EPISODE 123: AFTER LIFE

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Previously in Pop Culture Spirit Wow (it's our first two parter!):
The Writer almost breaks his nose when he gets so distracting looking at a house with 666 as its address (a number he has real trouble, and in fact spent way too much time trying to figure out whether there was a way to write this sentence that did not include it) that he collides with a pole.

Soon after, in a fugue state, the writer tries to describe his experience with exorcisms in Hollywood, and instead ends up writing about why DC TV shows are actually way better than the Marvel comics movies. (Which, in retrospect, he has a lot more to say about, and thinks was an important question for all of us right now. But still, those were not the droids we were looking for.)

Meanwhile, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” is literally a week away and he has barely mentioned it and he is afraid someone will soon be coming to collect his Star Wars fan club ID and all his Star Wars Topps trading cards.

And it’s Advent, almost Christmas, which seems like such the wrong time to be talking about demons and possession and evil. But then again, the world has kind of gone crazy and each time he’s had to preside at Mass or write an article since he has had found himself completely unable to speak other than to say he wishes we could all stop being outraged and just deal with the fact that we’re all pretty frightened and that admitting that is the first step towards dealing with whatever the next four years hold.

In the spring of 2012, two crazy things happened to me at almost exactly the same time. First – well, no, actually second, but I’m writing it first; call it a homage to “Westworld”, which apparently I have to rewatch -- a TV script I submitted to UCLA’s annual writing contest was one of the contest winners. Called “After Life”, it imagined a George Lucas-meets-Damon Lindelof-like father (i.e a brilliant pop culture storyteller who has had the fandom turn on him when the later episodes of his great story have proven not what they had come to expect) and his young-and-diabetic-but-otherwise-Jim McDermott-like son (I don’t care about Jar Jar Binks any more, George, all is forgiven; Damon, love you long time) trapped on opposite sides of the United States when a plague basically wipes everyone out. And it’s the story of the son traveling with a spooky girl called Druh (think Girl with a Dragon Tattoo but more spooky) across the U.S. to try and find his dad, while the father, assuming his son is dead, tries to start over in a haunted house New York.

Nothing had come of this story as of yet, but I keep trying to find a place for it in reality, because everywhere I go I think of more characters and storylines. Like I the Australian man trying to cross the Sydney Harbor Bridge post-Bleed (as people die their bodies liquefy, leaving just splotches of blood; there’s also a lot of scream coughing) but he can’t get across because someone keeps shooting at him; or the strange fact that anyone who gets anywhere near the MOMA in New York ends up dead; or the modern dancers who begin to use the whole of New York City as their stage (while one chubby middle aged guy dances on roller skates to rock music in Central Park); or the conspiracy theorists who insist they know what’s going on, and have stockpiled bunkers of guns for just this eventuality; or the Native kid in South Dakota who has a secret.

Maybe it’ll be a comic book. Or maybe I’ll be on my death bed, nurses trying to take make me drink some water and I’m refusing until they hear me out about how the Bleed began and what the deal with Druh is and the story of George Lindelof being chased by a swarm of mosquitos after swimming through bodies in the Hudson River.

*Happy thoughts. Happy thoughts.*

The second crazy thing that happened at roughly the same time as that award is that my boss figured out I was a priest.

As a student at UCLA, people advise you that if you’re smart you’ll do internships wherever you can, both so that you can learn a bit more about how all this crazy Hollywood stuff works and so that you can meet some people who might take an interest in you.

Most people do a whole bunch of internships, which is again very smart. But me, I got an internship at the AMC TV network, and though I could have left after one quarter, or two quarters, or a full year there, each time I checked in with myself my gut said stick around, see what happens. So I just never left.

But I didn’t tell them I was a priest, either. Because do you really want a Catholic priest getting your coffee and making copies for you? No matter what your religious background is, that just seems way too weird. Thanks for stopping by, Father. Love that whole “resurrection and sins forgiven” thing.

