EPISODE 209 – MONSTERS ALL THE WAY DOWN

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POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

I was very pleased with myself when I came up with the title of this episode a couple weeks ago. It’s a bit of a riff on one of the early myths of the universe, that the universe is held up by turtles all the way down. It’s also the title of the last episode of “Awake”, a TV show I loved that pretty much no one saw.

But then this week I found myself thinking, “Really? More monsters?” In the words of Stephen Sondheim – and pretty much every spiritual director I’ve ever had – MOVE ON.

So I am going to move this wagon train along, next week. And I promise, it’ll be a change! I'm having my community do an exorcism on me over the weekend and everything. So excited I can barely stop twisting my head in circles.

But there was one more monster-y thing I wanted to talk about. It’s actually the tease I dropped at the start of this little mini-series, which was what, 15 years ago? To recall:

“The main reason I’ve been thinking about monsters a lot lately is that I’ve begun to realize, much to my surprise and dismay, that I seem to have a monster of my own living inside me. And that it’s been there a long time. And that my strategies for dealing with it have misunderstood it pretty much entirely. “ ++ So the other week I was having a perfectly normal conversation with a good friend, and as we were talking I mentioned in passing an unattractive tendency I was noticing in myself to get kind of flatter-ery and ingratiating when I get nervous. And then they said, “Yeah I’ve noticed that, too.”

And just like that, I FLIPPED. OUT.

Like this:

Meets this:

With a nice finish of this:

Because that makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean, how dare someone else acknowledge one of my many flaws. I don’t care if I did bring it up myself, when it comes to what’s wrong with me, I expect others to act surprised. That’s not unreasonable, is it? IS IT?

It’s the rage that really surprised me. Suddenly standing in my place there was this ranting, might-as-well-have-been-drooling creature. He had the petulance of a twelve year old, and at the same time the heat coming off of him was kind of scary.

I mentioned the FX show “Legion” a couple weeks ago, about the guy who seems to have mental super powers but is also mentally all kinds of broken, and a lot of the show is these other super powered people going through his memories, trying to help him put the pieces back together. And there’s this incredibly disgusting creature you see lurking in dark corners of his mind from time to time.

He just exudes malevolence, doesn’t he? If I had an Uncle Phil who I’d never met so I thought I should reach out and invite him to Christmas dinner and he showed up and he looked like that, I’m sorry, I know it’s Christmas and I’m a priest, but that is not happening.

Go back where you came from, Phil. I don’t know what you did, but you do, and you need to get your life together.

In my own ugly moment it was as though my own Uncle Phil suddenly showed himself. And he seemed a lot more pathetic than Legion’s Scary Pasty Face – he was definitely wearing kid’s knickers, and had his hands curled into tiny fists -- but he also seemed equally dangerous in his own way, both to me and to others.

Who is that guy, I wondered? What’s his deal? And like, how does have a room in my inn? Because, Yeesh.

++

As I’ve been thinking about that/him/it/okay-maybe-but-I’d-prefer-not-to-acknowledge-it-me, I’ve realized, as awful and scary as that dude seems, usually it seems like he’s also trying to protect me, just in some crazy Bizarro world #helpfulnothelpful kind of way. The impulse that tells me not to trust people might just want me for itself, the monster version of a Happy Meal (...an Unhappy Meal? Meatloaf?) but it’s also trying to keep me from getting hurt by them.

The voice that tells me that I need to grow up and get a real job is definitely not Captain Good Times. But if I just sit with its often BRUTAL meanness, I discover it’s also desperately afraid for me, that people might write me off as a crank or lazy or a waste of a vocation. I need to shut up and fly right (yeah, I don’t know how that metaphor works either) because as is people WILL NOT get me.

And the creature that leaps out at the barest sidle towards criticism is um, actually kind of a nightmare... And maybe part of that thing is some really dark “He’s My Precious, not Yours!” Gollum-level stuff.

But there’s definitely something protective going on there, too. ++ I was telling this other friend of mine about all this not long ago. And he’s done all this study in psychology, so he’s just listening, listening.

(In retrospect, he was probably also thinking, “He’s telling me a story about how when someone agreed with him that he has some issues he flipped out, and how that experience is helping him see some others issues, and what, he wants me to now comment? How stupid does he think I am?”)

