Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television (14 page)

On the shores of the Pecos River, nothing is as it seems: Kevin Spacey was once a terrible actor, Bob Dylan remains a terrible guitar player, and Val Kilmer is affable and insecure. Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy. Gusty winds may exist.

1
. For a protracted explanation of Advancement, see “Advancement,” available in
Chuck Klosterman IV
or the ebook collection
Chuck Klosterman on Living and Society
or as an individual ebook essay.

2
. I have no idea why I would cast Jude Law in this role, particularly if Heath Ledger were available.

Q:
You have been wrongly accused of a horrific crime: Due to a bizarre collision of unfortunate circumstances and insane coincidences, it appears that you have murdered a prominent U.S. senator, his beautiful young wife, and both of their infant children. Now,
you did not do this,
but you are indicted and brought to trial.

Predictably, the criminal proceedings are a national sensation (on par with the 1994 O. J. Simpson trial). It’s on television constantly, and it’s the lead story in most newspapers for almost a year. The prosecuting attorney is a charming genius; sadly, your defense team lacks creativity and panache. To make matters worse, the jury is a collection of easily confused sheep. You are found guilty and sentenced to four consecutive life terms with virtually no hope for parole (and—since there were no procedural mistakes during the proceedings—an appeal is hopeless).

This being the case, you are (obviously) disappointed.

However, as you leave the courtroom (and in the days immediately following the verdict), something becomes clear: the “court of public opinion” has overwhelmingly found you innocent. Over 95 percent of the country believes you are not guilty. Noted media personalities have declared this scenario “the ultimate legal tragedy.” So you are going to spend the rest of your life amidst the general population of a maximum-security prison … but you are innocent, and everyone seems to know this.

Does this knowledge make you feel (a) better, (b) no different, or (c) worse?

DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER

In 1989, my favorite television show was
The Wonder Years.
This was because
The Wonder Years
was the only TV program that allowed me to be nostalgic at the age of seventeen; when you haven’t even been alive for two decades, it’s hard to find media experiences that provide opportunities to reminisce about the past. One of the things I particularly loved about
The Wonder Years
was Kevin Arnold’s incessant concern over the manner in which certain people liked him. (This person was usually Winnie Cooper, but also Becky Slater and Madeline Adams.) The core question was always the same: Did these girls “like him,” or did they “
like him
like him.” And Kevin’s plight begs some larger queries that apply to virtually every other aspect of being alive, especially for an American in the twenty-first century. How important, ultimately, is
likability
? Is being likable the most important quality someone can possess, or is it the most inherently shallow quality anyone can desire? Do we
need
to be liked, or do we merely
want
to be liked?

I started rethinking Kevin Arnold’s quest for likability while I was reading
The New York Times
on the day after Christmas.

On the back page of the
Times’
s “Year in Review” section, there was a graphic that attempted to quantify a phenomenon countless people have discussed over the past three years—the decline in how much other countries “like” the United States. The
Times
printed a poll comparing how the international opinion of America (in a general sense) evolved between May of 2003 and March of 2004. The results were close to what you’d likely anticipate. In March of 2003, 70 percent of British citizens viewed the U.S. in a manner they described as “favorable.” That number had dropped to 58 percent by March of ’04. In Germany, the “favorable” designation fell from 45 percent to 38 percent over the same time span; in France, 43 to 37. Interestingly (and perhaps predictably), America is now
more
popular in places like Turkey and Jordan (in Jordan, the percentage of people who saw the U.S. as “very unfavorable” used to be 83 percent, but now that number is down to 67).

The explanation behind these figures, I suppose, is rather obvious; many nations—particularly European ones—don’t like America’s military policy, so they subsequently don’t like America. Meanwhile, countries with a vested interest in America’s occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have started to like us more. This became a hot issue during the election, as ardent John Kerry supporters insisted that George W. Bush needed to lose his reelection bid because “other countries hate us now.” Yet the more I think about this point, the more I find that argument to be patently ridiculous. There are easily a thousand valid reasons why Bush shouldn’t be president, but how other nations feel about America is not one of them. Americans allow other nations to exercise the kind of sweeping ethnocentrism we would never accept among ourselves.

There are 1.3 billion people in China. We are generally taught to assume that most of these 1.3 billion people are nice, and that they are hardworking, and that they produce their share of handsome low-post NBA athletes who pass out of the double-team exceptionally well. However, these 1.3 billion people also have a problem we’re all keenly aware of; these 1.3 billion people are governed by an administration that has a propensity for violating human rights. As Americans, we are philosophically against this practice. But if someone were to say, “Hey, have you heard about those human rights violations in rural Beijing? I fucking hate the Chinese!” we would immediately assume said person was a close-minded troglodyte (who would be hating the same people who are having their human rights violated).

From a very young age, we are taught that people are not all the same, and that it’s wrong to hate whole countries based on specific stereotypes. Remember that “freedom fries” fiasco that was supposed to illustrate our anti-French sentiment before we went to war with Iraq? Do you recall how every intellectual in America decried that practice as idiotic? The reason intellectuals made that decree was because this practice
was
idiotic. No intelligent American took that kind of childish symbolism seriously. It made no sense to hate France (or potatoes) simply because the French had a different foreign policy than the United States, and any conventional liberal would have told you that. But what’s so confusing is that those same left-leaning people are the Americans most concerned about the possibility of France
not liking us,
or of the British
liking us less,
or of the Netherlands
thinking we’re uncouth.
These are the same kind of people who travel from New York to Ireland and proceed to tell strangers in Dublin that they’re actually from Canada. They lie because they are afraid someone might not like them on principle. But why should we care if shortsighted people in other countries are as stupid as the shortsighted rednecks in America?

