Raised in Captivity

by Chuck Klosterman

  “Yes and no,” said Sharon. “That shift is what the consumer will extract from the story we construct. But we can’t just tell them this directly. We need to show this nonfictional possibility in the same fictional way we show everything else. Except this time, the fiction needs to be true.”

  You listen to the argument, you consider what it means, and you fix the commercial. It’s all you. You give the dog a problem and a desire, and the dog solves the problem to get what he wants. You bypass the logic and focus on the emotion, but the emotion is presented as logic and only falls apart if you refuse to embrace the emotion, which is an irrational way to respond to emotional logic. Your coworkers compliment your effort and concede that you are the best. When the work is finalized, they ask you to celebrate at the Irish pub directly across the street. You don’t want to go, but you say yes, and you instantly regret saying yes to something you don’t want to do. But it ends up being pretty fun, and you wonder why you always assume fun things will be awful. That night, two coworkers kiss for the first time. There’s a minor shoving match behind the pool table. Einstein loses his wallet and his car keys. You go home, you fall asleep, and three months later you see the dog food commercial during a Knicks game. “Is this one of mine?” you wonder. You get up from the couch and pour yourself a bowl of cereal. On the way back to the living room, the ceramic bowl slips from your hands and shatters on the floor. It makes you think about terrorism, and about your love of cereal.

  You are the only one who knows.

  Slang of Ages

  How many clowns are still in the lobby?” asked Donnie, well aware he’d become a caricature of gruffness. Walt looked down at his manifest and told him there were three. The first was a former history professor from a state college in the Midwest. The second was a woman who referred to herself as a sports sociologist. The third was a journalist who’d quit The Times-Picayune to attend law school, only to graduate and become a professional poker player. None of them seemed promising, but neither had the previous twenty-seven maniacs they’d interviewed throughout the afternoon.

  “Let’s do them all at once,” said Donnie. “Let’s get this over with. We have enough chairs. I never have any follow-ups, anyway.” Walt agreed. He called the receptionist on the intercom and instructed her to send in the last three candidates as a group. They filed into the conference room with smiles on their faces and hands extended for shaking. Donnie and Walt did not reciprocate.

  “Just sit down,” said Walt, without looking up from the list. “Which of you is the college guy? The JFK guy?”

  A bearded man in his late thirties sheepishly raised his hand.

  “You’re first,” said Donnie. “You have two minutes. Go.”

  “Oh! Well, thanks,” the red-haired man began. “As noted in my application, I was recently terminated by my employer, ostensibly for forwarding this theory online and proposing a three-hundred-level class around my research. Like a lot of my peers, I assumed academia would be a place where I could grapple with unconventional ideas. I was naive. So when I saw this opportunity advertised, I thought—finally. Here’s a chance to follow my passion and galvanize my brand.”

  “We don’t care,” said Walt. “We don’t give a shit about your passion, and your brand can rebrand itself with its own cock. Get to the point.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” said the unemployed academic. “I’m not used to this kind of interview. This is all new to me, so I’ll cut to the chase: John F. Kennedy was a complicated man, living in a complicated time. When we look at the world of 1963, what we see is—”

  “This is not the chase,” said Walt. “Whatever you’re about to say is not the chase. We’re all familiar with John fucking Kennedy. You want to cut to the chase? The operative word is cut.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” the man said again. “I wasn’t expecting it to be like this, but I can tell you’re both busy, so I apologize. My concept, in basic terms, is that JFK was not assassinated. Not really. He knew what was going to happen. He knew the CIA was going to murder him. So that’s part of it: The CIA did kill Kennedy. That’s true. But that isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that Kennedy knew he would be killed and still wanted it to happen. This was a depressed person with debilitating back pain. He had loved Marilyn Monroe and felt complicit in her death. He couldn’t get over the Bay of Pigs and never recovered from the missile crisis. He’d had enough. He went to Dallas knowing he would be killed during that parade, and he went through with it anyway, waiting for the bullet. Wanting the bullet. Which is the basis for my supposition, which is that JFK was the progenitor of suicide by cop.”

