Choice of Evil

James Ellroy recently said that "the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity."

Just one minute's reflection destroys argument: what else is noir but an almost fetishistic glamorization of romantically wretched/"fated" males? Who insist on living in swine-filled cesspool cities, knowingly falling for cruelly colorful fatales whose main function is to either fuck and leave or gum up the hero's hopeless quests, all of which leads to lonely hours of self-pitying drinking.

Of course, Ellroy is as guilty of this love of self-pitying losers as anyone. As readers, we also can't get enough of this. But Ellroy makes a very large assumption.

As the title Choice of Evil makes ironically clear, Andrew Vachss' characters -- the most spiritually cauterized of society's cast-offs, at-core malformed survivors of sexual predation, repeat childhood abuse and neglect, of rape -- these people don't have the nihilist luxury of self-pity. They have no choices just as their perpetrators had all the choice in the world.

Considering that Vachss views writing as an adjunct to his real profession, that of being an attorney whose practice deals only with young people and children, the most distressing aspect of his writing is that it may not be fiction at all, but rather, case studies done up in narrative drag.

Years before some degenerates caused people to use the phrase otherwise, Choice of Evil, is set in the under-reported "ground Zero" of the festering urban sinkhole of the universe --a.k.a. New York City. Despite Disney and Mayor Giuliani's efforts, the horrors of the Vachss milieu do not politely disappear with cosmetic urban renewal: they've just moved further underground.

Burke -- no other name given him by his foster home -- is a by-default detective whose obsession with child abuse, rape and other beyond-the-criminal-pale atrocities compels him to take cases other detectives -- or most law-order professionals -- would shun. Burke is a classically traumatized hardcase who gives lie to the usual romanticized noir hero.

He's more concerned about maintaining the anonymity of his bunker-like apartment than keeping appearances. He doesn't have a gum-smacking secretary. He doesn't even drink. Again, Burke is not about self-pity: he's about survival. His own, and, perhaps even more importantly in terms of Vachss' larger concerns, that of Burke's non-biological family.

Among the members of Burke's chosen family are: a mute Mongolian strong-arm named Max; Michelle, a deeply empathetic transsexual; Mole, a brilliant techie who lives in a junkyard; and the Prof, a diminutive black schemer who speaks mainly in rhyme. While some have accused these characters of being cartoonish, it's missed that, by giving his characters only one name, Vachss underscores a basic premise: blood relations often have little to do with "real" family.

Choice of Evil begins with Burke's girlfriend being murdered in a drive-by killing at a gay-rights rally. It seems like an extreme -- if typical -- random homophobic action. Until someone starts dispatching the fag-bashers themselves -- somebody who calls himself "Homo Erectus" (we kid you not).

Burke is hired by a backroom cabal of extremist gays of both genders. They want Burke to find Homo Erectus and make certain he is whisked into safety. Hopefully after he finishes polishing off a few more fag-bashers. Burke takes the case mainly as an opportunity to exact revenge for his lover's murder. Within 30 pages, the reader is confronted by a common Vachss hard-ass ethical conundrum: Okay, killing gays is wrong.

As is vigilantism. But most fag-bashers get away with light sentences, if they're caught at all. So what's the problem with there being a guy who's doing little more than some well-focused street-cleaning? Strong arguments are made for both sides. But onward.

Homo Erectus' modus operandi is nerve-wrackingly similar to that of one of the most frightening characters in Vachss' already nightmarish canon: Wesley. Wesley was an ice-blooded, remorseless triggerman. The ultimate killing machine. Burke grew up with Wesley, and idolized him as a child, but unlike Wesley, he somehow developed a few functional human attributes. But in a prior novel, while killing the entire graduating class of a New England prep school, Wesley died. Or did he?

Because now, it seems, he's back. Perhaps in the form of Homo Erectus, perhaps as an unknown cyber-villain. And maybe as a ghost.

