The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  6. The Punch Line

  I’m a queer and skinny adult whose flesh has known more blades than fists, whose mind knows the MOs of Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, Ramirez, and others, who is still a bit bolstered by being able to stomach certain information without a cringe.

  One study purports that Black people are believed to feel pain to a lesser degree than whites. Another supports the existence of racial PTSD. Another: the physiological effects of racism can substantially shorten a life. What Black bodies perhaps know: you can spend a long lifetime performing the role of a retort, a punch line. I want to make of this an if-then statement, a colored optimism. My poetry students are optimistic about clichés. They hypothesize that if an artist acknowledges the cliché and/or transforms it just enough, then an audience can more readily accept the cliché.

  In 1997, singer Brandy played the lead role in an updated movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Cinderella. The cast—portraying mixed-race families, royal and common—still (humorously) perplexes people on IMDb message boards. The year after, Brandy was Karla Wilson in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, a sequel for which the filmmakers seem to have taken a cue from Scream 2 and included Black characters in the supporting cast and allowed them to survive more than half the action.

  Scream 2 cast Omar Epps, Jada Pinkett, Elise Neal, and Duane Martin. In the first minute, Pinkett’s Maureen delivers the line “All I’m saying is the horror genre’s historical for excluding the African-American element,” and the sequel laughs loudly at its predecessor. Epps’s Phil jokes about “an all-Black movie,” and Craven maybe giggles a little at himself. (His directing credit immediately preceding Scream had been Vampire in Brooklyn, which grossed less than its budget and boasted a predominantly Black cast.) Martin’s character, Joel—a source of comic relief—is the only one of the four who survives Scream 2; the others suffer together a total of at least thirteen stab wounds, Phil and Maureen having been targeted, it turns out, because their names loosely replicated those of white characters who died in the original Scream.

  Karla Wilson is the best college friend of Last Summer veteran Julie James, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. Julie runs a lot but lives again, as does her partner, Ray. Unlike her partner, Tyrell, Karla—having fallen backward through the glass ceiling of a bedroom, having fallen backward through the glass roof of a greenhouse, having fallen backward through a glass door and played dead—also lives, limping into the penultimate scene.

  7. She Is (Beside) Herself

  My first and only real conversation with my great-grandmother, the truest stoic I ever knew, was a warning after she caught wind that I “went around” with white girls. Perhaps she recalled how this would’ve ended in the early part of the century she had lived, had witnessed. The consistent drama of horror seems to be its nestling inside the trope of preying on and violating innocence, which is the domain ruled by young white women, if ruling is a way of being puppeteered. I wonder if Uncle Craig was somebody’s Black friend, or if I should mention that Aunt Deborah could pass as white.

  In Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Jailer,” the speaker declares that the title figure burns holes in her skin with lit cigarettes, Pretending I am a negress with pink paws. / I am myself. That is not enough. I hold these lines like a grudge. Plath’s speaker wants to level an indictment against the shadowy man who has imprisoned, abused, sedated, and violated her. A numeration of injustices. Here, to be burned with cigarettes is apparently a violence that a Black woman traditionally vests. Unambiguously, “paws” belong to an animal. I am myself, as if the rapist’s imagining the inhuman Black body in the speaker’s stead lubricates his brutality. He is deluded, unappeasable. The poem swells with the desperation of this moment. I am myself. For whom is that not enough?

  8. Spectacle/Sport

  Consider the state-sanctioned hubs of public humiliation and mutilation. Gladiator death matches, Crusades, the Inquisition, the evolution of legal public execution including lynching, from the advent of television into continuously looped video clips of police shootings—all as if there’s a consistent desire to access carnage from the safe distance of a spectator. Less than a century out of Jim Crow, I doubt it’s difficult to argue that a public imagination lingers with the same appetite for gore that lynchings—their rape, dragging, shooting, castration, hanging, burning, and displayed decay—once sated. Now it leaches elsewhere.

  The physical kill. The imaginary kill. The execution that is nigger. The amateur porn subgenre of race-play. I tell a friend, No, I won’t let a man call me that, fucking or not, but I’ve watched a Black man enjoy exactly this somewhere on MyVidster, threefourfive times now. When the white boys slap the hog-tied Rogan Hardy and call him nigger, their jaws glitch over the strange shape of the word, their faces momentarily funhoused away from human, the eyelids receding, whites waxing cartoonish. I watch and a heated radius expands. I’ve been sweating the matters of agency and impulse. My friend responds but it’s fantasy—which it is, for everyone except the actors: the man whose mouth makes the killing and the one whose body approximates a corpse. But maybe, I concede, even for them.

  9. Unmaking the Monster

  I try to elude the burden. Then I attempt to share it. I remember how I got here, who sent me, the single sentence that propels me.

