Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession by Laurence Leamer

“Inevitably, though, sometimes it was just him and me, and it was usually the same excruciating dance.  He would find some way to express his obsession with me, which he never referred to as an obsession, as if I owed it to him to reciprocate somehow.  I would find some way to make it clear that his obsession wasn’t reciprocated   and never would be.  He’d become cruel and petulant and then, within a few hours or a few days, start all over again.”

There is no doubt the statements above sound like they could be coming from either a tawdry horror novel about a stalker and his prey or from a contemporary piece of #MeToo non-fiction devoted to the likes of predators such as Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby.  But they are not.  They come from actress Tippi Hedren’s 2016 memoir and they are about the “Master of Suspense” himself: Alfred Hitchcock.  Much of the autobiography is about her life and career, both before and after The Birds; however, there are multiple times throughout where Hedren speaks to Hitchcock’s dangerously amorous personality.  In fact, Hedren claims at one point Hitchcock physically accosted her while they were filming Marnie, which obviously was the final straw to what was a highly abusive relationship, one he seemingly had with many of his flaxen starlets.  As Laurence Leamer, in his new book Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession, much of what Hitchcock did would be “enough that in the #MeToo mood of today, he would have been fortunate if only his hands were slapped,” as would have been the case back in the early days of Hollywood.  This is where Leamer’s work thrives in that he is quick to point out that not only was Hitchcock completely obsessed with these actresses but that he was also a disturbing letch who seemingly devoted his time to having complete control over both the cameral and those in front of it.

To be clear, Leamer does not place harsh judgment on Hitchcock and his distressing proclivities, as easy of a target as he was; the book is neither a subjectively-written rant nor a feminist tome about female injustice or empowerment.  Instead, Hitchcock’s Blondes is about the tenacity, drive, and difficult personal lives of the women who graced the silver screen during a time of great misogyny in and outside of Tinsel Town: June Howard-Tripp; Madeliene Carroll; Ingrid Bergman; Grace Kelly; Kim Novak; Eva Marie Saint; Janet Leigh; and, the aforementioned Tippi Hedren.  Although Hitchcock famously was not an actor’s director, what Leamer suggests is that these women as well as the many more that were in Hitchcock’s films, were integral in their respective movies’ success and, more importantly, in Hitchcock being the director that he was.  As much power as he presented to those on set while filming, he was nothing but a scared, petulant, horny little boy who lived a life of insecurity associated with his looks, his weight, and his humble beginnings being “the son of a greengrocer and an Irish mother.”  Hitchcock knew these actresses had a hold on his libido and the only way he was able to command authority and, in an odd way, feel comfortable around these beautiful women was to play childish pranks to make them blush, recite dirty limericks and tell off-color jokes, and torture them while he filmed them in precarious situations such as when handcuffed or when trapped in a room while being attacked by murderous winged beasts.  And yet, even if they got embarrassed or frustrated or revolted by Hitchcock’s indecency, all of them, with dignity and with elegance, did their job to ensure the project was both finished and lucrative.

Hitchcock’s Blondes presents readers with an understanding that these women, against all odds, managed to have enough strength and character to reject Hitchcock’s advances and disregard his immature nastiness, to become the central focus of his movies.  The actresses named above are forever going to be remembered as talented, dynamic, funny, and influential in the industry; they commanded the screen not only because of the way they looked (which is why they were hand-picked by Hitchcock) but more so because of their abilities to entertain and enthrall the masses.  Also, these women were able to give brilliantly rich performances in spite of Hitchcock’s harassment, in spite of the industrialized patriarchy, in spite of their tumultuous relationships at home with spouses or lovers or both.  Leamer makes it known, with each chapter focusing on a different actress, that each sometimes suffered with unhappy marriages, divorces, bad habits and behaviors, and breakdowns.  Although perceived by the moviegoing public as blonde, angelic figures of male desire, of Hitchcock’s desire, they were human beings who just-so-happened to live a chaotic life of affluence and opulence, so much so that, for some, it would become their downfall. 

There are moments in Hitchcock’s Blondes where Leamer dryly devotes time to summarizing Hitchcock’s films to ensure readers understand the storylines if they have not seen the films, and there are moments where stylistically Leamer writes with a slight fan magazine quality that comes from writing about celebrities for many years (he has written books about the Kennedys, Johnny Carson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others), but the book is not meant to be a theoretical, scholarly understanding of Hitchcock’s representations of women in his films.  With that said, whether intentionally or not, Leamer brings about a very serious discussion point and question that needs addressing: How should cancel culture be used for not only films of the past but for personalities from the past?  In contemporary culture, when a celebrity does something deemed problematic, the cancelling of that individual is swift and far reaching.  But what about those that have passed away and have done known harm to another?  Should there be a closer look at those individuals?  Leamer does not explicitly answer that question; however, he does bring about an argument for future conversation.  Hitchcock’s films are masterpieces, no doubt.  He was truly one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century; and yet he was undeniably a sadomasochistic misogynist who consciously inflicted psychological and physical torment on women, whom he found sexually attractive, for his pleasure and for the enjoyment of an audience all too willing to except his chicanery.  Hitchcock’s Blondes strongly helps show Hitchcock aficionados, those that revere him for his undeniable talent, that the director tried to degrade and tear down these stalwart and accomplished women, fortunately, to no avail.  As Tippi Hedren says in her memoir about her experience making The Birds, “It was a thrilling, amazing time.  I never forgot for on moment that it was all happening because of Alfred Hitchcock, I never forgot for one moment that I’d earned it.  I didn’t feel like a smoke-and-mirrors Hitchcock illusion anymore.  I felt like a full-fledged movie star who’d worked hard for the privilege.”

