Colin Marshall

Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, 1986)

When I finally picked Watchmen off my girlfriend's bookshelf, I took care not to read it in public. It isn't that I'm one of those guys who can't be seen reading a comic book, but the big-deal IMAX adaptation is playing in theaters as we speak, and I didn't want to come off like I was half-assedly reading the book just because the movie came out. Problem is, I actually was reading the book — albeit, I would argue, full-assedly — because the movie came out; despite having for years harbored a vague intention to open the thing already, I wasn't moved to crack it until I just couldn't take hearing and reading any more discussion about subject matter which which I had no familiarity. Faced repeatedly with talk of mysterious entities like "Rorschach", "Doctor Manhattan" and "giant space squid", and, inevitably, felt a burning urge to find out more. In the name of curiosity, I got over myself and read the book, exposed to all the world, at Coffee Cat. Part of my hesitancy to get on with it must have sprung from the sheer amount of baggage Watchmen carries, or at least the sheer amount of baggage that all I'd heard about Watchmen made me bring to it. According to friends, acquaintances, commentators, bloggers and wags, the book is pretty much the Best Thing Ever, or at least a Great Thing Indeed. The voluminous, subtle detail! The groundbreaking comic storytelling techniques! The resonances internal and external! The capturing of the zeitgeist! The "total, devastating deconstruction of virtually every archetype in the genre's history!" (Thus spake Mark Tillich.) If nothing else, I take from Watchmen that it is difficult indeed to experience any work with such vertiginously built-up expectations, especially given that my experience with superhero comics is limited to a handful of Spider-Man annuals and the premiere issue of Force Works, which I never removed from its bag for fear of damage. (This was back when comic books were briefly considered a viable investment vehicle.) My journey from panel to panel was significantly slowed by my constant asking of myself, "Did you catch all the greatnesses in that text bubble? What about in that image? Is there some greatness in the background that you're missing?" The unceasing Easter-egg hunt for awesomeness exerted a strong drag. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed the book. Hell, it probably merits "very enjoyed", but I know full well that I don't — perhaps can't — have an uncorrupted perspective on such an oft-quoted, oft-imitated, turgid-academic-paper-inspiring work. As with other pieces of art whose fans grow devoted, though, I can relate the experience that they often wish aloud they could have again: that of taking it in for the very first time. (I take my duties as a Watchmen virgin seriously.) Going in, I only knew two facts about Watchmen, besides that of its belovedness. The first was that it's written my Alan Moore, the eccentric, heavily-bearded fellow behind such critically-acclaimed comic books as The Killing Joke (own it, read it, can't fully appreciate it due to lack of Batman background), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (liked the concept and saw the film, which is... just as good as you've heard), From Hell (saw the film, which surprisingly dim memories indicate I enjoyed) and Lost Girls (which I got Madelaine for her birthday and may read myself Real Soon Now). Moore's name doesn't draw me to nor repel me from a work. The second was that it's known for — here comes that word again — its "deconstruction" of superhero comic conventions. In this case, it seems that by "deconstruction" people mean "treatment as real". For years, I heard Watchmen pitched to me as the tale that dares to ask what superheroes would be like if they existed in the real world. The concept struck me as cool until Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins revealed that even the best, most detailed rooting of Batman in the real world results not in a Batman story, but the story of a Batman impersonator. And given his famous lack of superpowers, Batman should be the easy one to make realistic! The good news is that Moore and artist Dave Gibbons seem to execute the real-life-superheroes idea just about as well as it can be executed. Watchmen's main "costumed vigilantes", a slouchy amateur ornithologist, the bitter daughter of the previous generation's star heroine and a socially maladroit grown orphan with a rigidly Manichean worldview, are drawn from messy, imperfect life indeed. They're filled, in varying measure, fear, anger, doubt, disappointment and resentment. (I seem to recall "actual" superheroes being broody too, though in a less realistic fashion.) They labor under normal troubles like loneliness, awkwardness and piles of messy dishes. What pleasantly surprised me was that the characters not only exist in a real place, they exist in a real time; the story actually takes place in October 1985, though the October 1985 of a tweaked alternate America. (Richard Nixon, to take one of the most visible departures, is still president.) Watchmen's (relatively) young generation of heroes are given birthdates in the 1930s and 40s; their predecessors in the 1910s and 20s. Their lives are tied to the eras in which they've played out. The characters are, in short, made to exist. Which is why it seems like heresy, not to say a grand mal missing of the point, to claim that the superhero angle actually feels like a bit of wrench thrown into the works. I'm with the characters until they assume the thousand-yard stare and reminisce about the days when they used to run around in costume chasing down thugs. The idea, see, is that in this alternate America, the superhero thing actually bled from early Superman comics to real life; ordinary people, fed up with the failings of the justice system or whatever, chose to lead lives imitating paneled art. Despite early complications — a cape fatally caught in a revolving door being a memorable mishap — several such costumed crusaders join forces to form the "Minutemen", a league that tensions external and internal ultimately dissolve. It's the heirs of the Minutemen that Watchmen is concerned with, the straggly remnants of superherokind left after the 1977 outlawing of flamboyant vigilantism. And make no mistake, it is pretty cool to see some of the possible ramifications of the superhero lifestyle played out in a setting more closely resembling reality. The aforementioned ornithologist, who fights crime under the name of the Nite Owl, endures more than most, once losing a criminal's tail thanks to time wasted while strugging with his suit during a bathroom break and another time getting his arm broken by a malfunctioning powered exoskeleton. (He's the Batman analog, though his gear isn't quite as reliable.) There's also a familiar theme from The Killing Joke, that of the codependency of superheroes and supervillians. Watchmen's world appears to have always suffered from a paucity of supervillains, or at least of competent ones, leaving the heroes to beat up on petty miscreants when they're not feeling enervated by this new "white-collar" crime. But here's the problem I couldn't shake: there aren't superheroes in real life. There never were. There wasn't, to the best of my knowledge, even an aborted dress-up-and-fight-crime craze, much less one spanning two generations. And yeah, duh, positing a scenario where there are superheroes in real life is the whole raison d'etre of a speculative work like this, but the mental itch insisting that things didn't add up never went away. I ended up having to switch perceptive gears every time the characters talked about or did superhero stuff, requiring a more favorable