Elizabeth and Tyler, he crosses many people’s stories but can’t tell his own. He and the woman to whom “nothing bad has ever happened” (173) create Tyler, the inheritor of his parents’ self-importance and second-degree immortality. Like the Undersea’s population, Tyler longs to see and be the sunrise (“How do you bring the light if you are the light?” [293]) and actively derails humanity’s improvement to immortalize himself in brainwashed followers and multiple wives’ children.
Tyler’s equal and opposite reaction is his spiritual half-sister, Kirsten. Kirsten can’t remember her biological parents; she’s instead raised on the undying fragments of Arthur and Miranda. Before Arthur can die and the apocalypse can begin, the three share a brief but essential domestic tableau in Arthur’s dressing room, where Miranda plants the seed for her Doctor Eleven-style disciple. While Elizabeth hands down to Tyler her privileged solipsism, Kirsten’s surrogate mother bequeaths a comic book about outsider survival, as well as a paperweight for when survival is insufficient-- After all, what’s more notoriously useless than a paperweight?
The paperweight’s storm cloud, immobile but perpetually visible, represents the post-apocalypse mood that propels Kirsten and Doctor Eleven. The final act of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns dissects this mindset in a medieval pageant/musical written by second- and third-generation apocalypse survivors. Springfield’s deceased represent the values their extinction punished: Homer dies in blind optimism, Lisa and Marge die longing for home. When Bart emerges as Springfield’s sole survivor, no one’s more perplexed than he is, and that’s because his unwilling and unwitting spirit is a key feature of the new humanity’s mindset. Dr Eleven and the people of Year Twenty aren’t sure how or why they’re alive, but the planet continues to propel them forward.
As Arthur had hoped, his children manage to redeem his life’s selfishness. The surname “Leander” suggests a Lear who meanders, a deluded and disgraced ruler wandering through worlds and generations attempting to save his kingdom. This would seem to apply to both Tyler and Kirsten; as Arthur’s surrogate child, Kirsten would share the Leander name, and her earlier role as Cordelia promised that her loyalty and perseverance would redeem her king’s legacy from her wicked sibling. But Cordelia was the disinherited child and, as such, Kirsten no longer bears the family name. Recall instead Kirsten’s symbolic conception: Miranda entered Arthur’s feminine domestic space and sowed the seed of Station Eleven, the story of a man who inherits a different kind of broken kingdom through a process resembling patrilineal descent. Kirsten is Arthur and Miranda’s child, but she isn’t a Leander-- She’s a Carroll. Miranda’s gender-bending role as Captain Lonagan means that “[in Lonagan’s] absence, [Kirsten] must lead” (304) her inherited lost kingdom not with Lear’s vanity, but with Dr. Eleven’s selfless determination.
These dueling philosophies of survival collide in Kirsten’s and Tyler’s recitation of Station Eleven, which convinces Tyler’s 15-year-old henchman to turn against the light of Lear’s lost kingdom and defend the broken space station. The adolescent nods as Kirsten tells her fellow 28-year-old that they “long only for the world [they] were born into” (302). Tyler reminds her “it’s too late for that,” and these words carry a new weight for the boy born five years after the apocalypse. While Kirsten and Tyler remember, however vaguely, the luxuries of pre-flu existence, the teenager realizes he has no referent for a sweeter life to return to-- If he wants a better world, he needs to stop the disgraced ruler who’s sabotaging it so the new, imperfect planet can move forward.
Like Let It Be (1970), Yellow Submarine (1969) was a semi-consensual release of leftover and outgrown songs, the Beatles having closed the door (of perception?) on their psychedelic phase following Brian Epstein’s death in 1967. The first side of the record is Beatles originals; the back side is George Martin’s orchestral movie score. Within Side A, two of the six songs had been previously released: “Yellow Submarine” (on 1966’s Revolver) and “All You Need is Love” (as a single in 1967). The Fab Four was contractually obligated to dredge up just four unreleased songs. Here’s the breakdown.
