Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

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Age of Innocence: On the Bygone Pleasure of Being City Kids

February 28, 2019 / / 24 Comments

Contrary to common misconception, city kids do indeed have backyards.  We even had a name for ours:  New York.

My little grade-school gang and I enjoyed a free-range childhood we exploited with an adventurous spirit influenced in equal measure by the intrepid curiosity of Indiana Jones and the gleeful tricksterism of Axel Foley.  We discovered secret subbasements hidden in the cobwebbed bowels of the Bronx’s mammoth apartment complexes.  We explored the abandoned housing/condominium developments commissioned during the 1980s building boom then subsequently left to rot and ruin after the ’87 Wall Street crash.  We scaled the vertiginous understructure of the Henry Hudson Bridge.  We even dressed up as Boy Scouts and sold candy in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria.  (Karmically, we never got to spend our ill-gotten gains.  Of our quartet, we selected the guy whose mother was least likely to find the cash—we made over $70 in profit, an astronomical sum for four kids in 1990 who couldn’t afford a slice of pizza between them—and stashed it at his place.  She found it anyway, though, and blew it on booze.)

There’s so much I could say about those days, but I could in no way express my sentiments more truthfully or concisely than Stephen King’s plainspoken summation from The Body:  “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.  Jesus, did you?”

It didn’t take age and perspective to recognize how special our fellowship was—I knew that and cherished it even then—but I can’t say I fully appreciated just how lucky we were to have the Biggest City in the World as our personal playground until I’d lived elsewhere.  Take my home of the past seventeen years:  L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, population 1.77 million.  Every square block of it (that isn’t a strip mall) looks exactly like this:

No hidden facets.  No winding streets or towering edifices, no sidewalk cellar doors or obscured alleyways promising adventure to those willing to probe parts unseen.  Hell, by this vantage, the Valley doesn’t look much different from a Monopoly board, with all its identical houses tidily arranged side by side on rectangular lots.  Maybe it’s shamefully condescending of me, but I feel sorry for kids who have to grow up here.  What about the above inspires or invites exploration the way New York does?

Or should I perhaps say did?  It’s possible, upon recent observation, that culture is irreversibly changing.

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Well, There’s Bad News and Good News: On Matters of Human Extinction

January 29, 2019 / / 10 Comments

In a piece that appeared in last month’s New York Times online philosophy blog—plainly titled “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?”—Todd May explores the existential question of whether the inherent and singular value human beings possess as an intelligent species, through our scientific and intellectual and creative pursuits, is worth the immense anguish our practices inflict on the nonhuman animals with which we share this planet:

“To make that case, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial.  Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it.  This is happening through at least three means.  First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies.  Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact.  Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways.  There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon.  Quite the opposite. . . .

. . . But there is more to the story.  Human beings bring things to the planet that other animals cannot.  For example, we bring an advanced level of reason that can experience wonder at the world in a way that is foreign to most if not all other animals.  We create art of various kinds:  literature, music and painting among them.  We engage in sciences that seek to understand the universe and our place in it. . . .

. . . We appreciate and often participate in such practices because we believe they are good to be involved in, because we find them to be worthwhile.  It is the goodness of the practices and the experiences that draw us.  Therefore, it would be a loss to the world if those practices and experiences ceased to exist.”

Todd May, “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?,” The Stone, New York Times, December 17, 2018

On the abstraction of extinction, I take something of a prostrative view:  It seems to me the natural world has a way of deciding for itself who ought to be here and when it’s time for them to go; at some point, after all, it concluded the dinosaurs had overstayed their welcome, and with the brute efficiency of an asteroid strike, put them on a path to annihilation.  There’s something perversely liberating—and by extension even comforting—about the question of our own existence being out of our control.