  “What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have the nigger in the first place.” James Baldwin poses this challenge on a PBS segment of Henry Morgenthau III’s “The Negro and the American Promise” in 1963. “Cause I’m not a nigger,” he continues. “I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it.” Skip to 2011: in Chapter 7 (“Black Is Back!”) of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman analyzes Craven’s 1991 cult favorite The People Under the Stairs, “in which the ’hood and the suburbs stood in confrontation against each other . . . with the ’hood proving victorious.” She writes of the white slumlords in the film:

  The couple, then, represent a bundle of horrible taboos: (1) food (forced cannibalism); (2) death (they murder the two thieves); and (3) incest (among themselves and with their “daughters”). Central to the narrative of their taboos is that these are horrors easily hidden behind wealth and Whiteness; two positions of power which mean one would seldom be suspected of, or can get a pass for, evil.

  Coleman has, by this point in the chapter, already made legible a few ills of Candyman (1992), a supernatural slasher that is perhaps more candid about its leaning on the myth of Black monstrosity than it means to be, practically in syzygy with King Kong and, Coleman argues, The Birth of a Nation. But Candyman’s eponymous hook-handed haint is only the Vader mask to its messy racial mush-mouth.

  The Candyman is the vengeful spirit of a lynched man, Daniel Robitaille, mutilated for his miscegenation. His bloody acts manifest his desire to seduce the live white Helen to her death. His trail of impoverished Black victims from the Cabrini-Green projects seems peripheral to this bizarre infatuation. Helen debuts as a (bored and scorned and) curious grad student in Chicago. After hearing the legend of Candyman, she’s taken in by a headline: “Cause of Death, What Killed Ruthie Jean? Life in the Projects.” Her arrival in “the ’hood” from the highway’s good side, looking for sources to inflate her thesis on urban legends, is cute and exploitative. What killed Ruthie Jean is more enigmatic and enticing than what usually kills the all-Black residents of Cabrini-Green, where, according to Helen and her friend Bernadette, every day a kid gets shot. Around seventeen minutes in:

  BERNADETTE: I just want you to think, okay? The gangs hold this whole neighborhood hostage.

  HELEN: Okay, let’s just turn around then. Let’s just go back and we can write a nice little boring thesis regurgitating all the usual crap about urban legends.

  In recent months I’ve been gradually collecting notes for the practice of centering Blackness. The Candyman is a distraction. Decor. I fold him aside. Helen needs thi
s haunting. Her whiteness and access to a predominantly white institution of higher education have failed to elude the risk of mediocrity. Whatever is lurking in the gutted Cabrini-Green projects, whatever killed Ruthie Jean, can save Helen from disappointing namelessness. In a stasis-intrusion model of plot, little dissimilates the intrusion of Candyman (who appears only to her) into Helen’s high-story-condo life from Helen’s intrusion into Cabrini-Green—where most of the blood in the film is shed—except that nobody seems to hallucinate Helen, or the corpses made in her presence.

  When I view the images of mobs huddled under hanged men, of Michael Brown’s half-fetal body four hours facedown and cops at compass points, I want to talk about necessity. I want to ask, What do you need? Do you know? What did the landscape of Darlington, South Carolina, need with Craig’s darkness? What does the urge toward mass murder need with anomalous madness? It seems that forms of atrocity have no use for the semantics of mental fitness. Darren Wilson hallucinated a demon and a body dropped. What did he need? What does ritual human sacrifice need with a god?

  10. Grace and Mercy

  One of the most insidious facets of Dylann Roof’s massacre of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, is the matter of setting: the Black church is a testament to and tomb of America’s sustained racist violence, a memorial of the pillaged spirit poorly substituted with religion. Its insistence on the power of healing forgiveness is unwavering because what else. There is always something to forgive, to get over.

  I was brought up in these places. My grandma can be found in one three or four days a week. Even on the phone she has a suffocating hopefulness. All that she survives she does so “by God’s good grace.” I’m still not irreverent enough to tell her that her God and our Black lives are irreconcilable to me. I want to call more often. I wish she would just pray at home.

  I’m anxious, ambivalent about the representations of daily horrors—man shot down, gun planted; woman pulled from car, her pregnant body slammed—because I neither trust America to live with its own memory nor trust myself not to forget to live. I mean I might try to forget in order to live. I might try. I’m often afraid. I’m not above trying.

  There’s a scene in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, after a hurricane hits and the body pile first peaks, when Julie—who took this vacation in the Bahamas in an effort to move on from the murders of the previous year—finally reveals to her friends that they’re all going to die and the who and the why.

  KARLA: How could you not tell me the whole story? I’m your best friend!

  JULIE: I just wanted it to be over. I didn’t wanna involve anybody else.

  KARLA: Well, it’s too late for that now.

  They all stand in a downpour, distraught, on a useless pier.

  OLIVER SACKS

  A General Feeling of Disorder

  FROM The New York Review of Books

  1.