1) “Yellow Submarine” - John
2) “Only A Northern Song” - George
3) “All Together Now” - Paul
4) “Hey Bulldog” - John
5) “It’s All Too Much” - George
6) “All You Need Is Love” - John
So who wins the album?
George.
Like the mystic Beatle, Yellow Submarine was a late bloomer, underappreciated and largely ignored. Though George’s introduction of Eastern religion and instrumentation helped define the band’s psychedelic phase, Revolver and Sgt Pepper (1967) gave him the short end of the stick. The other Beatles vetoed “Only A Northern Song” for Pepper, meaning Harrison’s sole contribution was “Within You Without You,” a song sped up in post-production to trim Harrison’s presence by another minute and a half. Harrison featured more prominently on Revolver with “Love You To,” “I Want To Tell You,” and one of rock’s greatest album openers (and George’s only opener in the Beatles discography), “Taxman”. However, John and Paul once again outpaced the introverted Beatle-- Paul even stole the lead guitarist’s role on “Taxman”, performing the solo after George couldn’t play it fast enough.
Yellow Submarine is different. For the first and only time in the Beatles’ discography, George shares an even third of the credit with John and Paul, who were unenthused about the project and reeling from Epstein’s death. “All Together Now,” like many McCartney songs, is catchy fluff; even McCartney branded his lone contribution “a throwaway.” Two of John’s three contributions had been previously released: “Yellow Submarine” and “All You Need Is Love,” while both iconic songs, already had their heyday. However, “Hey Bulldog” was in its prime. The only Yellow Submarine song recorded after Epstein’s death, it carries an intoxicating blend of Sgt Pepper psychedelia and White Album (1968) return-to-roots mentality. The blazing guitars of “Taxman” and Sgt Pepper’s title tracks collide with the jaunty piano-slamming of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Sexy Sadie”. The song’s climactic howling is half “Good Morning Good Morning” barnyard samples and half “Yer Blues” shrieks, the sound of the Beatles’ rose-tinted mystery tour giving way to austere self-examination.
Though “All You Need Is Love” is Side A’s closing song and the ostensible climax of the Yellow Submarine movie, “It’s All Too Much” eclipses John’s sappy singalong with its own acid-driven revelation. Ringo admitted that George’s song “really sets the mood of the movie [Yellow Submarine],” providing the moment in the final abstract sequence when “the music and the movie really gel.” “Too Much” starts with one of psychedelia’s signature sounds, the wail of guitar feedback, until the Hammond organ enters with the suggestion of a religious epiphany. For the next six minutes, these two instruments contribute a droning “Aum” previously reserved for the tabla and sitar, and the result is a Westernized meditation on consciousness within the Summer of Love. George’s dry, literal lyricism finds a home in psychedelic rock that it would struggle to find again. (For example, 1976’s dragging “See Yourself” informs the listener that “it’s easier to see the books upon the shelf / than to see yourself.”) That lyrical bluntness becomes an anchor in a sea of alien noises and blaring feedback. “Too Much” reaches transcendental heights in its lyrical austerity, simulating how LSD endows menial details with life-changing emotion. After four minutes of hallucinogenic reverie, Harrison’s non-sequitur “With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue,” borrowed from a Merseys song and repeated for emphasis, feels like nothing short of a revelation.
“Only A Northern Song” contains a similar transcendental austerity, this time with a fracture in the fourth wall. (Once again, Paul steals the lead instrument, but this time he’s purposely underperforming on trumpet, a half-developed skill from his teen years.) From the first line, the singer is addressing the listener. It’s a common narrative tool in pop songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”, but this time the singer and listener are exactly that: “If you’re listening to this song, / you [the listener] may think the chords are going wrong.” And Harrison’s right; the chords are dissonant, the instruments awry. But the same stanza assures us that “they’re not, / We just wrote them like that.” What is this narrator’s relationship to the music? How much agency does this band actually have over the sounds they produce? Does this person revel in dissonance, or are they as helpless to “repair” the song as the listener is? (Thanks to the limitations of analog technology, the Beatles were no strangers to unfixable mistakes: Listen for the previous take’s flubbed guitar solo in the background of “Can’t Buy Me Love”.)
