Hancockis due to arrive in theaters tomorrow, a Tuesday, which is weird, but I don't mind that. If it's going to come out tomorrow, there ought to be a showing at 12 tonight. But there is no midnight showing because, as it turns out, the movie does not arrive in theaters until 7 p.m. tomorrow. This really sucks. For months, I've expected to see Hancock at midnight. It's that kind of movie, goddamnit. What kind of excitement can there be at a 7 p.m. showing, when any normal person can stroll into the theater?
To add to yesterday's list, I've written a similar post, this time addressing nonexistent movies, another form of fiction within fiction. I've come up with five favorites, described below in no particular order.
1. Firestorm (from Seinfeld) - Apparently, this actioner contains a helicopter landing on top of a car, an "underwater escape," and a scene in which "Harrison Ford jumped out of that plane, and he was shooting back at them as he was falling." What more can you want? (A movie called Firestorm was made in real life in 1998, but it starred Howie Long and was not, I gather, the movie that Jerry and his friends described.)
2. The Old Mill, aka The Fires of Home (from State and Main) - Directed by Walt Price, the maker of Gandhi 2, and written by acclaimed playwright Joseph Turner White, The Old Mill is the "tale of a passionate fireman's quest for purity." I know because it actually has its own website, oldmillmovie.com, which earns extra points with me: It may be the only site on the web devoted to a movie that doesn't exist. The Old Mill may not have a mill in it, but I like its signature line, spoken by Alec Baldwin: "The only second chance I know is the chance to make the same mistake twice."
3. Hail to the Chimp (from The Simpsons) - Homer Simpson watches this movie at a drive-in and enjoys it immensely. It is the story of a chimp who has been elected president of the United States, a plot similar to one that Kilgore Trout is purported to have used in Breakfast of Champions. Here, the chimp, who seems a rather dictatorial leader, does not hesitate to slap and scream at any advisor possessing the temerity to dispute his decisions. "That's what you get for not hailing to the chimp!" Homer asserts.
4. Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season (from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) - The first Good Will Hunting was utter pap; the sequel looks much better. Just watch this clip.
5. Chubby Rain (from Bowfinger) - In accountant-turned-screenwriter Afrim's script, "when the aliens come down to earth, they come inside raindrops, making the rain chubby" -- hence, Chubby Rain, Bobby Bowfinger's sci-fi extravaganza starring Kit Ramsey. Having watched Bowfinger many times, I feel I know Chubby Rain better than a lot of real movies I've seen; I only wish I could view the full version.
It's a funny thing: I've realized that I regard a couple of these as minor classics of the cinema.
Lately I've been thinking a little about works of fiction that exist only within works of fiction. There are many. Writers naturally enjoy writing about writers -- if not as their protagonists, like Lucien de Rubempre of Balzac's Lost Illusions, then as supporting characters, like Dick Caramel of Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned -- and, to establish a sense of authenticity, must attribute a few made-up works to their characters.
If the writer is a really good character and his nonexistent books are well-titled, then they, too, take on a curious authenticity -- I can't help but imagine that the novels really were written in some alternate universe, and I begin to speculate about their contents. One can even begin to think that they might sometimes be better than the works that contain their fictitious authors.
The other day, I took a moment to think about which nonexistent novels I'd most like to read if they weren't, you know, nonexistent. I came up with a list of five, in no particular order:
1. The Manoeuvres of Arthur by Jeremy Garnet (from P.G. Wodehouse's Love Among the Chickens) - Wodehouse doesn't give us very many details about Garnet's semi-autobiographical novel. We know that it didn't sell very well: Garnet is forced to visit bookstores anonymously to suggest that they start carrying his book. We encounter in Love Among the Chickens only one person, aside from Garnet, who has read The Manoeuvres of Arthur beyond the third page, and, though she praises Garnet's cleverness, she believes the heroine to be the creation of someone who "didn't know very many girls." Still, Garnet narrates Love Among the Chickens so amiably that one must suppose that his own novel would be a pleasure as well. Just look at his description of a dog that has been outrun by the hen it's been chasing: "After the first field Bob, like the dilettante and unstable dog he was, gave it up, and sauntered off to scratch at a rabbit-hole with an insufferable air of suggesting that that was what he had come out for all the time." I love it.
