A History of Violence: Part One

Gail's is a pretty small restaurant, consisting of two small floors, tacky tropical decorations, and an audio system blaring tackier ballads from the 1990's. (Mariah Carey, Savage Garden, etc.) What interested me most in the restaurant, other than the menu, was the small collection of English books on each floor. Most of them were pulp thrillers or variations on Danielle Steel, so the only book I gravitate towards was Different Seasons. It was a novella collection by Stephen King, and each of the four novellas in it represented a different season and the season's prescribed characteristics. At first I wanted to read Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, because of the wonderful movie made from it, but I couldn't continue after the second paragraph. In my mind, every single word was read by Morgan Freeman, and that left me cold.

I turned to the next novella. Apt Pupil. I had seen the trailer for the movie a long time ago, so I knew it was something about a hidden Nazi living in an idyllic American suburb. Summer of Corruption, the byline said, and I turned the page.

And I was surprised. A thirteen year old all-American boy named Todd Bowden discovers an enormous interest in concentration camps, in particular the Nazis' different ways of torture. Through his research he finds out that a former officer in the Nazi army lives in his neighborhood. After wearing him down with threats to go to the authorities, Todd forces the former Nazi, Kurt Dussander, (the “Blood Fiend” of Patin, a fictional concentration camp) to tell him his experiences. All the while Todd's grades plummet, he becomes more aggressive toward his parents, and his outlook on life is tainted.

When we finish our meal, pay the bill, and drive away, I articulating my thoughts in the backseat. Can someone seemingly “normal” develop an interest in the perverse, and through learning more about it become perverse too? In the beginning Todd seems like he’s just indulging in an actual subject that intrigues him. His teacher badgers everyone to find an interest:

“You see something for the first time, and right away you know you have found YOUR GREAT INTEREST. It's like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time. That's why Careers Day is so important, children - it may be the day on which you find YOUR GREAT INTEREST.” And she had gone on to tell them about her own GREAT INTEREST, which turned out not to be teaching fifth grade but collecting nineteenth-century postcards.”

But when does YOUR GREAT INTEREST turn malevolent?

Something of the like happened during WWII. Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation. It was begun to develop weapons of mass destruction and later evolved into experiments to try to prevent epidemics. This was of great interest to the military, and probably did contribute to a greater understanding of the human body. But the things they did! Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss, and then the removed limbs were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. They were also hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death. Should the noble pursuit of knowledge cross ethical lines like this?

Of course, this statement assumes that learning about perverse things makes you commit perverse acts too. As any student who has had a history teacher drone on about the bloody exploits of the Ottomans knows, this isn’t always true. As Michael Moore points out in Bowling for Columbine, if having a violent history causes violent citizens, why does the U.S far outstrip Germany in the number of gun-related deaths? The Germans are far from ignorant about their reprehensible past, and nowadays their country is quite peaceful. The rise of neo-Nazism there, however, raises questions about whether history does affect human opinions.

History is defined as the study of humanity’s past. It uses a narrative to examine and analyze the sequence of events, and it attempts to objectively investigate the patterns of cause and effect that determine events. History should be considered just that, but there are always people who buff up essays by concluding that learning about history will inform us about future decisions and learn from mistakes. But do we? Is history only to educate or also to influence?

In his poem “The History Teacher,” Billy Collins suggests that not telling the truth can rot the minds of students. Ramona Bennett, a Native American interviewed in Studs Terkel’s oral anthology American Dreams: Lost and Found, talks about the false history every student learns about early interactions between white settlers and Native Americans, and says,

“I know damn good and well that if American children in school had learned that the beautiful Cheyenne women at Sand Creek put their shawls over their babies’ faces so they wouldn’t see the long knives, if the American schoolchildren learned that Indian mothers held their babied close to their bodies when the Gatling guns shot and killed three hundred, there would never have been a My Lai massacre.”

When world leaders are intent on changing opinions, they go to such troublesome lengths to fudge up what really happened. And all this works.