Like the instrumentation, “Northern Song’s” disparate subject matters strengthen the song’s overall conflict. The track is a passive-aggressive jab at the band’s imbalanced partnership. George had stayed on John and Paul’s Northern Songs music label to selflessly grow the others’ payouts; John and Paul each owned 15% of Northern Song’s shares, while George owned a minuscule .8%. At the same time, the song title playfully references the boys’ childhoods in Liverpool, the “holy city” of Northern England. George’s contribution to the Fab Four’s nostalgic period remains conspicuously absent from the contest between Paul’s “Penny Lane” and John’s “Strawberry Fields Forever.” (“Penny Lane” leaves me cold, but I’d struggle to choose between “Strawberry Fields” and “Northern Song”.)
As with many of George’s best songs, “It’s All Too Much” and “Only A Northern Song” contain contradictions that a careless listener might confuse for underdeveloped songwriting; George Martin himself called “Northern Song” his least favorite of George’s catalog. But the conflict in George’s music-- Between the casual and the transcendent, the biting and the numbing, the enlightened and the apathetic, the music and its author-- is enough to salvage an otherwise unremarkable film soundtrack (think Magical Mystery Tour) and bring the movie itself to a triumphant, emotional climax.
“How long did it take to grow that mustache?”: Gender identity in Napoleon Dynamite
This summer marks the 15th anniversary of Napoleon Dynamite, a film so unique and divisive that computer scientists now use the term “Napoleon Dynamite problem” to describe the difficulty of predicting an eccentric movie’s likeability. From thrift-shop chic to nerd culture, Napoleon Dynamite lingers in the millennial identity— for proof, check out the comic book sequel coming this September. 2019 feels like the right time to analyze how the movie portrayed gender and sexuality to a generation that has since navigated high school, pushed for LGBT rights, and championed the #MeToo movement.
In this essay, I rely on the fraught, stereotypical terms “feminine” and “masculine”. It’s an imperfect schism-- women don’t have a monopoly on emotional sensitivity any more than men hold a lease on courage. But these terms accent how the adolescent Napoleon forges his adult identity through gender performance and subversion of stereotype, and I wanted to exploit those connotations. Subvert gender stereotypes, and all your wildest dreams will come true.
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After the opening sequence of hand models presenting food (MTV insisted the casts’ hands were too ugly), Napoleon Dynamite boards a school bus of children. The ages are uncertain, but the age gap is obvious. (It helps that Jon Heder was 27 during filming.) The gap in maturity is less apparent with the film’s first lines. “What are you gonna do today, Napoleon?” “Whatever I feel like I wanna do, gosh!” Then, in the movie’s framing thesis, Napoleon throws a toy wrestler out the window to drag it behind the bus with fishing line, an adolescent boy exercising a cathartic sadism on the image of masculinity.
Napoleon is frozen in a boyish immaturity, and he is crushingly isolated. At school he’s bullied, taunted and laughed at by various incarnations of that plastic wrestler, until he calls his brother Kip to plead for rescue. Kip is just as important to the film’s point as his titular brother, because his quest offers an inversion of Napoleon’s journey. Kip is Neville Longbottom to his brother’s Harry Potter, his quest foundering in delusion while his brother successfully marries his masculine and feminine identities. The Dynamite brothers embark on separate journeys for the film’s central motifs: companionship and, most importantly, adult masculinity. The two grails overlap frequently in the form of various role models and gender performances the brothers engage with.
