Eating the Dinosaur

by Chuck Klosterman

  The problem with Rear Window is that the things Stewart sees are too lucid. It does not feel like he’s watching strangers; it feels like he is watching a collection of one-act plays. Miss Lonely-hearts (the pill-eating spinster) stages imaginary dinner dates in her kitchen and cries constantly. Miss Torso (the bombshell ballerina) has cocktail parties and invites only men. A struggling musician sits at his piano and writes silly love songs, thinking out loud as he plinks out melodies. There is never anything confusing or non sequitur about how Stewart’s neighbors behave. When he starts to suspect Raymond Burr has murdered his nagging wife, his logic is linear. “There is something to see over there,” he tells Kelly. “I’ve seen it through that window. I’ve seen bickering and family quarrels and mysterious trips at night. Knives and saws and ropes. And now, since last evening, not a sign of the wife.” A competitive game of Clue is less transparent than this story line. When Burr peers out of his window into the courtyard, it instantly triggers Stewart’s suspicions. “That’s no ordinary look,” he tells his nurse. “That’s the kind of look a man gives when he’s afraid someone might be watching.” That’s a nice piece of dialogue, but not very convincing—what Stewart actually notices is “the kind of look” that only exists in Hitchcock movies.

  Now, part of this can be explained by the way Hitchcock designed the people in his films (he was never as interested in characters as he was in character types, and all the people we see fit that description). But the fact that Stewart is ultimately correct about his murder theory is a problem; it makes for a much better plot, but it heightens the aesthetic distance. The only reason it’s possible to piece this puzzle together is because the only things we see are inevitably connected, and that’s not how window watching works. Rear Window implies that voyeurism is enticing because we get to see the secret story of who people are—we peep at a handful of interwoven brushstrokes that add up to a portrait. The reality is that voyeurism’s titillation comes from the utter chaos of noncontextual information. It’s closer to a narrative that ignores all the conventional rules of storytelling; it’s more Lynchian than Hitchcockian. If we could fully comprehend what was happening through a stranger’s living room window, it would not be thrilling in the same way—it would feel more like reality TV. You’d think we’d care more, but we’d probably care less.

  Surprisingly, a better depiction of window watching comes from Brian De Palma’s 1984 effort Body Double, an attempt to rip off/pay homage to all the qualities Hitchcock perfected. Body Double is not half as good as Rear Window, but it’s crazy perverse2 and incredibly fun to watch. It stars a guy strongly resembling Bill Maher (Craig Wasson) who gets tricked into living in the coolest apartment in Los Angeles. One of the apartment’s advantages is a telescope that allows Wasson to watch his sexy next-door neighbor (Melanie Griffith), a woman who seductively dances and masturbates at the same time every night. Not surprisingly, this situation devolves into a grisly, complex fiasco. But what Body Double gets right is Wasson’s reaction to the woman’s nightly routine—he doesn’t question it at all. It makes no sense, and—somehow—that seems more real. What makes her dancing so exciting is that there’s no elucidation whatsoever. Wasson knows nothing, so everything feels good.

  2D This is an idiotic situation to describe, but I will try nonetheless: During the same period I was living in my $160 Fargo apartment and watching my neighbor by accident, I spent a lot of my free time sitting in parked cars and being weird. My best friend had a vehicle we used for this specific purpose; we would park her car in a dark place and be weird together. One night we were doing this in the parking lot outside of the newspaper where we both worked. It was a little past eleven o’clock. We were listening to ELO. During the chorus of “Don’t Bring Me Down,” we noticed a bachelor friend of ours exiting the newspaper building; he had been working late on a concert review and was going home. He did not see us, so we decided to follow him.

  Our friend got into his car and drove the ten minutes to his apartment. Our vehicle crept behind him, two lengths back. This was black ops. We were speaking in code. He arrived at his building. We parked across the street. Sitting in the car amidst the voice of Jeff Lynne, we continued to watch him through tinted windows. It took him twenty-five seconds to climb his stairwell (we couldn’t see that part). The door of his second-floor flat finally opened and the overhead light came on. Our friend walked through his living room, shuffled through his mail, and then disappeared into the bathroom.

  It was at this point that I came to a semi-sobering realization: We really had no fucking idea what we were going to see next. Both of us knew this man extremely well … but did we really know him? What if we didn’t? I was already aware of his strangest interests (Nancy Drew novels, nonmelodic krautrock, department store mannequins, Tippi Hedren, etc.), but what if his private pursuits were even stranger than I imagined? What if we were about to see something we could not unsee? For the rest of our relationship, I would know secrets about this man that no one was supposed to know but him.

  I mentioned this to my friend as she sat behind the wheel. She said she was having the same thought. “Maybe we should go,” I said. “We probably should,” she replied. But then our prey returned from the bathroom; instantaneously, the stakeout resumed. My coconspirator began taking notes on an envelope. We really knew how to be weird.

