I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined)

  This is especially true in situations that aren’t real.

  David Mamet (America’s greatest con-obsessed screenwriter) has made two films in which confidence men are heartless villains: 1987’s House of Games and 1997’s The Spanish Prisoner. In both movies, the con men are exceedingly charming until it’s too late, mirroring the actual experience of being bamboozled. But this type of narrative is rare. In most con-artist stories — The Sting, Paper Moon, The Grifters, Matchstick Men, Catch Me if You Can, White Men Can’t Jump, and even The Music Man — every unearthed detail about who the con man is makes us more empathetic toward his vocation. Usually, he (or she) has complex feelings about taking money from strangers. Often, he’s been socially crippled by some kind of past emotional trauma, usually involving his parents. If a film involves multiple confidence men, the con artist we “know” the most is inevitably double-crossed by his (inevitably less ethical and less explained) partner. He’s never as immoral as the person he works with. There’s always this underlying message that — if we could only understand the inner con man — we would love him. But this is not something that’s true; it’s only something we believe.

  Once, while drinking in a bar in Washington, D.C., I expressed philosophical admiration for con men to an acquaintance of mine (at the time, I was actually reading The Big Con). I mentioned how much I like movies about confidence men, and I casually wondered if grifting people would be something I’d excel at. My acquaintance looked at me like I’d just vomited on his baby. “But don’t you find con men fascinating?” I asked him directly. He proceeded to tell me about his father, a man who made a bad living by pretending to be a minister at multiple churches in order to embezzle money from widows within the various congregations. When that scheme finally collapsed, he quietly used his teenage son’s Social Security number to obtain illegal credit cards, which he never paid back (for the next ten years, my acquaintance was burdened with a massive debt and an obliterated credit rating). His father ruined the lives of everyone in his family, and then he disappeared.

  “So . . . no,” my friend finally said. “I do not find con men fascinating.”

  I felt guilty for what I’d said moments earlier. I felt childish. I apologized. But I also silently wondered: If my acquaintance’s life was a made-for-TV movie, who would be my favorite character in the script? And why is that so different from the story I just heard?

  The 1984 movie Purple Rain is unforgettable for many reasons: the live performance of “Darling Nikki,” its underrated examination of what constitutes art, the unexpected cameo from Apollonia’s breasts, and the discomfiting nostalgia it evokes for that bygone era when Prince seemed way weirder than Michael Jackson. The film has a lot to offer, except for acting. But its single most memorable element will always be the inclusion of Morris Day, an antagonist so self-assured that he ends up being twice as endearing as the hero he antagonizes.

  The premise of Purple Rain is rote. We have a struggling Minneapolis-based musician known as “The Kid” (Prince) who longs for success, but everyone (at least in his mind) is against him. Unlike most rock films, his problems are not an extension of drugs or booze or poverty. His dilemmas are purely artistic: His abusive father doesn’t respect his musical ability. Local club owners are disturbed by his indulgent, uncompromising pop art (“Nobody digs your music but yourself,” the owner of First Avenue tells him directly, a sentiment shared by everyone living inside Prince’s imagination). His own band views him as paranoid and controlling. Even his love life is a musical concern — the reason the loss of his girlfriend is so painful is that she becomes enamored with The Kid’s professional rival. That rival is Morris Day. In Purple Rain, Day plays an amplified version of himself. He is the frontman for a group called The Time, which (in reality) was created by Prince in 1981, an extension of Prince’s contract with Warner Bros. that allowed him to develop other artists. When Morris Day and The Time toured with Prince and the Revolution in 1982, a real rivalry between the two bands emerged; this professional animosity was the catalyst for the film’s musical conflict. As fictionalized in Purple Rain, we’re supposed to feel sympathy for Prince and antipathy toward Day. In theory, this makes sense: Morris Day presents himself as an egocentric pimp who demeans his subordinates, mocks suicide, tosses women into garbage Dumpsters, and requires his onstage sidekick (the sycophantic Jerome) to literally hold up a mirror during concerts so that Morris can admire his own reflection. This fake version of Morris Day is a progenitor of the real Chris Brown, the self-absorbed R&B superstar who assaulted Rihanna in 2009 and was instantly despised by everyone in America (except Rihanna herself, who seemed to like him slightly more). Morris Day should be easy to hate. But that’s not what happens.