While Pedro and Deb are vital to Napoleon’s journey to selfhood (and one wonders whether Kip wouldn’t have gone astray if he’d had friends like them), the critical intrusion into the Dynamites’ stasis is Grandma’s removal. Grandma has been the orphan brothers’ anchoring role model, a sexless matriarch providing shelter in a sea of gender performativity and social isolation. The brothers’ first conversation shows the stark contrast of these two worlds as the wounded Napoleon seeks refuge with the school receptionist (herself a Grandma-type haven) to call Kip at home, where he “chats online with babes all day” and revels in the freedom to remotely assume an identity so far from his real-world grasp. When the hypermasculine Uncle Rico replaces Grandma (an unwelcome intrusion in itself), he reveals that she’s been adventuring across dunes with a secret boyfriend. Now lacking Grandma’s ostensible solidarity, the Dynamite brothers begin their quests to find the companionship and adulthood they’d convinced themselves they were successfully living without.
Napoleon latches onto Pedro. The day after Rex Kwon Do’s emasculating karate demonstration, Napoleon echoes the macho-man and asks if Pedro has his back. Pedro’s confused “What?” evokes a rare moment of vulnerability as Napoleon looks off and breathes “Never mind.” To Napoleon, Pedro is an enviable specimen of masculine maturity, possessing bike pegs, confidence with women, and the ability to grow a mustache. When Pedro says he intends to ask Summer Wheatly to the dance, Napoleon attempts to match Pedro’s masculinity by showing off his made-up girlfriend. “I like her bangs,” Pedro says. “Me too,” Napoleon replies, staring at a picture of a stranger.
Kip’s identity is even less stable than his brother’s. Despite being older, Kip is physically and emotionally weaker than Napoleon. Uncle Rico becomes Kip’s first stable companion and masculine role model. Kip, happy to play the toady instead of the victim (voyeuristically watching the steak hit Napoleon rather than receiving Rex’s slap himself), becomes a tool for Rico’s deluded ambition. Rico’s masculinity exudes the usual toxicity: Self-absorption, disrespect for women, a desire to get ahead. His fixation on his life’s masculine peak as a young athlete is particularly telling, revealing both his worship for manhood and his own stunted maturity. In their first one-on-one hangout, Rico and Kip talk about women, and it’s Kip’s turn to try on masculinity as he describes his own incredibly suspect girlfriend. She has a vague, “pretty good-looking face,” as well as “sandy-blonde hair” that Lafawnduh doesn’t have.
Like so many “Magical Black” characters, Lafawnduh is interesting and underdeveloped, entering the story to provide solutions for White characters. In this case, it’s Black identity itself that offers Kip an answer. Just as Rico’s retro style embodies his antiquated vision of manliness, Kip’s transformation reflects the widespread early 2000’s appropriation of Black fashion and music to express White masculinity: Third wave ska bands like Reel Big Fish, clothing trends like pants-sagging, and white rappers like Eminem all brought Black culture into vogue to an extent unseen since the 1950’s.
Meanwhile, backed by the proper companionship and cultivating a respect for the feminine, Napoleon continues to hone in on his adult identity. Napoleon’s companions, largely devoid of the White (or Black-appropriated) masculinity Kip is chasing, are feminine archetypes, compassionate and artistic. The duo serve as surrogate parents for Napoleon, with Deb demonstrating the power of feminine vulnerability and creativity and Pedro teaching Napoleon that a mustachioed, socially confident man can exude femininity. Pedro’s head-shaving provides a key lesson in Napoleon’s education. The replacement wig, provided courtesy of Deb’s pink-draped studio, exposes gender identity as performance, malleable and superficial. “I think this matches your season,” Deb declares. Pedro responds with a soft smile.
The next day brings another lesson as Napoleon offers a bullied student one of Deb’s boondoggles to symbolize Pedro’s protection-- A feminine craft symbolizing a masculine strength. The boondoggle’s promise is quickly called upon, and Pedro’s cousins chase off the bully. Napoleon witnesses the paradox of masculinity, one that CJ Pascoe observes in her theory of “fag discourse”: Though masculinity offers endless ways to dominate and police others, even the manliest identities are never secure. Masculinity is a never-ending performance, a contest that can’t be won. (Uncle Rico learns this lesson as well, and his broken arm, along with his broken masculine delusion, ushers a female energy into his life that the gentler Rico welcomes with Pedro’s soft smile.)
