Read This And Get a Free Thing

A few quick items, while they're on my brain.

• I reviewed Doorman's pilot a while back. I said at the time that I hoped you could watch it one day. Well, now you can. It's here and it's good and it's ten minutes long. Come on, you don't have ten minutes? You have ten minutes. 
• In my bookmarks tab, I have a subfolder marked "Blog material." I've touched that subfolder probably twice since last April. On my more recent visit, I rediscovered the (increasingly popular) webcomic Strong Female Protagonist. It's one of the more interesting takes on superherodom going anywhere in fiction right now. The dialogue gets a little heavy-handed and moralizing, but I'm not in a position to criticize someone else on that point, am I? 
• Oh right, this is where I tell you to get your copy of Nos Populus. And then you can like it on Facebook. You know, if you want. No pressure.
• Back in September, I predicted a Denver-Seattle Super Bowl. I probably shouldn't get to brag about that, but this is the first time to my memory that I've successfully predicted both Super Bowl teams. Basically, I'm now qualified to be a sportsball expert guy. I should learn how to get paid for this. Anyway, most would stick with their guns, but I have no faith in my guns. Adjusting my previous pick, I'm calling: Seattle over Denver, 28-20.

So, that's it for now. Your free thing? I just gave you several. Were you expecting a car? That was never realistic. Part of you knew that, didn't it? But you had stuck with your fanciful dream. And now we're both unhappy.

Slow Getting Up

"I am meat, traded to the highest bidder: the only bidder. Fine, I'll be your meat. I'll be whatever you want me to be. Just give me a helmet."
--Nate Jackson, Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival From The Bottom Of The Pile

Last fall, I watched PBS' League of Denial. I didn't do the swearing-off football thing. I didn't tell myself I'd never see the sport the same way again. But I did predict that it would be harder for me to watch football and ignore what I had already sort of known: that these men kill themselves and each other for my fleeting pleasure. I had said and written as much myself prior to that. But after absorbing League of Denial, I now had too much human evidence bouncing around in my skull to go back to how things used to be. I may still watch, but with different eyes, I told myself.

Ten days later, I was apoplectic over the Bears' chronic inability to stop allowing easy first downs (that was the game at Washington, for anyone keeping score).

In Slow Getting Up, former NFL role-player Nate Jackson gives a first-hand account of how injuries took him from middle-of-the-road receiver to formerly-serviceable tight end. And how, even toward the end, he couldn't quite face the obvious warning signs that his dream (a word he uses a lot) was dead.

"I still believe in the beauty of the game. This above all else is true. But to be a fly on the wall, or to be [Jackson's rehab trainer] Derek, is to be struck in the face with how delusional a man scorned by his lover can be. Here I am telling him all the reasons why I hate her, in between sets of an exercise specifically designed to lead me back into her arms. I am sick."

That first sentence is easy to overlook. Football, like any decent sport (not you, curling), is beautiful. It just happens to have a staggering human toll. I tell myself that the players know what they sign up for, that they take it as a job hazard. But even with the possible (major) exception of what players know about concussions and other head injuries, Jackson's story indicates that a player can't possibly account for everything his body will endure. We worry about the obviously gruesome injuries (like Navarro Bowman's during Sunday's NFC Championship game). But who anticipates Nate Jackson tearing nearly every muscle in his groin clean off the bone? And in a universe where "there simply isn't time to pay attention to the individual athlete's body," where things move "too quickly for... conscientious objections to keep pace," how often are other, more minor injuries allowed to fester and conspire with other injuries to dismantle world class athletes?

For the record, Jackson never suffers a concussion and credits this miracle to the shortness of his career, writing of guys with longer tenures in the game, "they stay healthy longer, play more, smash skulls more, die younger." I guess if you have to choose one or the other...

Jackson was a notch above the average NFL'er: one of the guys you don't think about, the guys whose short rides give us that unglamorous statistic that says the average NFL career is about three years long. Three years of service (closer to eight, in Jackson's case), with a body degraded a decade or more beyond normal because of a commitment to the game they love. And it their commitment. It's only for the fans in the sense that they have to say it's about us. It's their competitiveness that straps on the helmet, not the fans. We just benefit. The owners do, too.

It's not fair to compare our blindness to theirs. For Jackson and his compatriots, the destruction is so much more intimate. It's not us at a training camp in Arizona, making one last Hail Mary attempt (I see what I did there) at a career via the short-lived United Football League, running a standard fade route and feeling his hamstring explode one last time. We get to keep on watching from a distance. And now so does Jackson. He has no regrets about pursuing his dream. And he shouldn't. Anyway, it's not like he could convince a younger version of himself not to go through with it. They all think of themselves as invincible, the same way others view them as disposable, the same way fans view them as an abstracted combination of the two. And so the games go on, distracting us from... themselves.

I haven't gotten round to watching the game differently, as I predicted. At least, that new eye hasn't developed the way I thought it would. But seeing guys like Nate Jackson as something other than invincible, disposable meat, put on this planet for my entertainment, is a start.

I wonder if that'll make the games too hard to watch.

