Wolves amongst the wolves

These days I've been reading The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus, whose exhilarating Lipstick Traces should be required reading for everyone who considers him- or herself still in possession of a fighting soul. In Shape, he tells the story of a depraved America, an America equally as loathsome and rotten as Orson Welles' lawman in A Touch of Evil as it is as pious and thoughtful as Atticus Finch. There is a particular quote he uses from David Lynch which sums up the tone of the book: "We're in a time when you can picture these really tall, evil things running at night, just racing. The more freedom you give them, the more they come out and just race, and they're running in every direction now."

Marcus quotes Philip Roth in talking about famously dead Laura Palmer of "Twin Peaks": "She was totally corrupt and totally innocent... The extreme innocence was the corruption"; imagine such a thing! America's greatest secret, the secret that Marcus is poking at, is that the underbelly is actually not under- at all, it's right there on top. It's as if a teenage boy plagued by acne were to pick it all away, only to find that the acne itself was the face. It reminds me of what Thorstein Veblen wrote about the hucksterism of the American small town, which mirrors Lynch's comments on it; in Lynch's movies, small towns have dark secrets, but rather than being behind the scenes, they are the scenes. The small town is indeed pure, but its purity has the character that would be equally at home greeting one's neighbor as deliberately exterminating the Indians, equally at home pitching in at the local food bank as fleeing Hurricane Katrina one to a car.

America is not a conflict between good and evil, it merely is good and evil, each accomplice to the other. The myth of the honest, hardworking businessman who rises to the top needs the corresponding myth of the corrupt, backstabbing shark who leaps there, not because the two oppose each other, but because they are in union. Cartoon characters like Two-Face or stories like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are tropes aimed at fostering the belief that evil can be vanquished and good can triumph, that one's "bad side" can be suppressed and the reins handed to the "good side." In reality, everyone is ethically capable of almost anything at any time, from ghoulish depths to noble heights; as Marcus says, the only real freedom left to Americans is moral freedom. American Psycho demonstrates this very well; in some ways Patrick Bateman was not free not to be rich, young and successful, but he was free to kill. Well, now it's 2007 and our liberties are severely constrained at best, our class system quickly solidifying, and our opportunities shrinking, but nothing binds our inalienable American right to be as good or as evil, or as both, as we see fit.