Owed to my Romantic proclivities, the most spiritually challenging aspect to living in Los Angeles is its seasonal monotony. I am never so acutely aware of it than at this time of year, when my biorhythms, still calibrated for the East Coast after nearly two decades, anticipate the cooling of the air and coloring of the foliage. With only gentle reminders, at best, from Mother Nature of the Earth’s shifting axial tilt, a greater metric burden is placed on holidays: Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is how I make the mental transition to spring; Fourth of July reminds me summertime has commenced in earnest; Thanksgiving heralds the coming Christmas season, when those who are dear to me will be near to me once more.
In that way, holidays do more than merely mark the passage of time—anotherbirthday, another Mother’s Day, another New Year’s Eve—but in fact give the year its very structure. With the exception of August, which itself is traditionally a time for family vacations, every month has at least one official holiday that helps define it. The particular aesthetics of one over the other, from its foods to its music to its very color palette, conjures a fully immersive sensory experience all its own. Sure, we may prefer some holidays over others, or celebrate some more than others, but where would we be without them?
I guess we’d be in 2020. I don’t know about you, but the only friends I got drunk with on St. Paddy’s were Sean Penn and Gary Oldman; the only baseball games I got out to this past spring featured Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Charlie Sheen; the only beach I visited this summer was out on Amity Island. My cousin’s son turned twelve this past May, and I couldn’t help lament he wouldn’t be spending what will likely be his last summer of innocence on the streets with his friends as I did; I sent him a copy of Stephen King’s The Body so he could at least have a vicarious boyhood adventure. We’ve all made due however we must this year, “celebrating” seasonal occasions in our living rooms or backyards, clinging to the semblance of normality those traditions provide in these traumatically abnormal times.
But when the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health prohibited trick-or-treating last month, that was a bridge too far. Parents—not kids, mind you—went apeshit, and the very next day L.A. softened its position substantially, merely recommending against the time-honored practice, so cease-and-desist with the hate-tweets, please! Banning trick-or-treating was perceived as canceling Halloween—an unacceptable sacrifice in a year full of previously unthinkable compromises.
The Peanuts gang goes trick-or-treating in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” (1966)
It’s impossible to imagine my own parents, who always made the holidays special, reacting so histrionically. The first decade of my late father’s life, after all, coincided with the Great Depression; I don’t think he would’ve felt particularly sorry for us had trick-or-treating been suspended on account of a major public-health crisis. And not because he was unkind or unsympathetic, but rather because he wouldn’t have viewed it as an impediment to celebration.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Vogler’s industry-standard screenwriting instructional The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, here’s an in-depth look at why the time-honored storytelling principles it propounds are existentially endangered in our postnarrative world… and why they’re needed now more than ever.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the “monomyth”—the universal narrative patterns and Jungian psychological archetypes that provide the shape, structure, and emotional resonance of virtually every story in the Western literary canon.
As it’s more commonly known, this is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the status quo is disrupted, sending our protagonist on a perilous adventure—physically or emotionally or both—through a funhouse-mirror distortion of their everyday reality (think Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley, Dorothy in Oz) in which they encounter Mentors, Shadows, Allies, and Tricksters throughout a series of escalating challenges, culminating in a climactic test from which they finally return to the Ordinary World, ideally a bit wiser for their trouble. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to a given episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Hero’s Journey is the foundational schema of storytelling.
The stages of the Hero’s Journey
The book’s influence on the visionary young filmmakers who came of age studying it was quantum: George Lucas consciously applied Campbell’s theory to the development of Star Wars (1977), as did George Miller to Mad Max (1979), arguably transforming a pair of idiosyncratic, relatively low-budget sci-fi projects into global phenomena that are still begetting sequels over forty years later. After serving Western culture for millennia, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the Hero’s Journey became the blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster.
