America's greatest horror writer answers our questions on prose style
Stephen Graham Jones' masterclass on prose style ^ Plus Part 20 of The Demon Inside David Lynch
The rear entrance to Santa Rita’s Psychiatric Hospital, Madrid
In today’s issue
—’I read about people trying heroin for the first time, and the way they explain it, it's like tapping into a perfect and perfectly timed semicolon’: a masterclass on prose style by arguably the anglophone world’s greatest horror writer, Stephen Graham Jones. On Friday we chose his Don’t Fear the Reaper as the most stylishly written book on the shortlist for this year’s Bram Stoker Award for best horror novel. We have masterclasses coming up from many more of the world’s greatest writers.
On Tuesday we picked John Langan’s The Fisherman as the best-written previous winner of the Bram Stoker award, part of our project to find the most stylishly novel of the century in any genre.
—‘When I was still boozing a friend’s sister gave me a copy of AA’s Big Book and I read it in a single go, and for months carried it around with me, including in the bars and clubs I stole people’s drinks in. I compulsively re-read its portrayals of denial and nodded and smiled along drunkenly at its wisdom and warmth, before sticking it under the noses of fellow drunks who seemed as though they needed a bit of wisdom to puncture their alcoholic denial, sometimes the very drunks whose beers or nips I’d just slyly stolen and who needed some warmth to cheer them up’: Mike Pences with Greying Waxed Moustaches: A Case Study, Part 20 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have continued to show this series.
You can also browse our author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
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STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES ON PROSE STYLE
What were the first books you read where you realised you were enjoying the quality of the prose?
I think the first book where I was ever aware of the quality of the prose in an envious way, a challenging way, a "can I do it this well?"-way, was Ken Kesey 's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I was probably twenty years old. I'd read a lot of Louis L'Amour, all the Conan I could get my hands on, Catcher in the Rye, Vonnegut, plenty of King, but… there was something different to the Kesey, to me. Though I read this at roughly the same moment I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road—also amazing, and challenging in all the right ways—so those two are in the same place in my head, and my heart, and my fingertips. Then, shortly after these two, I stumbled into Virginia Woolf's To the Ligthhouse and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the one-two punch of those, man, it left me reeling, they left me seeing stars. I'm still looking for those same stars, each time I pluck a book up from the shelf.
What stylistic issues were most important to the writing of Don't Fear the Reaper?
I had to come up with a delivery method that was both all-purpose, could work for all the heads and voices and angles Reaper was going to process through, but also particular enough to capture or express or render—all three?—each individual voice. It was a trick, and took a few attempts. But I finally, like I probably always do, fell back on David Jauss's "From Long Shots to X-Rays" article (also a chapter in his craft book, I believe), where he takes us through how to get "into" a character's head and voice in a way that can bubble up to the surface of the page in an efficient way, without a lot of clutter. To me, that's fully half of strong prose: scrubbing the clutter away. Which, I'm not making a case for stripped-down or minimalist stuff. Just, I like the prose to do, not just deliver. And it has to look easy, can never look strained. We don't get points for degree-of-difficulty. What we get points for is pulling the reader into the world and voice and lope of the story. Hopefully the techniques we use to do that fade into the background, don't draw any attention to themselves.
You clearly believe that the quality of your prose matters, but could you explain why this is so?
Dean Cundey, a cinematographer, says that, in pre–production for Halloween (the 1978 one), he realized that John Carpenter wasn't using the camera to record the story, but to tell it. That's how prose should work in fiction, I think, or, that's the kind I prefer to read, anyway. The stack of decisions that have to be made about word-choice and -order, punctuation, rhythm, all of the many pieces we have to play with, they're all vital and telling. The stronger the prose in a work is, the more the length contracts, too. Just because it's becoming more and more efficient—it's doing more with less, or, in less space, anyway. What I want from prose fiction is the certainty that, if this is translated out of its native language, something is going to be lost. Because the prose isn't just a window to look through, down onto the story. It's not a lens that focuses our attention on scenes, on characters, on developments. The line is where all of those things happen.
What do you understand by ‘voice’ in writing, and how much does this matter to your own?