2. A Match Made in Space by George McFly (from Back to the Future) - We never get a glimpse inside George McFly's thick opus, but we can guess what sort of book it is. According to George himself, he tends to write "stories! . . . science fiction stories! . . . about visitors coming down to Earth from another planet." The title and cover of A Match Made in Space suggest that it is a love story about a boy and a girl united by an alien named Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan, who looks suspiciously like Marty McFly in a radiation suit. (You can even see his portable tape deck.) Presumably the novel illustrates that, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.
3. Avalon Landing by William Forrester (from Finding Forrester) - Don't get me wrong: Finding Forrester is not a great movie, and not only because the white-mentor-teaches-impoverished-black-teen-the-power-of-the-mind angle is trite. The biggest problem is that the young hero, Jamal Wallace, though touted as a writing prodigy, is so totally bereft of personality that one cannot imagine him writing anything remotely interesting. But one can imagine that William Forrester, the stock Salinger-inspired recluse, famous for his one novel and his silence thereafter, has written something good. The reason, I think, is Sean Connery's performance, which invests the character with intelligence and charm. We know, at least, that his Forrester is a master of urban slang, which doubtless aids him in writing dialogue.
4. The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank by Kilgore Trout (from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions)
- Kilgore Trout probably is the world's best-known fictional sci-fi novelist. He
is almost certainly its most prolific, so here I had many titles from which
to choose. Of the several mentioned in my favorite of Vonnegut's books,
Breakfast of Champions, I picked The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank,
which Vonnegut briefly discusses on page 286: "I agree with
Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of
nit-picking details. In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank,
the hero is on a spaceship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles
in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his
neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it
back. The librarian asks him why he doesn't like it, and he says to
her, 'I already know about human beings.'"
5. Eloise and Abelard by Katrina Van Tassel Grant (from Philip Roth's I Married a Communist) - Roth's most famous character, Nathan Zuckerman, is a novelist, and he figures prominently in I Married a Communist; however, in the same book, another fictional novelist makes an appearance. She is Katrina Van Tassel Grant, famous for her historical romances, her radio show, and her husband, a columnist and critic supposedly descended from Ulysses S. Grant. She is described "the most pretentious of all the rich, pretentious river folk up in Staatsburg," and it is her hilariously purple prose that entices me. A minor personage in Roth's work, Katrina Grant appears as a major character, under the name Amanda Keeler Evans, in Dawn Powell's 1942 novel A Time to Be Born, but only in I Married a Communist do we catch a glimpse of her writing. Here is the passage that Roth offers: "His hands clasped about her waist, drawing her to him, and she felt the powerful muscles of his legs. Her head fell back. Her mouth parted to receive his kiss. One day he would suffer castration as a brutal and vengeful punishment for this passion for Eloise, but for now he was far from mutilated. The harder he grasped, the harder was the pressure on her sensitive areas. How aroused he was, this man whose genius would revamp and revitalize the traditional teaching of Christian theology. Her nipples were drawn hard and sharp, and her gut tightened as she thought, 'I am kissing the greatest writer and thinker of the twelfth century!' 'Your figure is magnificent,' he whispered in her ear, 'swelling breasts, small waist! And not even the full satin skirts of your gown can conceal from view your loveliness of hip and thigh.' Best known for his solution of the problem of universals and for his original use of dialectics, he knew no less well, even now, at the height of his fame, how to melt a woman's heart. . . . By morning, they were sated. At last it was her chance to say to the canon and master of Notre Dame, 'Now teach me, please. Teach me, Pierre! Explain to me your dialectical analysis of the mystery of God and the Trinity.' This he did, patiently going into the ins and outs of his rationalistic interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma, and then he took her as a woman for the eleventh time."
When I heard the Three 6 Mafia's latest single, "Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body)," I overreacted. The situation is, as it turns out, not so dire: The song's anonymous banality is atypical of their new album, Last 2 Walk, which, though not the group's best work, is a hard-hitting, engrossing CD.