In the 1990s, a story analyst at Disney by the name of Christopher Vogler wrote and circulated a seven-page internal memo titled “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” a screenwriter-friendly crib sheet that was notably used in the development of The Lion King (a classic Hero’s Journey if ever there was one), evolving a few years later into a full-length book of its own: The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which was published this past summer. The nearly 500-page revised volume is partitioned into four sections:
MAPPING THE JOURNEY: Here Mr. Vogler characterizes the mythic archetypes of the Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, and Trickster.
STAGES OF THE JOURNEY: Each monomythic “beat”—The Call to Adventure, Crossing the First Threshold, Approach to the Inmost Cave, etc.—is given thorough explanation and illustration.
LOOKING BACK ON THE JOURNEY: Using the tools he teaches, Mr. Vogler provides comprehensive analyses of Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Shape of Water, and Lucas’ six-part Star Wars saga.
THE REST OF THE STORY: ADDITIONAL TOOLS FOR MASTERING THE CRAFT: The appendices are a series of essays on the history, nature, and cultural dynamics of the art and craft of storytelling. After 350 pages of practical technique, Mr. Vogler earns the privilege of indulging a bit of literary theory here, and his insights are fascinating. He devotes an entire chapter to the subject of catharsis, “comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities” (Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 4th ed. [Studio City, California: Michael Wiese Productions, 2020], 420). Stories, in that sense, are medicinal; their alchemical compounds have healing properties—more on this point later.
Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey codifies mythic structure for contemporary storytellers, demonstrating its form, function, and versatility through more accessible terminology than Campbell’s densely academic nomenclature, and by drawing on examples from cinematic touchstones familiar to all: The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Titanic, etc. Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces before it, The Writer’s Journey has become, over the last quarter century, an essential catechism, affecting not merely its own generation of scribes (including yours truly), but the successive storytelling programs that stand on its shoulders, like Save the Cat!
Comparison of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Snyder’s “beat sheet”
But why is it essential? If Campbell and Vogler and Blake Snyder have simply put different labels on narrative principles we all intuitively comprehend from thousands of years of unconscious conditioning, why study them at all? Why not simply trust those precepts are already instinctive and immediately type FADE IN at the muse’s prompting?
Because just as a doctor requires an expert’s command of gross anatomy even if no two patients are exactly constitutionally alike, and an architect is expected to possess a mastery of structural engineering though every building is different, it behooves the storyteller—be them screenwriter, novelist, playwright, what have you—to consciously understand the fundamentals of the narrative arts:
The stages of the Hero’s Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature “heroic” physical action and adventure. The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.
The way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer in unaware of them, but some knowledge of this most ancient guide to storytelling is useful in identifying problems and telling better stories. Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero’s Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable, and dependable.
ibid., 7
I’ve read and reread previous versions of The Writer’s Journey endlessly, and I take new insight from it each time: An excellent primer for aspirants, it yields yet richer dividends for experienced writers—those that can readily appreciate it vis-à-vis their own work. Though this updated edition, which includes two brand-new essays in the appendices (“What’s the Big Deal?” and “It’s All About the Vibes, Man”), was certainly sufficient reason in its own right to revisit The Writer’s Journey, I had a more compelling motivation: I wanted to see for myself how Mr. Vogler makes a case for the type of conventional story arc he extols in the face of mounting evidence of its cultural irrelevance in our postnarrative era.
Less than three months out from arguably the most important presidential election in living memory, our democracy is in deep, deep shit.
Need we recap? Commuting Roger Stone. Gassing Lafayette Square. Suppressing the vote. Sabotaging the Postal Service. Floating the postponement—and actively undermining the credibility—of the November election. Sending federal agents to detain (read: abduct) protestors in Portland. And that’s just a topline best-of-Trump-2020 compilation.
This is America?
Let’s face it: The spirit of nihilism that animates MAGA was never about making America great again so much as it was burning the Republic to the ground. That’s what Trump’s supporters really voted for in 2016, and it’s the one big (if never quite explicit) campaign promise he might actually deliver on: reifying the very American carnage he once claimed exclusive qualification to redress. To wit: The nightly news plays like an apocalyptic bookend to the rousing founding-of-America story told in Hamilton.
Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Hamilton”
While Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary masterpiece certainly challenges us to appreciate anew the value and purpose of democracy—a timely reminder if ever there was one—it somewhat less conspicuously does the same for an equally imperiled institution: narrative itself.
Hamilton has been described by its creator as “a story about America then, told by America now” (Edward Delman, “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Shapes History,”The Atlantic, September 29, 2015). But if the musical’s creative approach to its subject matter is unorthodox, its narrative structure is very much a conventional hero’s journey. (For my Save the Cat! scholars, it’s a “Real-Life Superhero” tale, and not, as some “experts” would have you believe, Golden Fleece.) The power in and of narrative is a central preoccupation of Hamilton; the show literally opens with a dramatic question posed to the audience:
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
Alexander Hamilton is a man who imagines—who writes—his way out of poverty, and, in turn, “rewrote the game,” by “Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom”—meaning, the institutionalized “divine right of kings” narrative.
Batman Forever and The Lost Boys director Joel Schumacher died on Monday, June 22, at the age of eighty after a yearlong battle with cancer. In an industry where branding is sacrosanct, his brand, as it were, was his steadfast refusal to be artistically pigeonholed: Hit-and-miss though his track record may be, he was a rare breed of filmmaker who worked in virtually every genre, from comedy (D.C. Cab; Bad Company) to drama (Cousins; Dying Young) to sci-fi/horror (Flatliners; Blood Creek) to crime thriller (Falling Down, 8mm) to legal thriller (The Client, A Time to Kill) to musical (The Phantom of the Opera). His filmography is as winding and unconventional as was his path to commercial success:
Schumacher was born in New York City in 1939 and studied design at Parsons and the Fashion Institute of Technology. . . .
When Schumacher eventually left fashion for Hollywood, he put his original trade to good use, designing costumes for various films throughout the Seventies. . . . He also started writing screenplays during this time, including the hit 1976 comedy Car Wash and the 1978 adaptation of the musical The Wiz.
In 1981, Schumacher made his directorial debut with, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a sci-fi comedy twist on Richard Matheson’s 1959 novel, The Shrinking Man, starring Lily Tomlin. Fitting the pattern that would define his career, the film was a financial success but a flop with critics. . . .
Schumacher’s true breakout came a few years later in 1985, when he wrote and directed St. Elmo’s Fire, the classic post-grad flick with the Brat Pack cast, including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore and Judd Nelson. Two years later, he wrote and directed The Lost Boys, a film about a group of teen vampires that marked the first film to star both Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, effectively launching the heartthrob duo known as “the Coreys.”
Though Schumacher did not write The Lost Boys (1987) as the Rolling Stone piece erroneously asserts (the screenplay is credited to Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam), neither his creative imprint on the project nor the cultural impact of the movie itself can in any way be overstated. Sure, teenage vampires may be a dime-a-dozen cottage industry now, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight to The Vampire Diaries, but if you happened to grow up on any of those Millennial staples, it’s worth knowing that pubescent bloodsuckers had never really been done prior to The Lost Boys—no, that celebrated iteration of the vampire’s pop-cultural evolution is entirely owed to the pioneering vision of Joel Schumacher.
Late filmmaker Joel Schumacher; photo by Gabriella Meros/Shutterstock, 2003 (498867t)
When Richard Donner left the project to direct Lethal Weapon instead, the script Schumacher inherited was essentially “The Goonies… with vampires.” By aging up the characters from preteens to hormonal adolescents, Schumacher saw a creative opportunity to do something scarier—and sexier. A cult classic was thusly born, and though The Lost Boys itself never became a franchise (save a pair of direct-to-video sequels two decades later, and the less said about them, the better), its fingerprints are all over the subgenre it begat. We owe Schumacher a cultural debt for that.
Kiefer Sutherland’s David (second from left) leads a gang of teenage vampires in “The Lost Boys”
And I owe him a personal debt. Over any other formative influence, The Lost Boys is directly and demonstrably responsible for my decision to study filmmaking in college and then to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood. More than simply my professional trajectory, in point of fact, my very creative sensibilities were indelibly forged by that film: The untold scripts and novels I’ve written over the past quarter century have almost exclusively been tales of the supernatural with a strong sense of both humor and setting—the very qualities The Lost Boys embodies so masterfully and memorably. All of that can be traced to the summer of 1994.