Grade: B+

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

"Loss is the standard trajectory. Something appears in the world--a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent--with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, it's going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can't fathom why it's not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell... Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity."
--Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

When you put on a convincing enough show, you run the risk of deluding yourself. I'm not talking about telling a lie so often that you begin to believe it. No, the show is the thing you put on to enhance reality (a halftime show at a football game, say) or distract yourself from that reality (the football game itself). The problem is, between the two, there's not much left to enhance or distract from and, after a point, the reality and the show become indistinguishable. And we cannot acknowledge the show, lest risking that it all come crashing down. Whole economies are built on the fantastical puff we've constructed: war, business, Hollywood. The show is what makes the world go round. Best to stay the course. So Ben Fountain slyly demonstrates in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

When Bravo Company become national heroes via a video captured by a Fox News imbed, they're given the star treatment and a victory tour through the States... just before being sent back to Iraq. The pomp and circumstance provide ample rumination material for 19-year-old Billy Lynn, whose real world experiences boil down to the war and the things he did to get sent to the war. That relative inexperience--along with one hell of a hangover--notwithstanding, Billy demonstrates impressive observational skills and possesses a fine ear for bullshit, if only because he hears it often enough.

Two days before redeployment Billy and the Bravos are the props guests of Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones Norm Oglesby at a Thanksgiving game. America's heroes (for the time being), hosted by America's team (hahahaha), enjoying America's game (so appropriately war-like that Billy wonders why we don't send the players--"well rested, suited up, psyched for brutal combat"--to fight the war). The Bravos, being late-teenaged/early twenties, are hungover, party-ready horndogs, preferring (given their druthers) a lack of sophistication. That's precisely what's charming--and human--about each of them. But to the nation they are icons, heroes that America is starved for in the age of terror. Never the twain shall meet, save for a brief subjection to a gross, confusing, and exploitative halftime show that opens a couple of the Bravos up to the early stages of PTSD. In America, the more garish and over-saturated an event is, the less open it is to doubts of patriotism.

Between exploring the bowels of the immense Texas Stadium, receiving showy receptions from the wealthy attendees, and witnessing the clunky process of acquiring a movie deal, Billy gets a crash course in how most things seem to be coated in a thin layer of bullshit. Once again, that's not to be confused with lies. Everyone in the book is refreshingly honest. Bullshit is the constant in Billy Lynn. That and the most pointless kind of capitalism. The concourses of Texas Stadium are as much a shopping center as a sports venue. Combined with the airports and arenas and hotels that the Bravos pass through, America comes off as little more than "a mall with a country attached," as Billy observes. Young Billy is barely able to process the psychic onslaught at Texas Stadium. Everything has a listed value and nearly everything is for sale and "nothing looks quite so real as a fake." That's the sweet spot of bullshit. 

It's hard to peg a solid chronology in Billy Lynn. George W. Bush is still president and the Cowboys still play at Texas Stadium (the reader pines for what Fountain might've done in describing the monstrous carnival that is that stadium's replacement) and not only is the war still raging, it hasn't gone to hell yet. Admirers tell the Bravos totally straight-faced that the public supports the war (though we must account for some of the aforementioned showmanship). Anyway, we're probably looking at mid-2000s, a time when the Iraq War seemed a semi-reasonable idea when argued by the right people. It wasn't so much a war built on lies as it was built on bullshit. And we're not smarter than we were ten years ago, we've just wiped those layers clean. Mostly.

Buttressed by some truly lovely writing ("the manager himself, a slender, oleaginous fellow with the unctuous patter of an undertaker murmuring pickup lines in a bar"), Fountain lays out an American experience that's soul-punchingly honest, if a little hard to remember through the fog of... whatever we've been doing since. Candy Crush, probably.

I don't know if anyone will remember the minutiae or the day-to-day psychology of that era. Billy Lynn offers a decent entry-point into all that (for anyone with the stomach for it), but it would be unfair to say that's all it is. Billy Lynn is about America, Iraq War or no. And it will happen again. There will always be a Billy Lynn, just as there will always be a Norm Oglesby. All that will change are the nouns. At least we get good stories out of them.

Grade: A

Anchor Christmas Ale

 
I first had Anchor Christmas a couple of years back. I wasn't impressed. Christmas beers are hard, either nothing special or too heavy on the nutmeg. A few manage to get it about right, but for the most part it's nice packaging around something that would work just as well any time of the year (I'm looking at you, every brewery that puts out a passable porter/stout and tells me it's holiday-themed). But in the spirit of seasonal forgiveness, I decided to give Anchor another chance to get me drunk this Christmas.

The winter warmer-style beer pours medium dark; I'd call it mildly translucent.

It smells heavily of malt (in deference to the style), with light hints of some vague spice.  Let's call it clove?

Nutmeg (here we go) hits the tongue first, but is soon washed away by dry, hearty malt, which dominates the flavor until the end. The post-malt swim is short and dry, like the ghost of a beer.

Medium-bodied, the beer feels like it's aiming for heaviness, but falls a little short. It's makes for a decent session beer, good news for those who run the family-presents-meal marathon today.