Credit and © sdecoret – Fotolia

But… that’s not what’s happening here at the dawn of the Anthropocene, is it?  It’s the very practices we engage in—our project of civilization itself—that has brought on the existential crises we now confront.  Since this blog often examines its subjects narratively, this citation seems apt:

“In many dramatic tragedies, the suffering of the protagonist is brought about through his or her own actions.  It is Oedipus’s killing of his father that starts the train of events that leads to his tragic realization; and it is Lear’s highhandedness toward his daughter Cordelia that leads to his demise.  It may also turn out that it is through our own actions that we human beings bring about our extinction, or at least something near it, contributing through our practices to our own tragic end.”

ibid.

Climate change—at least this epochal instance of it—is the (admittedly unintended) consequence of our own Industrial Age–conditioned behaviors, rather than that of some naturally occurring planetary phenomenon.  Far from a cyclical geological inevitability, like, say, an ice age, we’re doing this to ourselves, outside the governing purview—or otherwise unimpeded design—of nature.

Or are we?

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Maybe It’s Time: Here’s to Making 2019 the First Official Year of the 21st Century

December 28, 2018 / / 28 Comments

“Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.”  How ironically apropos that in a world led by a reality-show president, where facts are subjective and everything from our energy sources to our economic policies to our pop culture are the antiquated vestiges of a previous century, that a lyric by a fictitious rock star from a remake of a remake of a remake of a movie from 1937 should emerge as the perfect, hopeful mantra of an impending (if belated) new millennial era.  I propose officially adopting it as such; it might make what comes next a little easier to accept for those of us still clinging nostalgically to the 1950s (Baby boomers) and the 1980s (Gen X).

If you belong to one of those analog generations—I’m an Xer myself—and you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of working with a Millennial, you know their nonlinear minds interpret the world in an entirely different manner than those that came before them.  The first wave arrived in the workforce a decade ago, expecting a seat at the table before they’d earned one, demanding their voices be heard before their opinions were informed by practical experience.  Their operating philosophy seemed to be:  Yeah, but just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it… this way.  In their view, the arduous, incremental, straight-line path of our institutionalized practices and protocols didn’t square with their hyperlinked grasp of our new Digital Age reality.  Thusly, conventional (read:  linear) thinking was to be openly challenged, not obediently emulated.

Like many of my fellow Xers that came up the hard way—those of us that knew our place, paid our dues (there’s that pesky sense of linearity again), never assumed we had all the answers—that worldview has often left me bewildered at best, infuriated at worst.  And the sense of entitlement so endemic to Millennials is only compounded by their corresponding characteristic of impatience:

“They’ve grown up in a world of instant gratification.  You want to buy something—you go on Amazon, it arrives the next day.  You want to watch a movie?  Log on and watch a movie—you don’t check movie times.  You want to watch a TV show?  Binge!  You don’t even have to wait week to week to week.  Right?  I know people who skip seasons just so they can binge at the end of the season.  Right?  Instant gratification.”

Simon Sinek, “Simon Sinek,” Inside Quest with Tom Bilyeu, August 7, 2016

Now, to a middle-aged generation still trying (without success) to take the seat at the head of the table from the unyielding occupancy of the Boomers, the Millennials’ impulse—their self-ordained imperative—to grab the wheel and make “meaningful impact” is their most vexing attribute.

And—Christ help me for saying this—it just might change everything for the better.

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“Almost” Doesn’t Count: On Trying and Losing (Repeat as Needed)

November 28, 2018 / / 26 Comments

In the event you don’t keep track of these things, the Los Angeles Dodgers lost the World Series last month, four games to one, to the Boston Red Sox.  It was both the Dodgers’ second consecutive World Series appearance and defeat.  From the point of view of many a long-suffering fan here in L.A., collapsing yet again mere inches from the finish line amounts to nothing more than another season-long strikeout, a yearlong exercise in futility, a squandered investment of time and emotional support.  “This is where baseball breaks your heart,” someone said to me in the waning days of the season.  To be sure, I share the sentiment:  It’s hard as hell to get so frustratingly close to the Golden Ring only to go home empty-handed.  A miss is as good as a mile, after all.  Close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades.  “Almost” doesn’t count.