Napoleon’s perception of Rico and the adult manhood he represents continues to sour as the adolescent realizes what misery and delusion the grown man brings in his wake: Clogged toilets, electrocuted groins, and superficial relationships. Rico shames Napoleon for not having a job, and the subsequent chicken-cooping work earns Napoleon a dollar an hour and a Hamlet-level resentment toward his uncle. He courts Summer’s popular friend Trisha, only to find the relationship with her brand of femininity unfulfilling and unsustainable. When Napoleon and Rico finally come to blows in an impasse that can only be described as Oedipal, two important revelations emerge. Napoleon realizes he has reached his tolerance for toxic masculinity, and that that toxicity is, when elbowed, vulnerable to Napoleon’s own masculine strength. Napoleon is no longer willing to lie about wolverines or supermodel girlfriends to survive within masculine discourse-- now he knows he can harness the power of his emotions. (It’s been suggested that the Tree of Knowledge provides Eve not with a magic apple, but with the indelible knowledge that she has the ability to disobey. Does it seem fitting that Napoleon initiates this confrontation by throwing fruit?)
The identity struggles within Napoleon rise up for a final confrontation at the school election. Napoleon’s relationships with his masculine and feminine pillars, Rico and Deb, have been thrown into jeopardy, and Napoleon realizes which character’s energy is most important to him. With proper guidance from his companions, his masculinity has taken the form of a quiet strength that protects others and knowingly performs gender (i.e., the brown suit he takes off a female mannequin), and his femininity carries an emotional intelligence that can’t be acquired from Uncle Rico’s herbal supplements. And once again, Black gender identity arrives to save a White character, but now Black femininity rather than masculinity supplies Napoleon with the tools for victory. D-Qwon’s dance tape gives Napoleon the feminine power of dance as physical expression (contrast this with Kip’s physical outlets of Rex-Kwon-Do and cage fighting), and Lafawnduh herself gives Napoleon the soundtrack he’ll have on hand at the election. (That said, I’m aware that Napoleon’s dance moves are incredibly White.)
Napoleon’s dance, a triumph of femininity over masculinity, performs a vulnerability that brings the previously blank-faced student body to its feet. The students see themselves not in Pedro’s or Summer’s campaign speeches, but in Napoleon’s harrowing self-expression. Napoleon gambles his physical and emotional self on his friend’s behalf, in an act so free and selfless that Deb realizes this person would never fall prey to a “Bust Must+” brand of femininity. But the fact that the audience connects with the dance, the fact that it wins Pedro the election, doesn’t matter. What’s important is that, like Spirited Away’s Chihiro or Russian Doll’s Nadia, Napoleon confronted a final test and produced a correct answer. The prize is an immutable inner truth that will endure any bullying or masculine taunts.
After the climax, with one at the end of his journey and the other hopelessly lost within it, the Dynamite brothers cross paths one last time. (The wedding was a campy, fan-service ending tacked on after MTV’s acquisition, and I don’t consider it canonical.) Kip, in full hip-hop regalia, doesn’t notice his brother as he and Lafawnduh board a bus (in an ending reminiscent of Ghost World). Napoleon watches helplessly from across the street. This scene always makes me sad, partially because we don’t see Kip telling anybody he’s leaving-- it seems like another confused, uncharacteristic move. These brothers, having started the story together in their sexless grandma’s stasis, have ended in completely different worlds, and Napoleon, after painstakingly forging his adult identity, can only watch as his lost brother continues his own quest for meaning.
This article has been published in Entropy Magazine.
The Reynolds Pamphlet and Hamilton’s eventual vindication
In 1792, Hamilton started cheating on his wife with Maria Reynolds. Maria turned out to be a pawn for her husband, James Reynolds, who had married her when she was 15 and impregnated her within two years. (Despite Ron Chernow’s and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s slant, Maria didn’t have a lot of agency.) James Reynolds extorted money from Hamilton, who decided that, hey, he might as well keep doing the deed since he’s already being blackmailed.