The very day I published my previous post, George Floyd was murdered by four Minneapolis police officers, sparking a series of nationwide—even worldwide—protests against police brutality and systemic racism.
Like many other industries, entertainment companies have issued statements of support for the protests against racism and police brutality now filling America’s streets. But there’s something Hollywood can do to put its money where its social media posts are: immediately halt production on cop shows and movies and rethink the stories it tells about policing in America.
For a century, Hollywood has been collaborating with police departments, telling stories that whitewash police shootings and valorizing an action-hero style of policing over the harder, less dramatic work of building relationships with the communities cops are meant to serve and protect. There’s a reason for that beyond a reactionary streak hiding below the industry’s surface liberalism. Purely from a dramatic perspective, crime makes a story seem consequential, investigating crime generates action, and solving crime provides for a morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion.
The result is an addiction to stories that portray police departments as more effective than they actually are; crime as more prevalent than it actually is; and police use of force as consistently justified. There are always gaps between reality and fiction, but given what policing in America has too often become, Hollywood’s version of it looks less like fantasy and more like complicity. . . .
. . . If the entertainment industry truly believes change can no longer wait, it should start with its own storytelling.
It would be altogether impossible to quantify the hours my best friends and I—all Irish boys from the Bronx—spent in our youth delighting to the madcap mayhem of cop movies like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, and how Beverly Hills Cop inspired us to fast-talk our way into all sorts of places we weren’t supposed to be, like the time outside the Cloisters we opportunistically insinuated ourselves into a school field trip—not from our junior high, that’s for damn sure—and got a tour of the museum and a free lunch for our efforts, or when, disguised as Boy Scouts, we sold candy under false pretenses in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria.
For the past three decades, we’ve kept spouses and colleagues in stitches with those anecdotes, and yet it’s only dawned on me over the last three weeks the reason we got away with any of that shit was owed far less to our cleverness than our color. Those juvenile adventures, energized by movies that trafficked in a worldview whereby (mostly) white men with badges were free to act without even the smallest measure of accountability, were an ethnic privilege I’ve spent my entire life taking for granted. I am the exact same age—less than one month younger—as the police officer directly culpable for the death of George Floyd.
Given this blog’s ongoing conversation about moral imagination in storytelling—and the responsibility of writers to interrogate the narratives we have long cherished—I thought it was worth chronicling how the police have been portrayed in our popular entertainment over the last century, how those portrayals have influenced public perception and supported real-world systemic dysfunction, and how storytellers can be part of the necessary reform by rehabilitating our own reliance on lazy, even dangerous, tropes—particularly that of the “hero detective.”
Gary Cooper in “High Noon” (1952)
For the first half of the twentieth century, the Western was the genre through which we mythologized the American project, and the gunfighter (typically a nomadic cowboy, a lawman, an outlaw, or any combination thereof) was the archetypal hero of such stories, whose spirit of rugged, can-do individualism and courageous code of honor made him the perfect—and often but not always reluctant—agent of “frontier justice.” We’re a country founded on rebellion, after all, and we love our rebels—or antiheroes, as we call them in fiction.
But with the rise of organized crime during Prohibition and the ensuing poverty of the Depression, the relative moral simplicity of the open range gave way to the ethical complexity of the enclosed alleyways of our teeming metropolises. The hardboiled fiction of Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler presented “a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a holdup in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the holdup men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge” (Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay,” The Simple Art of Murder [New York: Vintage Books, August 1988], 17).