History may not seem a large driving force in society, but it is behind many important facets of it. An individual’s perspective and life is based off the unique cultural and situational identity he or she inherits and the history associated with it, and by analyzing what others have done before with that identity people can start to formulate their own opinions of what they can do. By listening to the Dussander’s glorified descriptions of the Nazi party’s horrific crimes, Todd began to glorify them too. The Japanese were fed on historical propaganda declaring themselves as a superior race, and this helped them feel detached toward the humans they were experimenting on. Gun culture in the United States is far closer to patriotism and nationalism than most other nations, and histories highlighting its power in national wars and its pivotal role as tradition in family has probably lead to its increased usage. American school children’s limited view of their country’s past cruelties made them feel like they could do no wrong when they were obviously heading into a decision full of wrong.

“How could the Holocaust happen?” we question, and the very horror of other such events induces us to feel like “protecting” the young by censoring the politically un-correct. Like Todd’s attraction to terrible crimes, learning about the violence of history might induce us to emulate it as well, but that was because he only had a selected version of history, one heavily leaning on the wrong side. Learning the full picture is far better than stumbling across the act alone and ignorant – without, one is left without context, and without a ladder back to rationality.

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Death in a Swimming Pool

Recently my family moved into a new apartment complex quite different than our old one. We only moved five miles away, but that five miles changed the milieu of new home completely. My old apartment complex, Parkview Place, was smack dab in the middle of the city, amongst tenement halls, cheapo shops, restaurants dripping in MSG, and crippled beggars lounging on the street. Despite all this, it managed to be a very family-friendly community, with elderly tai-chi groups practicing their craft every sunrise, building guards who took care of stranded kids, and festivals with communal entertainment for the New Year. The many stores and eateries populating the sides and the open layout of the complex only made it seem more like a mini-neighborhood – after shopping for necessities, you could enter the fenced enclave of Parkview Place to go back home.

My new place, on the other hand, fits its name quite well: The Cosmos. Just like the Cosmos, it has service and amenities that reach beyond the stars, and each apartment has an enormous amount of space. The layout of the complex is a sleek maze – golden-tiled corridors duck under gardens of petunias to surface onto a swimming pool with small waterfalls and Aztec-decorated walls. It’s so far from humankind, however. Very little people have moved in, and the ones that have are mostly foreigners who trickle into the gyms at the weekends and disappear into their sealed lives afterward. It’s also in a developing district, so all I can see at night are more complexes being built by construction workers hauling bamboo or operating cranes, the glare of midnight lights illuminating their sweat.

I had mixed feelings moving here. Bustling crowds were sacrificed for new facilities, and speed dial to three great Cantonese delis was sacrificed for a larger bedroom. I suppose we all have sentimental feelings for the places we’ve stayed the longest in, no matter how seedy (seven years in the same cramped surroundings). And apparently it really was seedy.

Just a week after we moved, a nine year old boy unattended by his parents was frolicking in the large swimming pool where we used to enjoy the coolness of chlorinated water on a hot summer’s day. For some reason he panicked, and started splashing and spluttering, struggling to get his head above water. As he took his last half-breaths and started sinking in the 1.4 meter pool, more than forty kids, parents, and grandparents were swimming or playing around him. Someone only noticed when he was already floating face down in the water.

The tightly-wound community of Parkview Place lost no time. The swimming pool was drained, and the parents protested: what was the complex’s management paying the lifeguard for? How lax was he that a nine year old boy had to be discovered dead by those who were swimming around him? Was the high, vaulted chair he sat on to oversee people’s actions or to lord it over us common mortals? Being a lifeguard must have been easy money: slouching in the chair, ogling bikinis, blowing the whistle when each period of swimming was over and paying no heed to a boy clearly in crisis.

After I heard this account, all I could think of for the next week was that little boy and everything about him. I dreamt about his grieving parents, victims of a police and legal force unable to cope with an increasingly expanding bourgeois China. I pictured the rioting mothers and fathers, their trust in a stable institution they had worked their lives to achieve suddenly shattered and cast away. I imagined his empty room, his dusty toys, the vacated seat in the classroom. Most of all, I played his death scene over and over again.

Little pieces would emerge after each visualization. At first he had a swimming cap, but that was later gone, to think of his short, black hair swaying in the water. He was always thin, but he now had knobbly knees, a small bruise on his elbow after a small ping pong accident, and a thin, angular face that tapered down to a large, teethy smile. I couldn’t – wouldn’t – imagine his eyes, assuming that they were the stereotypical Asian slits where you could barely tell if it was open or not. I imagined him first jumping into the water with a cannonball, swimming to the deepest end while avoiding the other swimmers, and looking underwater at the fluorescent swimming suits flashing from side to side. But something went wrong.