When I’m done, he tells me he thinks it sounds dead-on. (Again, no fool he.) But then he added this: “What if the monster isn’t protecting you from the outside world. What if it’s protecting you from something else inside you that you’re actually way more scared of.”

Which was maybe the scariest thing anyone has ever said to me, and suddenly I was afraid to be alone in a room with myself.

But it turns out he meant it another way. (Phew.) What if this creature, he says, is so intent on keeping me from the world because what I’m really afraid of is the possibility of success.

Now: that sounds a) like the WORST humblebrag that humanity is capable of – “I’m just so afraid of how talented I am, you know?”, he says as his friends stab out their eardrums with knitting needles; and b) it’s WAY too easy on me. “Hey, guys, my real fear isn’t that I’m an awful person, it’s that I’m just so great!”

“How nice for you”, says the friend still having trouble sleeping after I went full Nicholson on him for agreeing with me that yeah, I can sometimes be a little bit harsh.

But I also think for a lot of us the idea of doing well is actually way scarier than failing. We know what it’s like to be rejected. To fail. To not have it – whatever “it” is. Every human being goes through that, even the ones who don’t seem like they do. (Hate those guys.)

Success is a lot more unknown. Which can mean, bizarrely, it can feel way less safe.

I used to teach at this high school in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. It was a tiny school, just two hundred students in a two floor building with I don’t know, maybe fifteen classrooms.

And there was this bulletin board that the theology department was responsible for, just outside the principal’s office. And one semester this great volunteer teacher posted this quote from a writer I’d never heard of. (Twenty years later, it’s still with me.)

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Maybe our monsters are sort of like training wheels we insist on keeping on our bike even though we’ve known for a long time now how to ride. And the more horrible they are, the better, because that makes them into a distraction big enough that we don’t think to ask, But why is it I’m still using training wheels anyway?

Or maybe we really are all locked in a house alone with scary Uncle Phils who we just know are eventually going to eat us and there’s no way we can stop so we need to spend all our time fighting and/or running just as fast as we can.

Yeah, that sounds way better.

Or maybe not...? ++ If you want a movie that brings a great meditation on monsters as more our wayward friends than our nightmare enemies, I highly recommend “A Monster Calls.” It’s the story of a little boy whose single mom is struggling to survive cancer when one of the enormous trees in his backyard rips itself out of the ground, turns out to be a Liam Neeson-sounding enormous scary wood monster, and starts making demands. (Note: that's probably the weirdest least helpful description of the film possible.) It's about grief and fear and monsters and stories and it's really great.

++

Speaking of great films... up until pretty recently, I was kind of the worst person to go to the movies with. (I probably still am.) I always see all the flaws. Because perfection is a super-healthy standard for anything.

(Also, it’s always very satisfying to sit in judgment of something you wish someone would let you do. Especially when you know you would do it better.

A major insight I’ve gained from since coming to Hollywood: it takes an incredible amount of work from a huge number of very, very talented people – like, an ENORMOUS amount – to create a BAD show. So “Anything you can do, I can do better” is a lot less straightforward than it seems when you’re sitting in your room in your pajamas watching “The Americans” while a pile of way-better stories you know the world really needs more right sit on your computer waiting for someone to buy.

And if come away from that last paragraph thinking the moral of the story is maybe you should start watching “The Americans”, it’s not, but I will allow it, because man is that show good.)

Anyway, this year as I was watching some of the Oscar contenders, I found myself (shockingly) less interested in whether they were perfect and more interested in whether they were still with me days later. “Moonlight”, for instance, is a quiet film, a very quiet film, just a couple small interrelated short stories about a young man wrestling with acceptance (self and otherwise). The character as a child is the kind of person most people overlook, the kind of person who wants to be overlooked.

And yet days later the feelings of that story were still floating around in me, like the echoes of a choir in a church.

There’s a couple new stories out right now that I’m finding are doing much the same.The first is this new film “Get Out”, which is basically – stay with me here – “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” meets “Rosemary’s Baby”.

I know, “Rosemary’s Baby”, horror, they’re not for everyone. (Also, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”? Huh?)

But it’s actually an incredibly apt and resonant combination. “Rosemary’s Baby” is all about what it’s like to be a new wife surrounded by a “family” that isn’t yours, dealing with their expectations (and occasional devil worship). And “Get Out” is about the anxieties (and incredibly weird things) black Americans face when in all-white settings – in this case, visiting your girlfriend’s family and friends.

