Chuck Klosterman on Film and Television

  There are lots of mind-expanding moments in Waking Life, and it’s able to get away with a lot of shit that would normally seem pretentious (it’s completely plotless, its characters lecture about oblique philosophical concepts at length, and much of the action is based on people and situations from Linklater’s 1991 debut film, Slacker). There are on-screen conversations in Waking Life that would be difficult to watch in a live-action picture. But Waking Life doesn’t feel self-indulgent or affected, and that’s because it’s a cartoon: Since we’re not seeing real people, we can handle the static image of an old man discussing the flaws of predestination. Moreover, we can accept the film’s most challenging dialogue exchange, which involves the reality of our own interiority.

  The scene I’m referring to is where Wiggins’s character meets a girl and goes back to her apartment, and the girl begins explaining her idea for a surrealistic sitcom. She asks if Wiggins would like to be involved. He says he would, but then asks a much harder question in return: “What does it feel like to be a character in someone else’s dream?” Because that’s who Wiggins realizes this person is; he is having a lucid dream, and this woman is his own subconscious construction. But the paradox is that this woman is able to express thoughts and ideas that Wiggins himself could never create. Wiggins mentions that her idea for the TV show is great, and it’s the kind of thing he could never have come up with—but since this is his dream, he must have done exactly that. And this forces the question that lies behind “What is reality?”: “How do we know what we know?”

  This second query in what brings us to Memento, probably the most practical reality study I’ve ever seen on film. The reason I say “practical” is because it poses these same abstract questions as the other films I’ve already mentioned, but it does so without relying on an imaginary universe. Usually, playing with the question of reality requires some kind of Through the Looking Glass trope: In Waking Life, Wiggins’s confusion derives from his sudden placement into a dream. Both The Matrix and Vanilla Sky take place in nonexistent realms. Being John Malkovich is founded on the ability to crawl into someone’s brain through a portal in an office building; Fight Club is ultimately about a man who isn’t real; eXistenZ is set inside a video game that could never actually exist. However, Memento takes place in a tangible place and merely requires an implausible—but still entirely possible—medical ailment.

  Memento is about a fellow named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who suffers a whack to the head and can no longer create new memories; he still has the long-term memories from before his accident, but absolutely no short-term recall. He forgets everything that happens to him three minutes after the specific event occurs.2 This makes life wildly complicated, especially since his singular goal is to hunt down the men who bonked him on the skull before proceeding to rape and murder his wife.

  Since the theme of Memento is revenge and the narrative construction is so wonderfully unconventional (the scenes are shown in reverse order, so the audience—like Leonard—never knows what just happened), it would be easy to find a lot of things in this movie that might appear to define it. However, the concept that’s most vital is the way it presents memory as its own kind of reality. When Memento asks the “What is reality?” question, it actually provides an answer: Reality is a paradigm that always seems different and personal and unique, yet never really is. Its reality is autonomous.

  There’s a crucial moment in Memento where Leonard describes his eternal quest to kill his wife’s murderers, and the person sitting across from him makes an astute observation: This will be the least satisfying revenge anyone will ever inflict. Even if Leonard kills his enemies, he’ll never remember doing so. His victory won’t just be hollow; it will be instantaneously erased. But Leonard disagrees. “The world doesn’t disappear when you close your eyes, does it?” he snaps. “My actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them.”

  What’s ironic about Leonard’s point is that it’s completely true—yet even Leonard refuses to accept what that sentiment means in its totality. Almost no one ever does.

  I’m not sure if anyone who’s not a soap opera character truly gets amnesia; it might be one of those fictional TV diseases, like environmental illness or gum disease. However, we all experience intermittent amnesia, sometimes from drinking Ketel One vodka3 but usually from the rudimentary passage of time. We refer to this phenomenon as “forgetting stuff.” (Reader’s note: I realize I’m not exactly introducing ground-breaking medical data right now, but bear with me.) Most people consider forgetting stuff to be a normal part of living. However, I see it as a huge problem; in a way, there’s nothing I fear more. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality. And since objective reality is fixed, all we can do is try to experience—to consume—as much of that fixed reality as possible. This can only be done by living in the moment (which I never do) or by exhaustively filing away former moments for later recall (which I do all the time).

  Taoists constantly tell me to embrace the present, but I only live in the past and the future; my existence is solely devoted to (a) thinking about what will happen next and (b) thinking back to what’s happened before. The present seems useless, because it has no extension beyond my senses. To me, living a carpe diem philosophy would make me like Leonard. His reality is based almost entirely on faith: Leonard believes his actions have meaning, but he can’t experience those meanings (or even recall the actions that caused them). He knows hard reality is vast, but his soft reality is minuscule. And in the film’s final sequence, we realize that he understands that all too well; ultimately, he lies to himself to expand it. In a sense, he was right all along; his actions do have meaning, even if he doesn’t remember them. But that meaning only applies to an objective reality he’s not part of, and that’s the only game in town.

