My Heroes
I want to write about the kinds of people
The others want erased
–The Wolfgang Press, “Sucker”
I need some attention;
I shoot into the light
–Peter Gabriel, “Family Snapshot”
To try to wed together the excellent arguments Mr. Castle, Mr. Hodge and the Tems offered this month (or at least to steal their clothes while they’re all rhetorically skinny-dipping), it’s a lead-pipe cinch that solid characterization is the secret ingredient that allows genre lit to transcend formula, and become indistinguishable from magic. This is a more essential ingredient for horror, than any other genre. If the people in your story don’t have somewhere else they’d rather be, and the wherewithal to try to get there, than you’re just frying ants with a magnifying glass. But while it is vital that the reader connect with the characters, is it really so important that the reader actually like them?
In “serious” mainstream literature, character occurs more or less in a plotless vacuum, so the characters’ choices or lack of same are what passes for a plot. Crime And Punishment, The Stranger and The Immoralist all shoehorn us in the skins of monsters, as they try to live with their aimless evil. But in genre literature, the writer takes the characters on a ride, and if she hopes to entice the reader to come along, it should be a ride they want to take, and the character with whom they’re going to experience the story should offer a secure, comfortable seat. Shouldn’t it?
I know there’s probably something wrong with me, but I’ve almost always rooted for the bad guys. It’s not because I identified with their goals or methods, but what they were doing, or trying to do, was made watching movies or comics worthwhile. In genre movies, the hero is often a blank slate, a comfortable chair for the audience to sit in and vicariously enjoy being handsome, vitally important, and pure of heart. Bleh. James Bond, Sindbad and Luke Skywalker are pawns, easily duped and manipulated by the villains on the Manichean chessboard, but destined to win, because the game is perpetually rigged.
I have put down many, many books, and turned off many movies, because I didn’t care about what happened to the characters. But the ones that I love and return to most, are those that strike that amazing balance between fascination and repulsion; my favorites let me take a ride in a truly unlikable character in a way that illuminates the ugly shadows of human nature, and takes me to places decent folk never go.
In my dreams–the ones I remember–I almost always follow someone else, rather than inhabiting them, or playing myself. As a reader, I was far more drawn to fascinatingly flawed characters, than ones I liked, or with whom I could identify. Books and movies are like a telescope through which I can intimately observe the kinds of people I never could share a smoke with, without coming to grievous harm.
Al Pacino’s character in Dog Day Afternoon is a great cinematic example. As the robbery spins into a siege and Sonny goes out to face an army of cops armed only with an arsenal of raw nerve, we’re not sure whose side we’re on. He’s charismatic and intense, yet repulsive and confused, and we are not invited into his head, so much as we are held hostage, clinging to him to find out why it’s happening, as well as what’s going to happen. When we finally find out his motivation, it kicks us miles away from identifying with this guy or validating his choices, but it teaches us a lot more about human nature, than if the game had been stacked with a likable guy who ends up in the same situation, or if we were riding with an anti-hero who robs banks to hit back against a crooked system run by assholes and buffoons, as in Bonnie & Clyde and Dillinger.
My best writing has never been about expressing or confessing myself, but interrogating others, and the best stories I’ve written (or, at least, the best-received so far) have all proceeded from asking how some people look at themselves in the morning. My story “Burning Names,” which appeared in Cemetery Dance a few years back, came from catching a tweaker as they tried to shoulder-surf my social security number as I filled out forms at a courthouse. In trying to figure out what that person would end up doing with my stolen identity, I found that I could, in turn, steal theirs, and I had a lot more fun with hers, than she would have, with mine.
It’s easy for these kinds of stories to devolve into a rote formula–”bad things happen to bad people”–a kind of instant pulp karma that EC Comics distilled into its pure essence. Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror dished out justice straight from the Hammurabi Code, and while it was delicious in eight-page bouts, it was also not very edifying, because the depiction of human evil was so shallow. The characters in EC Comics were so reflexively immoral that they leaped from petty theft or extortion to cold-blooded murder before page 3, freeing up the remaining panels for the creeping reveal of some clanky ironic retribution. They get the just desserts that Raskolnikov prays for, in a tidy way that’s more reassuring than scary, to those with no murder in their hearts.
Whether or not we’d like to share a beer with our characters, a clear advantage of bad characters is that their stories will most likely go untold, in the wide world they inhabit. If a family moves into a haunted house and survives the experience, they’re going to rush to every media outlet in the land with proof of life beyond death, and milk it for a string of movies and TV specials. It’s kind of important, in a good horror or fantasy story, that the plot not spill out of the writer’s control and change the world; it’s not instant death, but it does swing the balance of plausibility wildly out of true. If we can believe that a horror story might have occurred in the world we inhabit, it sticks and does its work far more effectively, and this is hard to sustain if people walk away from the denouement with a story to tell Larry King. How much more plausible is a haunted house story, then, if the protagonists break into the house with larceny on their minds, rather than a pleasant vacation?