Accordingly, new kind of (anti)hero was needed, one uniquely suited to such labyrinthine urban intrigue:
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
ibid., 18
This distinctly American gumshoe differed appreciably from the preternaturally eidetic detectives of the Old World, like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot: “Outwardly composed, but inwardly disheveled—like some bruised, tarnished variation on the folkloric All-American hero—his life, like that of most screen sleuths, is essentially a solitary one, as befits a hired snooper parrying the resentment of those in whose lives he necessarily interferes” (Al Clark, Raymond Chandler in Hollywood [Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1996], 13). Unlike their European forebears, hardboiled detectives such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (both notably played by Humphrey Bogart) did not serve as hired consultants for the local police, but rather worked around them, far too “insubordinate” for institutional law enforcement. This uniquely American iteration of the detective was decidedly, even proudly, an outsider—a rebel; an antihero.
A strange question, I’ll concede, to emerge from an impassioned conversation about the transformative systemic overhauls required to our energy policy, our health care, and our economic ideology in the wake of the coronavirus—
—because what could the cartoon villain from the Avengers movies possibly have to do with any of that?
The answer, frustratingly, is: More than you may realize.
During a recent online confab with the leadership team of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project, the discussion drifted momentarily from existential matters to televisional ones: What’s everybody been binge-watching?
Now, anyone who knows me—in person or through this blog—is peripherally aware of my immedicable disdain for movies and television. Yet… with no baseball this spring to occupy my time, I’ve been reluctantly compelled to sample quite a bit of scripted media to which I’d have otherwise turned up a nose. And, to my surprise, I find myself excited to share a handful of programming that, in my view, embodies creativity with a conscience. (We’ll get to those coveted endorsements shortly.)
The cast of “Schitt’s Creek” (2015–2020)
To that end, one of our Climate Reality Leaders recommended Schitt’s Creek: “The evolution of the self-absorbed yet well-meaning characters as they deal with the adversity that helps them discover what it really means to love is quite endearing,” my colleague said, “and I believe has left an impact on many who are out there now hoping for the world to refashion itself in that way.”
Schitt’s Creek is one of those shows that got away from me in our era of Peak TV, but I second the motion for more prescriptive fiction that both challenges us to be better—individually and collectively—as well as provides a model to do so. Hard as this may be to fathom for those born into a postnarrative world, but our popular entertainments used to reliably perform that public service. To wit: Earlier this month, this unflinching indictment of white privilege from a 1977 episode of Little House on the Prairie resurfaced on Twitter to considerable gape-mouthed astonishment:
Art as expression –
Not as market campaigns
Will still capture our imaginations
Given the same
State of integrity
It will surely help us along
Talk about advice unheeded. Consequently, our commercial entertainment is often embedded—however unconsciously—with culturally pernicious values, from glorifying vigilante justice (superhero sagas; revenge thrillers), to undermining trust in public institutions (the self-serving White Houses of Scandal and House of Cards were a far cry from the empathetic Bartlet administration), to romanticizing criminal sociopathy (the street-racing “rebels” of Fast & Furious) and—bonus!—thereby validating a mindset in which “environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal” (robin, “The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road,”Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment [blog], September 20, 2019)
March? Please! I’ve been in self-isolation since January.
No, I was not clairvoyantly alerted to the impending coronavirus pandemic; only our dear leader can claim that pansophic distinction. Rather, my wife started a new job at the beginning of the year, necessitating a commute, thereby leaving me carless. (Voluntarily carless, I should stipulate: I refuse to be a two-vehicle household; as it is, this congenital city kid, certified tree-hugger, and avowed minimalist owns one car under protest.)
My obstinance, however, comes at a cost: I don’t live within convenient walking distance of anything save a Chevron station (the irony of which is only so amusing), so while the missus is at work, I’m effectively immobilized. I got nowhere to go… save the home office opposite my bedroom. Thusly, I made a conscious decision at the start of the year to embrace my newfound confinement as a creative opportunity—to spend the entirety of winter devoted all but exclusively to breaking the back of my new novel. I kept my socializing and climate activism to a minimum during this period, submitting to the kind of regimented hourly schedule I haven’t known since my college days.
Johnny Depp in creative self-isolation in “Secret Window” (2004), from Stephen King’s novella
Before long, my period of self-imposed artistic self-isolation was yielding measurable results, and I’d been looking forward to emerging from social exile. The week I’d earmarked for my “coming-out party”? You guessed it: The Ides of March.