  What happens is that you root for Prince to succeed, but only out of obligation. This is a movie and you’re the audience, and you understand what movie audiences are supposed to do. In the same way that Prince fashions an on-screen character after himself, we fashion ourselves as people who pull for the film’s hero and feel satisfied when he overcomes adversity. We accept our emotional responsibilities and adhere to film grammar, at least during the 111 minutes we’re occupied with the story. We are against Morris Day, because the narrative derails if we support him. But once the credits roll and the picture ends, Morris instantly becomes more likable than Prince, even though Day’s behavior was (technically) more boorish. Morris steals the movie and remains its greatest creation. He exists as a charming goofball who’s more “real” than Prince, despite being fabricated in every way (except for his name).

  So why does this happen?

  It happens because Day’s over-the-top, undeserved confidence is more desirable than Prince’s insecure, wholly earned arrogance. “The Kid” knows he’s the best artist in town, but he’s shackled by a fear of failure and a paradoxical desire to have his avant-garde pop accepted by the mainstream; like the man he’s based upon, The Kid needs other people to affirm his self-evident greatness. He needs every outsider to tell him what he already knows. But Morris Day is the opposite. How Day views his own ability is irrelevant; he works from a position of limitless self-regard. His confidence is more central to his character than his music or his image. His confidence is his art. He needs no love, because he already loves himself. And as much as we like to pretend that narcissism is gross, it doesn’t function that way in society (particularly if the person projecting that narcissism has a sense of humor). It scans as charisma. Prince’s supernatural genius ends up feeling less enchanting than Day’s supercilious hubris.

  There was a sequel to Purple Rain (written and directed by Prince) that not many people saw and even fewer liked — 1990’s Graffiti Bridge. Both Prince and Day reprise their Minnesotan characters, this time battling over the ownership of local rock clubs and the heart of a New Age poet named Aura (Ingrid Chavez). Morris is as petulant and self-absorbed as ever. Prince consciously positions himself as a Christlike figure emotionally supported by Aura; near the film’s conclusion, Aura dies in an inexplicable car accident. This (somehow) convinces Prince and Morris to end their feud. They shake hands in the street. It’s almost like Prince realized he could never turn Day into a true villain, so he decided to create a scenario where Morris suddenly changed. But here’s the rub: Morris didn’t change. He won without winning, because winning was irrelevant. He had nothing else to prove.

  A lot of unforeseen things happened to television at the turn of the twenty-first century, the strangest being that it actually became great. Nobody really thought much about TV in the 1970s, or even in the early ’90s — everyone watched it, but hardly anyone cared about it. In 1985, Joyce Carol Oates wrote an essay for TV Guide (!) that lauded the value of Hill Street Blues, and everyone wondered if she was being perversely hyperbolic. As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn’t own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don’t own a TV simply means you’re
poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction. The way people talk about TV radically changed, and so did the way we judged its quality. For example: When consuming TV in 2013, how do you know the program you’re watching is supposed to be art? The most important indicator is the network airing it — if it’s on HBO, AMC, or FX, the program is prejudged as sophisticated (and must therefore adhere to a higher standard). But a less obvious clue involves the depiction of any characters who sell drugs. If the drug dealers are depicted positively, the show is automatically seen as “realistic” and directed toward a discriminating adult audience. Drug dealers on high-end TV shows are never straight-up bad guys; they are complicated, highly intelligent, and generally sympathetic.

  This is new.