A typically labyrinthine Vachss plot ensues. Burke becomes homeless. The cops finger Burke as Homo Erectus. A twisted S&M relationship with a possible female ally gets even more twisted. As always, the supporting cast of characters is like some graphic comic drawn by Frank Miller while suffering some hallucinogenic bi-polar incident.

There's Xyla, Gen-X geek programmer extraordinaire; sexed-up investigative assistance from Strega, a Queens-based ex-mobster wife with a voodoo gloss and a few memorable others whose mention would give away a doozy of a plot. I will let go the fact that there's a new wrinkle to Vachss and Burke's ongoing struggle. Something the other books contained nary a drop of: hope.

I opened Choice of Evil with a certain amount of trepidation: Vachss' last few Burke books were not, I thought, up to par. The intricate plots and true-to-the-darkest-life characters were being pushed aside somewhat in favor of long sequences where I felt that Vachss was, for lack of a better word, preaching. There was also, I sensed, a bit of weariness, which was understandable, considering what the author must encounter on a day-by-day basis.

In Choice of Evil, the author is seriously back and running on all six cylinders, turbocharged, using every literary implement in the house, co-opting cyber and S & M culture, elements of supernatural fiction, pulp and literary structural trickery and more to bring his dark universe to light.

Although renowned for his minimalist style -- entire "chapters" are often not more than a paragraph long -- Vachss here proves to be a stylistic and cultural omnivore. Words, for this author, are weapons, and he does not discriminate against any particular bit of ordnance. There's also sly humor beneath the gritty veneer -- witness this play on Thomas Harris-style cat-and-mouse between a hyper-intelligent nemesis and Burke:

"Ah. You surprise me. I would not have thought --"
"I did a lot of reading in prison," I told him.
"Which apparently included a great deal of pop psychology," he said dryly.

Never known for his tolerance for weaker or ethically confused characters, Vachss shows a new maturity in this book. There are very touching thumbnails of a cop trapped by his own testosterone and a seeming fatale revealed as a pitiable victim of a subtly insidious form of evil.

Because of his chosen material, Vachss is forced into making his first-person alter-ego both potentially nuts and relatively sanguine about life's niggling details. It's a hell of a high-wire act, and the author barely breaks a sweat here). A proven master of unrelenting darkness, Vachss seems to have found a use for gray.

Vachss has also forged an entirely new sort of human monstrosity, a book-long, mostly epistemological creation cobbled together from police reports, the speculation of victims and Burke's employers, postings on the Internet and, finally, an extended discussion between Burke and an encoded 'net-based diary written by this monstrous character. It's an understated, chilling performance. Hannibal Lecter comes off as an amiable cartoon character next to this human demon. And, even in hardback, the book's dénouement is so left-field disturbo, it's easily worth the price of admission.

There are flaws. The death of Burke's lover seems a somewhat distant event; we never quite sense his grief. Here and there, his Internet lingo may make the geek-reader mutter about not being cutting-edge. And sometimes Vachss' terseness becomes too terse, leaving the uninitiated reader a bit at sea.

But what the author truly accomplishes here is making an exciting, deft and incisive argument against his detractors.

We live in times of cheapjack nihilism and an unearned postmodern cynicism; a sort of media-glut, empathetic exhaustion. After the Menendez brothers, O.J., or, for that matter, the Columbine slaughter, Burke, and by extension, Vachss' raison d'être, threaten to appear anachronistic. Burke evokes, to some extent, a tarnished hero from a simpler, more idealistic time (about seven or so years ago, maybe). Vachss' roughly behaviorist worldview -- that we are not formed by complex bio chemical structures (where would HMOs and Prozac be without this construct?) -- is seen as simplistic by many critics of his work.

And, from a certain POV, it is. Vachss keeps carping simplistically about terrible homes, horrific parents, insane laws (in New York City, selling a small amount of cocaine is a more severely punished crime than multiple rape). It's imaginable that, like Brett Easton Ellis, he could have a psycho character go to the laundry and complain about blood in his designer shirts a la American Psycho, but, unlike Ellis, it would be equally important to find out why he would do so.