To me, "voice" isn't the diction-level or the 'sound' or the prosody or any of that, though I know that's the main way "voice" is understood, or talked about. To me, voice is the angle at which exposition can flow into the narrative—and that's about the single most important aspect of a piece. Only example I have handy is from my own stuff, if you'll allow that. In my novel The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, the first line is "What I remember best about my father are the suicide notes." What this signals to the reader is that those suicide notes are going to play some part here—we're going to see them (yes), they're going to be a structuring device (yes), they're going to make sense (no). So, to me, "voice" is kind of an establishing of tone, or a set of permissions. Both, really. It's the single most vital decision you can make in a piece, but it's got to be functionally invisible, too. That's a big part of what makes writing fun: the challenge, the difficulty. But, things that are challenging and difficult, they're the most rewarding, aren't they?
Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Can musicality be taught? Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?
In grad school, I spent a year being completely insufferable. We should leave a moment of silence here for anyone who thinks I never left that stage—raise your hand now, I may very well still be insufferable. But, when I was twenty-three, maybe twenty-four, I was especially hard to work with. Reason: I'd made the decision, "judgment," really, that I had graduated beyond the constraints of punctuation in prose fiction. I'd still use it in expository pieces, in criticism, in my research methods courses, but, when when writing fiction, I no longer allowed myself all that grubby punctuation. Not just talking periods and commas here, either. Capitalization is punctuation. Paragraph breaks are punctuation. Italics are punctuation. I didn't even use em-dashes or ellipses, question marks or quotation marks. My stories were these long scrolling paragraphs that never allowed the reader to take a breath, or look up, get their bearings. In retrospect, this was probably me, trying to hold not just a clutch of puppet strings over the text, but every string in the area—I was kind of a control freak, I'm saying. And that's not the way to be. You can't micromanage the reader across the page. But? I wouldn't trade this year of no punctuation in, either. I feel like this year is when I became whatever kind of writer I am. I had to learn to "do" punctuation and emphasis with syntax and word-choice. It took what feels like a maniacal level of attention to the smallest things, such that I was in those lines swimming, sometimes gasping, often lost. But, when I found my way to the end, and provoked a real feeling of some kind? That's when I knew the magic of the line, the power of fiction, the potential bundled up in prose, the kinetic energy waiting to be released. So, after that year of living dangerously, when I came back to the fold, I was now crossing the page in a different manner—I'd internalized all the little ways you can punctuate-without-punctuation, and I'd never be the same, for better or for worse.
Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?
I never thought I did, but then I started galavanting all over the world on planes, and the people sitting beside me for those flights would always give me those "So who's this weirdo?"-looks, and I finally realized it was because I was muttering everything I was writing, to try it out, see if it would hold. Had to train myself away from that, sadly. Too, before I hurt my back in 1997, 1998, I was a different writer. Ever since then I've been on meds that cloud my thinking, some. That first year of being on them, though, it was wild. It was like I was under the surface of some great body of water, and the next word I needed was floating up there on the surface. I would reach for it—it had always been there for me before—but I couldn't quite make contact. I had to come up with different ways of accessing the "vocabulary" part of my head—that's a term straight from neuroscience, yes—and… I did it, I do it on a daily basis, but I'm fairly certain that the word-store I found I could access, it's not quite the same one I used to use. When I go back and read a paragraph or a page of how I used to write, I wonder who that guy was, and I miss him, I miss being able to write like that.
George Saunders proposed on his substack that it’s in the editing process that literary voice emerges -- the more a writer edits the more they’ll make choices different to other writers, resulting in a voice and style unique to them. Do you agree with this?
I'm sure this it's this way for some writers, yeah. For others, it happens precisely at the point of contact of pen to page, of fingertip to key, of voice to recorder. Like… William Gay, say. I think the qualities and peculiarities of his prose were maybe a product of the revision process. Bret Easton Ellis, though, I think that's just how he writes, from line 1. And? Doesn't matter either way, I say. What matters, finally, is the product, not the process.
How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the minuscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?
