Just re-read my last post...

...though I didn't particularly want to; I felt pretty much as soon as I finished it that it was cringe-worthy, and a second look hasn't done much to dispel that feeling. Here's the thing: the past eight years have been totally eye-opening for me -- and I'm sure it's not just me who feels that way. I guess it's just that this is the first period of serious upheaval that people my age have lived through, and seeing for myself the way that people react in times of crisis makes a lot of what I've read about in history books or seen portrayed in films and literature make a lot more sense. Or not "more sense," exactly, but it all suddenly seems much more credible and relatable.

In fact, what's been most illuminating is how much all of it doesn't make sense. Or more specifically: I don't think that I truly understood, before all of this happened, the degree to which human beings are not, in a fundamental sense, rational creatures. Which from one perspective is a little weird, because I certainly act irrationally all the time. But for me, anyway, my misunderstanding probably arises from one general and two more specific factors:

General: Growing up in a relatively prosperous household in a relatively prosperous area during a relatively prosperous era (for the US, anyway). I think we all understand, to some degree, that growing up clothed/fed/unabused/etc. sets you up for a pretty different worldview than growing up poor/starving/mistreated/etc. But--for me, anyway--this makes it very, very hard to connect to how people react when they're frightened/desperate/etc. in anything other than a very abstract and intellectual way. It also hasn't helped (me) that:

Specific #1: I was raised by almost miraculously emotionally stable and rational adults who, while they no doubt have their own irrational desires and selfish needs, managed to so thoroughly sublimate those impulses in raising their children that I've still never seen a trace of them (i.e., the irrational desires and selfish needs) in them (i.e., my parents) In the world I grew up in--i.e., my parents' household--people are fundamentally good, they don't act from malevolent motives, and if it seems like do, you probably aren't trying hard enough to understand their point of view. And I know that sounds ridiculous and Leave it to Beaver-ish, but that really is the moral universe I was brought up in. No one ever believes me when I say this, but I swear to God that I've never--and I mean never--seen either of my parents do anything for purely selfish or petty motives. I know, I know, it sounds hopelessly naive and hero-worship-y. And it's not like I don't think they're flawed; but honestly, the biggest beef I ever had with them, growing up, was that they were just too damned good (i.e., and thus did not properly prepare me for the cruel world out there.) (And just BTW, I stopped being upset about this a long time ago).

Specific #2: Lacking any sort of drama, hardship, or conflict in my real life (at least until I became a teenager, at which point I learned how to create my own), a really unreasonable amount of my understanding of human conflict has come from watching American television and film. And of course the problem with this is that while, yes, drama is built on human failings and conflict and so forth, it's still fundamentally rational, at least in a structural sense (i.e., events occur for a purpose (i.e., they're included because they drive the plot), and conflict eventually leads to a resolution, whether for good or ill). And the problem gets seriously magnified if your drama is American drama, and even moreso if it's the brand of drama that we use for movies and television (I really do think I'd have been marginally better off if I'd been really into theater or literature--but I wasn't). And that's because American film and television is infested right down to its core with with protagonists who are fundamentally decent and moral. And I'm not talking here about the old-school John Wayne archetype, which is so thoroughly old-fashioned and antiquated that it's not even really worth commenting on.

But even for our anti-heroes--which is what most mainstream protagonists are these days anyway, at least the hip ones (i.e. Batman, every character that Vin Diesel or Jason Stratham plays, etc.) -- there are certain lines that you can't cross. By which I mean that there's
always a relatable, expressible motive that can be seen as "noble" and/or moral by some code or other. Take gangster films, for example: whether it's Michael Corleone or whoever Denzel Washington was playing in American Gangster, they're all ultimately motivated by their love for their family (or in the "gangsta" subspecies--The Fast and the Furious is what comes immediately to mind, for some reason--love for the crew/sect/gang/etc. that is their de facto family).

But what you'll pretty much never see in an American film is a character like Jonas Engström in the original Swedish version of Insomnia (played by Stellan Skarsgård): a fairly corrupt and apparently incompetent cop who accidentally shoots his own partner and then spends the rest of the movie doing anything he possibly can--including colluding with a known pedophile--to save his own ass. I mean, seriously: that's his only motive. And in the end, he succeeds--which I would argue is almost genetically impossible in an American film. The US version of the film deals with this problem by a) beefing up the part of the female detective who's on to Engström (or Will Dormer, as he's called in the American version), thus making her the "moral center" of the film (in the original, she's strictly an obstacle to be overcome), and b) not letting Dormer (played by Al Pachino) get away with it; in the US version, Pacino gets shot right at the end, and--finally realizing the error of his ways--says to the female detective, with his dying breath, "don't be like me."

I'm not saying that American films never ever try to go with a totally self-centered protagonist--American Psycho comes to mind. And to be fair, the US version of Insomnia is a pretty weak target to pick on; bottom line, it's just a crap movie. But I would argue that there are certain aspects of human nature that are damned near impossible to express in popular American culture, no matter how "edgy" or "dark"; actually, it's the fact that the "edgy" and "dark" stuff--which is, after all, what I've always been drawn to anyway--still has this in its DNA that makes a worldview formed in large part on American film and television so especially problematic.

All of which is a long ways off from the point I was originally trying to make, which is: why did my last post end up being so facile, obvious, ill-focused, and preachy? And I don't know that any of the above has illuminated that point. I mean, it has a connection in my mind, which I guess is where this whole blogging thing has gotten off to a rough start for me; for all of my thinking and talking and being pretty good at stringing words together and making them sound good, I have very little experience at making, sustaining, and substantiating any kind of argument. And what I managed to put down in the last post really didn't express at all what I was trying to say. Or at least, I don't think it expressed anything that isn't really, really obvious--and what I was trying to say wasn't. Or at least, I didn't think it was.

Also obviously: I don't seem to be doing a very good job at focusing my thoughts. And I don't know what to tell you about that, other than that I've decided to try to keep at this in the hopes that, in the process, I'll start to figure out how to do so. So: I appreciate the three of you or so who are (presumably) still reading, and hopefully at some point I'll start to pull this shit together.