Storytellersunplugged

by Brian Hodge

Yesterday saw the 2500-screen nationwide opening of Apocalypto, the new movie co-written, directed, produced, and financed by Mel Gibson, and notable for, among other things, being his second flick in a row whose dialogue is in an ancient tongue.

And before you get the wrong idea: This isn’t really about the movie or its director. Those are just the gateway to something else.

Apocalypto’s release has sneaked up on me. For about as long as I’ve been aware of the movie, since sometime last year, I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it. This had nothing to do with the relatively recent Trouble With Mel.

Nothing I heard about Apocalypto was encouraging. Supposed set rumors made it sound as though Gibson had gone into the jungles of Mexico and embarked on an odyssey that was something like a real-life cross between Fitzcarraldo and, in a titular coincidence, Apocalypse Now. Early this year people were saying that it was incomprehensible, unwatchable, destined to bomb, that it would be his ruin … although I wondered if they weren’t passing verdicts on the movie based solely on a teaser trailer that showed up on the web … and which was, well, incomprehensible. But that long ago, the movie couldn’t have been in a final edit, and filming may not have even been complete.

Since it was more or less off my radar, I didn’t realize its release was imminent until an article showed up in the December 5th New York Times. The first critics’ screenings had taken place a few days earlier … and the reviews, in the main, are pretty darn good. My interest is definitely piqued.

One of the more interesting aspects of the article was its allusion to the thread of psychoanalysis that has crept into some of the early reviews. One is quoted as praising Gibson’s ability to make a compelling film, although “he just happens to be a cinematic sadist.”

The charge isn’t new. It may have arisen with Braveheart; certainly it reached grand heights with The Passion of the Christ. According to the Times article, Apocalypto “features unrelenting, savage violence” and depicts “decapitation and hearts ripped from the chests of human sacrifice victims.” Which, personally, is neither a selling point nor a turnoff.

But here’s the most resonant thing I drew from the article: Speaking about the film’s box office chances, Variety editor Peter Bart is quoted as saying, “The violence is an issue. But that’s the way [Gibson] is. That’s the way he sees the world.”

Which nudged me toward thinking: How do I see the world … and is there any discrepancy between that and how readers may think I do, based on my work? Which makes me wonder how my fellow writers see the world, and if you hope to impart a little of that my way when I come across your byline.

On the one hand, I don’t even know if most writers can be accused of proffering much in the way of a consistent worldview. After all, part of the appeal of writing novels and short stories and everything in between is trying on different ids and egos for size, and exploring lives that we otherwise might never have a chance to live.

Then again, it seems almost inevitable that if anyone builds up a sufficient body of work, a consensus of themes and viewpoints is going to emerge, if anyone wants to look for it … or it may jump out even if they aren’t.

This may be especially worthwhile to consider for those of us whose work is inclined toward the darker sides of existence and human nature, be it horror, crime fiction, depictions of war, and so on.

More than once I’ve been labeled nihilistic, something I try to refute when the means are available. (Occasional facile response, stolen from my novel Prototype: “I looked into nihilism once, but there was nothing to it.”) Not because one or more of its definitions — and they’re surprisingly varied, if you check a comprehensive source — don’t necessarily apply to a specific piece or another. It’s more that, however applicable it may be, it doesn’t feel like the sum total of the motivation behind the work. Or maybe it’s because I chafe at labels even apart from genre.

I freely admit, though, that there has over time been a battle of viewpoints going on inside, and it’s active even now, maybe even more so, and it may never be resolved until I die. It isn’t a struggle for dominance; rather, it feels as though the various shards of a wildly inconsistent worldview shoulder forth to have their say and come to some sort of peace with one another.

What doesn’t waver is a deep love for and awe of the natural world, even its harshest manifestations of beauty. I’ve always wondered if the foundation for that wasn’t laid by my maternal grandfather, who died when I was five, his lungs blackened by Lucky Strikes and coal dust, and so I have only thin wisps of direct memory of him. But he was a quiet man, an avid hunter and trapper who was probably never happier than when he was alone in a forest, and who, it was suggested to me, found the Divine much more readily in the outdoors than in a church. He took me for woodland walks, and to see horses, holding me steady as I stood on corral timbers to reach up and pet their velvet muzzles. I have to wonder if he was, in some ways, more influential on me than everybody else who outlived him, and if part of the way I see the world was first determined by the view through his eyes.

Where the ambivalence enters the picture is in the way I look at this species of ours that has settled every continent, and the civilizations and institutions we’ve built. There are days when I feel a tremendous benevolence toward my fellow humanity. Other days give rise to misanthropic feelings so uncharitable that I’d be ashamed to catalog them most of them here with any specificity … although this is nearly always in the abstract, rather than directed toward individuals that cross my path. We can laugh, and I can delight in their company, and they’d never know.

But when it’s there, it’s there, and it feels like so much more than a passing mood.

In one work or another, I scrub off most of the world’s population, or that of an isolated city, and have to ask myself: What’s really going on here, under the surface and behind the scenes? I hear news of real-world chaos, and while part of me is sickened, another part feels perversely uplifted. What’s going on here?

Several months ago I got some insight into this from, of all people, George Carlin.

At the close of his most recent HBO special, Life Is Worth Losing, he steered his usual bitterly hilarious commentary into a culmination whose sheer scale and audacity were unexpected, even from Carlin. It was a play-by-play of apocalypse, a verbal portrait of escalating chaos and tipping points of no return leading to the eradication of all life on earth…

…and out of whose ashes rose something immediately familiar, and quietly better.

Carlin’s benevolence in that moment, and its stark contrast with his usual misanthropic stage presence, felt … cleansing is one word for it.

There was a lesson there, if I wanted to look for one.

In horror, there are two main polarities of story type and end result. Which oversimplifies matters, because polarities also imply all points between, but hang with it for a moment, if you would. At the one pole are conservative (in an apolitical sense) stories about threats from out there that must be vanquished in order to return to the status quo. At the other pole are the more transgressive stories in which threats, whether outer or inner, aren’t so much defeated as assimilated, or acknowledged, or lead to a breaking point after which one’s world, or body, or mind, can never be the same.

I find the latter more inspiring to read, and compelling to write. Because, in the main, I don’t want the status quo. We have the potential to be so much better than the status quo … and in that search for what’s better, we sometimes have to take a long, unflinching, perhaps even painful look at what’s worse.

And I can’t think of any better tools than stories for mirroring the world from whatever view seems valid, and remaking it in any form that seems better.

In the end game, here’s why writers, no matter how dark their visions may be, are the ultimate optimists: Few acts are more hopeful than writing.

We do it alone, often without much encouragement, and hope that we will finish. We hope that our ideas will sustain us through to the end, and seem as good as they did at the beginning. We hope that the results will be as good as, if not better than, we envisioned them. We hope that the work will be published, and in a timely fashion, and the same goes for whatever checks might be due. We hope that people will read our work, and get out of it what we intended. We hope that it might be remembered.

That’s a lot of hopes. Sometimes they fall into place. Sometimes they’re dashed … and when they are, we hope that things will be different next time.

Because we intrinsically believe that there will be a next time.

Can you ask for anything greater in a view of the world, and your place in it, than that?