It now seems rather silly that I was so sure they'd fail. They'd never seriously failed in the past. DJ Paul and Juicy J have been two of the best producers in hip-hop since 1995 (or, to some Tennesseans, earlier), and I don't know why they shouldn't remain so: Their consistency has been unmatched, and, if you discount the aforementioned atrocity, which, after all, is only one song, they've shown no signs of decline. Last 2 Walk provides fans with more of the Mafia's classic sound: heavy, ominous crunk, simultaneously keyed-up and trancelike. Complete with the usual advertisements for the group's side projects, Last 2 Walk plays as a Three 6 Mafia album should; it's not the last-ditch sellout effort I expected. Even "My Own Way," the group's collaboration with Good Charlotte, which I assumed would abandon the group's hardcore aesthetic, has a powerful, desolate anger; it is, in fact, one of Last 2 Walk's triumphs. "Lolli Lolli (Pop that Body)" is conveniently tacked on to the end, after the "Outro," where it cannot interrupt the aggressive, no-bullshit swagger of the rest of the album; it seems to have been placed here precisely to make it easy for fans to skip it.
The only major issue is the group's dwindling size, which even Juicy J and DJ Paul felt obliged to address in the album's title: The 2 is not merely AIM-speak. The group's two founders, who also are its two most crucial members, remain, but the rest have jumped ship, and, though the Three 6 Mafia can function without the extra emcees, it cannot run at full speed. The departures of Lord Infamous, Koopsta Knicca, and Crunchy Black have been especially deleterious. Juicy J and DJ Paul are proficient enough on the microphone: Their guttural voices and the unforgiving, bellicose tenor of their words lend their simple rhymes and chants a gripping ferocity. But, as they aren't multidimensional emcees, they need help to sustain a whole album. Last 2 Walk's guest appearances do not quite do the job: Project Pat is always a welcome visitor, but Pimp C's two posthumous appearances, one with Bun B and one without, are far too brief. "I'd Rather," a misfire of the sort that appears once on every Three 6 album, when puerile sexual humor collides with eerie, austere music, seems designed to highlight Gangsta Boo, whose disappearance never to me seemed remotely problematic till now.
It's clear that DJ Paul and Juicy J will continue to create excellent music; the trouble is that they no longer have enough friends to share it with. I wonder what Lord Infamous is doing these days.
I have seen You Don't Mess with the Zohan, just as I threatened I would, and it's bad, just as I expected it would be. It's idiotic, coarse, and, on the whole, unfunny. Some critics have decided to pretend that it's really a bold political statement, perhaps because it's more exciting to write such stuff than to describe another dumb Adam Sandler comedy, but if this movie is an examination of Israeli-Palestinian relations, then Billy Madison is an unflinching exposé of the American educational system. Since You Don't Mess with the Zohan takes place in a Middle Eastern community in New York City, it naturally contains a few pacifist sentiments, but they're merely a part of the Hollywood tradition of concluding every raunchy farce on a sappy, sanctimonious note.
Adam Sandler, in a performance that consists mostly of an accent and a lot of air-humping, stars as the superhuman Israeli counterterrorist Zohan, who fakes his own death in order to start over in America, where he hopes to live his dream: being a hair stylist. Having changed his name to Scrappy Coco, he gets a job at a salon owned by a gorgeous Palestinian woman, Dalia. He quickly becomes her most popular hairdresser -- in part for the extra services he provides his female customers after he has finished cutting their hair. That most of his customers appear to be twenty or thirty years older than he does not bother him in the slightest.
Two unfortunate developments then take place: First, an immigrant taxi driver (Rob Schneider, giving roughly the same performance in roughly the same role that he had in Sandler's Big Daddy) recognizes Zohan, snaps a picture on his cell phone, and sends it to Zohan's nemesis, a terrorist called the Phantom (John Turturro), who comes to New York to settle the score with his rival, though Zohan no longer wants any part of their conflict. Second, a heartless real estate developer, who wishes to build a mall where Dalia's salon and a few other small stores stand, schemes to destroy the neighborhood, inciting enmity between the Israeli and Palestinian store owners in the area by hiring goons to spray-paint racial slurs on their businesses.
