The Ballad of Mila

by Matteo Strukul

  TW: In the course of arguing the point you just made, the British academic, and novelist, David Lodge asked: “If these kinds of novels ‘aren’t literature’ then what are they?” As he said, an opera is an opera whether it’s ‘grand’ or ‘buffa’; it’s all music. I find that the supposedly ‘higher’ forms of literature – or at least of contemporary literature; it’s certainly not true of Shakespeare or Homer – seem to find it distasteful to engage with the more primal, visceral themes of life: survival, killing, vengeance, greed, lust, folly and insanity; etc, etc. They don’t want to get their pens dirty. But these forces are still alive and well, even if we use bankers and drones to do the job; and with the diversity of 21st century catastrophes roaring towards us, only a fool would assume that those forces won’t have their day again, even in the bosom of what is known as civilization. Or as certain American Indians put it: the ‘civilization disease’.

  Fiction and the movies have been cross-pollinating each other since cinematography was invented. More than ever the movies steal from literary sources, which is somewhat depressing – at least until they adapt my novels. Movies have had at least as much influence on my writing as novels have. Leone, Peckinpah and Kubrick are my holy trinity. But since we’ve mentioned the great Chester Himes, and Shakespeare and Bloody Sam, and our excuse is the Ballad of Mila, let’s talk about decapitation (or even heads in bags). It seems to have been a notable human practice since we found a flint sharp enough to do the job. What’s the attraction, both for the human race in general and writers (or at least some of us) in particular?

  MS: About decapitation... well I must confess that my favourite movie is Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I remember when I was sixteen and I watched The Wild Bunch with my father. He is a big fan of Peckinpah by the way. And he said something that sounds like: “Tomorrow we will watch something stronger.” The day after we watched that incredible movie with Warren Oates that is a real masterpiece, something so strange and unbelievable that I can't describe. I remember the sequence when Warren Oates took the ice to refresh the head of Alfredo. Well, there was, and is, something so cruel, merciless, and lurid in that movie, it’s like to sniff the devil's smell, you know what I mean. And remembering the words of the Player who was Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead drama, well he said, talking about tragedy at one point, “Well, we can do you blood and love, without the rhetoric, without the love, and we can do all three concurrent or consecutive, but we can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They are all blood you see.” So, I think that, as a writer, I must represent violence in its very most extreme dimension, especially if I'm writing about a tragedy and about a vengeance, Mila's vengeance, a woman who had been violated by four men when she was a child. So she is merciless, she is extreme, she is cruel, because cruelty is what remained to her at the end of the story. So, as you said to me one time, if you want to represent violence as a writer, you have to be extreme because violence is always extreme, otherwise you are a liar. I don't know why I'm so familiar with decapitation. In fact, it's a horrible thing that really scares me, but I want to write about feelings, about hatred, about passions, and I want to do it in a very honest way. I'm thinking of Derek Raymond's I Was Dora Suarez that was a very disturbing, cruel, shocking novel, or to David Peace's 1974, or, just to mention an epic work, to the Nibelungenlied, The Song of the Nibelungs when Kriemhild swears to take revenge for the murder of her husband and the theft of her treasure... well that is the kind of feeling and atmosphere that I wanted to capture with Mila's feeling... and if you remember at the end of the second part of the epic poem, all the Burgundians are killed in a bloodbath when Kriemhild orders the hall to be burned with the Burgundians inside. So, in the end, I think that I was writing about decapitation because I wanted to express how profoundly horrible and all-consuming a woman's vengeance could be.

  And talking about vengeance, a real classic in literature, what do you think about the difference between a man's vengeance and a woman's vengeance?

  TW: Revenge seems to be a very deep-seated instinct. Taking personal revenge (rather than socially sanctioned revenge via the law) has been forbidden for a very long time – all the great religions disapprove of it, and all legal systems, no doubt because it’s a recipe for anarchy. So, why is revenge the core element in such a vast amount of drama from the ancients to this day? We never seem to get tired of it as a theme. I certainly don’t. It’s hard to beat the excitement and satisfaction of a hero taking to the vengeance road, as Mila does. Even when the moral of the tale is that vengeance is bad – ‘Dig two graves’, etc – it’s the vengeance that keeps us hooked.