  Nothing is more crucial to the survival and independence of organisms—be they elephants or protozoa—than the maintenance of a constant internal environment. Claude Bernard, the great French physiologist, said everything on this matter when, in the 1850s, he wrote, “La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition de la vie libre.” Maintaining such constancy is called homeostasis. The basics of homeostasis are relatively simple but miraculously efficient at the cellular level, where ion pumps in cell membranes allow the chemical interior of cells to remain constant, whatever the vicissitudes of the external environment. More complex monitoring systems are demanded when it comes to ensuring homeostasis in multicellular organisms—animals, and human beings, in particular.

  Homeostatic regulation is accomplished by the development of special nerve cells and nerve nets (plexuses) scattered throughout our bodies, as well as by direct chemical means (hormones, etc.). These scattered nerve cells and plexuses become organized into a system or confederation that is largely autonomous in its functioning; hence its name, the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS was only recognized and explored in the early part of the twentieth century, whereas many of the functions of the central nervous system (CNS), especially the brain, had already been mapped in detail in the nineteenth century. This is something of a paradox, for the autonomic nervous system evolved long before the central nervous system.

  They were (and to a considerable extent still are) independent evolutions, extremely different in organization, as well as formation. Central nervous systems, along with muscles and sense organs, evolved to allow animals to get around in the world—forage, hunt, seek mates, avoid or fight enemies, etc. The central nervous system, with its sense organs (including those in the joints, the muscles, the movable parts of the body), tells one who one is and what one is doing. The autonomic nervous system, sleeplessly monitoring every organ and tissue in the body, tells one how one is. Curiously, the brain itself has no sense organs, which is why one can have gross disorders here, yet feel no malaise. Thus Ralph Waldo Emerson, who developed Alzheimer’s disease in his sixties, would say, “I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.”

  By the early twentieth century, two general divisions of the autonomic nervous system were recognized: a “sympathetic” part, which, by increasing the heart’s output, sharpening the senses, and tensing the muscles, readies an animal for action (in extreme situations, for instance, life-saving fight or flight); and the corresponding opposite—a “parasympathetic” part—which increases activity in the “housekeeping” parts of the body (gut, kidneys, liver, etc.), slowing the heart and promoting relaxation and sleep. These two portions of the ANS work, normally, in a happy reciprocity; thus the delicious postprandial somnolence that follows a heavy meal is not the time to run a race or get into a fight. When the two parts of the ANS are working harmoniously together, one feels “well,” or “normal.”

  No one has written more eloquently about this than Antonio Damasio in his book The Feeling of What Happens and many subsequent books and papers. He speaks of a “core consciousness,” the basic feeling of how one is, which eventually becomes a dim, implicit feeling of consciousness.1 It is especially when things are going wrong, internally—when homeostasis is not being maintained; when the autonomic balance starts listing heavily to one side or the other—that this core consciousness, the feeling of how one is, takes on an intrusive, unpleasant quality, and now one will say, “I feel ill—something is amiss.” At such times one no longer looks well either.

  As an example of this, migraine is a sort of prototype illness, often very unpleasant but transient, and self-limiting; benign in the sense that it does not cause death or serious injury and that it is not associated with any tissue damage or trauma or infection; and occurring only as an often-hereditary disturbance of the nervous system. Migraine provides, in miniature, the essential features of being ill—of trouble inside the body—without actual illness.

  When I came to New York, nearly fifty years ago, the first patients I saw suffered from attacks of migraine—“common migraine,” so called because it attacks at least 10 percent of the population. (I myself have had attacks of them throughout my life.)2 Seeing such patients, trying to understand or help them, constituted my apprenticeship in medicine—and led to my first book, Migraine.

  Though there are many (one is tempted to say, innumerable) possible presentations of common migraine—I described nearly a hundred such in my book—its commonest harbinger may be just an indefinable but undeniable feeling of something amiss. This is exactly what Emil du Bois-Reymond emphasized when, in 1860, he described his own attacks of migraine: “I wake,” he writes, “with a general feeling of disorder.”

  In his case (he had had migraines every three to four weeks, since his twentieth year), there would be “a slight pain in the region of the right temple which . . . reaches its greatest intensity at midday; towards evening it usually passes off . . . At rest the pain is bearable, but it is increased by motion to a high degree of violence . . . It responds to each beat of the temporal artery.” Moreo
ver, du Bois-Reymond looked different during his migraines: “The countenance is pale and sunken, the right eye small and reddened.” During violent attacks he would experience nausea and “gastric disorder.” The “general feeling of disorder” that so often inaugurates migraines may continue, getting more and more severe in the course of an attack; the worst-affected patients may be reduced to lying in a leaden haze, feeling half-dead, or even that death would be preferable.3

  I cite du Bois-Reymond’s self-description, as I do at the very beginning of Migraine, partly for its precision and beauty (as are common in nineteenth-century neurological descriptions, but rare now), but above all because it is exemplary—all cases of migraine vary, but they are, so to speak, permutations of his.