Day by Michael Cunningham

                Back in August of 2001, my wife and I decided to move out of Brooklyn to live in Upstate New York.  We had just been married in June of the same year, and made the choice to leave while living together, along with our collie and a bunch of angry cockroaches that migrated from the house being renovated next store, in a miniscule basement apartment on a quiet side street in Marine Park.  I knew if I had stayed in Brooklyn, I would have stayed in Brooklyn forever; like the proverbial rope tied around the stationary elephant’s ankle, the city has this unexplainable and frustrating invisible hold on its residents.  In Michael Cunningham’s newest novel, Day, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author picks up on this trait and provides readers with richly mundane characters seemingly in search of an exit but trapped in their respective situations, living in a metropolis where they do not want to be and becomes a pseudo-prison during COVID-19.  Day thus is a high-concept work with a remarkable amount of subtly about one group’s lives in contemporary Brooklyn before, during, and after the pandemic.

                Day takes place on April 5th, 2019, 2020, and 2021.  In 2019, Robbie and married couple, Isabel (Robbie’s sister) and Dan, are living with each other in a brownstone close to Greenwood Cemetery, along with the couple’s two children, Nate and Violet.  Isabel and Dan are having marital issues.  These issues are faintly expressed throughout the chapter but are primarily focused around their misplaced love for Robbie, the dynamic between all three of them being both awkward and ambiguous.  Robbie, who just recently broke up with his boyfriend, is squatting in the family home; however, he has a penchant for travel and wishes to leave.  To satiate his need for wandering and normalcy, Robbie, an Adderall-popping schoolteacher, creates an avatar named Wolfe, a worldly doctor who seemingly has it all and is still able to take care of ailing children.  The need for escape is palpable in the first pages of Cunningham’s novel and not only for Robbie but for Isabel and Dan as well, who circle each other in an unrenovated, too-small building across the street from a dilapidated shoe repair shop.  Their conversations have devolved into mundane small talk; in other words, there are no feelings left, if there were any to begin with.  Their children get more attention from Robbie and their babysitter, Chess, who has personal issues of her own: She has a child (Odin) with Garth, who agreed to not be overly involved in the boy’s life but now wants to be more of a parent and, much to Chess’s dismay, more romantically involved with Chess.  Day is about unfulfilled dreams and stagnation; men, women, and children stuck in a concrete jungle without much ahead of them, which gives the book a maudlin feel, even if there is not much in the way tone at all.  Cunningham writes with a flat affect that continues throughout, which is indicative of the indifference and apathy of each character, including Robbie who has the most personality out of all of them. 

In addition, Robbie unwittingly is the glue keeping everything together; so, when he leaves in 2020 for Iceland during the heart of the pandemic and gets trapped there for several months, the fissures between Isabel and Dan and their kids, Chess and Garth, and even Nate and Violet seem to get wider and wider.   They are all living in a world that has an uncertain future.  Not only are they bound by where they live and their respective lots in life, now they are also bound by the rules and regulations associated with a plague that has killed millions.  Cunningham is astute; he recognizes how taxing it was to be in the same place day after day, week after week, month after month, with the same person or people during that dreadful year.  And, he also recognizes some people were alone and had nothing but social media to keep them connected or were stuck in a place where social media was not even an option.  Day is a narrative of loneliness and distance, both physical and emotional.  In one memorable moment, Chess is holding Odin behind her apartment window while Garth waves to him, hoping that Odin recognizes him as his father.  This was a common occurrence throughout COVID, where family members could not be there for other family members while they were sick or dying.  In this case, Chess is not in love with Garth, and still the moment is difficult to digest, very much like the many images of elderly married couples, wed for 50 years or more, trying to see each other just one last time.  Cunningham’s strong use of narrative, which jumps from person to person as if they are all on their own even when they are not, accurately reflects the mood of the time and what the human race was thinking and feeling as they continued to just try and survive.  The emotional distancing that takes place in Day is jarring but so is the physical distance between the group and Robbie, which becomes exacerbated when a horrible “cold” takes hold of Robbie at the end of the second chapter, and is a nasty foreshadowing to the final chapter which takes place a year later.

                In 2021, Isabel, Dan, and the kids are trying to figure out what to do with Robbie’s ashes.  Even being many, many miles away and in seclusion, Robbie still caught COVID and was found dead after the group had not heard from him in a while.  His death, on some level, becomes the catalyst for massive changes that happens to each character, including Nate (who feels responsible for his uncle’s death) and Violet (who grew up quickly after living through the pandemic).  Day does not become an optimistic book in its final chapter; however, one can argue that with the changes that do take place (which includes a move from Brooklyn), all of these characters are starting to find ways to settle down a bit to the point of being comfortable.  Yes, they may still be somewhat stagnant but at least they are inching their way to some form of happiness and peace.  They are now trying to find their way forward knowing that time is fleeting and short, and that living to a ripe, old age is not guaranteed.  And, why spend your life unhappy if you can help it?

                Day, ultimately, is a compact and well-constructed post-COVID novel about Brooklynites who needed a nudge but ultimately got violently shoved into finding a way to living a fuller, richer, and, at the very least, more comfortable life than before.    