As recently as a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known, much less cared, who won or lost this Series—or even who played in it.  I came to baseball relatively late in life—around forty—as I recounted in “Spring Fever,” the gist of which was this:  For whatever reason, neither I nor any of my boyhood pals were born with the “sports gene.”  We were all pop-culture fanatics, more likely to be found at the local comic shop than Little League field.  When we saw the Bronx Bombers play the Indians at Yankee Stadium in 1986, none of us knew what the hell to make of that abstract experience; when we watched them face-off again in David S. Ward’s Major League in 1989, in the context of a Cinderella narrative, suddenly the rivalry had meaning.  We loved movies and comics; sports we simply had no use for.

A few years later, I found myself formally studying comics (under legendary Batman artist and DC Comics editor Carmine Infantino) and cinema (in college) in preparation for making a career in those fields.  What they don’t tell you in school, though, is that when you turn your passions into your profession, you often do so at the expense of the joy you once took in those pastimes.  Worse still, so many of the things that directly inspired me to be a screenwriter, from Star Wars to superheroes, I eventually grew to disdain.  And what Dodgers baseball restored in me, outside my conscious awareness as it was happening, was the innocent pleasure of being a fan of something again; it’s been a welcome, even analeptic, reprieve from the tyranny of passion.

Game 2 of the 2018 World Series

The Dodgers’ reentry into the World Series this fall, and the collective hope it kindled of their first world-championship win in precisely three decades, coincided with a sobering anniversary of my own:  It’s been exactly twenty years—October of 1998—since I signed with my first literary manager off a screenplay I’d written called BONE ORCHARD.  It occurs to me only now, as I type this, that the project was something of a creative precursor to Escape from Rikers Island, trafficking in many of the same themes and concepts:  an urban island left to rot and ruin, overrun with supernatural savages (demons, not zombies), with a neo–hardboiled detective at the center of the action.  (I’d studied Raymond Chandler in college and have since been heavily influenced by his fiction.)

Anyway, there I was, twenty-two years old and only a few months out of school, and everything was unfolding right on schedule.  The script would be taken to the spec marketplace and I would soon join the ranks of working screenwriters.  You study for a career in the arts, and you get one—simple as that.

Christ, if only.  BONE ORCHARD didn’t sell.  And while I was halfway through writing my follow-up, the management company repping me shuttered.  Young and naïve though I was, I nonetheless intuited I wasn’t likely to move the needle on my screenwriting career in New York—an ambition I was resolute about fulfilling—so I left the comforts of home behind for Los Angeles.

When you first arrive in Hollywood, good luck getting anyone with even a modicum of clout to give you the time of day.  Not gonna happen.  What you do—and what I did—is seek out aspiring filmmakers at the same level and pool resources.  In addition to screenwriting, I’d had experience as a film and video editor, so I started cutting USC thesis shorts pro bono.  Within a year or two, I’d established a circle of friends and colleagues, all in our twenties, who were collaborating on “portfolio projects.”  I was editing by day and writing by night, hoping to network my way to new representation—an objective that would, to my slowly percolating astonishment, take another half-dozen years to realize.

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Dreaming Dreams and Seeing Apparitions: On Writing Horror and Fighting Climate Change

October 30, 2018 / / 26 Comments

It certainly occurred to me, ahead of last month’s post, that the blog’s left turn into environmentalism might’ve whiplashed those expecting the customary deep dive into craft or culture.  As part of our training as Climate Reality Leaders, we’re asked to reflect on our personal climate stories—the origins of our interest in the movement—something I’ve invested no small amount of time doing this past month.  To that end, it dawned on me that the very same formative circumstances inspired both my passion for horror fiction and climate activism; they are not unrelated callings but very much part and parcel.