mechanical ratio to suspend the vastly increased weight of my disbelief. This, on top of the self-conscious greatness-spotting, put me on a rocky reading road indeed. The plot is essentially this: when someone defenestrates the Comedian, the youngest of the former Minutemen who became a sort of nihilistic patriot in middle age, Rorschach wants to know who and why. Several deaths later, he comes to suspect a conspiracy intent on specifically killing costumed vigilantes or, as he calls them, "masks". The trouble Rorschach proceeds to both make and get into jostles the Nite Owl and the second Silk Spectre, ever-reluctant heroine and daughter of the first one, out of retirement. Amid NYC's mounting chaos, Rorschach and the Nite Owl discover an elaborate, wide-reaching scheme on the part of Adrian Veidt, formerly the superhero Ozymandias and currently a simple millionaire captain-of-industry genius. He plans, from his high-tech Antarctic hideout, to simulate a giant space squid invasion in order to end intra-humanity hostility by directing it toward a perceived non-human enemy. (It speaks volumes about the common perception of comic books that it comes as a pleasant surprise to find that Veidt, the closest thing Watchmen has to a villain, does not openly regard himself a villain.) Above all the proceedings, sometimes in more ways than one, stands Dr. Manhattan, a "big blue space guy". (Thus spake Brandi Jensen.) For all those concerned about how a formerly mild-mannered physicist could possibly turn into a bald, naked, blue giant (when he decides to be giant) who never ages, who may be made of pure energy, who can synthesize any element, who possesses full knowledge of the past and future, who can split into two or teleport himself wherever he wants, rest assured: it was an experiment gone wrong. Naturally, the U.S. military takes the poor alienated guy on a superweapon, using him to win Vietnam and hold the threat of even more mutually assured destruction over the Soviets. More to the point, he acts as a genuine, superpower-possessing — maybe all-superpower-possessing — superhero in a setting where the other main characters are just regular schlubs, albeit schlubs in better-than-average shape and goofy suits. I'm still wrestling with whether Dr. Manhattan's presence wrecks the superheroes-in-reality device by making reality too unreal, or whether it enriches it by forcing the workaday "superheroes" to reconsder their roles in a world containing an invincible dude who goes around raising floating castles on Mars with his mind. But even I, a Watchmen tyro, realize that to spend a lot of time on the plot is to ignore the book's greatest successes. Moore set out to create a comic book that takes full advantage its medium, and boy does it. Even in the sequential art renaissance that's supposedly going on as you read this, I haven't read anything that more actively exploits the strengths (and maybe even weaknesses) of its medium. The insertion of pages ostensibly from things that aren't comic books, for instance — a retired superhero's autobiography, another's paper in an ornithology journal, a back-page interview with another in one of those gotcha-question 70s magazines — or the threading through of an E.C. homage pirate story that parallels... well, it parallels a lot of things. (Watchmen is big on parallelism.) There are specific examples to cite of comic book techniques pulled off well, but it's more of a gestalt thing; the story unfolds in a way that only comics (and the fact that the comic reader can spend as much time as they want with a panel) allow. This clarifies Terry Gilliam's labeling of the material as "unfilmable", but clouds the modern decision by Zack Synder et al to film it anyway. So much would presumably get lost in translation that I'm not sure what the appeal is. And yes, Hollywood's all about the quick buck, but how bankable a property is a 22-year-old DC graphic novel like Watchmen, really? As I understand it, box office returns have thus far disappointed. Nor, as a Watchmen tyro, can I ignore the book's greatest excesses. From what I know of Alan Moore, he loses against the urge to politics-up his work as often as he wins, and he can't chalk up this occasion as a victory. I happen to listen to quite a lot of albums produced in England in the late 1970s and 1980s, and thus have grown accustomed to what I've come to call the "incoherent anti-Thatcher rant". In that era and country, you see, it was apparently in bigtime artists' fashion to hate on the prime minister, and to that end a number of musicians wound up including a track or five on their records of the period that, thinly veiled if veiled at all, attack her. While I'm generally on the side of criticizing those in power and while many of those numbers are musically quite enjoyable, the batting around of the same old icon of evil in these pop stars' internal cosmologies gets old quickly, especially since songs can't really deliver convincing arguments. Speaking in prose rather than verse, the singers did little better; evidently they thought maddeningly incomplete assertions like "Oi, Maggie Thatcher says there's no such thing as society, right!" would do the job. The most cosmopolitan of these pop politicos would also include Ronald Reagan on their roster of forces currently dismantling the world, sometimes paranoiacally lumping Thatcher and the Gipper into a their own sneering, mustache-twirling alliance of destruction. My problem isn't that they attack Reagan and Thatcher — I don't have any special attachment to those politicians — my problem is they don't seem to care enough to make their attacks hold water. If you argue that Reagan and Thatcher are so self-evidently bad that if I don't automatically agree with you I'm part of the problem, then sorry, I'll have to take Reagan and Thatcher. While the reasoning-free impressionism of those songs make Watchmen's own jabs at the leaders of the day look like an article from Nature, the politics with which Moore imbues the work aren't much more thoughtful. The narrative's being rooted with unusually dense detail in its era dates it in a good way; its treatment of matters political dates it in a bad way. I suspect that Moore — and especially the Moore of a, say, V for Vendetta — has a touch of the standard artist's process for assuming political stances: take positions based not on the ideas but on your like or dislike for the people who profess them, and make sure the like or dislike is as aesthetically-based as possible. (How else to explain the prevalence of Che shirts?) Anthony Lane's criticism of the Watchmen movie, I think, holds true for this aspect of the book: "it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear — deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation — is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along." It does nothing to change my provisional position that works of fiction shouldn't make political arguments — or arguments of any kind, really — since they're inevitably undercut, no matter how well-argued, by the unaccountability of their delivery system. But with maturity, I've learned to be bothered less by political puerility in art. If I let it get to me, after all, what art could I enjoy? Certainly vast tracts of comicdom would go right off the table. Neo-realist film wouldn't stand much of a chance, either. And what non-Stoppard playwright could I ever appreciate? (Not that I have much theater appreciation left over for the non-Stoppards.) Watchmen is, in practically all its other aspects, not a flimsy piece of art, and even that statement understates the case. The book may get clunky when it butts up against reality, but internally, there's a fine nuance and a damn fine structure. I'll soon read it again, I'm sure.