  It’s significant that the character of Rita in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a woman with total amnesia, and that we’re eventually forced to conclude that she might be nothing but a figment of another character’s imagination.4 It’s almost like Lynch is saying that someone who can’t remember who they are really doesn’t exist. Once your reality closes down to zero, you’re no longer part of it. So maybe that’s the bottom line with all of these films. Maybe the answer to “What is reality?” is this: Reality is both reflexive and inflexible. It’s not that we all create our own reality, because we don’t; it’s not that there is no hard reality, because there is. We can’t alter reality—but reality can’t exist unless we know it’s there. It depends on us as much as we depend on it.

  We’re all in this together, people.

  Semidepressing side note: Eight months after reading Owen Gleiberman’s review in EW, I woke up with another tummy ache in the middle of the night (this time at a Days Inn in Chicago). The only thing I had to read was the July 15 issue of Time magazine that came with the hotel room, so I started looking at the “letters” page. All the letters were about Tom Cruise (Time had just done a cover story on Cruise after the release of Steven Spielberg’s film version of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report). These are two of them:

  I was glad to see Tom Cruise, the most respected person in show biz, on the cover of Time. In general, Hollywood actors contribute little to society, other than mere amusement. Cruise, however, is different. He isn’t simply another mindless entertainer. He is a role model who overcame his childhood problems by being confident and motivated.

  —Daniel Liao, Calgary

  Was this article intended to help Tom Cruise regain his clean-cut image? He lost so much of it when he left his wife and children. Most alpha males need to control the women in their lives, and since Nicole Kidman has come into her own, it appears that Cruise moved on to a woman he had more control over. Are you going to be doing a cover on Kidman? She is the one who has had to go through the humiliation of being dumped by a famous husband and deal with being a single mom. She is a much more interesting person.

  —Susan Trinidad, Spanaway (Wash.)

/>   My first reaction to these letters was guttural: “Since when does Time publish letters that are written by rival publicists?” However, as I sat there in pain, feeling as though my stomach was being vacuumed through the lower half of my torso and into the bowels of this Illinois hotel, I was struck by the more frightening realization: These are not publicists! They are just everyday people, and they are some of the people I am trying to understand reality alongside. Somehow, there are literate men in Canada who believe Tom Cruise is a respected role model and “different” from all the other actors who contribute nothing but “mere amusement.” Somehow, there are women in the Pacific Northwest who think Nicole Kidman is interesting and wonderful and an icon of single motherhood, and that little five-foot-seven Cruise is an “alpha male” (even though everyone I know halfway assumes he’s gay). These are the things they feel strongly about, because these are things they know to be true.

  We don’t have a fucking chance.

  1. As opposed to this essay, which tends to be philosophy for shallow people.

  2. Unfortunately, this does create the one gaping plot hole the filmmakers chose to ignore entirely, probably out of necessity: If Leonard can’t form new memories, there is no way he could comprehend that he even has this specific kind of amnesia, since the specifics of the problem obviously wouldn’t have been explained to him until after he already acquired the condition.

  3. Holland’s #1 memory-destroying vodka!

  4. For those of you who’ve seen Mulholland Drive and never came to that conclusion, the key to this realization is when the blonde girl (Naomi Watts) masturbates.

  How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

  I’m having a crisis of confidence, and I blame Jesus.

  Actually, my crisis is not so much about Jesus as it is about the impending rapture, which I don’t necessarily believe will happen. But I don’t believe the rapture won’t happen, either; I really don’t see any evidence for (or against) either scenario. It all seems unlikely, but still plausible. Interestingly enough, I don’t think there is a word for my particular worldview: “Nihilism” means you don’t believe in anything, but I can’t find a word that describes partial belief in everything. “Paganism” is probably the closest candidate, but that seems too Druidesque for the style of philosophy I’m referring to. Some would claim that this is kind of like “agnosticism,” but true agnostics always seem too willing to side with the negative; they claim there are no answers, so they live as if those answers don’t exist. They’re really just nihilists without panache.

  Not me, though. I’m prone to believe that just about any religious ideology is potentially accurate, regardless of how ridiculous it might seem (or be). Which is really making it hard for me to comment on Left Behind.

  According to the blurb on its jacket, the Left Behind book series has more than 40 million copies in print, which would normally prompt me to assume that most of America is vaguely familiar with what these books are about. However, that is not the case. By and large, stuff like Left Behind exists only with that bizarre subculture of “good people,” most of whom I’ve never met and never will. These are the kind of people who are fanatically good—the kind of people who’ll tell you that goodness isn’t even that much of an accomplishment.

  Left Behind is the first of eleven books about the end of the world. It was conceptualized by Dr. Tim LaHaye, a self-described “prophecy scholar,” and written by Jerry B. Jenkins, a dude who has written over a hundred other books (mostly biographies about moral celebrities like Billy Graham and Walter Payton). The novel’s premise is that the day of reckoning finally arrives and millions of people just disappear into thin air, leaving behind all their clothes and eyeglasses and Nikes and dental work. All the humans who don’t evaporate are forced to come to grips with why this event happened (and specifically why God did not select them). The answer is that they did not “accept Christ as their personal savior,” and now they have seven years to embrace God and battle the rising Antichrist, a charismatic Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia, who is described by the author as resembling “a young Robert Redford.”