This was where my ideas diverged, skipped a beat. I could imagine him suddenly swallowing a wallop of water (something I always did) except he now followed that with more swallows of water, each a larger gulp than the other. He might have started to flail his arms – or maybe been unable to by a cramp, as a friend of mine suggested. The lack of oxygen might have already started to constrict his some of his organs, the overabundance of water damaging the others. But I couldn’t make the connection between flailing to a sudden stillness in his limbs, heart, and mind, and then to the inevitable floating, like dead fish. When it came to dead fish, one night it was swimming through the water, and the next I was screaming because the water was swimming through the fish instead.

Those were two separate images, and I could not imagine the exact moment that it just gave up and died. What is the exact definition of death anyway? Wikipedia terms it as “the irreversible termination of the biological functions that define a living organism.” But even that precise sentence holds a wealth of different possibilities. Some religions feel only the physical body dies while the soul continues to the afterlife or rebirth, while many others think that it culminates in the complete ending of the mind or consciousness. But then what is consciousness? How about those that are by definition dead, but have no consciousness? (single-celled organisms, arguably) Does it precede the failing of the body, or is it the last to go? Is death one total event (finito) or is it a systematic process – first the lungs, then the heart, then the neuron synapses of the brain fail?

I’ve been trying to rationalize it these past few weeks, and I’ve gotten nowhere. Along with the image of his actual death, another point of contention is just the stupid ignorance of the lifeguard and those swimming around him. How could they not have seen? The swimming pool is always crowded with people, and most of the time they’re aware of your presence, and sometimes move out of the way for others to swim through. In my inner, imagined video, I always imagine the boy alone in the swimming pool, because it’s just not possible for so many other people to be there and not notice the little figure dying right beside them. Yet, it happened. As Tom Clancy said, “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”

It’s terrible of me to admit, but I feel some sympathy for the complex management as well. Though China likes to think it’s modernized enough to get by swimmingly in the 21st Century, most of it is still superstitious, insanely so when it comes to the subject of death. I can only imagine the amount of people who’ll move out or curse the property, probably doomed to demolishment a measly ten years later. Hundreds of people toiled to provide the home for so many, my family included, and I’d like to say, “It was just a little overlook.” But I know it wasn’t. It’s terrifying how a minute can change so much.

In the end I know this matter will probably broil for years, just like the simmering ethnic conflict between the burgeoning Middle-Eastern population and the native Chinese that everyone chose to ignore when I was still there. And I know I have no business meddling in others’ affairs, especially in something as personal as this. The rest of my family have forgotten it, and I probably should too. For most of my short life, however, mortality has never been an issue, the closest being a dreaded topic for an upcoming literature essay. When something so close and unexpectedly horrific does happen, I tend not to let it go easily. Instead I’ll mull it over in my family’s new apartment at The Cosmos, so far away but steadily getting closer.

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Top Ten Lessons for Marketers

Recently I just finished a three-week introductory course in marketing and advertising, and here is a handy-dandy list of important lessons I've learned about how to rip off people's money.

1. Satisfying consumer needs comes first (know their wants and lifestyles)

Probably the most important lesson for marketers is to know what their consumers want. Isn’t that the main point of marketing anyway? Marketing is basically the act of helping to sell things to people who want it, so why this maxim is sometimes forgotten I don’t know. If you want consumers to latch on to the message and product you are advertising, you have to know what they want, what stimulates them, so that they actually pay attention. These days people are inundated with so many images, words, and advertising that most of the time it’s blocked out and ignored. If you really want to have them respond and buy the product or service you are advertising, you have to provide them the reason why they want it.

To do this, a marketer needs to translate observations into interpreted needs. People fumbling with phone cords and unable to talk to their friends outside of buildings led other people to see the need for mobile phones. Marketing helped spread this trend, and now not having a mobile phone is practically a heresy. This is called empathic design, the ability to see what people want and to act upon it.

2. Build strong customer relationships

There’s a reason why Apple stores are always bustling while PC stores seem to be empty and devoid of light. Apple has an award-winning customer service program, and its appealing and always helpful Genius Bar in every official Apple store helps to make sure that if there’s ever a problem concerning an Apple certified product, someone will easily fix it with a smile.