Surfwise (Doug Pray, 2008)

I think about documentary filmmaking a lot, both in regard to my own project(s) and the dissection of others'. The best documentaries, in my viewing experience, have been the ones most topically dialed-in, those that eschew grand narrative for something a little more comfortably small-scale. Helvetica, Gary Hustwit's film about the eponymous (and omnipresent) font, takes on just about as sprawling a subject as I like to see. (And, while pretty damn good, I'd say it actually suffered from having too much to cover in its scant 80-minute runtime; doubled, the length would have allowed the material to breathe.)

My very favorite documentaries tend to keep the lens on an individual or a small group of people. Chris Smith's American Movie, probably the most frequent holder of the top spot on my list, chronicles the travails of just one aspiring Midwestern horror filmmaker (and, to a lesser extent, his wasteoid musician buddy). John Nathan's "The Japanese" trilogy, certainly my preferred documentary triptych, sticks to families: Full Moon Lunchto a Tokyo caterer patriarch and his brood, Farm Song to a hard-working rural clan andThe Blind Swordsman to hard-drinking actor Shintaro Katsu and his coterie. And we'd be remiss to neglect Michael Apted's Up series, which needs no summary.

Apted's project has had to follow fourteen subjects, but over seven installments and counting. Doug Pray's Surfwise, a study of an eccentric surfer doctor, his wife and their nine kids, has nearly as much to accomplish in an hour and a half. Given that the deck is stacked hugely against the movie's success from the get go, I found quite a bit to admire. None of the eleven-member Paskowitz family is present to the same level of detail as was Mark Borchardt, sure, but that's not a fatal flaw; it just means I'm unlikely to revisit Surfwise as often as American Movie.