  The two of us watched our friend walk over to his stereo. He thoughtlessly looked at the back of a few CD cases and then pushed the machine’s play button, evidently content with whatever was in the disc tray. He sighed. He picked up a back issue of the New Musical Express and plopped into a chair that faced away from the window. It looked like he was reading about the band Ash, but I could not be positive. Maybe it was an article about Blur. I did not have binoculars or Jimmy Stewart’s camera.

  We continued to watch him read NME for twenty minutes, and then we drove home. It was a wonderful, memorable night. I still don’t know why. What did I expect to learn? What was I afraid I might observe? There are no answers to these questions.

  1A The theory I am proposing, I suppose, is this: The reason voyeurism feels pleasurable is more physical than psychological. And this, I realize, is an easy hypothesis to torpedo; it takes a bad human trait and makes it seem both natural and amoral. It seems like an excuse for deviant behavior, which is the same reason people hate theories that suggest male infidelity is a product of sociobiology or that alcoholism is a congenital disease. But there is something unexplainable about spying on strangers that doesn’t seem connected to what we actually see. On the surface, it seems like this should be similar to the human affinity for gossip, but it’s not; we’re never interested in gossip about people we’ve never heard of, and we’re rarely interested in average gossip about average people. It’s not interesting to hear that an old man was building a bookshelf at three am last night, especially if I’ve never met the old man in question. But if I were to see this act through a neighbor’s window, it would be different. I would watch him, and I would be transfixed. And I wouldn’t imagine what books he was putting away, and I wouldn’t speculate about why he was doing this construction so late in the evening, and I would not think I suddenly understood something about this person that’s intimate or telling or complex. I would simply be seeing something I could not control and would never understand, and I’d be cognizant of a reality we all consciously realize but rarely accept—that almost all of the world happens without us. To look through the window of a meaningless stranger proves that we are likewise meaningless; the roles could just as easily be reversed with the same net effect. And that should disturb us, but it doesn’t.

  What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell’s murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.). But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other: The
possibility that one’s life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who’s nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great—a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people3 want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it’s interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable—any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to “Eleanor Rigby,” all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.). If you know exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. Yet most lives are the same, 95 percent of the time. And most lives aren’t extrinsically meaningful, unless you’re delusionally self-absorbed or authentically Born Again. So here’s where we find the creeping melancholy of modernity: The one thing all people are supposed to inherently deserve—a daily subsistence that’s both meaningful and unpredictable—tends to be an incredibly rare commodity. If it’s not already there, we cannot manufacture it. But looking through another man’s window helps. It diminishes our feeling of insignificance, because spying illustrates how all lives are equal (“We are the same”). It also feeds the hunger for spontaneity, because there is no sense of control or consistency (“This stranger’s reality is beyond me”). No one thinks these thoughts consciously, but we feel them when we snoop. Seeing the secret lives of others removes the pressure of our own relative failure while reversing the predictability of our own static existence. It is more and less interesting at the same time. And our body understands this, even if we do not.

  “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms,” Stewart’s nurse remarks in Rear Window after rubbing him down with liniment. “What people oughta do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.” Good advice, I suppose. But that won’t make us feel any better, and it might make us feel worse.

  Q: How did you deal with the response? Did it bother you, or was it kind of exciting?

  A: At the time, we wanted to consciously anticipate the backlash and use it to our advantage. It seemed like the only way to stay viable. We were constantly trying to come up with an idea that would fail so horribly that everyone would decide it was too obvious to criticize or attack. For a while, we were going to make a live-action, shot-for-shot remake of the animated film Heavy Metal, but without using any CGI whatsoever. Matthew McConaughey was supposed to be the star. We were even going to use all the same songs off the soundtrack, except now they would be covered by Christian rock artists. We had convinced Jars of Clay to record “The Mob Rules,” and I think dc Talk had been suggested for “Veteran of the Psychic Wars.” Everyone sincerely believed that this was the one movie absolutely no one wanted. However, we couldn’t agree on who the audience wasn’t, so it became a marketing problem.

  The Passion of the Garth

  1 Half the energy I’ve spent writing (and reading) about music over the past fifteen years has been preoccupied with the same problem: “Is this thing I’m writing about real?” It wasn’t something that always needed to be addressed directly, but it was always there. Is this artist genuine? Do his songs speak to an actual experience? Is the persona of this music’s creator the same as who the creator is? What is the fidelity of these recorded sounds? Were the guitars actually synthesizers? Were the synthesizers actually guitars? What is the ultimate motive of the musician, and does that motive match the aspirations of his audience? These issues have formed the spinal cord of what music journalism inevitably is—the search for authenticity and the debate over how much authenticity matters. And certain conclusions finally seem apparent:

  1. Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting.