  I recently read some research from Yale University which demonstrated that, when watching a puppet show, babies as young as eight months old prefer characters who punished a ‘bad’ puppet to the characters who treated it with kindness. “That puppet needs to be decapitated!” they gurgle. (They also preferred characters who helped a puppet in difficulty to those who made things worse or did nothing.) This was interpreted in terms of evolutionary psychology (which is all the rage these days, for convincing reasons). Revenge in these terms is a ‘hard-wired’ expression of the need for justice, fairness, right and wrong, if a society is going to survive.

  On a more emotional psychological note, I think revenge is more fundamentally a reaction to humiliation, again as with Mila. If there is no humiliation involved, the same painful or tragic event provokes very different feelings. If a loved one dies of an illness, our house burns down, the bank crashes with all our savings, or we are physically injured by accident or nature, we feel bad in all sorts of ways, but we don’t feel vengeful. If someone does these same things to us – murder, arson, theft, assault – it torments us in a very different way. We’re humiliated, shamed, insulted – and we want pay-back. It’s not the calamity itself, it’s the loss of power.

  In real life, we almost never get revenge; we very rarely try to take it; the consequences are too grim; we not only understand the ‘two graves’, we are also usually afraid of the person (or institution) who fucked us. I think this is another reason for the great satisfaction that revenge dramas give us. Having wasted a great deal of time on real-life revenge fantasies that never got further than high blood pressure and grinding off fragments of my teeth, I must say I love them. When I come back in my next life, I want to be Lee Marvin in Point Blank.

  As for Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, it’s without doubt a great masterpiece, and possibly the most sophisticated meditation on revenge and humiliation in the whole genre. It even includes a wonderfully vengeful woman.

  On that topic – male versus female – I’m not sure what to say. I would guess that the impulse is just as strong, but that violent methods of acting on it are generally less available to women.

  I always find writing women characters a greater challenge than writing about men. This seems to me perfectly natural. I’m always afraid I will make them too masculine; and then I fear that my fantasy of what it is to be feminine will be ‘too feminine’, i.e. based on cultural prejudices and clichés, especially as I like to write characters from the inside. Your central character is a woman. What are your feelings about that challenge?

  MS: Well, I feel good, and my choice was the best one for me. I think that the reason a woman is the central character of my novel is that I wanted a powerful character that could change and upset the structures and clichés of Italian crime fiction, where ALWAYS you have a giallo, or a hard boiled male main character like a detective or an inspector. So, in Italian crime fiction women are never, ever protagonists, except for the classical, tired cliché of the femme fatale or the dark lady. Hey, we live in 2013! And it's a shame because - during these years – we’ve discovered wonderful female characters in pulp and crime fiction and movies, like Luc Besson's Nikita, Quentin Tarantino's Beatrix Kiddo (strongly inspired by the Lady Snow Blood manga, in fact) Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth
Salander, so, as a writer, I think it would be anachronistic not to have an Italian powerful female character in crime fiction. More than this, a female character offered me interesting perspectives: contradictions, fragility and savageness, sweetness, and rage and, above all, integrity. I think because, in Italy, women have never had power: political power, professional power, social power. So, it's a kind of revenge because of this. I'm just a novelist, so I can't change anything, of course, but I would like to testify that, in my opinion, a woman, today, could do everything she wants, especially today when in Italy we have this social plague called Femicide: “the killing of females by males because they are females”. Two thousand women were killed by men in the last ten years in Italy. Have you any idea of how many characters like Mila we need? Well, I don't want to say that women have to kill Italian men, of course not, but it's a tragedy and a proof, if proof were needed, that women have to take the power in this stupid, idiot ‘macho country’. So, there were so many reasons to have an Italian woman as a central character for my novels that I can't count all of them. More than this, as a novelist, I was afraid to put something of myself into the novel, and I don't want to make that kind of mistake, and I had a unique opportunity: to write a female character. What a great challenge! And, well, I want to thank my wife, Silvia, because we talked and talked about Mila, and her virtues and vices and the way she talks, the way she fights, the way she cries... everything, so it was amazing and very interesting, and I learned so many things and now I think that the ‘Mila’ character is not too feminine or too masculine. She is just a woman, a killer, a victim, an avenger.