  Donnie and Walt looked at the professor, then at each other, and then back at the professor. Donnie gave him a polite nod while Walt gestured toward the bookish woman seated in the center chair. She took the hint and launched into her monologue.

  “Let me open with a question,” she said with buoyancy. “In your professional opinion, would you say that contemporary college football cheerleaders are less attractive than college football cheerleaders from the past?”

  Donnie and Walt did not speak or react, assuming the question had been rhetorical. When they realized she was not going to continue until her question was answered, Walt said, “Actually, no. That notion had never occurred to me. But for the sake of whatever you’re about to say next—sure. Whatever. Yes. My answer to your question is a conditional yes.”

  “You’re joking,” she said, “yet it’s not a joke. The difference I cite is real. I have research and surveys that prove this. From a conventional, traditional, patriarchal perspective, modern college football cheerleaders at all five of the so-called power conferences are less sexually desirable than their peers from the past, relative to the population at large. I realize one could argue that this is a positive evolution. I would argue that myself. On a base level, this whole discussion is oppressive. But that’s a different argument. My research has to do with explaining how and why this evolution transpired, regardless of the evolution’s merit. So let me pose another question: Why do you suspect cheerleaders are less attractive than they used to be?”

  Again, Donnie and Walt sat immobile and silent. They would not fall for this twice.

  “The answer,” continued the woman, “is the Internet. In the pre-Internet era, what was the best possible opportunity for a nineteen-year-old woman in rural Tennessee who had been conditioned to view her humanity through the lens of the male gaze? When a sexist, male-dominated society tells a young woman that her value is solely a manifestation of her physical attractiveness, where does that young woman gravitate? In all likelihood, she gravitates toward scenarios where her attractiveness is most readily appreciated by the public. In 1974, that would equate to the sidelines of a football stadium in Knoxville, cheering and posing for three hours in front of a hundred and two thousand spectators. But the Internet has muted the potential reward offered by a physical space. The Internet is a more robust, more practical avenue. That same young woman now has unlimited bandwidth to express her sexual truth, in a context she can completely control. Every second of every day, over twenty-five thousand people are looking at amateur online pornography. It’s monetized and socially acceptable. It would be illogical for a present-day person desiring sexual attention to choose a venue with the limited scope of a football stadium. This is why college football cheerleaders are becoming less attractive: That niche population is losing its strongest candidates to digital platforms.”

  Donnie raised his eyebrows and almost seemed to say, “Hmm.” But then he just coughed and cleared his throat, much to the woman’s chagrin. There was a fleeting pause, broken by Walt’s pointing toward the handsome husky fellow in the third seat. Walt rotated his index finger in a circle and the chubby dreamboat nodded optimistically. Walt nodded back.

  “My gambit is just an observation,” said the third applicant. “My gambit is that people who compare sex and violence often g
et the complexity of that relationship backward.”

  “No shit,” said Donnie. “People who talk about ideas always get them backward. If they understood what they were talking about they wouldn’t need to tell other people. But go ahead. Give us your little example. You have two minutes.”

  “Something I’ve continually noticed,” said the deep-voiced fellow, “is that progressive pundits often express outrage over the fact that a violent action movie will get a rating of PG-13, but a thoughtful film with a little sex and a little nudity will somehow get rated R. They see this as hypocritical, and they’re always worried that violent content will desensitize children to actual violence. The point they inevitably make is that sex is a normal part of a healthy life, while violence is aberrant and detrimental. But that, to me, is exactly why it’s worse for a kid to watch actors having sex than it is for kids to watch actors killing each other. An erotic movie will warp the way a young person views his or her own sex life. They will compare what they see in the movies with the real sexual experiences they’ll eventually encounter as young adults, and that will warp their perception of how romance and sexuality is supposed to work and feel. But violence? Real violence is actually super rare. You guys ever read Steven Pinker? From a statistical perspective, worldwide violence is continually disappearing. The average kid will never experience a gunfight, even if he lives in Chicago. He’ll never see a woman tortured or a man pushed through a wood-chipper. Children are being desensitized to violent experiences they’ll never actually experience. And let’s say they do end up encountering violence. Let’s say they do end up in a war or in the middle of a mass shooting. Wouldn’t being desensitized to that type of event almost be preferable? Why would anyone want full emotional engagement with something so traumatic? I believe fake sex is worse than fake violence. That’s my gambit, for your consideration.”