By this time, the US had splintered into a two party system, which no one had really predicted or wanted. Hamilton and Washington were Federalists and believed in commerce and a strong executive branch. Republicans, including BFFs and back-to-back presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, believed in states’ rights and agriculture. Nobody was certain this government would survive, so politicians slung mud with the furious conviction that their opponent’s triumph could mean the country’s complete demise.
Hamilton, as Washington’s treasurer, was under heavy fire from Secretary of State Jefferson and the Republican newspapers the devious Virginian clandestinely employed. James Reynolds wanted Hamilton to get caught schtupping his wife but, James’ weird fantasy notwithstanding, Republicans really wanted to catch Hamilton siphoning money from the Treasury that Reynolds would then use to speculate (even though Reynolds was terrible at playing the market.)
When rumors of this corruption first emerged, James Monroe and two others investigated the treasury secretary, only to beat a hasty retreat from the Hamilton household after Alexander proved to them, for hours, in excruciating detail, that the money James Reynolds kept gambling away was merely blackmail-sex-money from Hamilton’s own pocket. Concerned only with potential embezzlement, the three visitors kept quiet. But in 1797, the gossip reemerged that Hamilton was having an illicit affair using the government’s money. So Hamilton holed up in a boarding house and wrote the Reynolds Pamphlet, aiming to permanently dismiss the charges of embezzlement.
The pamphlet didn’t work. Opponents and friends alike pointed out that pleading guilty to adultery didn’t clear him of embezzlement. But the pamphlet did free Hamilton from further blackmail-- and not just from James Reynolds. For years, Republican knowledge of the affair had prevented Hamilton from fully thrashing his opponents. When Hamilton, in anonymous open letters, hinted at knowledge of Jefferson’s ongoing assaults of Sally Hemings, one of Jefferson’s cronies insinuated knowledge of the Reynolds affair in his open response. Now Hamilton could strike freely, knowing that any remaining gossip or accusations against him were untrue.
Additionally, Hamilton lost the battle but won the war. Though Jefferson won the presidency while Hamilton was fizzling out, it’s commonly understood today that Jefferson assaulted his daughter’s teenage slave and refused to free his other slaves, some of whom one perturbed guest to Monticello noted were “as white as I was”. Hamilton owned no slaves, and while the age gap and matrimonial bondage didn’t allow Maria Reynolds full autonomy from her husband’s bidding, she had more room to consent to an affair with Hamilton than Hemings did with Jefferson. Jefferson got to be president for eight years but, as the 2015 musical demonstrates, Alexander Hamilton ages more favorably through a 21st century lens. Bill Clinton couldn’t even muster the dignity to confess his infidelity, losing any salvageable respect by devolving into a semantic debate over what constitutes sex. 200 years later, the Reynolds Pamphlet serves as a thorough apologia in the face of what America is beginning to understand as a long history of grimy, lying male politicians.
Having envisioned him as the “one guy who lives up to [her] standards” (26), Enid is deeply disillusioned when she finds “nobody” at the book-signing for David Clowes, who she then deems an “old perv” (30). One essay observes the irony that Enid can’t accurately envision a man who is envisioning her life page by page. (Of course, one could argue Daniel Clowes’ character of Enid is as misrepresentative a glorification of her demographic as Enid’s initial vision of David.)
What does it mean that Clowes sent a bastardized doppelganger for his protagonist to meet? He could be foreshadowing that he’ll continue to disappoint his characters as he shows the girls’ visions for the future to be as idyllic and unstable as Enid’s vision of David. On the other hand, it’s possible Enid is the one letting her author down; David could be Clowes’ bleak self-portrait, ridiculed and feared by a flaky fan who can’t get his first name right. It’s also possible Clowes is referencing himself-- and getting his own name wrong-- to draw attention to the fact that he and his name are already in the novel. Christened with an anagram of “Daniel Clowes,” Enid Coleslaw is, in the book-signing scene, a young Clowes imagining a cartoonist’s life as sleek and glamorous, only to learn from an adult Clowes that the career is more desolate.