What I always wonder about these one-or-a-few-people documentaries is how the filmmakers find their subjects in the first place and, more importantly, how they came to realized that they were movie material. The real stories, when I hear them, are all over the place: Smith, I believe, had Borchardt as a student in a filmmaking class he taught; Apted was a junior member of the Granada TV project that actively recruited the kids straight from their schools; Albert and David Maysles latched on to the Beales after visiting them to research a documentary about the Kennedys; Chris Marker bumped into the titular Koumiko of Le Mystère Koumiko, of which I recently acquired a copy I'm jonesing to watch, at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Starting out with one project idea and then jumping to another after it's unpredictably exposed is surprisingly common.) Many documentary subjects are eccentrics, which I suppose makes them easy to spot, but the best usually aren't; perhaps it takes a certain kind of vision to pick someone truly fascinating-yet-commonplace out of the crowd.

The Paskowitzes, though, are eccentrics, with family head Dorian/"Doc" being by orders of magnitude the most eccentric of them all. I imagine it would be hard to junk your prestigious medical career, buy a beaten-up 24-foot camper and proceed to cris-cross the country doing nothing but surfing and fathering children without attracting attention. Surfwise opens up by introducing everybody, going over the details of Doc's conversion from straight-laced Jewish doctor to bohemian surfer dude and reinforcing the point that, no, they really just drove around all those years in that camper with only organic food and no jobs but catching waves.

One might charitably call the structure "classic" for this sort of documentary: first hit the audience with all these unusual and seemingly shocking facts — wait until you hear Doc lay out his attitudes about sex and why you might as well do it two feet from your kids since there's not going to be anywhere to conceal in the 24-footer — then pull back and show the downside of all this iconoclasm — Doc ran the family in a quasi-fascistic manner, and the now-grown, never-educated kids are pretty bitter about entering the adult world with near-Amish unpreparedness — then get everyone together and imply that everything's basically gonna be okay. High, low, medium-high. Happy, sad, basically happy. Call it whatever you like.

Errol Morris once said that if you let the camera run for a sufficiently long time while you're talking to someone, sooner or later you find out how crazy they really are. There are so many people in Surfwise that a disappointingly low amount of craziness makes it to the screen. The absolute zenith of the film comes when David, the eldest Paskowitz child, sits in his recording studio and groan-sings a sort of nu-metal track he's laid down about Doc and the demons he's instilled in his son straight at the camera, for likefive minutes. Alas, there's little else like it in the film; the craziness on display is mostly surface craziness, what's usually called "wackiness". (I do wonder how Morris would've treated the same material; with little wackiness, no doubt.)

On balance, Surfwise handles Doc and company gently, but it's easy to see the price he paid for going his own way. Part of me actually really admires the boldness he displays; one needs quite a lot of it to craft a life that nobody has lived before. (And isn't that the goal — nay, The Goal?) Another part of me argues that, yes, that force of will is impressive, but not necessarily when it's in service of producing a cluster of humans unable to deal with a settings constructed by their dad's peculiar mixture of asceticism, diet and exercise, sex-positivity and zealous Judaism. When Doc insists that school would only have filled his kids' heads with nonsense, I theoretically agree, but what did he replace the nonsense with?

* * *
2008

1. James Marsh's Man on Wire 
2. Tarsem's The Fall
3. Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In
4. Gus van Sant's Milk 
5. Alex Gibney's Gonzo
6. Doug Pray's Surfwise
7. Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD 
8. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind 
9. Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona 
10. Randall Miller's Bottle Shock

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)

... and my "Humanists" column on Chris Marker's Sans Soleil went up last week.

Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

It somehow slipped my mind to post this, but my "Humanists" column on Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas went up last month.

It's all in your head-land

From David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest:

He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear... It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real... He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen... He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

I've come to draw, or at to emphasize, a distinction separating two realms between which I divide my time: real-land and head-land. Real-land is the physical world, occupied by myself and billions of equally real others, in which my fingers strike a series of keys and a monitor displays strings of text corresponding to these keystrokes. Head-land is the world in which I construct an image of what this sentence will look like when complete, what this paragraph will look like when complete and what this entire post will look like when complete. And it doesn't stop there: in head-land, the finished post is already being read, readers are reacting, readers are (or aren't) responding and the resulting conversations are, for better or for worse, playing themselves out. In head-land, the thoughts I've translated into words and thus defined and developed in this post are already shaping the thoughts to be explored in future posts, the composition of which is going on there even now.

Head-land is the setting of our predictions. When deciding what actions to take in real-land, we don't base our choices on the possible actions' end results in real-land — by definition, we don't know what will happen in real-land until it already has — but on their end results in head-land. The obvious problem: while real-land is built out of all the information that exists everywhere, head-land is built not even out of all the information in a single brain — and that isn't much — but of whichever subset of that brain's information happens to be currently employed. Hence the brutally rough, sometimes barely perceptible correspondence between head-land and real-land in the short term and the nearly nonexistent correspondence between them in the long.