  As per usual, Donnie and Walt remained mute. It was impossible to tell if they’d even listened. The applicants squirmed in their chairs, unsure if they were supposed to speak but fearful of what might happen if they tried. Five people sitting in silence makes for an excruciating fifteen seconds. But then Donnie and Walt tranquilized, and they both smiled, and they thanked all three candidates with a sincerity that seemed only marginally rehearsed. Everybody stood up and the three visitors exited the room. The door closed and the lock clicked. Donnie returned to his chair. Walt stood in front of the window and watched a homeless man urinating on the sidewalk.

  “So a hard no on the first guy,” said Walt. “Agree?”

  “Totally,” said Donnie. “That wouldn’t even work as a podcast. Nobody cares about Kennedy. I’m sure kids under thirty consider him a sex predator.”

  “We could maybe use him as a guest,” said Walt, “if a cop ever kills someone famous. But that ginger beard has to go, and all that apologizing was pathetic. It felt like we were listening to Alan Colmes or something.”

  “I enjoyed the woman a bit,” said Donnie. “She has that If Maddow Were Coulter vibe, or maybe vice versa. And I like how she mentioned how she’s done all this deep research, but then never actually cited any research whatsoever. That felt smart.”

  “True. But can we really build a broadcast persona around football cheerleaders who are supposedly unattractive? That’s two weeks of content, max. I mean, I like how she blames the Internet, and I love how she keeps the focus on how these people look as opposed to what they do. The B-roll opportunities are epic. But it’s limited. If her core theory was about women in general, sure. But only cheerleaders? I don’t know. Outside of Tuscaloosa and Texas, what’s the demo?”

  “That’s the upside of the last guy, I suppose,” said Donnie. “Violence good, sex bad. That translates to everything. And I like how he knew when to stop talking without being told.”

  “But why did he keep saying the word gambit? Was he trying to remind us he’s a professional gambler? That was annoying as fuck.”

  “Yeah, that annoyed me, too.”

  Walt moved away from the window, toward the wet bar. He put two ice cubes in a highball glass and immediately dumped them into the sink. Donnie stared at the ceiling. There was nothing on the ceiling to stare at.

  “Thirty people,” said Donnie. “Thirty people today, thirty people yesterday, thirty people tomorrow. All worthless. There has got to be an easier way to do this.”

  “There isn’t,” Walt replied. “If there was, that’s what we’d be doing instead. But there isn’t.”

  “Can’t we just find the hottest person who’s willing to say whatever we tell them?” asked Donnie. “That was a good system. That worked for a long time.”

  “Today’s audiences see right through that,” said Walt. “They need to believe that the host believes that the deranged message the host is expressing is a deranged message the host believes to be true. Authenticity. Every focus group tells us this. Transparency. All the numbers point to that. It’s never about being perfect. We can’t just throw an attractive person on TV and feed them bad ideas. That’s not enough anymore.”

  “But why do the ideas need to be bad?” asked Donnie.

  “Because our show is going to be different,” said Walt. “We’re not going left and we’re not going right. We’re going all the way, which means we have to start at the end.”