Additionally, the book-signing isn’t Enid’s last or most important brush against the fourth wall. Thanks to an elusive graffiti artist (another Clowes avatar), Enid knows her own story’s title, a story with “a haunted quality” and a road “with many forks, all of which lead [...] to gloom and darkness” (78). At the novel’s end, Enid spots the Ghost World writer in the act, cementing Enid’s certainty that Ghost World is a place (and an author) Enid can confront.
Meanwhile, wearing an old lady cardigan and glasses (but still looking nearsighted,) Becky at once resembles an old woman and the hipster “woman of intellect and leisure” (78) Bob Skeetes foretold in Enid’s palm reading. It’s possible Skeetes was envisioning Becky, but it’s more likely he was envisioning the archetypal “beautiful young woman” (80) either girl would become by remaining in Ghost World. Dating Josh cements Becky’s metamorphosis, since Josh has represented an adult conscience for both girls throughout the story. With his own car and apartment, he’s responsible and financially independent. He’s also likable and mature, donating to the homeless and making the girls feel guilty for their “fucked-up trick” (43) at the Hubba Hubba diner.
In their last encounter, Becky doesn’t notice Enid and then sees her as “blurry” and “fading in and out” (76). It begs the question of whether Enid is disappearing or Becky just can’t see her old friend through the tunnel-vision of dawning adult life. Enid gets on a bus, fading in her last panel to a black silhouette. If their city was always a ghost world, does Enid’s fade-out suggest a resolution from the purgatory, and even a possible materialization into a living, human world?
Plot structure in Springfield (or, Why the Simpsons Never Learn)
While most shows rely on two or more storylines that may intertwine (Arrested Development, Seinfeld) or not (The Office, Friends), many Simpsons episodes follow a single character through several domino-effect pieces that rarely end anywhere close to where they began. It’s easy to recall hundreds of Simpsons plots without the slightest recollection of how the episodes start.
It’s reminiscent of Seinfeld’s landmark invention of characters that never grow or better themselves. (The motto on set was “No hugging, no learning.”) However, the Simpsons, instead of (or in addition to) actively avoiding self-improvement, live in a universe that doesn’t often provide morals or lessons: An episode like Marge Vs The Monorail starts with a Flintstones parody and ends with Leonard Nimoy having done nothing. (Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa, called the winding episode “truly one of our worst.”) While Seinfeld’s characters actively choose cowardice and vanity over and over, the Simpsons rarely have time for reflection as they’re whisked on a roller coaster of cause-and-effect adventure, at once lending the show the “so-good-to-laugh-at-such-bad-people” humor of Seinfeld and the full-frontal absurdity of a cartoon’s short attention span.
I preface this with a disclaimer that, in my eyes, The Simpsons is as canonized in our society as Shakespeare. Anyone who’s seen Anne Washburn’s play Mr. Burns will understand this sentiment. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven sees the post-apocalypse reaching for the classics, but I agree with Washburn’s prediction that, when the world ends, people are going to reach for what they know, what shaped their world. And what shaped their world, especially if they grew up in the 90′s, was The Simpsons. (For example, Donald Glover’s brilliant New Yorker profile recounts how the comedian once dreamed of writing for the cartoon. With most television shows forbidden by his parents, Glover would secretly record Simpsons episodes on his tape player and listen back to the recordings with his brother.)
With all that in mind, as well as the final act of Mr Burns: Homer Simpson is massive. Washburn toyed with shows like Seinfeld and Cheers before settling on The Simpsons, and I’m glad she moved past those shows. Reenacting Seinfeld episodes would just mean finding a bald guy, finding a tall dude, etc. But Simpsons characters are freakishly proportioned, becoming less realistic the closer you get to the eponymous family. New characters and celebrity cameos tend to look more human, but the older, more authentic characters have increasingly surreal features, most notably those enormous, overlapping eyeballs. Not to mention, does anybody actually know where the Simpson hairlines stop and start?