Every once in a while I'll get caught in a semicolon loop. That's where I've stumbled into the possibility of deploying what feels to me, in that moment, like the single most elegant semicolon to ever grace the page. Like, dropping in this semicolon is the T-Rex stomping on the landscape, that's going to make the water in every glass in the bookworld tremble, maybe even slosh over the edge. An elegant semicolon, man—is there anything better? anything more pure? I read about people trying heroin for the first time, and the way they explain it, it's like tapping into a perfect and perfectly timed semicolon. There's nothing more addictive. It's the ultimate rush. At the same time, though? Semicolons can be sort of a class-thing, a fru-fru thing. They can be unnecessary ornamentation—most often, they can be the writer showing off, or, worse, the writing indulging themself. And none of us want to have to watch something that onanistic, do we? But when they work… man. Wow. So, what I mean by "semicolon loop" is I get trapped placing it, deleting, placing it, deleting it. Speaking it aloud, as much as a semicolon can be spoken out loud. Using italics to lay it over and stand it back up, just to see if it wants to fall or not. Nine times out of ten, I end up not allowing myself this rarified punctuation. Colons, sure. Ellipses, always. Exclamation points… rarely. Or: it depends. Em-dashes? Why not, though I always have to burn back through, interrogate each one to see if it really deserves to be there or not. But, semicolons, I nearly always pull those, keep them in my hip pocket for next time, when I might have modulated the tone such that a semicolon won't call attention to itself, when I might be wrangling a character who themself uses them, meaning it's not really me showing off, it's them.
Though, talking this micro-level stuff, I am extremely superstitious, in the line. Example: if I type I'm goiing over there, and there's that extra vowel in there, then, in order to preserve the integrity of the piece—one drop of corruption can leach out, destroy it all—I have to go in, delete not the first "i," never that first "i," but only and always the intruder, the second one, the one sneaked in from the void and trying to stand there really still, so I won't notice it, so it can stay here, infect the world. I'm paying attention, though. I kill that second "i" grandly, with a flourish of my right thumb (I use a weird keyboard), and I show my teeth to it too, so it knows not to come back, try to do its badness in my stories, and make those squiggly red lines float under my words like Charlie Brown lips.
Do you see published prose adapting to the writing people read online, much of it written in the characterless bloggy style established twenty years ago? Has published prose adapted to the reduced attention spans that apparently result from heavy internet use?
For a long time, I thought that one of the many projects of prose fiction was to do storytelling things on the page that were inherently impossible to do on the screen—that writers should be pushing the boundaries of what's possible in text, on the page, just as a means to keep what we do vital and necessary. I think that's probably still the project, just, now, the boogeyman is AI, yes? With Reaper, and with the forthcoming I Was a Teenage Slasher, I was maybe playing at that a little, in that I decided I wasn't going to punctuate restrictive clauses in the traditional manner, so as to maybe gift a bit more impetus or momentum to the line. I mean, punctuation needs to be always evolving, of course, not trapped under glass to wither and die and become a museum specimen, and, the last couple decades, I think a lot of that evolution has come via all the various means of online communication: texting; videogames; emoji and emoticon action; social media posts with limited characters, requiring compression by various means. And that's great. Those aren't necessarily corruptions. They're more like alien DNA to be smuggled into the genome, creating a completely new beast. Just, that beast needs to be intelligible to more than just those trained in texting, gaming, social media. But, part of finding that line of comprehensibility is of course sometimes going past the point of comprehension. Then you dial back little by little, until the delivery method is optimized. And then, next year, it changes all again, wonderfully.
And lastly, do you have any stylistic tips that Auraist readers might not have heard before?
Dialogue, yeah. People always talk about Elmore Leonard as being the highest practitioner of it—and they're not wrong. Dude had it going on, for sure. His stuff is both propulsive and naturalistic, while also revealing a lot more than you think should be possible in such a limited space, with so few words. But, the strength of Leonard's dialogue, it's not between the quotation marks, necessarily. The strength is all the writing around those quotation marks. Leonard, like Twain, had a wonderful ear for rhythm and variation. He would stagger the type of dialogue tag he was using, he would lean on the non-verbal, and he would often emphasize by staging a comeback or revelation in its own small little paragraph, no tag at all. Diagramming out how he gets through an interchange, a discussion, and interrogation, you become yourself a stronger—see, "more intentional"—writer of dialogue.
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of novels, collections, and novellas including Don’t Fear the Reaper, Earthdivers, and The Only Good Indians. His essay “My Life with Conan the Barbarian” reveals his love for the character. He has won the Ray Bradbury Award, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire.