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik deBoer

                I tend to think of myself as a cynic, and I generally let my students know that I am one.  I speak to my students about the problems associated with American politics, corporations, the mass media, social media, healthcare, educational goals, etc., etc., etc.  I go after the 1%.  I talk about the issues with Far-Right and Far-Left ideologies.  I tend to believe there is always something underlying what we see and hear, something nefarious and dark.  In essence, I tend not to be an optimistic person about our future as a nation, as a world, and as a people.  As a young man, I had ideals and goals and a naivete about me; now, I am calloused and skeptical about just about everything around me.  It could be because of 9/11.  Our country changed quite a bit after that.  But I think it is more than that, and Fredrik deBoer in his newest work How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movements somewhat hits the nail on the head as to what more it could be: although many citizens want change and many organizations claim that change is about to come, the fact of the matter is change just may not happen.  Not because we do not have the resources, not because we do not have the intellect, not because we do not have the knowledge or the drive.  The reason: because there is just no leadership to follow that will keep us moving and keep us aware of what it is we need to do to ensure the funds and resources going to the underprivileged are going to where they need to go rather than into the pockets of CEOs and other charlatans.

                What I appreciate about deBoer’s work is that he is correct about many of the movements he speaks about (although I wish he was not): #MeToo, #Black Lives Matter, and a slew of others that have their heart in the right place but are losing steam day-to-day because they are mostly online causes that do not seem to have a strong presence outside of their social media platforms.  Also, because America has an ineffectual government, there is no official backing of these movements and no legislation that is going through to help these movements because our lawmakers seem to have more of an interest fighting each other rather than changing the problems we continually face.  What deBoer says is that much of this is not because of race, although of course that is a key factor in many of the issues we have in the United States (he recognizes this in the book), but because of class.  The rich get richer, whether they are Conservative or Liberal; whether they are Tea Party members or they are Democratic Socialists.  Being that deBoer is a self-proclaimed Marxist, he places himself into the position of being further left than the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and he mentions that whether or not these individuals talk a good game, they are doing quite well for themselves, and they are really not getting much done to help the American people in, what is truly, a time of need. 

                What we do is talk a good game but when push comes to shove, nothing gets done because we do not oftentimes participate in the movement.  We send money, we talk about it in our social circles and on Instagram, we occasionally watch as celebrities put pins on their lapels and sing to help fight this or that, occasionally we protest; however, most of the time our lives are too busy or disorganized to really devote to a cause. We do not have the attention span we used to have and we are often knocked down by the system.  I am not saying that we should not even consider fighting causes.  What I am saying, and what deBoer is saying, is that many of these causes die on the vine, which is sad but bound to happen because of our indifferences and our apathy.  deBoer, by the way, is an equal opportunity cynic going after the Trumps and the Bushes as well as the Clintons and the Obamas.  Ultimately, our national interests are overshadowed by our self-interests, and that needs to change even though we know more than likely it will not.

                deBoer is a good writer and I appreciate his commentaries here.  With that said, I learned a lot about myself reading this book, mainly about the tone of my voice and the content of what I say.  While reading his new book, I recognized that my cynicism may come off as a bit off-putting for some.  The question is: Am I willing to change?  I suppose only time will tell.  I also learned that I may be one of the people deBoer is speaking about, and to be honest, that frightens me.  He speaks about academics and how they are part of the problem too.  Does that mean I am part of the problem? 

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movements, ultimately, is eye-opening, raw, and it allows readers to really look within to see if they may not be doing the best they can do.  Will it change the current dynamic, however?  Well, I hate to be the pessimist but… 

Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges

by Stuart Klawins

Stuart Klawans’s new book Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, published by Columbia University Press, is impressive and memorable in that it does not read like most academic works: it is simple, straightforward, and free of convoluted postmodern theory that went out of fashion in the early part of the 21st century, but is seemingly still used regularly to complicate uncomplicated matters.  Klawans, in the spirit of Stanley Cavell, yet another easy-to-read film theorist, decides to stay away from Sturges’ personal and professional history, and a pseudo-psychoanalysis of his texts; and instead “reads” Sturges’ films as “reasoned arguments about subjects of real concern” (page 3).  Yes, Sturges was a loyal, card-carrying member of the Hollywood studio system, and his films generally adhered to the generic formulas of the time; however, beyond popular belief, Sturges also wrote profound, complex screenplays that regularly confronted and criticized the status quo: “Cynicism about social and political arrangements, yearning for and disillusionment with romantic love, defiance of prudery, enthusiasm for self-invention (especially by women who have little other choice), and horror at the thought of living out a perpetual, unvarying cycle-these are among the themes that run consistently through the films” (page 5). 

                Klawans sets out to prove his thesis by “reading” each one of his films, starting with The Great McGinty (1940); then continuing with Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), Triumph over Pain (1944), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947); and, ending with Unfaithfully Yours (1948).   Sturges, throughout his rocky career and in an effort to reveal his talent in his work, made sure he played with the language in his scripts, using what Klawans calls “three devices” (page 6): hypoarticulation or how characters can talk without saying a word; hyperarticulation or when characters speak with extreme “eloquence,” even though they are not supposed to, based upon societal and Hollywood stereotypes generated by the same studios Sturges worked for; and, his “aversion to malapropisms, or the substation of a wrong word for the right one based on a similarity of sound…(pages 7-8).  In his films, one can see Sturges cares a great deal about words, about sentences, about dialogue; but he also cares about all the intricacies associated with filmmaking.  From filmic techniques to wardrobe to music, Sturges had full control of the environment he worked in; and, based on what is written by Klawans, the screenplay was no different: embedded in what was seemingly an innocuous script was something much richer than Sturges was given credit for.  Each one of the chapters in Crooked, But Never Common sets a tone and voice that says Sturges may have been seen as mainstream by audiences and colleagues alike, but underlying his films is a lot more commentary that would not be easy to accept in a time when the Depression and then World War II had taken their tolls on everyone around the globe. 