(It’s also true that I had applied somewhere else at the same time and included a bunch of stuff on my resume that sort of pointed to me being a priest without actually saying so. And then when that fact came up in the interview, everything got weird and awful and I started talking in this guilty voice like I had been holding back this dark secret and I was sorry but God I’d be a great intern and they never called me back.)

So I spent a year at AMC like this, reading scripts and picking up lunches and doing whatever else was asked – and loving it, absolutely loving it, the people at AMC were some of the smartest and most decent people I could have worked for; people who really, really loved story.

And then, one day, out of the blue, my boss swore in front of me, and apologized. And not like, “We don’t ever swear around here, this was inappropriate of me”, but “I’m so sorry, I know shouldn’t swear in front of you.” Like people do around priests and their grandma.

I was stunned. First of all, because I have no trouble with swearing. One of the many blessings of living six years in New York was coming to appreciate the color and life that a good expletive can bring to any sentence or situation. Swearing is like a release valve that sprays out different colors; sometimes that color is “rancid poop”, sometimes it’s acid. But most of the time, as long as it’s not degrading, it’s usually value added in my book.

But the bigger issue was, how the heck had she figured me out? I went back through our interactions; once when I got asked to read a pilot script about medieval times I had said to her I was psyched to read it, as I had studied medieval lit in grad school, and she had cocked her head, looked at me funny and said “Of course you have.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, you could tell me you’ve done literally anything and I would believe you. You could tell me you were in the CIA, and it would make sense.”

So that happened. But still, the CIA is pretty far from the Catholic priesthood.

(Almost as far as this newsletter is from exorcism, I realize.

I promise, we’re Almost There.)

I couldn’t figure out any reason she would have read me as a priest. But clearly I had. So I asked – what was it? When did you figure it out?

And she just smiled. Turns out, she hadn’t figured out anything, it was just a weird reaction she had in the moment. But now it all made sense.

Now, I had no fear of being fired because I was a priest. But I did worry it would make things weird. So of course I came to work the next time all Massed up, black shirt, alb and chasuble and insisted that this was now holy ground and everyone here was simply by virtue of my presence all these months now a Catholic and a sinner.

Or I kind of kept my head down. You decide.

But then the award thing happened (William is the Man in Black!) and my boss asked to read my script. And then a few months later she asked me if I would ever consider thinking up some ideas for a show about an exorcist. Not “Then her head spins and she vomits holy water” horror, but something grounded. Something that felt real.

Now, if you’re ever given an opportunity like that, the correct answer is always the same: “Sure, amazing network that does such great work, I would love to.”

So of course I said no.

Don’t look at me like that. I told you, I do not like supernatural stuff. I saw “Paranormal Activity” years ago and even now every once in a while I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and be certain – CERTAIN – there is some invisible horror standing right beside my bed, hunched over and neck curled down so that its head is just inches from mine, staring.

(When I was a kid I used to believe there were monsters under my bed – actually, now that I think of it not monsters, but more goofy-looking thieves in domino masks and striped shirts, how was that even scary? But I also had concocted this belief system that as long as absolutely no part of me was hanging over the bed (and also, sometimes, that my entire body was under the covers) they could not take me.

Even more bizarrely, sometimes I still have that fear, and immediately I check to make sure I’m completely under the covers and not hanging over the side of my bed.)

Six months later, my boss came back to me again. They’d heard some really great pitches, but nothing had really landed. Any chance I might I have had any ideas?

Again I said I didn’t think so. Then I went back to my cubicle and got jumped by the rest of me. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?, it said, as it curb stomped me with a plastic chair and old desktop computer. THINK OF SOMETHING!

Now, I’m as much a fan of the occasional assault upon one’s sense of self worth as the next person, but when I started waking up to find myself doused in gasoline and a little lit candle by my bedside, a note beside it reading “NOT JOKING, BRO”, it seemed time to get to work. Because self-hatred is okay, but self-immolation is not. (Also, one should never call oneself “bro”. Or anyone else, for that matter, except in movies, where it serves as a nice shorthand for “This guy...ugh.”)