  Anyway talking about the tormentor/victim relationship… it’s something that’s brilliantly told, in my opinion, in your first two novels, Bad City Blues and, of course, Green River Rising. What do you think - as a novelist and psychiatrist - about this explosive kind of relationship and how powerful and useful could it be to build a disturbing plot and story?

  TW: I think we all know the basic fear that can be induced simply by asking a question. Who can forget those horrible, adult faces looming over us in childhood and screaming: “Where have you been???”, or “What’s the capital of Singapore???” Or my own boyhood favourite, combining numerous different branches of philosophy, neuroscience and depth psychology in a single a question that I’m still battling to answer: “Who do you think you are???”

  For the Inquisition, and the French legal system of the ancien regime, ‘The Question’ was synonymous with torture. Is it cultural training, or is our fear of the question inherent? It’s amazing that such a simple, non-physical, behaviour can be so deeply aggressive. It’s certainly a delicate matter in psychiatry. “Do you hear voices?” is enough to set anyone on edge. I originally intended Bad City Blues to be one long conversation, ninety percent dialogue, but I quickly gave in to the irresistible allure of explicit sex and violence.

  So let me put you on the rack, Mr Strukul. Why do you think that the people who have just read this book should immediately tell all their friends and family to rush out and buy The Ballad of Mila?

  MS: Good point, good point. Well, what can I say? Maybe, because, in my opinion, to read this book is a little bit like watching a movie. The Ballad of Mila is a fast paced novel, heavily influenced by American authors like Joe R. Lansdale, Don Winslow, Victor Gischler, Charlie Huston, Jason Starr, Duane Swierczynski (especially if you think of novels like The Blonde or Severance Package), and Chuck Wendig. But I have to mention also comic books. Garth Ennis’s The Punisher and Frank Miller’s Elektra are major influences for my work and all the novelists who I have mentioned before worked as screenwriters for Marvel or DC Comics or both, with the only exceptions being Winslow and, probably, Wendig. I am a comic book screenwriter too and I was so lucky to work together with Alessandro Vitti, who drew a wonderful three issues arc that I wrote and that had Mila as its main Character, and was awarded with an important Italian award. So, I must admit that, especially in this first novel in Mila’s on-going series (I’m working on book number three just right now), I was influenced by American pop culture. I loved all the crime stuff of that new generation of novelists who had Lansdale and Winslow as masters, and developed a new fresh way to approach pulp and crime fiction. So, I think that American readers could feel ‘at home’ with The Ballad of Mila. At the same time, there is something different in my novel, I hope, and it is an Italian flavour, because I tried to mix all the tricks and shootings and showdowns and action sequences of American pulp fiction with Italian taste. For this reason, we call this particular, bastard genre here in Italy Sugarpulp, that is, in fact, the pulp with the sugar, which is the most important product of the NorthEastern Area of Italy. In the beginning of the Twentieth Century, we had, here in the Region of Venezia and Padova, the biggest sugar refinery in Europe, so that’s the reason why we call this particular genre Sugarpulp, because it’s the American pulp mixed with the Italian attitude, landscapes, lands, cities, and crime. In some ways, Sugarpulp is a new brand or genre like Spaghetti westerns once were. I don’t want to compare The Ballad of Mila to a masterpiece like A Fistful of Dollars or For a Few Dollars More. I’m not so arrogant or mad. But the idea, the mechanism, the scheme to take something from another place and genre like American pulp fiction and to put some Italian white beet sugar on top is a little bit similar, as the attempt to take the classical western and recreate it in a different way like the Spaghetti Western did. But, back to The Ballad of Mila, as a reader you could learn about the Spritz, the classical aperitif that you can drink here in Veneto, a cultural heritage of Austro-Hungarian Empire, that occupied our region for a very long time in the Nineteenth Century, or the battle for the territory between the Chinese Mafia and the local gangs, and that’s just for starters.

  And then you have Mila.