                In fact, Sturges is very clear that his films were made for the sake of pure entertainment; Sturges was not an auteur because he knew he had an “obligation not only to efface but to deny the presence of anything personal, including an artistic impulse” (page 27).  His films were intentionally mathematical, organized; they seemed like “any assembly-line product” (page 27).  His movies adhered to “the vast American tradition of anti-intellectualism’ (page 27), and yet they still had a great deal of charm, personality, and intelligence, mainly for their pithy dialogue, the rise and fall of what is happening on screen, the parallel movements of the camera, and the satiric nature of the subject matter (page 13).  Included in all of what is mentioned above are the shape-shifting protagonists who seemingly are defined by them not being definable, according to Klawans.  For example, McGinty is a person (Klawan’s wording) who morphs into whoever he wants to be and, like many of Sturges’ other protagonists, is “thrust…into situations slippery with fraud or misunderstanding, to which they would comically struggle to adapt” (page 15).  And, once they are perceived of as winners, “…the world rushes to pour still more winnings into their hands” (page 34), like in Christmas in July, a film that seems to have the “fewest plot complications, narrative conundrums, and shifts of mood and the smaller population of memorable oddballs; and with its ready-made New York immigrant neighborhood, it exhibits the heaviest reliance on stock stetting and types” (page 35).  Sturges did not want to rock the boat with his audiences; however, he had no problem being satiric against those that signed his checks, the ones who had the money that produced his movies.  Moments of satire are difficult to decipher, which gave Sturges permission to hide his vitriol deep inside his texts (even when the films were about filmmaking, like Sullivan’s Travels).

                What one can appreciate about Crooked, but Never Common is Klawans’ ability to hide film analysis in the plot summaries for each film.  Each chapter is a comprehensive understanding of what the film is about, how it was produced, and what makes it uniquely a Sturges work.  He stays away from auteurism and psychoanalysis, which could get his book stuck in a web of high-theory, and decides instead to stick with pure textual analysis, which one can assume would be well-appreciated by Sturges.  An example of this comes in Klawans’s discussion about Sturges’ use stock characters: “One of the greatest gifts was [Sturges’] knack for infusing old types with some of the messiness and circumstantiality of lived experience” (pages 53-54).  In this case he is speaking about Maxford and Baxter in Christmas in July; but one gets the sense that Klawans can see this in many if not all of Sturges’ films. 

                It is rare to see a book like that of Crooked, but Never Common in that it is linear in its construction, similar to the way Sturges directed his films.  He goes in the order of Sturges’ movies rather than jumping from point to point and then finding a way to connect those points to random films in his cannon.  This allows for a smooth read from point A to point Z, and it keeps Klawans in check.  This means Klawans is meticulous and, like Sturges, mathematical.  The precise nature of his work is so very necessary, because Sturges made sure to do the same with his films.  In a way, Klawans is attempting to do Sturges justice by emulating the way Sturges wrote and directed his works; and, he achieves his goal in spades.  While talking about The Lady Eve, Klawans states Sturges’ work had a “calculated pretense of randomness” (page 68) that was undeniable.

                If one were to have one criticism about Crooked, but Never Common is that sometimes the book reads like an Internet Movie Database page in that the summaries about the films can get a bit lengthy and tedious.  Yes, it is necessary to include summary, but much of that commentary would be for the benefit of those that may have not seen the movies, which is a distinct possibility since Sturges has not pervaded American culture like Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock have (both of whom were not American-born).  Personally, I have seen a good portion of Sturges’ work, so reading the summaries for those films, although a good reminder of what happened throughout, was not as fascinating as the “readings” that Klawans speaks of in the beginning of the book.  When the book is most successful is when Klawans subtly weaves summary and “reading” together, like when he speaks about a moment in Sullivan’s Travels when the director regularly changes moods to keep audiences on their toes.  He claims Sturges “dumps you out of [a] languorous, bubble-bath mood into [a] new, breakneck tempo that from now on will a defining trait of his style” (page 99).  This frenetic pacing can be most recognized in what is arguably Sturges’ best film (at least in the eyes of this author), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, a film that almost was not made due to its almost sacrilegious material: “The opening, frantic beyond even the standard of Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story, plays as if the energy that Paramount and the censors were struggling to contain had just broken free” (page 194).  Learning about this film’s storied and controversial past, as well as Sturges’ constant difficulties, fighting and clawing away throughout his career, would give any reader a newfound respect for this underrated but important figure in American comedy and American film.

                Crooked, but Never Common is, overall, a richly informative text for anyone interested in Sturges’ work.  Whether the reader is a novice or an aficionado, Klawans wrote a text that will surely give anyone wanting information about this stellar filmmaker the material they need to learn more about the films and how to carefully “read” them as they should be “read”: with reverence to an underrated but brilliant comedic (and sometimes dramatic) writer and director.        

Rikers: An Oral History by Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau

In 2002, Sasha Abramsky wrote “Return to the Madhouse: Supermax Prisons Are Becoming the High-Tech Equivalent of the Nineteenth-Century Snakepit.”  The work attempted to provide readers with a better understanding as to what was happening in America’s jail system, and begins with a harrowing description of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison: “…the cells are arranged in lines radiating out like spokes from a control hub, so that no prisoner can see another human being—except for those who are double-bunked.”  In 2001, there were about 1,200 convicts in this one institution, each placed into a “barren concrete cell measuring 7 ½ by 11 feet.”  Two-hundred eighty-eight prisoners shared their small cell with another offender, and in the span of seven years, twelve double-bunked cellmates were murdered.  In essence, the conditions were deplorable, and Abramsky later speaks to the “casual overuse of these facilities is common,” and “imposing grim conditions on prisoners is all too often seen as a good in itself, regardless of the long-term costs.”