Mike Pences with Greying Waxed Moustaches: A Case Study
Once we got over our shock, we found our first watch of the series increasingly compelling, both to find out how low it would go and also because the fans’ and gatekeepers’ adoration of the thing was illuminating and engrossing, a compulsive-viewing trainwreck involving passengers cheering at another trainwreck.
Much about The Return is unique. Uniquely contemptuous, unique conditions that allowed it to get made and aired, unique measures needed to try to understand how bad it is, unique volume and seriousness of awful artistic choices. But these don’t just clinch the show’s status as uniquely bowfing. They confirm that we were meant to find it so. The bowfingness is too hardcore to be explained just by a loss of ability from the supposed creators. This abomination is systematically bowfing.
Meaning the viewers who completely missed the point were trainwreck-passengers like César who posted online about their profound investment in the immersive, humanly relevant events they were watching, claimed that every last aspect of them is deliberate and that any deliberate choice is necessarily good, and told the sceptics we just weren’t smart enough to appreciate them.
By this stage our friendship was clearly done, due to the money he still owed me for thereturn.es, and to differences over the abomination. Like Trinna and Jorge we spied on each other on CCTV and indulged nasty thoughts about each other’s dejection, and in César’s case his many bangles and wristbands and his bun and unbecoming moustache, which let me tell you don’t exactly make for an imposing look on a nightguard, no matter how scarred his face or how substantial his pecs and delts. Unlike Trinna and Jorge we didn’t hide our spying, so what we recorded at times was the other guard bent over his hut’s monitor to peer at footage of the other guard bent over to peer at his monitor’s footage of the other guard.
I also got footage of César Bartola, aged forty-two, as he browsed online for red leather wock‘n’wewl bumless chaps. I got footage of him as he munched through lettuces in one repulsive go, drank on duty, smoked weed or meth; he’d no equivalent footage of me because I only had to sneak a tab or pellet into my mouth. I also zoomed right in and got footage of his slumming-it-workwise-former-PhD’s face as it told itself what fun it was to re-watch some Return character we never see again take ages to wander up a corridor and then do nothing of interest whatsoever.
We got footage of each other as we typed out replies to the other’s comments on r/twinpeaks, followed by replies to these replies when we got back to our separate huts after chasing and apprehending a phone thief. It’s hard to capture in words what it feels like to double-rugby-tackle a thief with a thief of a former pal as you figure out how to work lettuce-munching into your reply to his
Although Mr Lynch is certainly a Master, we should stop short of uncritically forcing a masochistic label onto our experience of S3, for as usual we can detect a modular dissonance at play within the Master’s work which lets us sympathetically inhabit both the victim and torturer positions during viewing. The former position appears to become poetically actualized on-screen during the scene in which Jowday eats Sam and Tracey who have been awaiting her arrival in a large glass box which resembles the TV set of the home viewer. However, we should temper this uni-directional interpretation by noting how these two victims might represent not only those rightly enthralled by this magnum opus but also sourfaced, perma-envious, ageist, anti-auteur thugs like BurntheReturn in this thread who hate it, in which case we find ourselves switching from victim-like resistance and disgust at the actions of Jowday to the delight and satisfaction this amazing sadistic being must have experienced feasting on those philistine human faces.
There are certain patterns in fan defences of turkeys, and when frequently repeated together about a work they become a virtual admission of its rankness. Straw men, ad hominems and selective blindness are the defaults of fanboys served up a turkey—you’ll have seen this yourself frequently online, César, I told him one night at Santa Rita’s by walkie-talkie.
And this makes sense. If your starting point isn’t I’m neutral when it comes to The Boat That Rocked, so I’ll just see how it turns out but Richard Curtis is a man-god, therefore this film is guaranteed to be geeenius, in debate you’ll have to keep resorting to dishonesty. You can’t admit publicly, or even to yourself, that the reason you admire this film is solely because Curtis made it, just as Mozheads can’t admit they admire his novella solely because Morrissey wrote it, and Mr Trump’s followers can’t admit that the sexualisation of ten-year-olds isn’t out of order only because it was their hero who sexualised the kids.
What do you do, then? You misrepresent what the haters have actually said. You muddy the waters. You have to, since if you don’t you’ll have to try to defend the indefensible.