  A bombshell: medium height, red dreadlocked hair, green eyes; sheathed in leather trousers and a tight jacket, perfectly highlighting her curves. Breathtakingly hot. But, at the same time, she is lethal, a deadly assassin, a professional killer. Mila’s character is also in the tradition of Elektra, Cat Woman, Domino…

  For these reasons, I hope that all English language readers would be so generous and curious as to give a chance to The Ballad of Mila.

  But talking about Spaghetti Westerns, I know that you have a huge admiration for Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and some of the other Italian directors and authors. Why do you think they are so interesting and inspiring for your work and in general for other crime fiction authors?

  TW: Sergio Leone was my first true artistic hero, and, dementia permitting, I plan to watch The Good The Bad and The Ugly on my deathbed. I, too, have a great father to thank for that. He took me to see the Eastwood trilogy when I was about twelve years-old and those remain among the most mind-blowing moments of my life. One is more easily impressed, perhaps, at that age, but considering that A Fistful of Dollars is now fifty years-old, it retains a quasi-surrealistic freshness and originality that very few works of art retain and which no contemporary movies can lay claim to. It’s hard to remember just how radical those movies were at the time. Needless to say, they were universally trashed by the clever people at the time, as was just about everything by Kubrick and most other great directors. But then The Times of London also trashed Beethoven’s 9th on its first performance, so that tells you everything you need to know about reviewers.

  I think the great lesson to take from Leone is, on the one hand, to trust your own vision, and on the other, to match classical myths with radical new imagery and themes to create something no one has ever seen before. Which I think is what The Ballad of Mila does. The establishment is always fundamentally conservative; that’s their nature. Intellectually, they wear carpet slippers and smoke a pipe (strictly tobacco only, which they don’t inhale). Leone, like other greats, reached beyond them to the audience. Establishment culture limps along to catch up about a decade or two later, by which time it’s all changed again – or should have. These days the grip on th
e means of production – and mass indoctrination - is so tight that it’s much more difficult now to break through. The corporate machines don’t like originality. They are happy for us to eat the same swill from the same troughs forever, and technology has been their greatest asset in that process.

  So, I think one should always go for the throat and write without fear, before the clock runs out on the arts altogether. Of course, it’s ten-to-midnight on far more terrifying clocks than that. Maybe when those chimes strike, the arts will return to some semblance of their former importance. I’m still with Burt Reynolds on that: the machines are going to fail. Or at least fail us.

  There’s an undercurrent of a sci-fi vibe to Mila. Perhaps, like the Leone movies, a sense of a parallel universe, something hyper-real, almost uncanny, which is part of the effect. Are you aware of that, or is it an unconscious process? Most of my effects are unconscious – I don’t really know what I am doing. I deliberately try not to think too much. How cerebral is your writing process?

  MS: Talking about Mila, my writing process is totally visceral and compulsive. When I start a Mila novel, I have no synopsis, no plot, nothing, just a logline or something like that and an image, a picture that I have in my mind and that I know I want to tell and describe during the story. Sometimes I need an entire novel only to justify the meaning of that scene, because that scene is so important and seductive and powerful for me and I really NEED to put that image or sequence into the novel. I think that this is the reason why Mila is, in some way, a character so fresh, hopefully, because she can’t make plans or projects or whatever. Of course she is number one as a professional killer, she is disciplined like a soldier, but at the same time she is pure instinct and so you can never know what she will do or think. But, I must also say that, on a different level, there are some other influences or elements that, often, are ‘working’ in the back-office of my brain. And you are perfectly right! There is a kind of sci-fi vibe in Mila: the glasses, the cameras, things like those. I think that the two main influences that created that kind of vibe are Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional movie (that will be also a main influence for the third Mila’s novel) and Duane Swierczynski’s Severance Package novel, that really blew my brain away when I read it some years ago. It’s a wonderful novel so much influenced by comic books, I think, but I have to ask Duane if I’m right, because I’m not sure. Talking about Luc Besson’s work, even with Nikita, he directed a real masterpiece that form together with Leon: The Professional, in my opinion, a kind of great diptych. I don’t know if you have ever watched those two great movies, but there were unforgettable sequences, in fact, that I can’t erase from my mind. Like when Gary Oldman ate the pill and was going completely crazy, or, at the end of the movie, in the final shootout, when you have hundreds and hundreds of SWAT with machine-guns who have to kill just one guy.