  Certainly, there’s a long history of American theatrical movies in which drug dealers are supposed to be seen as good people, starting with 1969’s Easy Rider. It was okay to like a drug dealer for two hours, assuming everyone in the building was over the age of eighteen. But this is never how it was in the non-exclusionary, serialized realm of TV. It was possible for Miami Vice to paint a narcotics dealer as engaging, but never as moral. The notion of the drug dealer as a nonvillain was a novel, jarring transition that didn’t really happen until 2000. This, of course, doesn’t mean that drugs can be depicted positively, because that’s still verboten (except in satire). The consumption of hard drugs cannot be employed into any narrative without negative consequence, and that bias will probably exist forever (a rare exception was HBO’s Six Feet Under, where accidental Ecstasy ingestion was sometimes employed for comic purpose). Even the consumption of soft drugs is sketchy. Showtime’s Weeds, a program that promotes marijuana farming, showed its female lead smoking pot only twice during its first seven seasons. Yet the mere existence of Weeds — the mere existence of a show in which the suburban protagonist, Nancy Botwin, is both a drug dealer and a good person — illustrates how dramatically the pusher’s on-screen perception has inverted. There are still negative feelings about drugs, but not toward the fictional people who sell them. The two best shows of the past fifteen years — HBO’s The Wire and AMC’s Breaking Bad — were essentially built on the moral ambiguity of men who sell heroin and methamphetamine.

  The drug lords on The Wire were criminals, but they had a stricter ethical code than the corrupt police trying to stop them. The most admirable adult in the series was Omar Little, a hyper-violent stickup artist who lived by a code so austere he wouldn’t even cuss (in 2012, Barack Obama cited Omar as his favorite Wire character, thus making Obama the first sitting president to express admiration for a fictional homosexual who killed dozens of people with a shotgun). The second most admirable citizen of The Wire universe was Stringer Bell, a drug dealer who actually attends community college to become a better businessman. (The fact that this character’s identity was a composite based on two actual Baltimore drug lords, Stringer Reed and Roland Bell, isn’t even factored into the equation.) Walter White, the protagonist on Breaking Bad, was consciously designed by show creator Vince Gilligan to evolve from hero to villain as the show’s trajectory progressed. But the fact that his evolution occurred while he cooked meth is secondary — in fact, his initial decision to produce drugs was a straightforward act of heroism, committed for the good of his family. His failure is a desire for control.

  Now, don’t misinterpret what I’m arguing here — I realize these characters do murder people, and their involvement in the drug game is the catalyst for those crimes. But it wasn’t the underlying cause. The constraints of their illegal profession placed them in situations where killing was unavoidable. If we accept that criminal activity is an extension of social forces beyond any person’s control, criminals are judged for their ethics within that sphere; in a way, we stop judging them entirely. We feel for them when they kill, and we understand why it had to happen. We actively want them to get away with murder, because we are on their side. [And I concede that when I write “we” I’m really writing “I” — but I don’t think my sentiments fall outside the writers’ intent.]

  There are two possible explanations for why this happened. The first is creator driven: It’s possible that the people writing these shows simply decided to humanize drug dealers, and — because these shows were successful for all the traditional reasons well-made shows succeed — audiences supported whoever the narrative told them was the hero. Perhaps it’s no different from The Sopranos or Dexter, where people comfortably root for mobsters and serial killers simply because they’re the center of the story (and we’ve all been trained to experience fiction through whichever main character we understand most deeply). But I wonder if part of this isn’t coming from the opposite direction. I wonder if this is a way for people (particularly those born in the 1970s) to reconcile the dissonance between what they were told in the 1980s and what they actively experienced in the 1990s. Throughout the ’80s, the dangers of drugs were promoted endlessly, most memorably through the “Just Say No” campaign. It was impossible to grow up during that decade without absorbing the omnipresent message that drugs destroyed lives. But then those same kids lived through the ’90s, with the added advantage of life experience. They soon realized that PCP didn’t always make teenagers jump out of windows and that not everyone who used cocaine turned into Len Bias. They supported a president who smoked marijuana, regardless of his unwillingness to admit inhalation; later, they would vote for a president who admitted snorting blow. This created a jarring cognitive gap: An entire generation had been programmed to fear the very same drugs they came to recognize as mostly innocuous. The stigma of drugs was still hardwired into their worldview, but that stigma was unlike the reality they experienced. From this, an unspoken mental compromise emerged. It was still wrong to lionize drug use, but it was no longer necessary to demonize “drug culture.” You could actually like drug culture, and you could like the people who lived inside it. These were people like Stringer Bell and Walter White and Nancy Botwin. Confident people. People with guts who attack hypocrisy and embody pop’s truest aphorism: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” That dictum has become the only erudite way to think about fictional drug dealers. As straight-up TV villains, their time has passed. Now they’re just complicated versions of hardworking entrepreneurs. They’re coal miners. They’re farmers.