One might grant that while responding that running models in head-land is nevertheless the best predictor of real-land events that any individual has. And that's true, but it doesn't change our apparent tendency to place far more trust in our head-land models than their dismal accuracy could ever warrant. To take but one example: we really seem to believe our own failures in head-land, head-land being the place we do the vast majority — and in some cases, all — of our failing. How many times has someone entertained the dream of, say, painting, but then failed in head-land — couldn't get a head-land show, say, or couldn't even mix head-land's colors right — and abandoned the enterprise before beginning it? How many times has someone started painting in real-land, gotten less-than-perfect results, and then extrapolated that scrap of real-land data into a similarly crushing head-land failure? Even established creators are vulnerable to this; could the novelist suffering from a bout of "writer's block" simply be the unwitting mark of a head-land vision of himself unable to write? The danger of head-land catastrophes that poison real-land endeavors looms over every step of the path. The possibility of being metaphorically laughed out of the classroom, though probably only illusory to begin with, never quite leaves one's mind. The same, to a lesser extent, goes for experiencing rather than creating; someone who refuses to listen to a new album, sample a new cuisine, watch a new film or visit a new art exhibition on the excuse that they already "know what [they] like" appear to have seen, and believed, their head-land selves listening, eating or viewing with irritation, repulsion or boredom.

That most of what we get worked up about exists in our imaginations and our imaginations only is less a fresh observation than the stuff of a thousand tired aphorisms. No battle plan survives the first shot fired. You die a thousand deaths awaiting the guillotine. Nothing's as good or as bad as you anticipate. You never know until you try. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear is the mind-killer. It's all in your mind. Don't look down. Quoth John Milton, "The mind is its own place, and in it self, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." The more time I spend in head-land, the less time I feel like I should spend in head-land, because its awful, discouraging predictions are practically never borne out in real-land. (Even when one comes close, head-land seems to fail to capture the subjective experience of failure, which I find is either never failure qua failure or always somehow psychologically palliated or attenuated.) Experiencing a disaster in real-land is one thing, and its negative effects are unavoidable, but experiencing hypothetical head-land disasters as negative mental effects in real-land — which I suspect, we all do, and often — would seem to be optional.

Consider global economic woes. While you more than likely know a few who've had to take cuts in their incomes or find new ones, it's even likelier that you're experiencing all the degradations of destitution in head-land even as your real-land income has not and will not substantially shrink. You're living out the agonies of fumbling with food stamps in a long, angry grocery line despite the fact that you'll never come close. When one is starved for real-land information, one's head-land self gets hit with the worst possible fate. I hear of someone dying in a gruesome real-land freak accident, and I die a dozen times over in more gruesome, freakier head-land accidents. I visit a remote, unpopulated real-land location and my head-land map contracts, desolately and suffocatingly, to encompass only my lonely immediate surroundings. (Then my glasses fall off and break. But there was time! There was time!) I dream up an idea for implementation in real-land, but even before I've fully articulated it my head-land self is already busy enduring various ruinous executions of it. In head-land, worst-case scenarios tend to become the scenarios, presenting huge, faultily-calculated sums of net present real-land misery.

Fear of the ordeals that play out in head-land is a hindrance, but the paralysis induced by the sheer weight of countless accumulated hypothetical propositions is crippling. Even riding high on the hog in real-land is no bulwark against the infinite (and infinitely bad) vicissitudes of head-land. Say you're earning a pretty sweet living playing the guitar in real-land. But what if you'd been born without arms? Or in a time before the invention of the guitar? Or in a time when you would've died of an infection before reaching age twelve? Then you sure wouldn't be enjoying yourself as much. And what if you lose your arms in a horrific fishing accident ten years down the line? Or if you suddenly forget what a guitar is? Or if you die of an infection anyway? Despite the fact that none of these dire possibilities have occurred — or are even likely to occur — they're nonetheless inflicting real-land pain from across the border.

I call this phenomenon a blooming what if plant, beginning as the innocuous seed of a question — "What if I hadn't done or encountered such and such earlier thing that proved to be a necessary condition to something from which I enjoy and profit now?" — and sprouting rapidly into a staggeringly complex organism, its branches splitting into countless smaller branches which split into yet more branches themselves. More perniciously, this also happens in a situation-specific manner; namely, in situations whose sub-events are particularly unpredictable. The classic example would be approaching the girl one likes in middle school; the possible outcomes are so many and varied, at least in the approacher's mind, that the what-ifs multiply dizzyingly and collectively become unmanageable, especially if his strategy is to prepare responses to all of them. It's no accident that those never-get-the-girl mopes in movies spend so much time vainly rehearsing conversations in advance, and that doing the same in life never, ever works. There's a line to be drawn between the guys in junior high who could talk the girls up effortlessly and the ones who seized up merely contemplating it. I suspect the difference has to do with the ratio of one's relative presence in head-land versus that in real-land.