What served to create this monster?

We don't know why Hannibal Lecter is the way he is: he's just the boogeyman. Knowing the details of what formed him, seeing in him a sense of melancholy at his fall from psychological grace: all that would be tiring, would make the reader perhaps see too much of him or herself in the work. Vagueness in characterization is hip, moral relativism is even hipper.

Vachss chooses not to be attuned to the vogue of vagueness. Evil exists, he says. It's a real thing. And it's a preference, a conscious choice. In light of liberal and conservative bloat-chatter about choice and "empowerment," what Vachss says is entirely logical: If we can pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and choose life, then why can't we also choose its polar opposite and become total, unredeemable shitheads?

So yes, Vachss' arguments about evil are simplistic. Then again, what do you call a human-shaped mistake that feels good about itself as it finds rationalizations for sodomizing five-year-olds?
Do you really think therapy has the tools to deal with this?

Our best mystery writers, whether they say it or not, are in the business of locating, defining and vanquishing evil, no matter what they may actually call it.

Ellroy sees it as some weird energy causing Los Angeles to seethe from generation to generation with some sort of ambient X-factor, which causes infinite corruption. Joe Lansdale finds it in the vast emptiness of the Texas desert. James Lee Burke finds it in the combination of a loss of spiritual values and the collision of cultures in New Orleans.

Vachss' work is not site or philosophy-specific. It cuts to the chase: evil lives, potentially, in everyone's heart. His real mission -- done up as an extremely satisfying "entertainment" in Choice of Evil -- is to implicate the reader. To not only investigate the atrocities on display in his work, but to reflect on our own lives, and see just what we have chosen.

[Written in 1999]

Joss Whedon explains, 2005

I interviewed Joss Whedon and wrote this article back when our Firefly-fan backstory was still fresh and it still seemed the spirit-winds could again lift out collective dreams aloft.


About how Firefly was the Brave Little Toaster of TV shows, attempting a seemingly impossible yet brilliantly realized fusion of soap, space, and horse opera.

How characters cursed in Chinese, action scenes were shot like ’70s revisionist westerns and, as with Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the dialogue featured whipsaw quipping o’plenty.

And from there, you know the story and I'll let the piece run as it did, just before Serenity failed to set box offices aflame. Metaphorically, of course, what with we being a peaceful people.

Our narrative delight ran a crushingly wee 11 episodes before Fox pulled the plug. But the damned thing wouldn’t die, mainly thanks to the show’s die-hard fans, DVDs that flew off retail shelves like rocket-powered griddlecakes, and Whedon’s conviction that “it was just too good for a silly thing like cancellation to make it stop.” The sheer existence of Firefly’s movie incarnation, Serenity (which opens Sept. 30), is payback for its supporters’ crazy faith.

But what sparked a fandom so bounteous and vociferous that it in part convinced Universal to blow about $40 million on a movie version of an axed TV show? Speaking via cell phone from Los Angeles International Airport, Whedon speculates, “I think Firefly gave fans characters they either identified with or just loved watching.”

Sounding just a mite tuckered out—understandably, what with months of traveling around the planet to attend genre-centric conventions and not-so-secret screenings of Serenity—Whedon continues, “And that kind of feeling breeds a different kind of fandom. When you really create a new world for people, they want to live in it—especially if it’s filled with really pretty people who say funny things.”

Foremost among those really pretty Firefly people who say funny things is Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a vet of the losing side of a civil war fought 500 years from the present between the self-explanatory Independents and an interplanetary corporate empire, The Alliance. Mal now captains Serenity, a Firefly-class junker spaceship, a sort of interplanetary U-Haul for-hire. Serenity’s crew: Mal’s ex-lieutenant Zoe (Gina Torres), pro courtesan Inara (Morena Baccarin), preacher Book (Ron Glass), strong-arm Jayne (played by Adam Baldwin like a comedic riff on Warren Oates ), mechanic Kaylee (Jewel Staite), physician Simon (Sean Maher), and Simon’s possibly telepathic sister, River (Summer Glau). Together, this oft-squabbling crew pulls odd jobs both legal and not-so on assorted planets that look like leftover sets from The Wild Bunch.