An additional factor in this, one I didn’t bother to communicate to César, was that as I knew only too well from my own resentment of it, his resentment of my Season 3 loathing depended to a significant degree on repetition. César looped your words of loathing in his head as he went out on hospital patrols, typed up posts on Instagram, reddit, or thereturn.es, was flooded with chemicals from his drug of choice, and with each repetition made your words subtly more extreme—the mind needs these edits to avoid getting bored by all the repetition—so that by the twentieth loop he’d switched off his walkie-talkie and put your safety at risk if you were attacked. But the real problem wasn’t whatever comment you’d made but instead the galoot pondering it so compulsively and bitterly he couldn’t respond to it because his stoned bunned head had turned it into another comment entirely.
To be fair, I suppose Lynch and Morrissey and Trump, the three titans of cheesiness, don’t exactly make things easy for their followers, do they? Picture yourself defending the erasure of the erasure of the erasure, List of the Lost’s prose style, or Mr Trump’s disquisitions on E. Jean Carroll’s looks, and maintaining your integrity and self-respect. It can’t be done. Something has to give.
You could of course question your devotion to the great man, your defences of the indefensible, but that’s prevented by your brainwashing. And so you get churchgoing mothers who share memes celebrating the death of Biden’s wife and daughter in a carcrash. You get Morrissey fans who’ll weep at the thought of a frightened lamb, who threaten to send anthrax to those who laugh at his novella. You get Césars who’re basically good people, they believe, maybe a little moody due to the fact they contemplate existence in such depth, but still basically nice fellas, who tell the world their favourite moment in cinema is an infant-torturer’s comeuppance played for laughs, and put their colleague’s safety at risk because they’re in the huff.
Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies dissects online transgression from both the right and left.
Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention or differentiation, are wrong. Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, its ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture, transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about the nature of its appeal and about the liberal establishment it defines itself against. It has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan ‘It is forbidden to forbid!’ than it does with anything most recognise as part of any traditionalist right. Instead of interpreting it as part of other right-wing movements, conservative or libertarian, I would argue that the style being channelled by the Pepe meme-posting trolls and online transgressives follows a tradition that can be traced from the eighteenth-century writings of the Marquis de Sade, surviving through to the nineteenth-century Parisian avant-garde, the Surrealists, the rebel rejection of feminised conformity of post-war America and then to what film critics called 1990s ‘male rampage films’ like American Psycho and Fight Club.
And then to this century’s most highly praised example of this tradition, and the series’ cult following. So yes, Mr Trump’s cult appear all the worse because they remind you of the series’ cult of transgression-cheering Césars. But the reverse is also true. Some of us have even less patience with the Césars’ defences of the show because they so resemble the output of the other transgressive cults that have infected public discourse.
A non-bam looks at The Return or at a presidential candidate sneering at a rape victim’s looks and their response is You have to be joking. If you yourself are agnostic on Twin Peaks, I guarantee that if you watch as many clips of the debacle as you can stomach, this will be your response. Guarantee it. Every single agnostic has this reaction: You have to be joking. This is one of the most lifeless, misanthropic shows I’ve ever seen, with maybe the worst characters and the worst acting.
There is practically no record anywhere of viewers not already fans of Twin Peaks or Mr Lynch, liking the debacle or even getting through all eighteen episodes. Hardly anybody turned up on Twin Peaks discussion boards to say they stumbled across The Return, enjoyed it, and were keen to explore the rest of Twin Peaks and Lynch’s works. Which is why the series is enjoyed by so few young viewers. The only people willing to enter Season 3 subspace had, like my Curtis-hating colleague, been members of the cult for many years.
And the saddest thing about him, other than his judgement regarding drugs and clothes and hair and infant-slicers’ narrative arcs and the rest, was that I strongly identified with the guy. I of all people knew what it was like to be brainwashed, not least in the form of denial on various fronts.
When I was still boozing a friend’s sister gave me a copy of AA’s Big Book and I read it in a single go, and for months carried it around with me, including in the bars and clubs I stole people’s drinks in. I compulsively re-read its portrayals of denial and nodded and smiled along drunkenly at its wisdom and warmth, before sticking it under the noses of fellow drunks who seemed as though they needed a bit of wisdom to puncture their alcoholic denial, sometimes the very drunks whose beers or nips I’d just slyly stolen and who needed some warmth to cheer them up.