In 2002, Abramsky showed readers how broken America’s justice system was; and now, twenty years later, America is still in the same place, and proof of that comes in the form of Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau’s exposé Rikers: An Oral History.  This work, coming out in January of 2023 through Random House Publishing, consists of interviews with more than 130 people who have experienced, in some way, Rikers Island, the largest and most notorious detention complex in the United States.  Rikers, as a facility and as part of an “incarceration industry,” is filled with stories of prisoners and employees who essentially live in a dichotomous world between fear and hope; and, it is this new book that attempts to give readers a glimpse into that world, a failed society that reflects the failings of society as a whole.                

The stories are harrowing in that they speak to the normalizing of dehumanization.  The conversations coming from former convicts, corrections officers, wardens, and a variety of others, allow us to learn that what should be a place for reform is more of a place of pain and horror, of fear and anxiety, of chaos and mayhem.  These individuals speak of men and women who go into what is called “the bullpen,” a place where prisoners are placed for intake, and become dope sick to the point of death.  Prisoners scream and yell and fight.  Intake can take hours and sometimes days.  There is gang violence, homicidal fights for seating and for the phone, women having children without proper medical assistance, mental health issues associated with being placed into solitary confinement, institutional oppression, etc.  Many of these individuals were going to Rikers just because of a drug offense or for petty crimes; sometimes they were let loose soon after while others languished in their cells.  What these interviewees tried to accomplish, and succeeded in accomplishing, is making sure we know what is happening behind those walls and bars.  Rikers, as presented by those speaking, is representative of what is wrong with our “justice system,” and the editors of this pseudo-anthology in a powerful way ARE able to reiterate what was somewhat already known those familiar with the penitentiary. 

Ultimately, Rikers: An Oral History is about giving those that are marginalized in society, those that have been mistreated and those that have been destroyed by the “justice system” in the United States, a voice.  They need to be heard; and those that perpetuated the problems we are seeing also need to be heard.  I recommend this book to those that want to learn about how punishing the world can be from those that are considered cruel, but are ultimately just as victimized as those that are victims of crimes. 

Does Rikers need to close down?  I am not sure of the answer to that; however, Rayman and Blau’s text sure makes a strong argument for it.     

Youngblood by Matt Gallagher

This is a review that just didn’t make it, but I thought worked:

                In Phil Klay’s National Book Award winning text, Redeployment, in the short story “After Action Report,” the main character intentionally becomes the protagonist of a tale he was only a bit player in: the shooting death of a teenage boy who picked up an AK and fired at the patrolling platoon.  He takes on the role of the shooter, while his comrade takes on the role of the passive observer, even though his comrade is in fact the one that killed the child.  A harrowing story, one of the many in Klay’s gut-wrenching anthology, “After Action Report” has one moment that reminds me of another book about our militaristic sojourn to the Middle East: Matt Gallagher’s Youngblood, a satisfying work very much like a middling sequel would be to a much more powerful original.  The moment comes soon after an IED explodes but does not kill:

Somebody said combat is 99 percent sheer boredom and 1 percent pure terror.  They weren’t an MP in Iraq.  On the roads I was scared all the time.  Maybe not pure terror.  That’s for when the IED actually goes off.  But the kind of low-grade terror that mixes with the boredom.  So it’s 50 percent boredom and 49 percent normal terror, which is a general feeling that you might die at any second and that everybody in this country wants to kill you.  Then, of course, there’s the 1 percent pure terror, when your heart rate skyrockets and your vision closes in and your hands are white and your body is humming.  You can’t think.  You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do.  And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, you go back to thinking.

If there is one thing that Gallagher does effectively throughout Youngblood, it is capturing that sense of sheer terror in those moments of absolute boredom.  At one moment, Lieutenant Jack Porter, the book’s main character, attempts to extract information out of the town drunk when, all of a sudden, a sniper successfully takes out unsuspecting soldiers.  Gallagher presents our presence in the Middle East as a war not like any other, where our military can be doing absolutely nothing and then, within seconds, be in a bloody firefight or blown to pieces.  In the prologue, Porter says, “So little of Iraq had anything to do with guns or bombs or jihads.  That’s what people never understand.  There was the desert.  And the locals, and their lives.  The way time could be vague and hazy one moment, yet hard as bone the next.”  Gallagher is much attuned to the angst of the deployed; he uses Lieutenant Porter as a  representative of this ambiguous torment that many of our soldiers currently go through, at least as far as I know based on conversations that I have had and texts that I have read.

                And is this not what writers like Klay and Gallagher try to get across to those of us who have no clue, and I mean no clue, what our men and women in the military face on a day to day basis?  In a way, it becomes their job to relay to us through narrative techniques and characterization the pain, the heartache, the sacrifice, and the monotony these young people experience while out in the heat, and the sand, and the townships, rife with folks that may want to either feed them or murder them.  Not only are they presenting a story or a series of stories about our people in the armed forces (whether fictional or not), but they are writing in such a way to lull us into a sense of security, just so they can viscously take it away from us in the span of a couple of graphic sentences.  This is, in a way, what makes Youngblood (and works like it) so compelling and gripping: you and I are placed in the combat boots of these brave soldiers, embedded in the dunes as they are, engaging with the hajj, trying to stay alive another day to play video games; or, make bets as to which will die first in a match-up between a  scorpion or a spider (which is a set-piece in Gallagher’s novel); or, have a Skype conversation with a family member back in the States.