I would submit that, whatever their results, the dudes who could walk right up to those girls and try their luck habitually spent a lot more time in real-land than in head-land. They probably weren't sitting around, eyes fixed on their own navels, building elaborate fictions of inadequacy, embarrassment and ridicule; if they were, wouldn't they have been just as paralyzed? They appeared to operate on a mental model that either didn't conjure such dire possibilities or, if it did, didn't allow them any decisionmaking weight. "So the chick could turn me down? So what? What if space aliens invade and destroy the Earth? I don't know what'll happen until I try."

This brings up something else Wallace wrote and thought about — equivalent verbs for him, I think — though not, as I dimly recall, in Infinite Jest. In his sports journalism, of which he wrote some truly stunning pieces, he kept looping back to the issue of the correlation and possible causal connection between great athletes' brilliant physical performance and their astonishing unreflectiveness in conversation and prose. I'm thinking of Wallace's profile of Michael Joyce, a not-quite-star tennis player who has no knowledge or interests outside the game and couldn't even grasp the thundering sexual innuendo on a billboard ad. I'm thinking of his review of Tracy Austin's autobiography, a cardboard accretion of blithe assertions, unreached-yet-strongly-stated conclusions and poster-grade sports clichés. What must it be like, Wallace asked, to speak or hear prases like "step it up" or "gotta concentrate now" and have them actually mean something? Is the sports star's nonexistent inner life not the price they pay for their astonishing athletic gift, but rather its very essence?

One can say many things about bigtime athletes, but that they live in their heads is not one of them. I'd wager that you can't find a group that spends less time in head-land than dedicated athletes; they are, near-purely, creatures of real-land. The dudes who could go right up to the ladies in seventh grade seemed to be, in kind if not in magnitude, equally real-land's inhabitants. It comes as no surprise that so many of them played sports and weren't often seen with books. And not only were they undaunted by the danger (possibly because unperceived) of crushing humiliation, I'd imagine they were inherently less vulnerable to crushing humiliation in the first place, because crushing humiliation, like theoretical arm loss and imagined endeavor failure, is a head-land phenomenon. Humiliation is what makes a million other-people-are-thinking-horrible-thoughts-about-me flowers bloom — but only in head-land. The impact can only hit so hard if one doesn't spend much time there, because in real-land, direct access to another's thoughts is impossible. In head-land, one can't, as their creator, help but have direct access to everyone else's thoughts, and thus if a head-land resident believes everyone's disparaging him, everyone is disparaging him. "So what if they're thinking ill of me?" a full-time real-land occupant might ask. "I can't know that for sure, and besides, they're probably not; how often do you think, in a way that actually affects them, about someone who's been recently embarrassed?"

But there's a problem: saying someone "lives in their head" is more or less synonymous with calling them intelligent. "Hey, look at that brainy scientist go by, lost in thought; the fellow lives in his head!" As for professional athletes, well... let's just acknowledge the obvious, that professional athleticism is not a byword for advanced intellectual capacity. (Wallace once lamented the archetypal "basketball genius who cannot read".) So there's clearly a return to time spent in head-land, and arguing for the benefits of head-land occupancy even to nonintellectuals is a trivial task. How, for instance, would we motivate ourselves without reference to head-land? How could we envision possibilities and thus choose which ones we'd like to realize without seeing them in head-land? Surely even the most narrowly-focused, football-obsessed football player has watched himself polish a Super Bowl ring in head-land. Why else would he strive for that outcome? Head-land is where our fantasies happen, where our goals are formulated, and is that a function we can do without?

Hokey as it sounds, I do consider myself a somewhat "goal-oriented" person, in that I burn a lot of time and mental bandwidth attempting to realize certain head-land states. But, as the above paragraphs reveal, I often experience head-land backfire in the form of discouraging negative imaginings rather than encouraging positive ones. Here I could simply pronounce that I will henceforth only use head-land for envisioning the positive, but it's not quite that easy; I can think of quite a few badly-ending head-land scenarios that I'm happy to experience there — and only there — and take into account when making real-land decisions. The head-land prediction that I'll get splattered if I walk blindly into traffic comes to mind.

And I'm one of the less head-land-bound people I know! I wouldn't be writing this post if I didn't struggle with the damned place, but traits like my near-inability to write fiction suggest that I don't gravitate toward it as strongly as some. Still, I feel the need to minimize the problems that spring forth from head-land without converting myself into an impulsive dumb beast. The best compromise I have at the moment is not necessarily to stem the flow of predictions out of head-land, but simply to ignore the bulk of their content, to crank down their resolution by 90% or so. Since the accuracy of our predictions drops so precipitously as they extend forward in time and grow dense with specifics, they'd mostly lose noise. Noise simply misleads, and attenuating what misleads is the point of this exercise.