  There’s no greater conundrum for the sports-obsessed historian than the relationship between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. It’s the most sensitive, least reconcilable schism within the complicated history of race and boxing. It’s a contradiction impossible to circumvent: Ali, an athlete whose active role in the history of American race relations looms larger than Jackie Robinson’s, consciously committed some of the most egregious acts of racial prejudice in modern sports history, over and over and over again, against someone of his own race (and for no defensible reason).

  Everyone who knows anything about Ali is aware of this; it is not some forgotten detail, scrubbed from history. Entire books have been written about the paradox (most notably Mark Kram’s Ghosts of Manila). HBO produced a documentary on the interpersonal conflict told almost entirely from Frazier’s perspective. No credible Ali biographer can ignore it, and no one has ever successfully argued that Ali’s rhetoric was taken out of context or exaggerated by his critics. It’s just a discomfiting fact about his life: Ali used racial invective to humiliate Frazier and turn African-American fans against him. He pretty much ruined Joe Frazier’s life.

  Yet this has not diminished Ali’s legacy in any consequential way.

  It has not damaged his cultural memory. It’s the darkest footnote to his professional career, but certainly not a body blow; with every passing year, the shadow of Ali’s stature grows. He remains a civil rights icon, and any suggestion to the contrary would be wrong. Ali was polarizing in 1970, but he’s not polarizing now. He’s an unassailable cultural character. (In
fact, simply including Ali in this book may prompt some to call me racist.) And this forces an inescapable question with no clear answer: Why have we collectively decided that Ali’s inexcusable treatment of Frazier is something we’ll (pretty much) excuse entirely?

  The details of their relationship do not help Ali’s case.

  Ali and Frazier fought three times: 1971’s “Fight of the Century” in Madison Square Garden (decisively won by Frazier), 1974’s less memorable rematch (decisively won by Ali), and the 1975 “Thrilla in Manila” in the Philippines, widely cited as the greatest heavyweight battle in history (Ali escaped with a TKO when Frazier’s trainer refused to allow a nearly blind Frazier to enter the fifteenth round). Devoid of all social implications, these three fights would still constitute the apex of twentieth-century pugilism. But it was what happened outside the ring that makes this rivalry important to people who don’t even care about boxing. The two enemies began as allies, engrossed with identical goals; when Ali was banned from boxing in 1967 for refusing military service, Frazier petitioned Nixon for Ali’s reinstatement and privately gave his exiled friend financial assistance. At the time, they were more similar than different. They needed each other. But that relationship ended the moment their collision became imminent. Under the guise of prefight publicity, Ali leveled racially infused attacks on Frazier’s intellect that framed Frazier as a stereotype and an extension of white America. “Boxers like Joe Frazier have no imagination,” Ali said. “He’s just a flat-nosed, ugly pug. He’s just an athlete. He can’t talk about nothing.” Most memorably, Ali ceaselessly compared Frazier to a gorilla. What’s difficult to understand is the way Ali was somehow able to paint Frazier as both subhuman and less authentically black. In 1974, on the BBC talk show Parkinson, Ali said Frazier was “the other type of Negro . . . he works for the enemy.” On a technical level, Ali was (probably) referring to the organization that backed Frazier financially, a predominantly white investment collective from Philadelphia called Cloverlay. But such an implication contradicted the totality of Frazier’s life: He’d been raised in poverty on a cotton and watermelon farm in rural South Carolina (and until his death in 2011, he still lived in a tiny apartment inside a gym in one of the blackest sections of Philadelphia). There isn’t anything about Joe Frazier that suggests he was disrespectful, uninterested, or even vaguely uncomfortable with his racial identity. But this did not matter. By the time they fought in ’71, Frazier was seen as a black man fighting for white interests. The onslaught continued immediately after Frazier won the fight, a unanimous decision Ali refused to recognize: “White people say I lost.”