Serenity goes beyond the simple train robberies, snatch-and-grabs, and willy-nilly Robin Hood plots of the TV show to encompass a galactic conspiracy tale involving the attempts of the Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an Alliance assassin, to capture River. Or rather, capture the memories implanted in her head that not only threaten to turn the girl into a literal human weapon but also pose a threat to the Alliance itself.

All of which is good and well, but really doesn’t tell you why both the show and movie work so damn well. The lived-in, multi-culti frontier planets made for good sci-fi, but what was truly precious was the intimately observed interactions of the crew: the way Inara, all cool sex-worker professionalism, and Mal, diffident or sometimes downright petulant, negotiated their personal codes with a growing, grudging affection; how Book irritated lapsed-believer Mal into reconsidering his notions of faith; how Jayne learned to not be a jerk (well, learned to be less of one); and the inevitable, spirited dinners in Serenity’s homey galley, with all assembled telling tall tales.

While glad to take “as much credit as I can” for this superb ensemble, Whedon more seriously adds, “Part of the reason Serenity exists is I was just so blown away by how these people loved each other, and gave off an energy of being a real crew.”

And as was the case with the core groups supporting Buffy and Angel, Firefly offered another of Whedon’s quietly radical redefinitions of the non-biological family. “My family was very ’70s, very scattered,” says Whedon, a third-generation TV writer (his father wrote for Captain Kangaroo, his grandfather for Leave it to Beaver) whose mother helped found the women’s rights group Equality Now.

“I didn’t really feel that kind of particular romance that you might get from something like Little Women or The Incredibles. For me, the created family . . . it’s like the clubhouse . . . a little nest you can hide in. It’s sacred, the most exciting kind of family.”

As family leader, Mal is a complex mixed bag, as capable of thrilling heroics as laughable pettiness. Most importantly, “Mal will lay down his life for the people around him,” Whedon says, adding that Mal both meets and falls short of the effective leader’s need to be “a little bit distant, a little bit uncompromising, and sometimes absolutely arrogant.” The result is the tragic-comic pickle of being stuck between “accepting that a) there’s something wrong with himself or b) there’s anything right with himself.”

Serenity’s villain suffers no such inner conflicts. The Operative is an ideologue, an Alliance assassin whose belief that evil—and River’s dangerous implanted memories of Alliance dirty secrets—can be extinguished, but only via violence. “He’s a creation of the monster that is good intentions,” Whedon says. “I believe in what the Operative wants as strongly as the Operative does, and I want to slap Mal around half the time, but at the end of the day, Mal’s the person who’s going to save us from the notion that we can be perfect.”

The Operative is also the human face of Serenity’s crackling political undercurrents—which, without spoiling a great plot twist, have everything to do with empire expansionism. “It’s about how everybody else’s politics—which don’t take us into account—inevitably affect our lives,” Whedon says. “And about the idea of individualism and dissent—how conflict is a natural outcome of that in the same way that what we consider to be sin is a natural outcropping of human behavior.”

Whedon is building a head of steam. “No matter how enlightened you are doesn’t make you the boss of the universe or . . . able to govern places that are very faraway and have very different customs and ideals,” he says. “You can’t just sort of say, ‘OK, we’ve got it right, our dance moves work so everybody dance like us.’ It’s just not going to happen.”

To fans who’ve suffered through the sudden death of Buffy’s mom or the demise of Angel’s entire supporting cast in its final episode, it won’t be surprising that Serenity’s battle between political opposites exacts a human toll that includes some fan favorites.