  Everything that happens in Left Behind is built around interpretations of Paul’s letters and the Book of Revelation, unquestionably the most fucked-up part of the Bible (except maybe for the Book of Job). It’s the epitome of a cautionary tale; every twist of its plot mechanics scream at the reader to realize that the clock is ticking, but it’s not too late—there is still time to accept Jesus and exist forever in the kingdom of heaven. And what’s especially fascinating about this book is that it’s a best-selling piece of entertainment, even though it doesn’t offer intellectual flexibility; it’s pop art, but it has an amazingly strict perspective on what is right and what is wrong. In Left Behind, the only people who are accepted by God are those who would be classified as fundamentalist wacko Jesus freaks with no intellectual credibility in modern society. Many of the Left Behind characters who aren’t taken to heaven—in fact, almost all of them—seem like solid citizens (or—at worst—“normal” Americans). And that creates a weird sensation for the Left Behind reader, because the post-Rapture earth initially seems like a better place to live. Everybody boring would be gone. One could assume that all the infidels who weren’t teleported into God’s kingdom must be pretty cool: All the guys would be drinkers and all the women would be easy, and you could make jokes about homeless people and teen suicide and crack babies without offending anyone. Quite frankly, my response to the opening pages of Left Behind was “Sounds good to me.”

  Things in Left Behind get disconcerting pretty rapidly, however, and part of what I found disconcerting was that its main character is a reporter named Buck Williams, which was also the name of a retired NBA power forward regularly described as the league’s hardest worker. As a result, I kept imagining this bearded six-foot-nine black guy as the vortex of the story, which really wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch, especially since the real Buck Williams was involved with the “Jammin’ Against the Darkness” basketball ministry. If the Rapture came down tonight, I’m guessing Buck would be boxing out J.C. by breakfast.

  A mind-numbing percentage of pro athletes are obsessed with God. According to an episode of Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports on HBO, some studies suggest that as many as 40 percent of NFL players consider themselves “born again.” This trend continues to baffle me, especially since it seems like an equal number of pro football players spend the entire off-season snorting coke off the thighs of Cuban prostitutes and murdering their ex-girlfriends.

  That notwithstanding, you can’t ignore the relationship between pro sports and end-of-days theology, and its acceleration as an all-or-nothing way of life. In the 1970s, the template for a religious athlete was a player like Roger Staubach of the Dallas Cowboys, someone who was seen as religious simply because everybody knew he was Catholic. The contemporary roster for God’s Squad is far more competitive; if you’re the kind of fellow who’d be “left behind,” you don’t qualify. These are guys like Kurt Warner of the St. Louis Rams, a person who would consider being called a zealot complimentary.

  Warner is an especially interesting case, because his decision to become “born again” appears to have helped his career as a football player. Here was a guy who couldn’t make an NFL roster, was working in a grocery store, and was married to a dying woman. And then—inexplicably—his life completely turns around and he becomes the best quarterback in the NFL (and his wife lives!). Warner gives all the credit for this turnaround to his “almighty savior Jesus Christ,” and that explanation seems no less plausible than any other explanation. In fact, I find that I sort of want to believe him. In the fourth quarter of Super Bowl XXXVI, Warner made a break for the end zone against the New England Patriots; at the time, the Rams were down 17–3, and it was fourth and goal. Warner was hit at the one-yard line and fumbled, and a Patriot returned the ball ninety-nine yards for what seemed to be a gameclinching touchdown. However, this play was erased—q
uite possibly wiped clean by the hand of God. For no valid reason, Patriots linebacker Willie McGinest blatantly tackled Ram running back Marshall Faulk on the weak side of the play, forcing the referee to call defensive holding. I remember thinking to myself, “Holy shit. That made no sense whatsoever. I guess God really does care about football.” St. Louis retained possession and Warner scored two plays later, eventually tying the game with a touchdown pass to Ricky Proehl with under two minutes remaining.

  I’m not sure why God would care about a football game, but he certainly seemed interested in this one. It looked like Warner’s faith was tangibly affecting the outcome, which is a wonderful notion. However, New England ultimately won Super Bowl XXXVI on the final play—a forty-eight-yard field goal, kicked by a guy who grew up in South Dakota and is related to Evel Knievel. You can’t question God, though: The following Monday, I happened to catch a few minutes of The 700 Club, and a Patriot wide receiver was talking about how God is awesome. With competitive spirituality, it’s always a push.

  • • •

  Part of the never-ending weirdness surrounding Left Behind was the 2000 movie version that starred Kirk Cameron, still best known as Mike Seaver from the ABC sitcom Growing Pains. Cameron portrays the aforementioned Buck Williams, a famous broadcast journalist (this is a slight alteration from the book, where Williams is a famous magazine writer). If one views the literary version of Left Behind to be mechanical and didactic, the film version would have to be classified as boring and pedantic. But—once again—there’s something oddly compelling about watching this narrative unfold, and it’s mostly because of Kirk’s mind-bending presence.