Casting a Shadow

Yesterday the weather was suitable to eating outside, so I enjoyed my Thanksgiving turkey at my picnic table. In lieu of my usual one or two dozen guests, I shared the meal with two stray cats who were attracted by the aromas. They instantly made themselves my best buddies. They returned for leftovers today but will be aloof again when the turkey runs out.

 

That overfull feeling

Afterward, I spent much of the day with a book and movie, which (along with sleeping off a turkey coma) is a common way of dealing with the aftermath of the meal. There was, of course, plenty on TV that was holiday related: not just Thanksgiving fare (A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving; Trains, Planes, and Automobiles; et al.) but the first batch of Christmas fare (e.g. Miracle on 34^th Street) as well. Special holiday TV programming seems a bit unnecessary in an age when you can stream (or, if you’re old school, play on DVD) pretty much anything anytime. Stations offer it anyway. Since 1956 The Wizard of Oz, has been aired on American TV on Thanksgiving, though it really has nothing to do with the holiday. Yesterday it ran continuously on TBS. I didn’t watch it. It’s not that I dislike it or the other offerings (well, some of them I do). I’ve just seen them enough. For the same reason, my book of choice was not A Christmas Carol. 

2020 demands something darker. The times in general do. This may seem an off-topic digression, but I’ll tie it in: Freud developed his theories in the Victorian era of strict moral codes. The codes didn’t merely restrict behavior (not altogether successfully) but dictated proper thoughts as well. To the extent people internalized these dictates, they felt guilty about their own (humanly bestial) thoughts and developed neuroses of the type that so fascinated Sig. The thoughts, desires, and motives were perfectly normal, of course. Freud spoke of motivations from the moral-free id. Carl Jung talked of the shadow self: the hidden side of one’s nature including dark elements that we don’t display in civilized society (unless we are sociopaths). Rather than deny the shadow’s existence or repress it, Jung emphasized the importance to psychic health of accepting it and integrating it into one’s whole personality. Not to accept it is to deny one’s own humanity; the shadow will express itself anyway – perhaps by cruelly moralizing to others. Don’t let the shadow drive the car, he tells us in essence, but recognize without guilt that it will always be a passenger. Existentialist philosophers also emphasized the primacy of action over mind; what matters is what you do, not what you think. All of these shrinks and thinkers aimed to increase human happiness by freeing people from the whole notion of (to lift a term from Orwell) thoughtcrime. In the 21^st century strict moral codes – this time political in origin – are returning; for those who internalize the dictates, thoughtcrime has returned as a notion as well. Art that challenges this (e.g. Dexter) has one mark in its favor for that reason alone. 

So, my book choice was one to tickle the shadow self. The author who goes by the nom de plume Delicious Tacos (by his own account to avoid losing his day job over something some boss or co-worker reader might find offensive) apparently has a substantial online following, but I never heard of him until a couple months ago when I picked up Finally Some Good News, his post-apocalyptic novel. Yesterday I tried Savage Spear of the Unicorn. This is a collection of short stories, many of them barely disguised autobiography. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” said Thoreau. Tacos may live in desperation, but in his writings he is anything but quiet. He hands his Jungian shadow self the keyboard and lets it scorch pages with the scabrous brutality of the way people actually think – even (maybe especially) the ones who speak and act politely. He spews utter frustration at a soul-crushing world in which we buy a car to work boring hours at an awful job just so we can pay for the car; he tells why he will die alone in a time when the sexes no longer even know how to talk to each other. Even in his tamer stories his characters are all too human – and not in an admirable way. For example there is a tale (*SPOILER* follows) of a young woman rescued from poverty by a mysterious benefactor who gave her $1,000,000. Having achieved her dreams, she dedicates herself to finding the anonymous benefactor who changed her life. At last she tracks down the aging wealthy recluse philanthropist and asks him, “Can I have more money?” 

The author is rude, crude, and harsh, and most definitely not for anyone who believes in thoughtcrime. Yet, beneath it all he writes surprisingly well: a Henry Miller for our time (who, of course, was banned in his). 

The movie of choice was one I saw mentioned on a Youtube list of underrated movies from the past decade. I’m not normally a big fan of comic horror films (unless written by Joss Whedon) but based on this list I decided to give it a chance. It seemed suitably dark. Made in 2014, Cooties is about a pandemic started in a chicken-nuggets factory and spread around in school lunches. The virus affects only children who are turned into murderous savages. The film is rated “R” (as it should be for scenes such as kids using a teacher’s head as a soccer ball) so the kids who act in it can’t legally watch it. It is a low budget campy gore fest unapologetically playing with the usual horror tropes. The humor is silly rather than clever, yet somehow the result is surprisingly genial. The film stars Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, and Alison Pill. I don’t think Cooties is remotely underrated. That said, watching it was (this year at least) preferable to watching Dorothy skip down the Yellow Brick Road yet one more time. Somehow it seemed right for Thanksgiving 2020. 

Now we are in the next holiday season and are hounded to buy, buy, buy on all media platforms. I haven’t yet selected any books or movies for the next few weeks, but this year It’s a Wonderful Life probably won’t be among them.