It was at the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, my old stomping ground, where many of my first boyhood adventures were undertaken.  My friends and I would scale the towering steel foundational girders of the Henry Hudson Bridge as high as we could climb.  We’d cross Spuyten Duyvil Creek by way of the century-old railroad swing bridge to explore the Indian caves in the vast, lush expanse of Inwood Hill Park at the northernmost tip of Manhattan.  (Incidentally, those caves feature prominently in the 2003 historical fantasy Forever, Pete Hamill’s centuries-spanning ode to Gotham.  Great novel.)

On weekends, my parents would drive us up the Hudson Valley—to Sleepy Hollow or Nyack or Bear Mountain—which was a particularly spellbinding delight this time of year.  It’s a truly magical region that in many respects looks just the same as it did to the Dutch explorers who first arrived in the early seventeenth century—and, more to the point, the Lenape Indians who called the valley their home for a dozen millennia before that.  For the conservation of this land, you can thank—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—J. P. Morgan.

And not just him—George Walbridge Perkins and John D. Rockefeller, too.  Owed in part to the efforts of these forward-thinking businessmen-philanthropists at the turn of the twentieth century, much of the woodlands on the banks of the Hudson was spared from development, as were the Palisades, the magnificent cliffs along the west side of the river.  Consider it:  These capitalists preserved the natural harmony of the Lower Hudson Valley from the ravages of capitalism itself; on account of their preemptive actions, much of it remains to this day virgin forest to be (re)discovered by successive generations.

The woodlands just blocks from where I grew up in the Bronx (photo credit: Sean Carlin, 29 December 2012)

As a writer of supernatural fiction who continues to draw inspiration from this region—virtually all my stories are set there—I walk in the footsteps of literary giants.  Two of the first American authors—horror authors, no less—lived in the area and wrote about it:  Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe.  Savor the way Irving lets this “region of shadows,” pregnant with manes, cast a spell over his receptive imagination in the Halloween classic “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: Continue reading

Living Here in “Allen Town”: The Fight to End Oil Drilling in Los Angeles

September 30, 2018 / / 17 Comments

In the previous post, I addressed recent efforts to emerge from the comfort of my social cocoon and rejoin the human race.  As such, I trained this past summer to be part of the Leadership Corps of the Climate Reality Project, a group of 17,000-plus social and environmental activists who’ve organized to communicate the stories of climate change and inspire urgency to act on this existential crisis.

To that end, I will on occasion be utilizing this blog—which has been from Day One a venue to promote the many forms and functions of storytelling—to talk about matters relating to the climate crisis with the same intellectual curiosity and comprehensive examination as my posts on craft, pop culture, and personal experiences.

I realize this is a subject that tends to provoke either denial or despair, but I have found that the more I learn about it, the more empowered I feel to effect change—and empowerment is the antidote to doomism.

Show of hands:  How many out there are aware that on September 8, organized Rise for Climate rallies were held in ninety-five different countries, on seven different continents, in a grassroots effort to compel a dramatic, immediate, and legislatively mandated transition away from fossil fuels?

Probably not many of you—am I right?  Lay some blame for that on the media.  Even though the nightly news, to hear Al Gore accurately describe it, has become “like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” coverage of this past summer’s worldwide extreme weather—the record-breaking heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires, for instance—barely if ever connects it, even if only suggestively and nondefinitively, with human-caused climate change.  Such willful denial—known as climate silence—can no longer continue:  Mother Nature is now refusing to be ignored, and so, for that matter, is the environmental movement—both, it seems, have reached a tipping point.

As such, over 900 actions were taken this past month as part of the Rise for Climate initiative.  The big assembly was up in San Francisco, ahead of Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit on September 12–14; Los Angeles hosted a more modest event, focused on a local environmental campaign:  the establishment of a 2,500-foot health and safety buffer between communities and urban oil-drilling sites—L.A. has 1,071 active wells, 759 of which are located within 1,500 feet of homes, churches, schools, and/or hospitals.