It's a flimsy plot, but it's enough to support some amusing gags. The trouble is that Sandler, co-writers Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel, and director Dennis Dugan haven't thought of any. I laughed quietly once or twice, but You Don't Mess with the Zohan is an unrelenting parade of wackiness, and if it cannot produce a few side-splitters, it really has no reason to exist: Ribald absurdity does not lend itself to staid appreciation. Zohan's overuse of hummus, which to him functions not only as food but also as toothpaste and hair gel, made me smile at first, but Sandler never lets it go: An hour and a half after the joke's introduction, Zohan sprays hummus from a hose to quell a fire, and I could only roll my eyes.
At times, it seems that the movie is being sustained solely by celebrity cameos: Mariah Carey, Kevin James, John McEnroe, George Takei, and Dom DeLuise all make brief appearances. Chris Rock delivers a couple lines in a truly bad Caribbean accent. Henry Winkler's scene is a baffling non sequitur: Zohan appears at his doorstep as a limo driver to take him to a party, after which the movie makes no further mention of Zohan's job as a chauffeur (the job's origin, too, is unexplained) and gives no further screen time to Winkler.
I gave You Don't Mess with the Zohan a chance because I hoped to see Sandler return to the nutty, irrepressible style of comedy that his earlier movies had. Ebert's review portrays it as such a picture. (Happy Gilmore, Sandler's comic pinnacle, he did not particularly like.) But there's nothing really mad about You Don't Mess with the Zohan; it's zaniness by numbers, an assortment of sexual and ethnic jests and physical hijinks that we've seen many times before. It's crude, but its crudity is nothing that will make you sit up and take notice; it's crude merely because earlier Sandler successes were. It's entirely uninspired.
• You may have forgotten that, in earlier years, Shaquille O'Neal pursued a career in hip-hop. Once his latest rap has reminded you, you will not forget again. "Kobe, tell me how my ass tastes" is a surprisingly catchy hook. Unfortunately, Shaq's off-color lyrics will cause him to lose his "special deputy's badge" in Arizona's Maricopa County, where, apparently, the sheriff's gross mistreatment of prisoners is considered A-OK.
Credit goes to Shelly for the second and third items.
Kazakhstan's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film of the Year category at the 2008 Oscars, Mongol, one of six nominees, was beaten out by Austria's The Counterfeiters. On Oscar night, few Americans had seen it -- perhaps roughly as many as were aware that Kazakhstan was a real country, not an invention of Sacha Baron Cohen's. Now, in June, Mongol has turned up at a number of theaters in the United States.
Mongol is the story of Genghis Khan. It runs only 126 minutes, but it is unmistakably an epic: Its timespan is three and a half decades; its setting is a continent; its subject is the stuff of legends. It concerns itself chiefly with Genghis Khan's early years, when he was called Temudgin. We see him first as the son of a tribal leader; we see his first love; we see him become an orphan, a slave, and, finally, a warlord.
If the epic is a genre, as the AFI has recently claimed, then, after the musical, it may be my least favorite genre. The trouble with epics is that they must simultaneously be human-sized and larger-than-life, and most only get the second part right, so they stand remote, like mountains too big to scale. Mongol has much of the good stuff that a lot of epics have. There is, for example, a great deal of horseback riding, which can look quite good on film; in fact, it was the chief attraction of Dances with Wolves. Here, the scenery, too, is very nice. There is an excellent variety of landscapes. We see sandy deserts, tree-covered mountains, snowy fields, and grassy, rolling plains, speckled with lakes that look like gargantuan rain puddles, from which rivers extend like stray strands of hair. Furthermore, we see a number of fine, bloody battles -- skirmishes that play as a cross between Gladiator and chopsocky and, later, large-scale wars that boast a satisfying combination of grace and messiness, even as, from a bird's eye view, the troops sometimes turn into a dusty smudge that reminded me of the battle scenes in Alexander. The CGI armies here often look considerably less real than the ones in Troy.