  2. Music that skews inauthentic is almost always more popular in the present tense. Music that skews toward authenticity has more potential to be popular over time, but also has a greater likelihood of being unheard completely.

  3. In general, the best balance seems to come from artists who are (kind of) fake as people, but who make music that’s (mostly) real. This would be people like Bob Dylan. The worst music comes from the opposite situation, such as songs by TV on the Radio that aren’t about wolves. If the singer is fake and the music is fake (Scott Weiland, Madonna, Bing Crosby), everything works out okay.

  4. Normal people don’t see any of this as a particularly pressing problem. They do not care. A few critics do, but that’s about it.

  5. The most telling moment for any celebrity is when he or she attempts to be inauthentic on purpose, and particularly when that attempt fails.

  Like most Americans, I’ve lost interest in the first three conclusions. The fourth conclusion isn’t interesting either, although the overwhelming truth of that sentiment makes it worth remembering. But the fifth point remains compelling. It speaks to the core confusion most humans have about who they truly are, and it illustrates why fame does not seem to make most famous people happy. When an artist successfully becomes somebody else, the result is defining and eternal: It’s David Bowie morphing into Ziggy Stardust and becoming greater than either himself or the character. But when such a transformation fails, the original artist disappears into something else. He disappears into himself, and everybody gets sad and uncomfortable and inexplicably obsessed with all those authenticity issues they never cared about before.

  This is what happened with Chris Gaines.

  2 Rock writer Rob Sheffield once drunkenly argued that the supernatural success of nondescript country artist Garth Brooks was a social reaction to the temporary absence of Bruce Springsteen. This is the type of argument so simultaneously obvious and unseen that only someone as supernaturally brilliant as Rob Sheffield could possibly make it. There’s a lot of evidence to support his theory: Springsteen essentially disappeared from America from 1988 to 1999. He even moved from New Jersey to L.A., casually claiming that building a new house in Jersey would be like Santa Claus building a new home at the North Pole. For roughly a decade, Springsteen stopped being Springsteen; he released a couple introspective albums, but he was not the man Americans knew. Garth filled that void by selling over a hundred million records. He created the Era of Garth. Brooks didn’t always write his own material, but he made songs that satisfied all the same needs that Bruce’s did, except with a little less sincerity and a better understanding of who his audience was. “Friends in Low Places” was as effective as pop music ever gets: It’s a depressing song that makes you feel better. Singing along with that song was like drunkenly laughing at a rich person and knowing you were right. “Friends in Low Places” addressed class in the style of Pulp’s “Common People,” was as emotionally obtuse as Nazareth’s “Hair of the Dog” and as pragmatic and mystical as BÖC’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.”1 It’s a song that makes me want to get drunk out of spite. Garth told stories about blue-collar people who felt good about what their bad life symbolized, which is the same reason Born to Run will never seem unimportant. Now, are the songs on No Fences as good as the material on Nebraska? No. But Garth understood an entire population of Americans he would never meet. I don’t know if Garth Brooks could necessarily relate to the masses who loved his music, but they could relate to him. They fucking knew who he fucking was, because he made them feel like themselves.

  And I think he felt weird about being able to do this.

  And that’s not unusual. And that’s why certain things happened.

  2A I don’t have a lucid memory of what the world was like in 1999; it seems more di
stant to me than 1989, for whatever reason. I do know music was still selling like crazy, though: Total album sales in ’99 were 940 million. What was playing on the radio still mattered, and most of it was mainstream alternative rock or Santana’s Supernatural. There was a certain kind of semi-heavy, quasi-spiritual, midtempo track that could be three years old but still get endless airplay— Creed’s “My Own Prison” was omnipresent at the bars and malls and Applebee’s I was frequenting at the time. The most popular single in the world was “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” a song about how Pro Tools made Puerto Ricans gay. There were a lot of bands who selected random numerical names on purpose (Matchbox 20, Third Eye Blind, Seven Mary Three), and there were a lot of people trying to convince themselves that a double album by Nine Inch Nails wasn’t ridiculous. Two disposable teens killed a bunch of beautiful people in suburban Colorado for reasons completely unrelated to Marilyn Manson, but traffic at Hot Topic improved nonetheless. Meanwhile, I was storing potable water and Oreo cookies in my hall closet; I was obsessed with Y2K, which negatively impacted my interest in things like TLC. At the time, TLC was advising me not to hang around with scrubs. This was kind of like their advice from 1994 about not chasing waterfalls. I never got that. Why not chase waterfalls? They’re so easy to chase. It would have been far more sensible if deceased arsonist Lisa Left Eye had told me not to chase something dangerous, like wildebeests. “Don’t go chasing wildebeests.” It was that kind of millennium. People cared about shit, but not really.