“People who know my work, know: I like to kill,” Whedon kids. “But it’s something I’ve dealt with my whole career—if a character is likable, you can’t kill him. So what we’re saying is God only kills bad people?” Noting the upgrading to superhero status of Hannibal Lecter in 2001’s Hannibal, he continues, “Or God saves cannibals? When you just sort of blithely say, ‘Bad guys die, good guys don’t,’ you’re robbing people of a bit of their humanity.”

And as much as Serenity is shot through with loss, it’s also, ultimately, about faith—something stated outright by Book and mirrored in the movie’s “Can’t stop the signal” tagline, which is both “a shout-out to the fans’” and mnemonic of the movie’s belief that the truth cannot be quashed.

So what does faith mean to an atheist like Whedon? “It means, ultimately, a little bit of cock-eyed optimism,” he says. “Not that there’s a higher purpose, necessarily, but that there is something worth doing, worth believing in. That what is good in us, the invention of altruism, will eventually outweigh what is bad in us, the invention of evil.”

THE FAMILY GUY: Takashi Miike

THE FAMILY GUY
Takashi Miike's extensive filmography is as sweet as it is strange



BY IAN GREY

Singing and dancing zombies. Insane lactating mothers. Incestuous killer sisters. A son rebuilt by mad science from pieces of a father figure. A minotaur-licking loser. Two daughters literally joined at the hip. Images that mix literal, metaphoric and just plain bizarre Oedipal nightmares. Others that gush over-the-top gore and sentimentality in equal parts. In the course of films that shift from abject horror to slapstick comedy, one can easily miss the fact that Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike really is a family guy.

Best known in the U.S. as director of the relentlessly controlled patriarchal nightmare turnaround horror Audition, Japan’s ridiculously fecund auteur is as obsessed with family as Steven Spielberg, but with none of the obsessive kneejerk-normative impulses that mark the US master as an American filmmaker.

Sometimes a Miike family is a “normal” construct under siege by outside forces (The Happiness of the Katakuris). Sometimes, the nuclear family fragments on contact with spiritually void consumer culture (Visitor Q). More often, that “family” is a substitute unit — the Japanese yakuza crime families that fill many of his films. (If this seems a stretch, note that Miike has a yakuza franchise film called Family.)

In the most extreme instances — and when talking Miike, “extreme” takes on new meaning — you get something like Gozu, in which a lonely yakuza separated from his crime family gives birth to himself via a lover’s birth canal, which makes her his default Mom. Or something.

Miike’s family thing is a prime reason why, despite the cultural details lost in translation, his films sink deep claws into a Westerner’s back brain. Viewers can depend on nothing but knowing that the unexpected is the rule. Like an early Brian de Palma on amphetamines, even his most horrid nightmares exist cheek by jowl with tenderness.

Or as Eye Weekly’s Jason Anderson smartly summarized, “Takashi Miike is not just some sick bastard — he’s a sick bastard with heart.”

He’s also insanely prolific. Miike has finished two movies this year and is filming his third, while this month will see the DVD release of 2005’s The Great Yokai War. So, rather than attempt to be comprehensive, the following is a list of representative titles that might help you get a grip on a sizable filmography.

Miike masterpieces

The Bird People in China (1998) — Magical realism, tragedy and comedy blend as a salaryman and a yakuza travel on a Herzog-like upriver search for a mystery tribe. An amazing underwater CGI shot of a flock of turtles powering a boat and a strobe-lit gangster gunfight nightmare are early indications of Miike’s febrile invention, while a character sums up the director’s career-long modus operandi, “It’s a metaphor, dummy!”

Three Extremes (2004) — After two feh shorts by Chan-wook Park and Fruit Chan, this anthology becomes essential because of Miike’s Box, the tale of a woman novelist whose increasingly surreal/frightening memories of patriarchal incest are causing her reality to break into sad, conflicting bits. Elegiac and visually gorgeous in a way suggestive of an Asian Bergman, it’s a meditative, mature look at identity.