                What is less compelling at times however, and this takes place with Youngblood, can be more the content of the narratives rather than the realistic tone they set.  Youngblood has Porter becoming, in a way, obsessed with the fate of another soldier, Staff Sergeant Elijah Rios, who fell madly in love with a Muslim woman named Rana, the daughter of a highly respected sheik.  As he begins to get too close to the above situation by falling in love with Rana as well, Porter, an unwavering and mentally stable leader, is trying to take care of his soldiers after an aggressive, no nonsense, somewhat fool-hearty sergeant named Daniel Chambers comes in “to undermine the fragile peace that the troops have worked hard to establish,” as the book jacket suggests.  The reader soon realizes that Chambers knows a great deal more about Rios’s death, which pits these two powerhouses against each other periodically throughout the book and which concludes rather dramatically with an uninspired stand-off, just one of several irksome moments in a book that sometimes resorts to preachy dialogue and a multitude of storylines, which ultimately degrade whatever the core conflict may be.   As stated above, Youngblood occasionally feels like a movie sequel that builds on the first installment, but ends up saturating the screen/its pages with too many character developments and too many struggles just to compensate for its weaknesses or holes in the script.  Also, Gallagher’s book, at times, takes the essence of other books and movies to create a Frankenstein-like pastiche or homage to artistic ventures associated with war, which takes away from the originality of the text; Heart of Darkness, Platoon, Jarhead, Apocalypse Now, and Redeployment immediately come to mind, all of which are more successful in their attempts to get the message across that war can be violent and taxing. 

                There is a moment in Youngblood that needs recognition, and I say this primarily because I don’t want to make it seem like the book is without its merits; the former U.S. Army captain and memoir/short story writer (Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War and Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War) is good at creating characters that are convincing and the book does keep the reader’s attention, even if one feels like there is no true conflict to focus on.  Porter, nearer to the middle of the book, is speaking to Saif, the head of the jundi (Iraqi police); to get some information on a terrorist called “Dead Tooth” (who becomes a major player in the text later on).  Porter stares at Saif and describes him: “The sweat underneath his pits had gathered into pools, and he plucked small hairs from his mustache, hiding the freed hairs in his palm.  Dark, puffy circles hung under his eyes like speed bags.  Everyone touched by war seemed aged or corroded in some way.  Saif wasn’t even thirty yet, but he had the calloused look of a man nearly twice as old.”  This is where Gallagher excels; Youngblood shows the reader how someone who is young and vibrant can easily become old and jaded by the time he or she leaves or is forced to leave due to mental or physical illness.  Even with its narrative flaws, the book is successful in providing the reader with a significant amount of reliable information about what has gone on in Iraq over the many years we have occupied the country and how weary our fighters are because of the various circumstances that keep them in battle.  By the end of the book, the reader fully understands that our warriors, as much as they feel obligated to our nation and to those they are protecting overseas, are mere human beings capable of feeling loneliness, indifference, fear, rage, confusion, and, above all else, fatigue.      

Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society, by Joseph G. Peterson

                Jim Moore is a relic.  He is a travelling salesman straight out of Maysles brothers’ documentary, flying from territory to territory, tired from and of his travels, feeling his age and contemplating his life, as he waits to get on a flight, a flight that seems perpetually delayed by a stubborn snowstorm.  Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society, the new novel by Joseph G. Peterson, is about a life unfulfilled, even if successful in the monetary sense; it is about those people you see in films and television shows, or on the bus going home from work, that are quietly sitting or standing in the background, spending their lives doing the same thing day after day without much change or deviation.  Jim Moore, our weary and middle-aged protagonist, is a stock character, the old-timey business man who wears a suit and tie, carries a briefcase and a newspaper, and shakes your hand while looking you straight in the eye and selling you whatever he sells, when most people are looking down and are now oblivious to their surroundings.  And yet, what makes this short work so very fascinating is that Moore, this human stereotype, is the focus of the story and we are made a privy to his thoughts.  He is the observer and we see what he sees, as mundane as those images may be; and, listen to his thoughts, which are unfortunately equally vapid.

                Like most unimaginative people, however, Moore believes (at least in moments throughout the novel) he is unique, different, and educated.  He regularly opines to himself about how the digital universe is stealing away our abilities to communicate with one another, and how climate change is negatively affecting the environment, and how parents do not know how to control and pay attention to their kids anymore; and, yet, these sorts of opinions stem mostly from surveillance of his surroundings and various reading materials rather than through experience or research.  Peterson writes Moore as a modern-day Henry Bemis of The Twilight Zone fame, a bookish man who alienates himself from the rest of the world by just existing outside of what he knows best, which is his clients and how to sell to them.  With that said, do his clients even know who he is?  Yes, they may see Moore as a dutiful sales representative who is always willing to take on more work from a boss who obviously takes advantage of him, and he always finds ways to insert himself into his clients’ lives by sending them cards and gifts, and by knowing their children’s names; but, do they really know who the real Jim Moore is as a human being, a living breathing person? 

                Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society is a book about how identity, or the lack thereof, is formed and lived.  Moore claims to his former girlfriend of two-and-a-half years, Rosemary, in pseudo-flashback that he cannot remember his past.  He can remember his mother and his father and his house on a farm in Iowa, maybe an event or two like a hunting trip he took with his dad, but all and all, he claims his early life was so bland he cannot recollect anything that may have happened to him.  His youth was filled promise and hope; and now he regularly looks at his face in the airport bathroom mirror, seeing himself as stoic, aged, and hardened by the day-to-day grind of meeting business representatives from state to state, in the hopes to keep a job, a job that in many ways has become his identity even though he never wanted that to happen.