(And just to be clear, we’re not dealing with some Hollywood stereotype of a rural white community. These are “good”, “liberal”, “forward thinking” white people.)

What “Get Out” highlights about our culture than is way more disturbing than any serial killer nightmare monster movie could be. I’ve seen it provoke some really compelling conversation, too. If you do podcasts, I highly recommend the “For Colored Nerds” conversation about it. This Esquire article about the film is also at the top of my “Must Read Next” list. And New York Magazine did this amazing interview with eleven people in interracial couples on what it was like watching the movie together.

It's definitely the kind of story that stays with you.

I also recently stumbled upon this new HBO miniseries “Big Little Lies” (which let’s be honest, has pretty much the most bland and unmemorable name ever. I am constantly calling it “Small Big Little Things”, “Little Big Big Things”, “Little Big Lies” or “Small Big Little”, which, I don’t even know what that means.

I know it’s based on a book of the same name, but come on, HBO, gimme a title I can remember!)

The seven part series stars Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley as mothers in a wealthy Northern California beach community who are somehow tangled up in the murder of one of them. Each week the story flashes back to weeks before whatever happened, because apparently that’s the only way HBO does detective stories now, and we watch whatever happened all slowly play out.

But what the show is really about is what it’s like to be a mother in the context of a community – the competitiveness and insecurity you face in relation to other moms; the fears for your children and about your relationships with them and your partners; the struggle to find trustworthy friends; the loneliness. From what I’ve seen in parishes and heard friends and family talk about, it is dead on accurate.

And at one and the same time it lets its characters both be incredibly hateful to one another and still deeply sympathetic. I can run a little hot and cold on Reese Witherspoon, but seriously, she is delivering a master class here on how to be “that” mom (you know the one) and still not lose the audience.

“Big Small Tiny Large Argh Whatever This Annoying Title Is” is a show I wish I could be watching with a bunch of moms. I have got to think the conversations would be amazing.

One last recommendation: I know comics aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I just have to mention “The Unstoppable Wasp”, a new comic about this super-smart Russian kid who as a child had been kidnapped by this nightmare spy organization that wanted to turn her into a killer, but she escaped to the United States and now she’s being looked after by basically Marvel Comics’ version of Alfred the Butler.

And for all that she’s been through she’s actually this goofy, this super-hopeful kid who notices that the top ten smartest people in the Marvel universe are all men and decides that’s stupid and probably not true, either. So she decides to go hunt down all the other super-smart girls so that they can form a super-cool science lab to make the world a better place.

It’s very much a book written for kids, which despite my general lack of impulse control and time spent goofing around I apparently am not. (I guess.)

But I find it an enormous wellspring of hope and laughter and just general positivity. (Also, each issue ends with short interviews of two real women who work as scientists. How cool is that?)

If you’re looking for a great “you can do anything you put your mind to” book for a child, or you yourself just need a little break from all the whatever this is clogging up every ounce of my news feed every moment of every day including Saturday morning when we should all be having breakfast, I know it sounds crazy to think a comic book could help, but this one really might. And you can read it on your Kindle too.

++ LINKS ++

I was a little surprised to find Joe Biden in my newsfeed this week, but these Obama/Biden memes really did make me laugh.

There were also some really cool “looking back on great old TV show” pieces this week, including this interview with my personal Jesus Joss Whedon on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” twenty years later; this oral history of “Cheers” (!); Frank Oz on the legacy of the Muppets (!!); and, this piece analyzing all of the art in “The Brady Bunch” house, which I am required to mention because the chances of such a thing ending up in the world are so incredibly small.

And lastly, because you all were so patient with my monster obsessions, please enjoy the Onion’s brilliant take on the shark in “Jaws”.

Some people say Lent is all about giving something up. I get that; it's certainly what the Church talks about enough. But sacrifice is really just supposed to be the means to another end. The point of Lent is, what can I do that will help me be more open and connected to God. If “drink less bourbon” gets you there, great.

But it could also be, spend ten minutes a day reading poetry. Take a walk and feel the breeze or the sun (or the bitter arctic chill, as the case may be.) Or eat two scoops of Ben & Jerry’s every night and make a point of enjoying it.

Whatever you’re doing, do it gently. And if you’re not doing anything, maybe do that gently, too.