Within all this, I say again that Homer Simpson is massive. Homer Simpson, the patriarch, the epitome of Springfield and its deformed characters, the embodiment of both our and Springfield’s worlds and the chaotic absurdity that governs them both. There are other characters in Springfield that are larger than Homer: Drederick Tatum and Rainier Wolfcastle are enormous, and Barney Gumble and Chief Wiggum are almost spherical. But these characters work within our world’s proportions: They’re body-builders, they’re obese, etc.
Homer has a perfect sphere in his abdomen that juts out as much from his back as from his stomach. He has thick limbs and he’s virtually indestructible, enduring every physical trauma that comes his way. In our world, Homer Simpson’s head would be 2-3 times larger than anyone else’s; even Springfield’s other residents don’t come close to Homer’s head-to-body ratio. Add jaundice-yellow skin and four-digit hands (three fingers and a thumb), and Homer Simpson is absolutely terrifying. (Maybe that’s why this episode always scared the hell out of me as a kid.)
There’s only one character who shares Homer’s proportions. Tellingly, it’s Springfield’s comedic demigod, Krusty the Clown. (Fans will recall that Homer even spends one episode as a Krusty impersonator: “Boss, I’m seeing double! I see four Krustys!”) In Springfield, Krusty the Clown is larger than life, an omnipresent celebrity and a figure of almost mythic proportion to kids like Bart and Lisa. We live in a similar universe, where Homer Simpson is less a character than an archetype plastered across the clothing, tchotchkes, and collective memory of the past 30 years.
So I say once again: Homer Simpson is massive. And he will likely remain massive in the years to come-- Even after the world ends.
“For Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep”: Why Hamlet Hits Different
I have to balk at protagonists like MacBeth and Richard III, these unhinged, power-hungry men who usher in their just desserts. (”Use every man after his desert and who shall ‘scape whipping?”) Richard III and Macbeth are punished for blood-lust, but Hamlet is punished for hesitation; if he were Richard III, he might have slain his uncle quickly and lived happily ever after. Of course Lady MacBeth goes insane; of course the cavalry comes for old Richie. But Hamlet has a plan: Drive Ophelia safely from the castle, kill Claudius only when he’s full of sin, return Denmark to its rightful state. Even when he sees the first actual proof of his uncle’s guilt, Hamlet escapes pirates and rushes back to Denmark-- to mope in a graveyard. Hamlet doesn’t see his life as a five-act structure. To him, life is a twisted trail that’s not always fair or linear-- it’s an actual human life.
So imagine the first jolt to his master plan, when he sees Ophelia getting buried. She was supposed to be hurt, confused, driven away, but not irretrievable. Still, he sticks with the plan. Weird, cruel Denmark: Now he’s going to sword-fight Ophelia’s grieving brother. Then his mother dies in front of him from poison in his own cup. And it emerges that he himself has minutes to live, not from an epic Henry IV/Hotspur showdown, but because an inferior swordsman has cheated. This is not MacBeth’s castle falling in a magnificent blaze that was literally foretold. This is not Richard’s final battle after everyone he’s wronged, living and dead, have caught up with him. Hamlet thought he was mid-story, and fighting Laertes was a footnote on the way to the final chapter, when the brave prince kills the usurper and lives happily ever after with his mother and lover (Gertrude and Ophelia; what did you think I meant?).
And suddenly, that’s it? Like Kafka’s Trial? Like Godot’s arrival? A ploy that feels orchestrated not by Claudius but Hamlet’s very author, forcing a random, abrupt climax like he found out the sitcom’s getting cancelled next week? And just like that, all Hamlet can hope for is Horatio mentioning him around the water cooler on Monday.