The gathering was convened on West 23rd Street in University Park, South Los Angeles, a tucked-away residential lane with Esperanza Community Housing on one side, and, behind a leafy redbrick façade, the two-acre AllenCo Energy drill site—with its twenty-one oil wells—on the other.  For four years, residents of the underprivileged community complained of noxious odors, nosebleeds, nausea, and respiratory ailments.  “One child living near the site was sent to the hospital with severe headaches, stomach pains and heart problems” (“The AllenCo Site,” STAND-L.A.).  In 2013, after an inspection by the Environmental Protection Agency that “resulted in more than $99,000 in fines,” operations were suspended and AllenCo became the subject of investigations by multiple governmental agencies.

However, earlier this month, “AllenCo sent a written plan to the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources citing a ‘planned startup date’ of Oct. 15.  It indicated that the facility would be staffed and operating all day, every day” (Emily Alpert Reyes, “Oil Company Says Disputed Site in South L.A. Could Reopen in October,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2018).  For the residents of this South L.A. community, this issue is never closed—it’s a specter that looms, needlessly and perennially, over their daily lives; when a drilling moratorium was imposed on the site five years ago, all that meant was that their children’s health was assured for now.

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Through the Looking Glass: How Johnny Depp’s Reclusive Tendencies Are a Funhouse Reflection of Our Own

August 31, 2018 / / 29 Comments

From his days on Jump Street when I was in junior high, to his offbeat movie roles during my time as a “serious” film student in college, to our shared penchant for supernatural cinema, Johnny Depp has steadfastly remained the most exciting actor of his generation.  But his apparent withdrawal from reality in recent years is the role I’d most come to identify with after my screenwriting career catastrophically imploded.  Alas, Mr. Depp—this is where I leave you.

Rolling Stone recently ran a feature profile on actor Johnny Depp, detailing his extensive financial hardships (a reported $650 million fortune vaporized by his compulsive-spending disorder), legal entanglements (home foreclosures and a contentious lawsuit with his former business managers), personal controversies (allegations of spousal abuse and a growing dependency on drugs and alcohol), and “reports he couldn’t remember his lines and had to have them fed to him through an earpiece” (Stephen Rodrick, “The Trouble with Johnny,” Rolling Stone 1317 [July 2018]:  83).

Thorough as Rodrick’s reporting is, though, the documented facts of the respective scandals are less compelling—less tragic, even—than the wider arc of the narrative he presents, illustrating just how far Depp has come from the “days when he was a male ingénue and not a punchline:  bankrupt, isolated and one more mistake away from being blackballed from his industry” (ibid., 134).

Isolated is precisely the right word; one can’t read the Rolling Stone piece and not be impressed by the extent to which Johnny Depp is alone in the crumbling edifice of his ivory tower:

I want to go home, but feel reluctant to leave.  One of the most famous actors in the world is now smoking dope with a writer and his lawyer while his cook makes dinner and his bodyguards watch television.  There is no one around him who isn’t getting paid.

ibid., 135

Yeah.  But who gives a shit, though—am I right?  Whether you’re of the mind that it’s hard to feel bad for spoiled Hollywood stars devoid of limits or impulse control, or whether, like me, you don’t have a crap to spare for the vacuous affairs of celebrity culture (I’ve been checked out at least as long as “Brangelina” was a thing), the trials of Johnny Depp should logically provoke either schadenfreude or apathy, but certainly not sympathetic interest.

If only this were a movie still…

And yet I don’t merely sympathize with his current state of reclusion—in fact I empathize with it.  Perhaps that’s because the different seasons of Depp’s career—the spring, summer, and arguably now the fall—have run parallel to my own life.  During my time as a film-school student in the nineties, he was one of the most exciting actors to follow because of his uniquely unconventional tastes in directors and material.  After I moved to Hollywood and learned to loathe the blockbuster, he headlined the last big movie franchise I actually genuinely enjoy.  But my awareness of him, and his singular talents, predates all of that.  He’s one of the only major artists whose career I’ve followed since its inception.

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The Cat in the Sprawl: Blake Snyder’s Genres and Postnarrative Fiction

July 23, 2018 / / 23 Comments

The industry-standard storytelling program Save the Cat!, developed by late screenwriter Blake Snyder, provides two chief implements for writers of fiction.