                Moore’s job is also a way to escape the reality that his father whom he loved, or at least looked up to, blew his brains out during Jim’s formative years.  Does Moore not remember his past or does he not want to face it?  Throughout the book, he goes into his own dreamland, similar to the young protagonist inGuillermo Del Toro’s cult classic Pan’s Labyrinth or Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, where he meets up with a character he calls the Woodsman, a burly chap who is regularly dressed in flannel and has no contact with the contemporary world.  Moore wants to be this man and he follows the Woodsman around in the hopes to experience what he experiences day-to-day.  There are multiple ways to read this imaginary friend; for example, there is no doubt the Woodsman is a father figure to Moore, who used to go hunting with his father and his fated dog, Lady (cut in half after being run down by a train).  Moore follows the Woodsman deep into this fictional land-of-make-believe, simulating the walks he had with his dad, both of them surveying the land, looking at the clouds that his father had expert knowledge of, and trying to find the game they took out with the same shotgun his father used to kill himself; and he wishes he could stay in this bucolic place that he constructed to escape from the realities of his life, a life he attempts to convince himself is just fine and unmemorable.

                Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society is not only about identity and escape, but it is also a novel that focuses on conscious ignorance, the need that many of us have to not face the realities that sometimes envelop us to the point of us becoming numb.  In a way, the novel speaks to the importance of working on mental health, a hot button topic that has, since the beginning of the pandemic, become more and more recognized as a necessary talking point needing serious attention.  The issue, however, is Peterson (the author) recognizes that mental health has become just a talking point very much like climate change or our dependence of our technologies or obesity; and Moore (the main character) is just a walking-and-talking product of a world that needs to change for us to literally survive but cannot seem to pull the trigger.  Moore, in essence, has become his father, someone who has accrued knowledge and knows how to chat about what he has read about, but sadly never really experienced anything of real worth.  He has travelled the United States, a country filled with stunning natural beauty, but his life instead has become a series of airports, hotels, meetings, and business deals.  Rather than him really walking through a wooded space filled with mountains and trees and wildlife, he has to go deeply into the recesses of his mind to do that because his time is spent trying to make his next dollar and his next flight.  Peterson’s work is a cautionary tale.  Will we spend our lives working, sacrificing our sanity, just so we can keep on working?  Or, will we take a moment or two to look up at the clouds, not in our mind’s eye, but in a physical reality created by the natural order of things?  These are age-old questions we are familiar with and taught (just another form of the stop-and-smell-the-roses theory we were exposed to as children) but we never seem to answer, or never seem to have to time answer, because, like Moore, we are mindlessly moving on this hamster wheel we call life, constantly trapped and consistently banging into walls. 

                Along with the perpetual running, or in the case of Moore, flying, from place to place without a real purpose, Peterson’s novel comments on how we are trapped in our own perceptions about gender.  Jim Moore is a man that does not consider himself as a man; he does not look at himself as the stereotype and he regularly wishes he could be that stereotype.  He often envies the imaginary Woodsman for his innate ability to be what is considered as manly, but also for being something other than a blank and hollow person like Moore, who laments about this reality throughout the book.  He sees himself as a nobody in a sea of nobodies going nowhere but is readily willing to accept it all because it just makes things a whole lot easier.  Rather than change, it is simpler to stay at a status quo, even if depression and oppression is frequently taking place, because societal norms tell us we have to and our own perceptions of self are suppressing our ability to make healthier decisions for our own well-being.  Moore sees it that way, but if we really think about it, we see it that way as well.  We will stay in a job we hate, or a relationship, or live in one place for decades because it takes too much energy to move somewhere we want to be, just because our minds and our environments are telling us this is the safer option.  How pathetic is that?

                And, how pathetic are we?  Memorandum from the Iowa Cloud Appreciation Society is a work that says: We are pretty pathetic.  Human beings have become complacent automatons that do the things that they do only because they are told to do them.  We are all Jim Moore, sitting still in a lifeless airport filled with bit players, while a snowstorm keeps us from flying to our next destination, a destination to somewhere we do not want to go.  We, like Moore, would rather move around freely in our own heads and experience unrealistic idealism while the world around us burns because it is so much easier to pay lip-service for something where tangible change needs to take place, whether globally or, more importantly, personally.  Peterson’s novel is saying to us, for us to move forward, we can not be stagnant.  For us to move forward, we have to put one foot in front of the other, plain and simple. 

A Death on W. Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy by Andy Kroll

Conspiracy theories are quite common in American culture: the moon landing; John F. Kennedy’s assassination; 9/11; UFOs; etc.  Back in the early days of the United States, and I would say until recently, most of these theories were not perceived of as fact by the majority of the country.  And, those that believed these theories were generally considered on the fringe or extremists or just plain kooky.  However, with the advent of the Internet, things have changed drastically.  Now, I am not saying that most of the country believes in Jewish space lasers, hidden cabals of cannibals, and that Barack Obama was not born in the US; but, one can argue that there are more and more people out there are apt to have their theories heard, thus allowing those theories to filter out into a world filled with impressionable and ignorant individuals in need of some form of connection, whether it is substantive or not, and whether or not those perpetuating those theories believe what they are saying.  This is the premise of Andy Kroll’s amazing new work A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, a book that gets at the heart of what has become a tried-and-true issue, which ultimately led to what happened on January 6th, 2021.

                The book is about the murder of Seth Rich, an amiable and well-liked young man who lived and worked in Washington, D.C. for the Voter Protection department at the Democratic National Committee (DNC).  One night, Rich, after getting wickedly drunk at a bar, was walking home when he was accosted by someone or multiple someones and shot dead.  Coroners, detectives, family members, etc. all came to the conclusion, based on an abundance of evidence, that he got murdered during a botched robbery, a common occurrence in that area of D.C.  Pundits, conspiracy theorists, influencers, and social media platforms, however, looked at his demise differently: They saw Rich’s murder as connected to the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal, in that he was the one that leaked the information, so he was murdered because he was the informant.  What happened after Rich’s death, according to Kroll, was an out-of-control maelstrom of false information perpetuated by armchair crackpots and embraced by Conservative talking heads like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who had absolutely no qualms sullying the good reputation of an upstanding citizen murdered in cold-blood and his entire family. 