It is, however, on the human level that Mongol falls short. Director Sergei Bodrov, who also co-wrote the script, chooses not to portray Genghis Khan merely as an evil, bloodthirsty tyrant, but Bodrov does not place a new character in the spot vacated by the common perception of the Mongol. At times, Tadanobu Asano, the lead, is able to convince us that he is a man with a vision, but the screenplay doesn't give him enough to work with to create the powerful personality that we expect of a historical giant like Khan. The hero's relationship with his chief rival, moreover, is a hazy cliche: There is nothing in the rapport of the childhood friends, sworn brothers, turned against one another in adulthood, to elevate their connection above stock conflict, nothing to make it stand on its own as a specific strife instead of drifting into a memory-mosaic of similar strifes from other movies about bitterness between best pals.
I cannot exactly call Mongol a bad movie. In fact, I can think of only a few bad moments. There is scene in which Khan (or Temudgin) is sold as a slave to some aristocrat, who, before buying Temudgin, is warned by an old, long-bearded, bald-headed monk that the purchase will only cause havoc, and when the buyer ignores him, it is like watching the horror-movie teens decide to have sex while the killer is on the loose; it should be clear to anyone that the monk is a sage whose premonitions are to be heeded -- that, in fact, the monk exists for no reason other than to voice grave, accurate premonitions. The use of the purchase is unclear, anyway, since Temudgin is not put to work; rather, he is locked in a cell, where his epidermis becomes a dry, flaky crust, the result of the kind of shoddy, excessive makeup that Clint Eastwood wore after he'd been dragged through the desert in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I must also mention a scene in which Temudgin praises the aural beauty of the Mongolian language, citing its word for "meat," which he pronounces as if coughing up a chunk of phlegm; I do not know that Bodrov intends the scene to be humorous.
Nevertheless, I cannot deny that Mongol generally looks good, tells a story that deserves to be told with someone other than John Wayne (or Omar Sharif) as the lead, seems interested in its topic, and makes a valiant attempt to bring it to life on the screen. But it isn't very compelling. The middle section is disjointed and sometimes hard to follow. The end is rushed, and it doesn't explain very well how Temudgin became the conqueror who emerged in 1206; the question of how Temudgin, the slave, transformed himself into Genghis Khan, the emperor, is probably the most interesting one that the movie could address, but Mongol nearly skips over it. It focuses, perhaps, too much on Temudgin's childhood and early adulthood, which, even as Bodrov mixes fiction with the facts, aren't particularly fascinating. Obviously, Bodrov withholds Khan's notable achievements for a reason: Reports indicate that Mongol is the first part of a planned trilogy.
That's the trouble with keeping everything in reserve. If you start too slowly, it doesn't matter how well you finish.
• Today's big news, which you've probably already heard, is that George Carlin has died of heart failure at the age of 71. I must admit that I never really was a fan of Carlin -- I'm generally not enamored of comedians who fancy themselves social commentators. I do not know why some people look to comedians to tell it like it is (perhaps because it's easier to watch a comedy show than it is to read a book), but I feel uncomfortable when a comic begins his ascent into prophethood, where jokes becomes insights, and we're supposed to applaud his views instead of his gags. Cinematical writes, "To call the late George Carlin a comedian -- even an undeniably brilliant one -- would be a serious understatement," but, to me, a brilliant comedian is more important than all the pundits, editorialists, and didacts. I don't mean to say that Carlin was only a pundit; he did pure comedy as well, and he was talented, but that other aspect of his performances turned me off. Still, I have fond memories of him as Rufus in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and its sequel. Rest in peace.
• Over the weekend, The Love Guru debuted at fourth place at the box office, with only $14 million, which for a Mike Myers comedy is really bad. I haven't seen it (and don't plan to), but since I've sat through the excruciating trailers many times, its failure makes me happy.
I enjoy a good list, especially one of the sort that ranks the greatest novels or the greatest movies. It is of course silly to attempt to rank such things, but such attempts have, on a few occasions, exposed me to enjoyable books and films that I might not have encountered elsewhere. A best-to-worst list is the best way to bring up a lot of disparate titles in a relatively small space and generate some interest in them. The important thing is to include at least one or two works that the reader probably hasn't heard of, so he gets something useful along with the annoyance of seeing how badly you have, in his eyes, bungled the rest of the rankings. Here are a few lists I've encountered in the past couple days:
The 100 Best Movie Posters of All Time - I'm not so enamored of the American Beauty poster, but the artwork for The Sin of Nora Moran, which I'd never heard of before this, does look really good.