The first is the “beat sheet,” which is just Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey by another (more user-friendly, less academically dense) set of names:  “Crossing the First Threshold” is renamed “Break into Two”; “Tests, Allies, Enemies” becomes “Fun and Games”; “Approach to the Inmost Cave” is simplified as “Midpoint”; and so forth.  The beat sheet offers an easy-to-use mythic blueprint for outlining a narrative.

Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” or monomyth

The second tool, which is really Snyder’s principal innovation, are his genre classifications—the ten different narrative variations on the hero’s journey, each with its own central dramatic question and particular set of story conventions:  Monster in the House is about a killer in a confined setting (Jaws, Halloween, Fatal Attraction); Dude with a Problem depicts an innocent hero thrust suddenly into a life-or-death battle (Die Hard, The Martian, Home Alone); Golden Fleece stories are about a quest undertaken for a defined and/or tangible prize (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ocean’s Eleven, Stand by Me), etc.

The beat sheet offers the writer a universal macrostructural narrative foundation; the genre categories prescribe the requirements/expectations germane to each of the ten subtypes of story models.  The most successful narratives are recognizable as a single genre only, whereas some of the biggest bombs and/or creative failures of recent memory (47 Ronin, Winter’s Tale, The Mountain Between Us) mixed and matched tropes from multiple genres, leaving the audience bewildered and disoriented.

Of course, the hero’s journey/beat sheet doesn’t apply to fiction in the new “postnarrative” mode of our hyperlinked Digital Age, which “is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 34).  So, given that, do Snyder’s genre types, then, have any relevance for nonlinear, open-ended “rabbit-hole” fiction—like Lost, Mr. Robot, This Is Us, and Westworld—for which “an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point” (ibid.)?

In a previous post titled “Saving the Cat from Itself,” I argued that postnarrativity, as a form, hadn’t yet been codified—merely identified—and therefore it would be a mistake to impose Snyder’s templates on series like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.  Beyond that, I haven’t much explored the matter, let alone settled it.

In today’s guest post, longtime friend of the blog Dave Lerner, a.k.a. dellstories, takes on the issue of whether the genre classifications of Save the Cat! have any applicability to postnarrativity.  Feel free to post follow-up questions for Dave in the comments section below, and kindly pay a visit to his Patreon page.  Take it away, Dave!

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Changing the Narrative: Why Some of Our Most Popular Stories Affirm Our Most Pernicious Beliefs—and How Storytellers Can Rewrite This Bad Script

June 25, 2018 / / 55 Comments

I can’t say it was by deliberate design, but the blog this year has been heavily focused on the power of storytelling as a cultural lodestar, one that reflects the changing times as much as it influences them.  Like gravity, or capitalism, narrative is a governing force in our lives that mostly operates invisibly, if for no other reason than we’ve gotten so accustomed to its ubiquity.

“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations.  Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives.  Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time.  That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 16).

Taking those values “into our dreams,” as Rushkoff puts it, is a crucial proviso, because it underscores the subconscious way storytelling works:  A good story seduces you with the promise of entertainment, incrementally winds you up into a state of suspense, and only lets you out when it’s made its point—when it’s imparted its takeaway moral.  Over and over we submit to this experience, fondly recalling with friends the parts of a story that made us jump, or laugh, or cry, but seldom do we give much consideration to its underlying ethos; that sort of subtextual scrutiny, let’s face it, begins and ends in third-period English.

But if fiction is the means by which our mores and traditions are conferred, then it is also, accordingly, the way in which bad ideas are inculcated, even by trustworthy artists.  Much of this is owed, quite innocently, to utilitarian narrative patterns that have, through mass-repetition, developed into accepted sociocultural precepts.