There are countless practical ways to implement this. One quick-and-dirty hack to dial down head-land's effect on your real-land calculations is to only pay attention to head-land's shadow plays to the extent that they're near your position in time. If they have to do with the distant future, only consider their broadest outlines: the general nature of the position you envision yourself occupying in twenty years, for instance, rather than the specific event of your buxom assistant bringing you just the right roast of coffee. If they have to do with the past, near or distant, just chuck 'em; head-land models tend to run wild with totally irrelevant oh-if-only-things-had-been-different retrodictions, which are supremely tempting but ultimately counterproductive. (As one incisive BEK cartoon had a therapist say, "Woulda, shoulda, coulda — next!") If they have to do with the near future, they're more valuable, and the nearer the future they deal with, the better you would seem to do to pay attention to them.

The concept behind this is one to which I've been devoting thought and practice lately: small units of focus. Alas, this brings us to another set of bromides, athletic and otherwise. One step at a time. Just you and the goal. Break it down. Don't bite off more than you can chew. The disturbing thing is how well operating on such a short horizon seems to work, at least in certain contexts. I find I actually do run better when I think only of the next yard, write better when I think only of the next sentence and talk better when I think only of the subject at hand. When my mind tries instead to load the entire run, the entire essay or the entire conversation, head-land crashes. (This applies to stuff traditionally thought of as more passive as well: I read more effectively when I focus on the sentence, watch films more effectively when I focus on the shot, listen to music more effectively when I focus on the measure.) When Wallace writes about "the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news" and "[hunkering] down in the space between each heartbeat and [making] each heartbeat a wall and [living] in there", I think this is what he means.

Ignoring all head-land details past a certain threshold, de-weighting head-land predictions with their distance in the future and focusing primarily on small, discrete-seeming, temporally proximate units aren't just techniques to evade internal discouragement, either; they also guard against the perhaps even more sinister (and certainly sneakier) forces of complacency. While failure in head-land can cause one to pack it in in real-land, success in head-land, which is merely a daydream away, can prevent one from even trying in real-land. I can't put it better than Paul Graham does: "If you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate."

This is why I'm starting to believe that coming up with great ideas in head-land and then executing them in real-land may be a misconceived process, or at least suboptimally conceived one. How many projects have been forever delayed because the creator decided to wait until the "idea" was just a little bit better, or, in other words, until the head-land simulation came out a little more favorably? It's plausible that this type of stalling lies at the heart of procrastination: one puts the job off until tomorrow because the head-land model doesn't show it as turning out perfect today, never mind the facts that (a) it'll never be perfect, no matter when it's started and (b) it's unlikely to turn out better with less time available for the work, especially given the unforeseen troubles and opportunities. I provisionally believe that this a priori, head-land idea stuff can be profitably be replaced with small-scale real-land exploratory actions that demand little in the way of time or resource investment. Rather than executing steps one through one hundred in head-land, execute step one in real-land; if nothing else, the data you get in response will be infinitely more reliable and more useful in determining what step two should involve. Those dudes in middle school knew this on some basic level: you just gotta go up to the girl and say something. It's the only gauge you have of whether you should say something more, and of what that something should be. It's all about hammering in the thin end of the wedge.

For what it's worth, I've found this borne out in what little creation I've done thus far. I've reached the point of accepting that I don't know — can't know — how a project's going to turn out, since each step depends on the accumulated effects of the steps that preceded it. All I can do is get clear on my vague, broad goal and put my best foot forward, keeping my mind open to accept all relevant information as it develops. When I started my first radio show, I had a bunch of head-land projections about how the show would be, but in practice it evolved away from them in real-land rather sharply — and, I think, for the better. When I started another one a year later, I knew to factor in this unforeseeable real-land evolution from the get-go and thus kept my ideas about what it was supposed to me broad, flexible and small in number, letting the events of real-land fill in the details as they might. With a TV project only just started, I've tried my hardest to stay out of head-land as much as possible; the bajillion variables involved would send whatever old, buggy software my head-land modeler uses straight to the Blue Screen of Death. (Yes, our brains are Windows-based.) Even if it didn't crash, it's not as if I'd be getting sterling predictions out of it. I have, more grandly speaking, come to accept much more of the future's unknowability than once I did; that goes double for the future of my own works. Modeling a successful work in head-land now seems a badly flawed strategy, to be replaced by taking small steps in real-land and working with its response.

I could frame this as another rung in thet climb from a thought-heavier life to an action-heavier life. of approaching and affecting the world as it exists in real-land rather than as it is imagined in head-land. I've nevery been what one would call an idealist and I suppose I'm drawing no closer to that label. Some regard flight from idealism as flight toward cynicism, but it's cynicism I'm been fleeing as well, perhaps even primarily; what is cynicism, after all, but a mistaken reliance on pessimistic head-land conclusions?