                A Death on W Street successfully shows readers the ramifications associated with these conspiracies and, although I do not necessarily agree that that this one event was the catalyst to what happened during the Insurrection, the work provides proof beyond reasonable doubt that Rich’s killing was nothing but an unfortunate event that got blown out of proportion by a savvy media machine and a gullible mass audience who wanted a scapegoat for all that was happening during the latter Clinton’s presidential campaign; or, a sensationalistic story that proved how corrupt Hillary Clinton was, so much so she would have someone killed.  What this killing was, rather than being just a tragedy of a life snuffed out too young, was an indication that ignorance and opportunity is fueling a lot of the vitriol that is happening in this country and around the world; that chaos is taking over; that there are those that lead and those blindly follow in the hopes to find connection or purpose in this world.  The problem with that, however, is logic and credible evidence is not as revered as it once was.  It is easier to watch the YouTube video, or read the Facebook newsfeed, or read 140 or so characters, then really embed oneself in the bulk of material out there that has copious amounts of research, which takes time and energy and patience to read.

                Andy Kroll shows how ridiculous and scary this all is, when the masses start to take the word of Alex Jones over those that really know what is happening and those that know the person that it happened to.  When did fiction become reality, and reality become fiction?  Who knows?  But, there is no doubt it is a problem that needs to be rectified.    

All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire by Rebecca Woolf

On December 23rd, 2021, writer Joan Didion died.  In her prolific career spanning more than several decades, she wrote hundreds of books, stories, and essays, one of which is a memoir: The Year of Magical Thinking (2005).  This powerful work is an ode to her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, who died suddenly from a cardiac episode in 2003; her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, who was in the hospital during John Gregory’s death and died while Didion was promoting her memoir; and, to herself for surviving the grief she endured during that most difficult period in her life.  She writes about her experience from a mourning widow’s perspective, which, in this case, is gut-wrenching.  She claims grief is “nothing we expect it to be” and that it has “no distance”; and, it deranged her mind to where she truly believed he would come back.  Didion treasured her spouse so much, she deluded herself into thinking he was not dead and he would walk back into her life like nothing happened.  Didion writes The Year of Magical Thinking from a place of love, the expectation most readers have of death memoirs.

                This adoration for the deceased is turned on its head, however, in Rebecca Woolf’s All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire, which is about Woolf’s experience taking care of her cancer-ridden, soon-to-be ex-husband, Hal, and the elation she feels after his quick passing.  Although at first one might find the book shockingly uncomfortable, it is Woolf’s joyous voice and unabashedly honest understanding of who she is and what she has becomes during and after his sickness that makes this particular chronicle a breath of fresh air.  This is a work about reluctant mourning that leads to a necessary rejuvenation.

                Woolf tells readers early on that in the span of days, Hal became an invalid.  One minute he was fine, the next he was painfully dying.  The cancer spread in four months, his diagnosis coming soon after the two decided to divorce.  Woolf had been unhappy for years: she had multiple affairs Hal had known about; she was verbally abused by Hal; he shunned his parental responsibilities; sarcastic remarks were the norm between the two of them; etc.  She was infatuated with the adventurous person Hal once was but he later became a burden to her and her autonomy; she even says, again early on, she is happier being alone.  The first section of All of This is about her experience taking care of a man she does not him.  She exposes the complexities surrounding how a woman who desperately wants to walk away from her offensive spouse cannot because of a sense of obligation during a situation beyond anyone’s control.  Readers are made aware of the conflicts she has during those several months: how she wanted to live her life without him, but she did not want him to die.  She goes back and forth between love and hatred, caring and indifference, acceptance and denial.  Woolf goes through the stages of grief speaking with a raw voice about her understandings of the process of death, the guilt she felt, and the bitterness she had.  Woolf’s text runs through the emotional gamut and we experience the whirlwind; she jumps from point to point, sometimes without a firm organization of thought, and yet she is cognizant of how her audience may react to her personal revelations and desires.

                All of This’s second and third parts are about Woolf’s new-found feelings of freedom.  While she and her children scattered his ashes in Oregon, and while she discarded Hal’s belongings, she had the desperate longing to move on, and move on she does.  In a profound moment in the text, a moment more profound since the overturning of Roe on June 24th, she speaks about the patriarchy and how Donald Trump’s panic-inducing presidency allowed for men to be sanctified rather than vilified for their abusive behavior; and, she herself allowed for that abhorrent behavior to take place, both in her marriage and in her early days, by consistently letting men, including her husband, use her body and mess with her mind for their own gratification.  Woolf is very open about how Hal’s death was an awakening, so much so it turned her on.  She had not been touched in two years and it was now her turn to have agency over her own sexual decisions.  Woolf speaks about her love-life with a frankness that provides a clear indication she is finally liberated, that the chaos she endured while married to Hal and even before she met him subsided to the point of now being able to grab hold of her whole self and her own emotions, whether she decides to break all of her dishes in her kitchen, have casual one-night stands with multiple partners, or occasionally miss Hal and the good moments they did had throughout their twelve-year marriage.

                In essence, All of This is a remarkable, timely book about a woman’s right to choose her own destiny after years of being suppressed by a patriarchal system that tells women how to love, hate, mourn, date, parent, desire, and dictate their own futures.  Woolf sees grief as a daunting process of self-discovery that can also be satisfying and life-affirming; it a complex journey that does not have to be unpleasant.  Rather, death can make one recognize the ones left behind are still very much alive.