Overall, this one is mild and inoffensive, but short and pleasant enough that a second may well be in order for a Christmas afternoon.

Grade: B

The Disaster Artist

"I'll do my own project and it will be better than everybody else. You think this movie we just saw was tragedy? No. Not even close. I will make tragedy. People will see my project and... you know what? They will not sleep for two weeks. They will be completely shocked. You watch."
-- Tommy Wiseau, per The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell 

I'm not going to try to explain The Room. Because I can't. Anyone who claims they can adequately explain the film in less time than it takes to watch it is lying. But as a psychological case study meets film-making how-not-to crash course, The Disaster Artist is worthwhile. At the very least, it's entertaining.

Greg Sestero is a struggling actor and much-too loyal and forgiving friend, which, combined, help to explain how a good-hearted guy with potential and a wild dream fell into the orbit of Tommy Wiseau and thenceforth into The Room. First brought on as a line producer, Sestero eventually inherits the role of "the Mark," best friend and cuckold-maker to Wiseau's protagonist "Johnny." With ghostwriter Tom Bissell, Sestero spins a yarn of the inept production of a bad movie and a decade-long friendship with the incomprehensible Wiseau. 

Alternating chapters are dedicated to Sestero's stop-start acting career. These chapters make for a decent story and the reader feels for his frustrations, but they are fraught with a burning question: Where's Tommy?

Luckily, Tommy is never more than a page or two away from calling Sestero, or showing up at the apartment he's let to Sestero, or moving in with Sestero. All the while, Wiseau manipulates the poor kid (at least twenty years his junior, though no one's totally sure of Wiseau's true age, likely not even Wiseau himself) into hanging out with him--and no one else, ever--or indulging him in his self-evidently awful "feature movie" project. These traits--the manipulation, the neediness, the pitiable misconceptions about himself and the world around him--veer from funny to sad to terrifying at a pace that leaves the reader marveling at Sestero's hardiness.

The world has plenty of people who exhibit these behaviors, of course, but few of them have a bank account that an uncircumspect teller would describe as "a bottomless pit." However and whenever he attained his fortune (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is an exiled heir to the Habsburg throne, allowed to keep his money in exchange for never returning to Austria), he has been insulated from ever having to embrace anything like reality. Sestero calls The Room a testament to "unrelenting drive and determination," proof that a dream--however ill-concieved--can be made real. But it helps a lot when you're able to put up six million dollars of your own money to ensure that that dream is realized.

And by all appearances, Wiseau believed that The Room would be a genuine masterpiece, a modern day Sunset Boulevard, a comparison Sestero makes in regard to his relationship with Wiseau, except that Norma Desmond's pretensions to talent and fame weren't entirely delusional. It's hard to know what he'd make of this book. Or the title. But when his film continues to make money hand over fist, it's hard to tell him otherwise. It's not Avatar, but people on multiple continents continue to line up to see The Room--and convince their friends to join them--in a way they don't for films that they think are well-made. Blame my generation's love affair with irony (though I'd argue that many people's love for The Room punches straight through irony, passing into total sincerity), but Tommy Wiseau has done very well for himself, if not for the reasons he might think.

There's a lost chance toward the end of Disaster Artist, when the world premiere of The Room brings Wiseau's dream to life, to explain how that first small, cobbled together audience interpreted the film and how it shifted from that into the cult hit acknowledged in the introduction. All we get is a beaming, tearful Wiseau and a dashed-off "proud of you, buddy" from a guy who's spent the previous 300 pages catering to everything that the cult is dying know. But maybe that's not Sestero's story to tell. As he observes, "The magic of The Room derives from one thing: no one interprets the world the way Tommy Wiseau does."

Wiseau is a perfect little mystery: an indeterminate origin, an unfounded self-confidence, a palpable disconnect with human experience; the money might help explain those last two things but where did that come from? Sestero takes a stab at unpacking the mystery, outfitting Wiseau with a thin biography informed by vague, sparse, and largely unverifiable facts. This biography does provide an plausible source for The Room's funding, but the explanation for how that money was generated is not a tidy one, by Sestero's admission.

The Room should be some kind of Kaufman-esque hoax (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is Andy Kaufman), but if it were a hoax, we'd know. Wouldn't we? No parody could be this perfect; we'd see the strings. There'd have to be some kind of wink to the audience. But there isn't. The Disaster Artist seals it--this movie really, somehow, was allowed to happen. Real human beings experienced and endured Tommy Wiseau in all his paranoia, poor judgment, and financial schizophrenia (sometimes a miser, sometimes spending lavishly and nonsensically).

Tommy Wiseau exists and the way he interacts with the world is every bit as bizarre as fans would suspect, while simultaneously so disappointingly benign. He wears his insecurities on his sleeve, making for an awkward obsessive whose every short coming is telegraphed. And his failure to assimilate is not through a lack of trying; at heart, he's more American than you or I. Wiseau is not a mad villain, just mad. And if The Room brings joy to audiences, he can't be a totally awful filmmaker. Just kind of an awful filmmaker.

The Room is still a terrible movie, after all.

Grade: B+