I can totally understand why someone in Paris or London or Berlin might not like the president; I don’t like the president, either. But don’t these people read the newspaper? It’s not like Bush ran unopposed. Over 57 million people voted against him. Moreover, half of this country doesn’t vote at all; they just happen to live here. So if someone hates the entire concept of America—or even if someone
likes
the concept of America—based solely on his or her disapproval (or support) of some specific U.S. policy, that person doesn’t know much about how the world works. It would be no different than someone in Idaho hating all of Brazil, simply because their girlfriend slept with some dude who happened to speak Portuguese.

In the days following the election, I kept seeing links to Web sites like
www.sorryeverybody.com
, which offered a photo of a bearded idiot holding up a piece of paper that apologized to the rest of the planet for the election of George W. Bush. I realize the person who designed this Web site was probably doing so to be clever, and I suspect his motivations were either (a) mostly good or (b) mostly self-serving. But all I could think when I saw it was,
This is so pathetic.
It’s like the guy on this Web site is actually afraid some anonymous stranger in Tokyo might not unconditionally love him (and for reasons that have nothing to do with either of them). Sometimes it seems like most of American culture has become a thirteen-year-old boy who wants to be popular
so much
and wants to go to the Snowball Dance
so bad
and is just
so worried
about his reputation among a bunch of self-interested classmates whose support is wholly dependent on how much candy he shares.

Now, I am not saying that I’m somehow happy when people in other countries blindly dislike America. It’s just that I’m not happy if they love us, either. I don’t think it matters. The kind of European who hates the United States in totality is exactly like the kind of American who hates Europe in totality; both people are unsophisticated, and their opinions aren’t valid. But our society will never get over this fear; there will always be people in this country who are devastated by the premise of foreigners hating Americans in a macro sense. And I’m starting to think that’s because too many Americans are dangerously obsessed with being liked.

We’re like a nation of Kevin Arnolds; being likable is the only thing that seems to matter to anyone. You see this everywhere. Parents don’t act like parents anymore, because they mainly want their kids to like them; they want their kids to see them as their two best friends. This is why modern kids act like animals. At some point, people confused being
liked
with being
good.
Those two qualities are not the same. It’s important to be a good person; it’s not important to be a well-liked person. It’s important to be a good country; it’s not important to be a well-liked country. And I realize there are problems with America, and I’m not necessarily sure if the United States is a good place or a bad place. But the reality behind those problems has no relationship to whether or not France (or Turkey, or Winnie Cooper) thinks we’re cool. They can like us, they can
like us
like us, or they can hate us. But that is their problem, not ours.

—
Esquire,
2005

Q:
How would your views about war, politics, and the role of the military change if all future conflicts were fought by armies of robots (that is to say, if all nations agreed to conduct wars exclusively with machines so that human casualties would be virtually nonexistent)?

ROBOTS

Like most middle-class white people who will never be shot at, I’m fascinated by the hyper-desperate, darkly realistic, paper-chasing world of postmodern hip-hop. I’ve learned a lot about life from watching
MTV Jams
; my understanding of the African American experience comes from street-hardened artists who have looked into the mouth of the lion and scoffed like soldiers. These are people like Shawn Carter (“Jay-Z”), Terius Gray (“Juvenile”), Nasir Jones (“Nas”), and Arturo Molina Jr. (“Frost”), who is technically Mexican American. And, to a lesser extent, Will Smith (“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”).

Smith is an intriguing figure, sort of. Unlike his peers, Will Smith has eloquently evolved with the culture that spawned him. Though once merely peeved by his mother’s fashion directives (1988’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand”), he has grown into a mature artist who’s willing to confront America’s single greatest threat: killer robots.

This summer (2004), Smith will star in
I, Robot,
the cinematic interpretation of nine short stories by Isaac Asimov. When I was in the sixth grade, Asimov struck me as a profoundly compelling figure, prompting me to subscribe to
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,
a monthly publication I quit reading after the second installment. (The stories seemed a little implausible.) I did, however, unleash a stirring oral book report on
I, Robot,
a literary collection that was punctuated by Asimov’s now famous Three Rules of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. Do not talk about Fight Club.

Now, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that the robots in
I, Robot
find a loophole to those principles, and they proceed to slowly fuck us over. This is a story that was written half a century ago. However, it paints a scenario we continue to fear.
I, Robot
was published in 1950, but writers (or at least muttonchopped Isaac) were already terrified about mankind’s bellicose relationship with technology. If we have learned only one thing from film, literature, and rock music, it is this: humans will eventually go to war against the machines. There is no way to avoid this. But you know what? If we somehow manage to lose this war, we really have no excuse. Because I can’t imagine any war we’ve spent more time worrying about.

The Terminator
trilogy is about a war against the machines; so is
The Matrix
trilogy. So was
Maximum Overdrive,
although that movie also implied that robots enjoy the music of AC/DC. I don’t think the Radiohead album
OK Computer
was specifically about computers trying to kill us, but it certainly suggested that computers were not “okay.”
2001: A Space Odyssey
employs elements of robot hysteria, as does the plotline to roughly 2,001 video games. I suspect
Blade Runner
might have also touched on this topic, but I honestly can’t remember any of the narrative details; I was too busy pretending it wasn’t terrible. There is even a Deutsch electronica band called Lights of Euphoria whose supposed masterpiece is an album titled
Krieg gegen die Maschinen,
which literally translates as, “War Against the Machines.” This means that even European techno fans are aware of this phenomenon, and those idiots generally aren’t aware of
anything
(except who in the room might be holding the ketamine).