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

After its screening, I immediately placed Let the Right One In right at the top of my personal hierarchy of vampire movies. In other words: best vampire movie ever, man. This is not actually saying much in itself, however, since I'm no fan of the vampire tradition. I mean, sure, Nosferatu is pretty cool, and so, in a different way, is Werner Herzog's remake. I'm also something of a fan of E. Elias Merhige's making-of-Nosferatu horror satire Shadow of the Vampire and the way Bela Lugosi says "The children of the night, what music they make" in Dracula. But on the whole, the undead-guys-drinking-blood thing leaves me cold. (No pun intended.)

The worst thing about the black-tux, cape-and-fangs vampire aesthetic is that it's a touch corny and has been sort of done to death (again, no pun intended) over the last hundred years or so. But it's nowhere near as lame as the effeminacy-and-sensitivity vampire aesthetic that's taken over during the past thirty. Now, I've got nothing against effeminacy and sensitivity per se, but making those qualities primary vampiric characteristics, blood-drinking and all aside, has always struck me as a tremendous miscalculation. I realize full well that I may only have this reaction because I am not a 13-year-old girl, and, consequently, have very little interest in fragile, brooding men who look and act just enough like other girls and who are by their very nature so inaccessible as to pose no serious coital threat. (Or... do I?)

Alfredson's film eschews the Count Chocula model and the Twilight model alike, opting instead for Eli, an outwardly if not literally 12-year-old vampire who's either a girl or a castrated boy, depending on your reading. (The source novel says castrated boy; the film hints but doesn't commit.) Eli and her creepy, inept middle-aged adult guardian move into the same apartment block of the Macaulay Culkin-y tween social outkast Oskar. Oskar befriends Eli by way of a lent Rubik's Cube — the action's set in the early 1980s, after all — and soon Eli is helping Oskar defeat his tormentors.

Reading over that description, the plot comes off sounding much more threadbare than it is. Not only is it set in the 80s, it would seem to bear the mark of one of that era's cheapest kid's-movie conceits, the biological outsider who helps the social outsider solve his problems. (I'm thinking Mac and Me.) But it's not exactly like that, and the difference is more in the telling than in the tale itself. Most of the vampire films I've seen and vampire books I've read happen to be just crushingly, ham-fistedly overplotted; viewing or reading them is like watching a speeding tractor drag a string of ciphers, some undead, on an intricately but deliberately shaped path through a narrative cornfield. At that point, why even bother calling one's characters characters, even when one has weighed a few of them down with a taste for blood, paler-than-usual skin and a tendency to lament? Let the Right One In is plotted blessedly lightly, letting infinity percent more character stuff to come to the fore organically, rather than via between-set-piece exposition. I'll wait while you Vampire Chronicles fans tally up the years of your life spent ingesting what amounts to Lestat Fun Facts.

The issue of vampire enabling is present with some strength in the film, and while it's not explored with a stunning amount of depth — I've heard the book does a thorough job — I'm just glad to see it depicted with more interest than other vampire stories seem to give it. A vampire enabler, to hammer together a quick working definition, would be a non-vampiric individual who aids and abets a vampire's blood-drinking ways, to the detriment of their own once-reasonably-normal existences. Eli enters the movie under the ostensible care of Håkan, the aforementioned sixty-year-old weirdo. Apparently he allows the novel to broach the rich theme of pederasty, but the film once again keeps cards near vest. The important thing is that Håkan has evidently dedicated his life to going around killing people in order to drain their blood and give it to Eli; the problem is that he sucks (pun unintentional) at it, allowing nosy dogs and impatient high schoolers to foil his plans every time. He's a poor vampire enabler, and he pays the price for it. Many interpret the ending of the film, which as Oskar and Eli getting the hell out of Dodge — er, Blackeberg — on the train together, as an indication that the boy has assumed Håkan's role.

It doesn't hurt that all this is shot and edited with that Scandinavian magic touch. I'm really not sure at all why I'm not more actively into the region's filmmakers, given that, in my limited experience, they get the aesthetics right nine times out of ten. Scenery is absorbing without being kitschily arranged. Shots last a comfortable amount of time. The camera doesn't jerk around (much). Journalistic ethics demand that I mention that the movie's score is a bit too expressionistic and on-the-nose not to irritate me, but, by the vampire genre's standards, the production's still well in the black (another pun not intended).

2008

1. James Marsh's Man on Wire
2. Tarsem's The Fall
3. Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In
4. Gus van Sant's Milk
5. Alex Gibney's Gonzo
6. Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD
7. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind
8. Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona
9. Randall Miller's Bottle Shock