I instead spent St. Paddy’s week mostly reeling, knocked sideways—as I imagine many were—by the speed and scale at which this crisis ballooned. But in the days that followed, I resolved to compartmentalize—to get back to work. I still had my codified daily routine, after all, which required a few adjustments and allowances under the new circumstances, and I had a project completely outlined and ready to “go to pages.” So, that’s what I turned to.
And in short order, I’d produced the first two chapters, which, for me, are always the hardest to write, because I have no narrative momentum to work with as I do in later scenes. You open a blank Scrivener document, and—BOOM!—all your careful planning and plotting, your meticulously considered character arcs and cerebral theme work? It ain’t worth shit at that ex nihilo instant. You may’ve built the world, but how do you get into it? Writing that first sentence, that first paragraph, that first scene, that first chapter is like feeling your way around in the dark. (Fittingly, my first chapter is literally about three guys finding their way through a forest path in the pitch black of night.)
“Going to pages” turned out to be just the intellectual occupation I needed to quell my anxiety, to give me a reprieve from our present reality. And now that I’ve got story momentum, slipping into the world of my fiction every morning is as easy as flicking on the television. For the three or four hours a day I withdraw to my personal paracosm, I’m not thinking about anything other than those characters and their problems. As such, I’ve thus far sat out this crisis in my study, trafficking in my daydreams to pass the time; I’m not treating patients, or bagging groceries, or delivering packages, or working the supply chain, or performing any of the vital services upholding our fragile social order. Instead, I’m playing make-believe.
Self-isolation didn’t serve Stephen King’s Jack Torrance particularly well in “The Shining”
It wasn’t long ago—Christmas, in fact—I’d issued an earnest, hopeful plea that in the year to come we might all forsake our comforting fictions, our private parallel dimensions, in favor of consciously reconnecting with our shared nonfictional universe. And now here many of us find ourselves, banished from the streets, from the company of others, confined by ex officio decree to our own hermetic bubbles—as of this writing, 97% of the world is under stay-at-home orders—with nowhere to retreat but our escapist fantasies. I’ve been reliant upon them, too—even grateful for them.
And that got me thinking about Stephen King’s Misery. As masterful, and faithful in plotting, as Rob Reiner’s movie adaptation (working from a screenplay by William Goldman) is to King’s book, the theme—the entire point of the narrative—gets completely lost in translation. This is a story about addiction, as only King could tell it: It’s about how drugs (in this case, prescription-grade painkillers) help us cope with misery, but it’s also about how art can be an addictive—and redemptive—coping mechanism, as well; how it can turn misery into a kind of beauty, especially for the artist himself.
Editor’s note: “Some Assembly Required” was written and scheduled to post prior to COVID-19’s formal classification as a global pandemic and the ensuing social disruption it has caused here in the United States and around the world; in light of that, a thesis about storytelling craft seems to me somewhat inconsequential and irrelevant.
More broadly, however, the essay makes a case for slowing down, something we’re all doing out of admittedly unwelcome necessity at present, and learning to value the intellectual dividends of thoughtful rumination over the emotional gratification of kneejerk reaction; as such, I submit “Some Assembly Required”as planned—along with my best wishes to all for steadfast health and spirits through this crisis.
Castle Grayskull. The Cobra Terror Drome. The Batcave. I didn’t have every 1980s action-figure playset, but, man, how I cherished the ones I got. In those days of innocence, there was no visceral thrill quite like waking up to an oversized box under the Christmas tree, tearing off the wrapping to find this:
I had one just like it!
Or this:
Optimus Prime was both an action figure AND a playset! Didn’t have him, alas…
Or this:
The seven-foot G.I. Joe aircraft carrier! DEFINITELY didn’t have this one…
Oh, the possibilities! Getting one of those glorious playsets was like being handed the keys to a magical kingdom of one’s very own. After having been inspired by the adventures of G.I. Joe and the Transformers and the Ghostbusters at the movies, on their cartoon series, and in comics, now you had your very own “backlot” to stage your personal daydreams. It was grand.