So I spent some time watching scary movies – “The Exorcist” really is like a great season of a TV show, so, so much more going on there than the twisting heads; reading accounts of exorcisms and even talking to a couple exorcists. (Suffice it to say, the invisible-monster-standing-there-looking-me-in-my-face nightmares grew more frequent. )

But I did come up with something. A couple things, actually. The first came from talking on the phone to an exorcist. Unlike every movie or TV show about the supernatural, he was a remarkably ordinary guy. He talked about doing exorcisms the way you might talk about dealing with your boss; it was hard work, pretty tedious at times. A lot more praying than “Yo, that kid is spitting rhymes in German”.

But as he went on about some of the drudgery of it, I found myself wondering a bit about timelines. “Wait, how long does an ordinary exorcism take?” I asked.

“Ah, the shortest I’ve worked with a person was about 18 months. But I’ve seen some people for 3, 4, 5 years.”

Three, four, five years? Huh?

Now, I don’t want to make any judgments about this priest, who seemed to be doing very good and important work, but as a general principle, exorcising someone for half a decade struck me as having the potential to be enormously messed up, a kind of abuse. Again, that’s not to say that was the case with this man. I have no reason to believe it was. But the idea of an exorcist who is in some ways getting his kicks from the suffering of these people he’s dealing with seemed like a horrible/fascinating/sadly apt concept.

The second big a-ha moment was discovering in my reading that sometimes possession has absolutely nothing to do with what Ouija boards, Brady Bunch voodoo totems and the like. (Not that I suggest messing with any of those. See: the world is way more mysterious than we generally give it credit for. Poke that bear and/or Hawaiian tarantula, be prepared to get bit/stung/form a band that attempts to undercut “The Partridge Family.”)

This is literally the only Partridge Family meme I could find. I don’t understand it at all.

No, in a number of stories I read possession emerged after a sexual assault, or, even more unexpectedly, in the subsequent generation of a family in which a rape or some other awful act of violence had occurred.

Now, if you’re like me you might immediately say, well, exactly. Because what we call possession is actually psychological trauma. But the situations I’m talking about were ones in which counselors had been called in and had themselves agreed that was going on was more than psychological.

It’s still a big leap, I know. But whether you believe in this stuff or not, it does make sense that physical and psychological trauma would have a spiritual component. Which led to my one original thought in this area, which I am unduly proud of and have forced you to read not one but two newsletters in order to share. Which I will now do.

I might be slightly excited.

What if, on a spiritual level, each of us is like a human cell, all the good stuff on the inside surrounded and protected by an invisible semi-permeable membrane that allows some things in and keeps all the pointy and the bitey and the coughy out. (Imagine the world beyond our cells is like what lives inside our walls or under our floors, all sorts of creepy and crawly that is not necessarily bad but we’re all very happy to keep outside, thank you very much.)

And when we’re attacked – whether it’s a sexual assault, intense bullying or just a family environment that has itself already, perhaps long ago, been tainted by something terrible – that membrane has the potential to get torn a bit, such that anything from the uncomfortable to the awful that lurks out in the dark might be able to get in.

I must have written twenty versions of the speech the main character gives on all of this. It really did make me so happy to be able to offer an idea that might actually be of use to people in their lives whether or not you go in for “Grr” and “Argh” and “The power of Christ compels you”.

There was one further insight from reading about the varied contexts out of which possession emerged that kind of sold me on the project. And it’s this: whether you believe in the supernatural or not, it’s certainly true that all of us have had the experience of having had bad things happen to us, and wondering often many years later whether we can ever really be free of them. Whether there really is life after life, or whether we’re all basically stuck in the nightmare that at some point we either chose or had inflicted upon us. It doesn’t have to be as awful as assault, either; what about, can we ever heal old wounds within our families? Can we ever get a fresh start with one another? I actually fashioned my story as about an exorcist and his sister who were long estranged as a result of some really messed up stuff. They used to be super tight, them against the world; now she’s appalled even to see him, but is forced to take him because his life is a total disaster. (I don’t care how detached you are, or how spiritual mojo you have, doing that stuff for very long has got to have permanent negative impacts on you – which would have also made for a lot of fun stuff to explore.) And as much as the show needed to be bump in the night scary, really the essential question was can these two people forgive each other, let go of their past and move on. Is that even possible?