You all know the rules: sin equals death

Genre conventions are part of a pact storytellers make with their audience, a set of tacitly agreed-upon expectations:  an action thriller will have violence; a slasher film will feature teenage sex; a romantic comedy will pair ideologically (and adorably) mismatched lovers.  The best stories find a way of at once honoring and challenging those tropes (Scream, The Dark Knight); most, however, simply take them as an uncontested given.  Commenting on the erotica blockbuster Fifty Shades Freed, comedian Bill Maher noted:

“Psychologists have to explain how in the age of #MeToo, the number-one movie in America is about a woman on a leash.  Or, how in romantic comedies, there are only three plots:  she married her boss; stalking is romantic; and ‘I hate you and then I love you’” (Bill Maher, “New Rule:  Hollywood’s Grey Area,” Real Time with Bill Maher, February 16, 2018).

To a certain extent, given their sheer volume, archetypal scenarios are unavoidable.  And most writers, I suspect, don’t promulgate them with an actively malignant agenda:  I don’t imagine screenwriter J. F. Lawton, for instance, set out to make the case that prostitution is romantic when he conceived the neo-Pygmalion fairy tale Pretty Woman; that was simply an incidental if unfortunate concomitant.  Artists, after all, have consumed thousands of stories, too, and are therefore as susceptible to the subliminal indoctrination of culturally ingrained—and narratively reinforced—worldviews as the rest of us.  Some of our most cherished American myths even help to explain how we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history.

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Counter Culture: Over the past Quarter Century, a Small Specialty Shop Became a Bronx Institution

May 31, 2018 / / 24 Comments

Before the geek underground went mainstream—before the Internet exposed its numbers as legion; before corporations fully understood that superheroes were woefully underexploited billion-dollar assets—there was no better place to both talk and learn about pop culture than the neighborhood comic shop.

When it opened in 1991, Magnum Comics & Cards wasn’t the first direct-market specialty store in the northwest sector of the Bronx where I grew up, but it was inarguably the liveliest, the one with the most personality.  That was owed, in no small part, to its colorful proprietor, Neil Shatzoff.

A photo of the shop I snapped on December 30, 2010

Holding court from behind the register, Neil would speak with juvenile exuberance and encyclopedic authority on pop esoterica:  why Brian Dennehy would’ve made for a better Commissioner Gordon than Pat Hingle (I agree, but, hey—at least we eventually got Gary Oldman); why Joel Schumacher’s track record for dark-skewing commercial cinema (The Lost Boys, Falling Down) made him a promising candidate to take over the Batman franchise from Tim Burton (well, it seemed like a good fit on paper…); why Kevin Smith’s unproduced Superman Lives script was budgetarily impractical and narratively quixotic (turns out, it was twenty years ahead of its time).  His disquisitions were all the more entertaining for his impish, whip-fast wit; reflecting on the Academy’s arbitrary predilection to honor films over movies, he once noted:  “Gandhi won an Oscar for Best Costume Design, and all they did was throw a couple of towels over him.”

 

COMIC ESCAPADES

All throughout high school, I’d pop by the shop every Wednesday to get my weekly fix of superhero soap opera—the now-classic Death of Superman and Batman:  Knightfall storylines were unfolding at the time—and, more to the point, to listen to Neil wax pop-cultural.  A decade my senior, he supplemented my cinematic education—the way an older sibling’s musical tastes might rub off on you—by introducing me to genre essentials that were just a little before my time:  The Thing and An American Werewolf in London and Thief (the feature-film debut of Michael Mann and spiritual precursor to Heat) and the Dirty Harry series.  (Though I can’t say for certain, it’s possible the first Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, influenced the name of the shop itself).

It was by way of the file cabinet–mounted TV behind the counter that I first became aware of things like aspect ratios and audio commentaries and director’s cuts; Neil was an early adopter of LaserDisc, and would dub them onto VHS and play them in the store.  Imagine my surprise to learn there was a “secret” longer version of Aliens (by seventeen minutes!), or a definitive two-hour documentary on the making of Jaws.  In the days before such things were standard-issue features on DVDs, there was only one guy I knew who had access to all that amazing arcana, and he delighted in sharing his zeal for it with his customers.

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