Less likable characters can also take initiative in ways ordinary folks can’t. Hammett was a genius at brushing us back from his plug-ugly anti-heroes, and keeping us following eagerly on their trails, rather than inhabiting their pants. When Sam Spade or the Continental Op tumbles to the twisted root of a case, he doesn’t bother to spell it out for you, even as he’s telling you the story. He figures it out and begins to lay a trap for the doomed evildoers, that’s at least as devious as the skullduggery he’s uncovering. This keeps with Scooby Doo Rule #3, (if the characters spell out the plan ahead of time, it always goes to hell), but it also lets the character be more of a player in the plot, than a pawn.
And finally, bad characters are great for the same reason they’re so tough to do properly. While everyone is more or less captivated by the effects of bad behavior, we’re still very much in the dark, most of us, about the ongoing processes behind it. Villains enjoy inflicting pain and despair because somebody has to do it, but the motivations of people who routinely do terrible things to themselves and others is often misunderstood, especially when it needs to be bent to conform to a plot. I can’t help but think of the assholes in so many of Stephen King’s stories, who serve to contrast and ground the supernatural weirdness with a mundane human mirror. From Mrs. Carmody in The Mist to the bullies in It, these dicks sometimes reveal a bit about how human evil works, but increasingly over his career (see The Langoliers or The Green Mile), King plugs in a sadistic fuckup from central casting, whose inner workings take a distant third priority to helping to grease the plot machinery.
What Hodge said about the cardinal importance of living, breathing characters goes double for the bad ones. Quite often, a traumatic childhood episode is the prime mover of bad behavior, but the push-button, abuse-in-evil-out dynamic that modern psychology has been chopped down to in popular entertainment is pretty weak tea. Look at how Michael Myers’s cartoonish broken home in Rob Zombie’s Halloween diminishes his evil to a knee-jerk rampage. Hannibal Lecter, too, was a formidably inscrutable devil, but when Harris let him become a lethal anti-hero, he upset the sense that there is any good or evil in his world, only sheep and wolves. On the flipside, take Michael Haneke’s ingeniously infuriating Funny Games, where the villains not only gleefully play with our craving for a motive, but look us in the eye and address us directly, shaming us for our callow voyeurism. “Have you had enough?” Paul asks, when we have had entirely too much, and nothing at all, that we expected.
Somewhere between these opposing, equally empty icons, lies a vivid depiction of real human evil that isn’t fettered by notions of heroism and villainy, and therein lies a treasure trove of story seeds that most writers overlook. I can’t think of any better exponent of this golden mean of evil than John Shirley, whose dastardly characters reveal the broken child inside every bad guy. The horrors that engulf his protagonists are just as often of their own design as they are unfathomable predators from beyond, and the broken rationales they hide behind are far more revealing than a visit with the likable nuclear families or burned-out but noble cops from most writers’ bullpens. If horror fiction is uniquely poised to offer any truly edifying lessons to the reader, it’s penetrating insight into the real machinations that drive douchebags… if not to arm our readers against the douchy wiles of others, then, perhaps, to force them to confront and defuse the symptoms of encroaching douchebaggery in themselves.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t toss a shout-out to a song that, more than any other single work, moved me to separate agreeing with a character, to wanting to understand them. Peter Gabriel’s “Family Snapshot” is a rousing, upbeat tune that would make a great opener for a campaign rally. The song’s parade-watching narrator excitedly builds suspense and bathes you in his anticipation, as he prepares to take charge of history by assassinating the president. It’s giddily unsettling to hear him explain why: “I don’t really hate you,” he ruefully admits, but then proclaims, simply, “I want to be somebody; you were like that, too.” Caught up in the stirring magic of the moment, the narrator is remorseless and psychotically detached, perfectly at ease with the paradox of killing without a cause. Only after the bullet is fired, and the music breaks down into a reverie, does the singer retreat to his true self: “a lonely boy, hiding behind the front door.”
As a kid growing up in the 70’s, I was haunted by the ghosts of great men whose blood had been spilled in the public square, their world-changing lives ended by mysterious, dead-eyed men like Oswald (et al.), Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, for reasons that sounded like the work of a ruthless hack. The first time I heard “Family Snapshot” and every time thereafter, I felt gifted with an insight that goes deeper than the excuses people give for their evil and others, and I’m not ashamed to say that it’s the only song that, no matter how many times I hear it, moves me to tears.
So let’s all shed a tear, and a few more drops of sweat, for our hard-working douchebags. They deserve more love and more dedicated probing than the likable characters, who get along pretty well, on their own. After all, more love and probing is all most of us douchebags ever really wanted, in the first place…
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