Which for me is one of the fundamental questions of life.

By the time I was done working on the project a year and a half later, I was both enormously grateful for the experience AMC gave me to develop this show with them, and frankly relieved to be able to move on and not spend more time wondering about demons torturing children.

But you know, as I write about it now, I also find myself wondering about it all again. You tell me, but I think there might still be something worthwhile there.

++

Last week someone asked me for recommendations of comic books for their kids, books that weren’t, quite frankly, all big boobs, ridiculous muscle formations and other things that are gross and weird and unnecessary.

As it turns out, recent years have been pretty fantastic for comics like these, and starring young people from a really interesting variety of walks of life to boot. If you, too, are looking for some recommendations for stocking stuffers, here’s a couple:

Miles Morales, Ultimate Spider-Man— In a parallel universe to ours (Yes, I imagine myself as living in a super hero universe, what?), Peter Parker dies in battle. But it turns out there was another kid also bit by another one of those same radioactive spiders, a black Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn called Miles Morales, and after Parker dies he takes up the mantle of Spider-Man. A fantastic book; Miles is a shy, sweet kid from a working class background whose family is desperate for him to get ahead, while he feels responsible for trying to do good for the world. It’s just the best. Except maybe for...

Ms. Marvel -- Kamala Khan is a Muslim Pakistani-American and total super hero fangirl living in Jersey City who gets cool stretching and “embiggening” super powers of her own and uses them to help people in Jersey. If Miles is the sweet, stable soul of this new bunch of superheroes, Kamala is its heart, passionate and hopeful and with a wacky sense of humor to boot. It’s a really, really great book.

Champions -- A team of young super heroes (which includes Miles and Kamala) decide all the punching and fighting that adult superheroes do is pretty stupid, actually, and try instead to inspire kids their own age to do good. (This book has only had three issues so it’s not yet in a collected form, you can only find it in stores (here’s a site to help you find a comic store near you), but I can’t recommend it enough. Something genuinely hopeful and new.

Spider-Gwen – In a different parallel universe than either ours or that of Miles, instead of Peter Parker getting bit by that spider his friend Gwen Stacy did, to become Spider-Woman. And then later Peter Parker kind of went crazy and became the Green Goblin and died and everyone blamed Spider-Gwen for it. So she feels terrible, and she’s on the run from the law and her father’s a policeman and she’s also in a band.
This book has a totally different vibe and look than the others, it’s punky and raw and more older teen-ish than Kamala or Miles, but Gwen is a really strong female character, conflicted and funny and trying to do good.

Last but not least – Kahlil, that fantastic “What if Superman’s ship landed in Pakistan instead of Kansas” comic that I’ve talked about before, is now available for purchase as a PDF. It’s a gorgeous book, and the story, which so far is about Kahlil as a kid and teenager, is really great.

++ LINKS ++

This little Christmas-commercial-cum-H&M-advertisement by Wes Anderson is very Wes Anderson. But also suddenly kind of sweet.

Speaking of Christmas, if you're like me, you probably have some get-in-the-mood favorites: A Charlie Brown Christmas; Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer; Elf; Love Actually.

COME AT ME, LOVE HATERS.

(Although I have to admit, this is also pretty great...)

If you have Netflix, I highly recommend adding to your seasonal must-sees "A Very Murray Christmas". Though it has a storyline (sort of) it's much more a musical variety show, starring everyone's favorite uncle, Bill Murray. And it has some really gorgeous numbers, such as this, this (damn, Rashida) and this.

That's it for this week. Six more days, y'all. They're even giving us a Christmas tree.

Be kind to yourselves. See you next week.