Entertainment Weekly's "New Classics" - EW has ranked the best books, movies, and albums, among other achievements, of the past 25 years. Yes, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is the second best album recorded since 1983. That, more than any of bad books or movies, makes me want to throw up.
AFI's 10 Top 10 - The American Film Institute has selected the ten greatest American films in ten genres. I don't know why they chose to rank "romantic comedies" instead of comedies or why a major genre such as horror was omitted to make room for a relatively minor genre such as courtroom drama, but, needless to say, the choices are terrible: If Hollywood has made more than eleven romantic comedies, then neither Sleepless in Seattle nor Adam's Rib can be among the top ten. Cat Ballou's inclusion on the list of Westerns is similarly absurd. But the worst part is that you've heard of every movie on the list and have seen nearly all 100.
A couple weeks ago, I was planning to write a piece about emo music, which I've always mocked ruthlessly, for the newspaper column.
I asked my friend Abe, who has listened to a great deal of the genre, to recommend a few defining bands, albums, and songs. He provided several good suggestions that I mentioned in the piece. Abe also brought up a song called "Teenage Dirtbag" by Wheatus. I didn't recognize the name. When we watched the video on YouTube, it sounded vaguely familiar, but I probably had never before listened to the song in its entirety. Now that I had, I didn't think it was very good, and I decided not to bring it up in the newspaper piece: Though it occupies the same lyrical milieu that emo does, it has the polished, measured sound of pop in place of emo's keyed-up agitation, and the singer's androgynous vocals, which Abe unfavorably compared to Roland Gift's, are more eccentric than anything I've heard in emo, where nearly all the singers sound roughly the same. I did, however, think "Teenage Dirtbag" was catchy, and I found myself listening to it a few more times when I got home.
You can take a look at the music video below. Note the one guy inexplicably jamming out with a banana and an apple at about 35 seconds into the show and again at 1:19.
The video seems to feature clips of the movie Loser, which I, like everyone else, have not seen, but I believe that much or all of the footage showing Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari was shot specifically for the music video, because the video takes place at a high school, while the movie (I somehow recall from trailers I saw years ago) takes place at a college. Loser was, according to the IMDb, released in 2000, which I suppose places the song in the same year.
In the video, Biggs, who represents the singer, is a geeky, awkward student. As is typical of such characters, he is pushed around by 28-year-old male models posing as high school jocks. He wears a ridiculous hat, much like Holden Caulfield did in The Catcher in the Rye, and this suits him, I suppose, because, if I had to describe the quintessential narrator of an emo song (and, lyrically, this is an emo song), I would describe him as a lovelorn, humorless, scummy Holden Caulfield. Biggs is in love with Mena Suvari, the girlfriend of one of the jocks, but she doesn't notice him. In the video's culmination, Suvari finally approaches Biggs with an invitation and a confession, which, in a creepy, effective touch, we hear in the male singer's nasal falsetto, matching Suvari's lip movements:
I've got tickets to Iron Maiden, baby.
Come with me Friday; don't say maybe.
I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby,
Like you.
One year removed from my teens, I am not too old to appreciate the seductive appeal of such a speech, poorly written as it is. (Except to rhyme with the next two lines, Suvari has no reason to call Biggs "baby" in the first significant sentence she has ever addressed to him.) The "like you" is not accusatory but rather an endorsement of his social defects and invitation to a natural, mutually accepting rapport, rooted in an honesty that we're led to believe does not exist in her relationship with her jock boyfriend. I turned 13 in 2000. If I had heard "Teenage Dirtbag" at that time, I would have liked it and pretended not to.
