The Villain of the Piece

Chuck Klosterman is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His essays (appearing in Esquire, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and elsewhere) most often are on popular culture, but sometimes they are just thoughts on the nature of life. He has the virtue of being non-dogmatic in these latter.  I disagree with a lot of what he has to say, but that is kind of the point of reading him. Klosterman is always at least interesting.

In I Wear the Black Hat Klosterman in a collection of essays muses on villainy including in himself. (Carl Jung would approve.) In the opening essay he explains: “When you’re young, the character you love most [in Star Wars] is Luke Skywalker (who’s entirely good). As you grow older, you gravitate toward Han Solo (who’s ultimately good, but superficially bad). But by the time you reach adulthood…you inevitably find yourself relating to Darth Vader.” His editor doubted the premise but published the book. [I’ve sometimes described Star Wars (jokingly – sort of) as the sad tale of a father trying to get ahead in the universe only to be betrayed by his ungrateful children.] Klosterman isn’t interested in out-and-out psychopaths or beyond-the-pale types such as serial killers, but in more complicated people who have (as we all do) a dark side – most dangerously present in those who don’t acknowledge it. He also muses about how we respond to villainy in others: overlooking some offenses (and offenders) and not others. Our responses, he notes, are not always scaled to the offense but to our own emotional natures. We’re sometimes willing to give a second chance to a charming murderer, for example, but not to some sports figure guilty of nothing more than a bad attitude or to a musician whose style we simply don't like.

Klosterman writes of the rogue in popular culture, such as the trope of the lovable con artist, e.g. Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve or George C. Scott in The Flim-Flam Man. (I’ve written a short story about a con artist myself: The Great Gaffe.) Klosterman relates how he once mentioned his enjoyment of such characters at a bar only to be schooled by another imbiber on how the fellow’s family was destroyed by such a person. Anyone who has been defrauded in a big way in real life, it is true, has no love at all for fraudsters. Klosterman still likes the trope, one can tell, but fully gets how the fictional representation differs from reality. He also discusses changing standards, so that what was, for example, a harmless joke in 1989 is villainous speech 30 years later. He seems OK with that evolution and with speech restrictions of like kind in general: a position that I find appalling (though I’ll ape Voltaire in defending his right to express it), especially by a writer who must know his own words are bound to offend someone. “The Constitution is awesome but overrated,” he says. The Bill of Rights is not overrated; it is underrated. The rest of the Constitution – which mostly just details the nuts of bolts of the governmental machinery – might well benefit from tinkering (and there is a process for that), but I don’t think that is what he means. Our difference of opinion in this matter helps make his broader point, however: that villainy is often just a matter of perspective.

Klosterman writes about the transgressions (real or imagined) of various people from Yoko to Bill Clinton to OJ. “Writing about other people is a form of writing about oneself,” he says. That is true. I’m doing it here. We can understand (and either forgive or not) villainy in others only because of the potential for it in ourselves. The potential is what makes passing on its exercise praiseworthy. I typically avoid Nietzsche quotes because using them seems pretentious, but, in acknowledgment of the blog site’s name, I’ll slip one in anyway: “I laugh at those who think themselves good because they have no claws.”

On balance, Klosterman’s book is worth a read. Too infrequently does one encounter someone giving intelligent thought to first principles, so it is gratifying when one does. However, while I see some truth in the book’s premise, I generally don’t wear hats, and I’ll pass on Darth’s wardrobe altogether for one very good reason: I’d look silly in a cape.

Theory of a Deadman – Villain