  Slow Pop

  He was crisp. That was the word he used to describe himself: crisp. “Back off. I’m a little crisp this morning.” Nobody knew what that was supposed to signify, but it seemed accurate. We all agreed not to disagree. “Let’s get crisp, fellas.” Sure. Let’s get crisp. One night he played us the Steve Martin comedy album A Wild and Crazy Guy, recorded in 1978. During the opening three minutes of the set, Martin notices a two-year-old child sitting in the audience and makes a few jokes about performing for a baby. “That baby was me,” he told us as the disc rotated. “My parents took me to that show. That’s how I got crisp.”

  [Wait. Allow me to start again.]

  He was focused. He was the most focused person I ever met, and his self-identification with that quality was unyielding. In 2014, the mayor of New York tried to ban horse-drawn carriages from Central Park. It was all over the news. Around that same time, he found a carriage driver who (somewhat justifiably) feared his business was doomed, and he convinced that driver to sell him the leather blinders that affix to the animal’s head. Paid him cash, on the spot, right there on Fifty-ninth Street. I think it cost him eighty dollars. But it wasn’t that he wanted a souvenir or a memento. He actually wore them. Whenever he was working on something around the apartment, he literally wore horse blinders. He altered the bridle and fashioned a foam forehead brace for maximum comfort. He’d answer the door wearing horse blinders. He’d go to the public library wearing horse blinders. He’d wear them on the subway. When he was especially interested in a movie or a play, he’d strap on the blinders inside the theater, right after we found our seats. We assumed he did this for attention. He insisted it was a psychological advantage. “The blinders help. I need to stay focused. Horses got it on lock. Horses are dope.”

  [Allow me to start again.]

  He was obsessed with preparation. “I prefer to be prepared,” he’d often remark, which is not an unusual thing to prefer or remark. But he took this to a crispier level. He once told me he’d prepared a ten-minute best man’s speech for almost every unmarried male he had ever met, on the off chance he’d inadvertently perceived one of these relationships incorrectly. “What if somebody I view as a casual acquaintance considers me his closest friend? I need to be ready.” I told him this scenario seemed unlikely, and that even if his fear was warranted and the event in question came to fruition, he would still have several weeks to come up with an original speech that is wholly acceptable to deliver extemporaneously. “What if the couple is eloping?” he asked in response. “What if the wedding is being televised or streamed live on Facebook? I’m not going to give an unrehearsed wed
ding speech about a man I barely know to a worldwide online audience.” Again, I noted that this scenario was implausible and certainly not something to worry about. “But that’s the thing,” he replied. “I’m not worried. You would be worried. I’m prepared.”

  [Allow me to start one more time.]

  I want to tell you about this guy. I don’t know why, but I do. And let me be clear: This is not a story about a guy. This is not a story at all. It’s just information about a guy you’ve never heard of, a guy you will never meet, a guy who left and never came back. But there was something about this guy, this person, this citizen, this bipedal humanoid projection. I’m still dealing with him, inside my mind. I’m still arguing with him, every morning and every night. He had a theory he called “slow pop.” It applied to everything. It was a field theory. The thesis was that anything that happens quickly should be forced to happen slowly, as this alters the natural exchange of energy and amplifies the experience in unexpected ways. He first mentioned this in a conversation about the male orgasm, but he found a way to apply it to almost anything we happened to be debating—state politics, Grateful Dead bootlegs, the Bundesliga. We never understood what his theory vindicated or why he believed it, until the night he attempted to demonstrate by making microwave popcorn in a conventional oven. Forty minutes later, our apartment building burned to the ground. In a sense, I suppose he was right: That particular experience was amplified in an unexpected way.

  [Let me start just one more time, and then I’ll give up.]

  There’s this process people go through, sometimes in high school and sometimes in college and sometimes when they’re thirty-nine and sometimes when they’re told they have cancer. It’s the process of asking oneself, “Why do I exist?” The question is grappled with for days or weeks or months, and the conclusion inevitably falls into one of two categories—either that there is no reason, or that some manufactured reason is insufficient but good enough. However, there’s an ancillary question that’s grappled with far less often: “Why do all the other people exist?” This question is harder.