The Great Yokai War (2005) — Miike shocks by doing a Jim Henson-y, super-cute kid’s movie involving a boy from a broken family ending up in a supernatural battle between some supernatural creatures of Japanese mythology.

The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) — The aforementioned zombie musical. What else can be said? OK — it’s a deeply spiritual, family zombie musical. With jokes.

Audition(1999) — Widowed patriarch systematically seeks new wife, finds sexually traumatized girl his daughter’s age. Multileveled hallucinations, mangled desire, acupuncture needles and knives meet body parts in less-than-conventional ways.

Visitor Q (2001) — An emasculated TV reporter tries to reconnect with his family via the creation of a documentary on family; incest, interfamilial lactation, necrophilia and worse follows. In the end, it’s actually an affirmation of familial happiness. Really.

Flawed but freakishly fab

Ichi the Killer (2001) — Thought Peter Jackson’s Dead/Alive was the last word in operatic gore? Think again. With one main character into lacerating S&M (when not blowing away roomfuls of yakuzas) and a meek programmed “assassin” who slices people sideways with his knife-enhanced Reeboks, Ichi is a reprehensible piece of manga slaughter that also manages to be, well, quite funny.

Gozu (2003) — A mystery woman indulges Miike’s lactation fetish, a character gives slimy birth to himself through his girlfriend’s birth canal and a minotaur haunts the director’s incomprehensible but hilarious idea of a road movie.

MPD Psycho (2000) — So there’s this detective suffering from multiple personality disorder. He goes after a cult with bar codes on their eyes and a killer who cuts off the tops of people’s skulls and plants sculptures in their exposed brains. Then Miike’s TV series gets weird.

Zebraman (2004) — This film is Miike in full-on adorable mode: A failed dad gets to “be” his favorite superhero. Despite or because of the loopy premise, it’s a sappy delight.

Fudoh: The New Generation (1996) — In his efforts to avenge the killing of his brother by his yakuza dad, a boy enlists the help of other teen malcontents, including a herm-aphrodite whose vagina shoots poison darts. While boasting unique set pieces and feverish, inventive style, Miike hadn’t yet perfected the mashing of melancholy, gore and comedy.

Other nonessential but fascinating offerings include 1999’s N-Girls vs. Vampire (virgin models become vampires), 2000’s The City of Lost Souls (a moody interracial gangster love story highlighted by a Matrix-style CGI cockfight) and Shangri-La (2002) a comedy that deals with, um, homelessness.

Miike misses

Look, the guy makes a lot of movies; some duffers are inevitable. These are titles you might want to skip. A good deal of these lesser efforts are yakuza films aimed to fill Japan’s ravenous direct-to-video appetite. The best (i.e., most perverse) of the lot is Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (2002), a gang turf–war/inter–crime family soap opera that is alternately dull and almost unbearably hyperviolent.

The most genre-recombinant is Full Metal Yakuza (1997). Equal parts gangster revenge film, RoboCop rip and Frankenstein, it’s a flawed jaw-dropper about an oafish yakuza who is killed trying to protect his father figure, a crime-family boss; a mad scientist “rebuilds” him with spare cyber-stuff and parts from the aforementioned boss.

Graveyard of Honor (2002), Dead or Alive (1999) and Kikoku (2003) prove that even Miike can be generic, and nobody will dis your Miike cred if you skip his competent but inessential J-horror entry One Missed Call and the extended J-pop video Andromeda.

But as career downsides go, and considering his astonishing production speed, these few off entries are small beer indeed. Especially in light of the fact that Miike is only 46 and just now hitting a new aesthetic peak as his ongoing family “project” is gaining a tighter focus. God only knows what images and ideas we’ll be gasping over when this article is hopelessly obsolete in, say, three months.

[NOTE: I wrote this in 2006. As of now, Miike has directed eighty-three (83) films.]