Such songs and music videos are based around an idea of camaraderie among adolescent misfits. I do not refer to anything like a teenage group therapy session. In the video for "Teenage Dirtbag," the young weirdos, huddled together like a pack of rats, jump with glee as the singer belts out the celebratory chorus: "I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby!" The intention is to make this clique look even cooler than the "cool" clique. The video reminds me of another, that of 2001's summer anthem "Fat Lip" by Sum 41 (its lyrics, too, cite Iron Maiden), in which we see the proudest, happiest collection of young freaks in the world, and the song reminds me of a hundred others half heard. For the teenager harboring feelings of uselessness and alienation, these songs promise an endless summer of unusual friendships, of noctural suburban mischief, of romances with blue-haired girls, of passing out in the cool grass of strange backyards after house parties, of taking everything as it comes and loving it. When I look at the kids smoking cigarettes outside the mall at night,
the ones who wear the same hoodies from October through March and the
same T-shirts from April through September, I see the attitude at work. I don't think they listen to Sum 41 anymore (does anyone?); I think they listen to emo music. I do not know how many of my peers have quoted the following, an atrocious line from
"Grenade Jumper" by Fall Out Boy: "My heart ticks in beat with these
kids that I grew up with, living like life's going out of style." I knew the line long before I'd heard the song.
There is, it's true, another side of emo music that has nothing to do with the attitude I've described. Many emo bands operate in a permanently devastated mode, writing apocalyptic breakup songs for teenagers who acquire girlfriends solely that they too might, with luck on their side, someday undergo such heartrending splits. Even these bands seem to believe there is a sublime magic inside any girl odd enough to have dated them, but for them the magic is forever lost. More often, however, bands intersperse, amidst their heartache, songs of the other kind: portraits of suburban friendships and romances, charged with the electricity of youthful abandon. I am thinking of stuff like "The Vast Spoils of America" by Saves the Day, "I Woke Up in a Car" by Something Corporate, "Swiss Army Romance" by Dashboard Confessional, and "Soco Amaretto Lime" by Brand New.
The attitude is evoked even by the teen classic "Baba O'Riley" by the Who. I don't know if the song intends to do it -- its lyrics, like those of most rock songs from the '70s, are impossibly vague. The term "wasteland" is not regularly used to describe a desired fantasy, yet a "wasteland" is precisely what many adolescents seek: a place for them to get wasted together and enjoy wasting their lives, which seem like a waste anyway. I imagine there is much good-fellowship "out here in the fields." The song's setting has a faintly mystical flavor; in fact, it is, in a way, less a wasteland than it is a wonderland. It is the same grungy wonderland that today's bands offer, the one that puts me in mind of Peter Pan's Lost Boys -- the orphans
who, cut out from normal society even more profoundly than the
disaffected adolescents, lived their own endless summer. The teenage outcasts, who would be orphans if they could, have created their own Neverland. By getting lost, they have, ostensibly, found themselves.
The Lost Boys, I've realized, creep up on my imagination frequently enough that one must conclude that I myself was once a lost boy. Yet I never was a teenage dirtbag. I did not have the opportunity to become one. Had I gone to high school, someone would have sent me the invitation, I'm sure. It is now expected of every young person to become an unwashed malcontent for a period; the ones who do not embrace an "alternative mindset" at least for a moment are the real losers today. And why shouldn't they embrace it? Anyone would rather be alienated among friends than be alienated on his own. All you have to say is: Yes, I'm a teenage dirtbag. Like you.
What would I have said? I cannot know. I hope I would have declined. I am describing a situation in which life, bad as it is, has made its most palatable offer, and we must shake our heads: No, we refuse.
If I had been in that spot, I know I would have recognized that the endless summer was only a fantasy, but then most young people do; they choose to believe in it anyway. And they go on believing it: A fourteen-year-old dirtbag likely will still be a dirtbag at twenty-two, haunting the suburbs with the hope of finding a really good party, like the ones they used to have. The good life begins to look like a kind of death. Sometimes he sings, and he can sing only about high school friends and high school girlfriends and the harmony he imagines they once inhabited. What else can a lyricist write about when, elsewhere, his most important memories are of Iron Maiden concerts?
Clearly he has missed something profound. Teenage alienation is easy to joke about, but it is not useless as long as one does not try to enjoy it or make a style of it; it is a necessary part of becoming someone who hasn't lived a billion lifetimes already, but one must experience it in solitude, or it is wasted. Musicians are obliged to pretend that we find transcendence in communal experiences, or else people would not go to their live performances. But, as far as I can tell, everything really important that ever happens to anyone happens to him when he's alone, physically or spiritually. Songs like "Teenage Dirtbag" are best listened to among friends.