Yet never once did I myself consider going to an AA meeting. I was a prime example of the adage in that same book that when it comes to alcoholism, data-gathering and understanding are useless if not combined with action. So trust me, I’ve had more than my share of denial. You’ll later see more the night César and me played crazy golf at Santa Rita’s and dropped ALD-52.
And so I knew how tough it was for him to admit he was wrong, to reach that absolute defeat he’d been seeking without knowing it. Admitting defeat isn’t exactly encouraged in our culture, is it? Not admitting it in any direct manner anyway. That slumped-shouldered brutalised porny how-did-I-get-here submission to the billionaire parasite class and the sociopathy and depravity of its culture, so pervasive you can hardly see it—that’s fine. That’s precisely what’s demanded of you throughout your life, one long capitulation, deeply denied but also deeply felt, to the message of all parasite marketing and propaganda: Submit. But not the fully aware type where you just admit to the truth of a personal defect and that you’re screwed. There aren’t too many Blu-rays featuring that kind of plotline in our security team’s shared locker.
And this helps persuade all of us, not excluding Revolutionary Communists, neo-Nazis, actual Nazis who worship Satan, and Greying Manbuns who dislike Richard Curtis, that we aren’t submissives—we’re still potential world-rescuers and world-transformers, dammit—so we’ll remain on our knees and allow the degradation to continue. It’s not easy to escape from a prison you can barely see.
Which means it becomes even harder to consciously submit and accept that drink, drugs, porn or The Return have wrecked your mind and heart and there’s nothing you (alone) can do about it. Dig in, grit your teeth, try and try again, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, creative visualisation, brisk runs at dawn, Antabuse, solemn promises that if you relapse you’ll skip around Atocha station with a megaphone praising al-Qaeda… all good stuff. But what if you’ve given them your best go and you’re still relapsing, and too shy for the Atocha stunt, or too hungover, or too suicidal? Might it not be time to accept you’re never going to beat this problem using nothing but your addict’s thoughts? If not, then when might be the time? After five more years? Twenty?
Something else Les drilled into me is that late-stage denial is seldom complete, seldom total. It can’t tell a late-stage alcoholic they’ve no problem whatsoever with drink, or tell a late-stage addict they’ve no problem with hookers or sudden grappling, because such lies are no longer believable. What it does instead, then, is downplay the seriousness of the problem. Rather than non-existent, the hookers or grappling problem becomes No big deal.
And as with resentments, MAGA, Take Back Control, brainwashing of terrorists, the anti-independence Shock and Awe of September 2014, ATL and BTL hype about The Return, and any other marketing campaign that sells you lies—including the existence of the self, Ella would insist—the key to the con is repetition. You must keep telling yourself it’s no big deal, ideally with a subtly less serious tone each time, a 4channish tone perhaps, loosen up FFS, so that by the tenth repetition No big deal has become, consciously or not, One more time, then and you find you’re on the brothel’s doorstep or surprising your colleague with a tilt-a-whirl arm drag.
Only in extreme cases such as the anorexic tweens I pass on hospital patrols (It doesn’t feel like I’m starving myself to death) is late-stage denial anything like total. Most of the time it’s only partial, though with regular urges to return all the way to total denial, a self-deceived mark once again when it comes to hookers or wrestling or screens or drink or whatever you’re having yourself. This is why absolute self-honesty is emphasised by every recovery sponsor: because its opposite is destroying you.
As I zoomed the cameras in on César there in his hut, tweaked or stoned or drunk in his manbun-tilted security cap, I used to pray on his behalf that someday his delusion about The Return might bring him to a rock bottom so bad, maybe even requiring admission to this hospital, that it would force his eyes open to the true hell of his existence. If he got lucky he might overhear himself saying it doesn’t feel like he’s lost his mind, or some other accidental slip, and the facade of his denial would crack and he’d find himself in the rubble of rock bottom, and its possible moment of grace.
But my old friend’s time in the rubble lay far in the future, not in a psychiatric ward but in an A&E. As with every admirer of the series the poor sod’s problem for now was he was still in the early stages of his insanity and therefore had no clue yet how lost he was and how badly he’d been conned.
[Reworks material from David H. Fleming’s Unbecoming Cinema: Unsettling Encounters with Ethical Event Films.]
The Manage Mother’s Poison Explanation, the next part of The Demon Inside David Lynch, is here.