Getting a new playset as a kid and a starting a new writing project as an adult share arguably the same three developmental phases. The first is what I call Think about What You Might like for Christmas. This is the stage when you experiment noncommittally with ideas, get a sense of what excites you, what takes hold of your imagination—maybe talk it over with friends—and then envision what it will look like. Selling yourself on a new story idea, deciding it’s worth the intensive time and energy required to bring it to fruition, is much the same as furnishing your parents with a carefully considered wish list: You’re cashing in your biannual Golden Ticket on this. It’s a period of escalating anticipation, and of promise. The “thing” isn’t real yet—it’s still a nebulous notion, not a tangible commodity—but it will be…
Stage two is Some Assembly Required: This is the recognition that your personal paracosm doesn’t come ready-to-play out of the box. You’ll need to snap the pieces in place, apply the decals; you need to give the forum structure first. To use another analogy: You don’t start decorating a Christmas tree that’s been arranged askance in its stand. (More on Some Assembly Required in a minute.)
Stage three: It’s Playtime! You’ve done the hard, preparatory work of building your imaginary realm, and now you get to experience the pure joy of writing—to have fun, in other words, with your new toys.
Word arrived as announcements of death often do: suddenly; stealthily. It hadn’t yet begun trending—or perhaps I wasn’t keyed into Twitter at that precise moment; either way, I was at least spared the impersonal shock of viral notification. My wife, working at the other end of our home, tenderly and sympathetically broke the sad news: Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist for the Canadian prog-rock band Rush, had died. He was 67 years old.
Peart’s death from glioblastoma on January 7 so stunned me not strictly on account of the closely guarded secrecy of his three-and-a-half-year battle with the illness, but because, to my mind, the rockers who came to prominence in the sixties and seventies—the ones who scored the soundtrack of my youth—tend to follow a reliably predictable pattern with respect to their mortality: They seem to either die tragically young (Keith Moon, Bon Scott) or, alternatively, not at all (witness, for instance, the numinous constitutional resilience of Keith Richards and Eddie Van Halen). But at 67? To brain cancer? However naïve it was, especially at my age, I’d come to regard Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart the way a child views his parents: uncannily exempt from illness or death.
Alex Lifeson, Neil Peart, and Geddy Lee of Rush arrive at the 28th Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on April 18, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)
Peart joined Rush in 1974 as replacement for debut-album drummer John Rutsey, and, despite his steadfast position in the power trio over the next four decades, was lovingly and perennially referred to as “the new guy” by Lee and Lifeson. He was also commonly known as “the Professor,” owed to his refined vocabulary and uncommon book smarts; indeed, his early lyrics are heavily influenced by literature, particularly science fiction and fantasy, and philosophy, notably the Objectivist (and controversial) views of Ayn Rand. On their own, Peart’s particular ideological passions and penchant for mythic tropes made for some atypical songwriting, but it was his instinct for linear narrativity, the Campbellian hero’s journey structure of his compositions, that, to my view, helped the band—heavily (and justifiably) criticized at that point as being too baldly derivative of Led Zeppelin—establish a singular musical and aesthetic identity.
Consider Rush’s breakout concept LP 2112 (1976), which depicts a futuristic society in which creativity has been outlawed by a totalitarian priesthood, and the idealistic hero with an ancient “weapon”—a guitar—who leads a revolution through music; filmmaker George Lucas was exploring similar themes at that same time in THX 1138 (1971) and even Star Wars (1977). Or “Red Barchetta” (1981), about a boy’s countryside car chase in an indeterminate future where such high-performance dragsters are prohibited. (Sensing a motif here?) And, of course, the band’s swan song, Clockwork Angels (2012), an album-length steampunk adventure about a young man who sets out into a world of alchemy and anarchy, presided over by a mysterious figure known only as the Watchmaker, which draws inspiration “from the likes of Voltaire, Michael Ondaatje, John Barth, Cormac McCarthy, and Daphne du Maurier” (Martin Popoff, Rush: The Illustrated History, [Voyageur Press: Minneapolis, 2013], 172).
Even absent an explicit narrative through-line, though, Rush’s albums are almost invariably constructed around a unifying subject or theme, be it fate (Roll the Bones), love (Counterparts), communication in the Information Age (Test for Echo), religious fanaticism (Snakes & Arrows); one can even reasonably glean the nature of the content from the title alone. Explains Peart:
In many of our albums that seem to be disparate songs, I’ve got a bone in my teeth, or my preoccupations at the time tend to come out. In the 1980s, both Hold Your Fire and Power Windows emerged with a pretty strong theme running between them that I hadn’t even considered . . . What I’ve learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal—or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.
As an angst-ridden teenager, I depended on hard rock—I’m certain you can relate—for the healthy emotional outlet it provided, but I never expected (or thought I needed) it to challenge me intellectually. And as a student getting his first intoxicating taste of literary criticism—learning to decipher subtext and recognize motifs in the fiction of Salinger and Forster, the dramas of Beckett and Pinter, the cinema of Eisenstein and Welles—the music of Rush yielded dividends each time I revisited it; there was always a previously overlooked cultural reference to catch, philosophical notion to ponder, poetic turn of phrase to appreciate, insight to reap.
That thrill of discovery in Rush’s music continues to this day: The more classical art and literature and philosophy I’m continually exposed to, the more of it I recognize, with a self-reprimanding slap to the forehead, in Neil Peart’s lyrics. (How well-read was he?) His songs are intellectual treasuries: They offer a different experience each time one hears them; they even mean something different at different periods in one’s life. Such is the reason why I’ve never moved on from Rush as I have so many other transitory interests; even now, at midlife, I’ve never ceased growing up with them. The band’s music—their twenty studio recordings and umpteen live albums—never take me back to the days of yore the way, say, Guns N’ Roses’ or Temple of the Dog’s might, but rather push me forward. Well, hell—I suppose that’s why they call it progressive rock.
“The good news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable,” Penn State climate scientist Michael E. Mann said recently. “The bad news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable.” Over the two decades preceding Dr. Mann’s good-news/bad-news pronouncement, when what reasonably seemed like a dire existential threat wasn’t quite getting the public attention it arguably merited (on account of, we later learned, orchestrated misinformation campaigns by Exxon and others), I was doing whatever I thought I could for the cause: swapping out my lightbulbs, carrying reusable grocery bags, voluntarily opting for a greater percentage of renewable energy sources from my local utility. And I looked to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, having voted for him in 2000 and been inspired anew by An Inconvenient Truth, for direction—and certainly for hope.
So, when I decided to do more than simply recycle and make the occasional donation to a green group—when I sought to become an environmental activist—I knew instantly the organization I wanted to join: Vice President Gore’s Climate Reality Project. I applied to the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, and was trained by Mr. Gore in 2018.
Since that time, I’ve had no shortage of opportunities to participate in climate rallies hundreds of thousands strong (in Downtown L.A. and New York), take meetings with elected officials (also in both L.A. and New York), give public presentations, and directly help to bring U.S. counties—including our most populous—into the County Climate Coalition, a nationwide alliance of jurisdictions committed to upholding the standards of the Paris Accord. The Climate Reality Leadership Corps has opened a world of opportunities—of hope—for me.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (Paramount Pictures)
And along the way something unexpected began to happen: Just as I had looked to Mr. Gore for hope—and still do—people in my life started looking to me for reasons to be hopeful. They’ve seen the coverage of climate change–caused catastrophes that have been (at long last) dominating the headlines, heard repeatedly about something called a “Green New Deal,” and—right here in L.A.—choked on the acrid, ember-speckled smoke literally right outside their front door. Friends and relatives have contacted me asking what can be done about climate change (a lot), or where they might move to avoid the worst effects of it (alas, we are all in the sacrifice zone now), and—most tellingly—if there’s any cause left for optimism on this crisis.
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