The most beloved of companies are not always the ones with the insanely advanced products, but the ones that pay the most attention to their customers. Customers like to feel pampered and cared for to distract all the money being sucked away from them, and marketing is no exception. Often the best marketing campaigns are the most personal ones, and the most effective public relations firms are the ones not afraid to get deep and dirty alongside the mass market of consumers. If you want them to trust the words you’re forcing inside their subconscious, you got to have them trust you first, and trust requires strong customer relationships.

3. Create clearly defined positioning and clearly defined brand equity that is relevant to the product (Brand Image)

Because humans have a compulsive need to anthropomorphize, companies get assigned personality characteristics, and because we’re humans, companies capitalize on that. The most successful companies have an army of marketing specialists to dictate them on what they should or should not do to continue or change their brand equity, and that is important because brand equity does reflect on everything the company does. They also have clearly defined positive positions (Snapple is quirky, Apple is hip, etc.) to appeal to people. Once you start moving away from your core personality, however, and attach divergent meanings to it (Starbucks−a furniture company? Really?) people get confused and muddled and don’t know what to make of your company any more. The image you project into people’s minds is important because we’re all extremely prejudiced so when that image is no longer clear, loyal customers get alienated. (“It’s not like it used to be…”)

4. Target a very specific segment of the population and focus all your attention on them

Sure, you want to conquer the world. Make a company that appeals to everyone. Unfortunately, everyone is different. Some people will cherish your company irrationally, and some people will hate it irrationally. It’s just how the world is. But you can be successful. All you have to do is target a specific segment of the population. For example, due to its ubiquity among students and creative professionals, Apple has started to target them obsessively, with “Genius Bars” that declare it’s helpful to be geeky and a design concept that makes their target audience shiver. Though they might alienate, say, Asians who still hold onto the belief that white is the color of death, the market that they have targeted feels cherished and loved and therefore commit themselves obsessively to the brand. And buy tons of i-Gadgets. This targeting also helps strengthen the all-important brand equity of the company.

5. Have a strong, clearly defined, realistic objective always in mind

You know, I’m sure that Microsoft aspires to have a PC in every home by 2010, but it unfortunately cannot be done. When marketers are thinking of campaigns to further bankrupt consumers, they have to think of end goals that signify whether the campaign is a success or a failure, end goals that if achieved will boost the company. These end goals have to be specifically tailored to the market, the company, and the plan, and therefore it has to be strong, clearly defined, and realistic. Imagine if a lax company simply said, “Yeah, we just want more people to be buying our products.” The next year there is a slight increase in how many products were sold, but only because people wanted to torch it at home. Is this a success or a failure? Also, the end goal helps shape the plan. Without an end goal, you really don’t have a plan, and you don’t have an advertising company you’re paying millions to come up with a plan either.

6. An ad should communicate its message as simply and directly as possible

An advertisement is purely for your target market. It is lovingly handcrafted, shaped, sculpted, and molded to appeal to your target market. It is supposed to instantly stimulate the participants of your target market into paying attention to it and later buying the product advertised. All this will be trashed if your target market cannot make heads or tails of what the advertisement is, or what it is trying to say. Eliminate confusion. It depresses people.

7. Detail, detail, detail−plan your marketing mix well

When you’re thinking of launching a product, there are four things that you have to consider: product, price, place, and promotion. In other words, what’s your product like, how much is it going to cost, where are you going to sell it, and how do you get people to answer the previous three questions. If you want to be successful, you need to be incredibly detailed and acute in your answers to the questions, and have supporting evidence to back it up. Those four P’s are very important in determining whether people buy it or not. Are notebooks in again? If they’re not, then don’t launch it yet. Is your product $200 more expensive than the iPhone but has 25% less memory space than it? Better crunch up your numbers again. Selling diapers in Home Depot? Hmm, wonder why no one’s buying it. Putting up advertising posters next to flyers about Mrs. Hamilton’s missing cat? Think you should expand more. The more detailed and explanatory your decisions concerning marketing mix are, the more you’ll eliminate bad ideas and churn out profitable ones.

8. Before embarking on a campaign, always research−but don't rely on it too much

As said in maxim #1, you need to know your audience. But how do Madison Avenue powerhouses learn to empathize and understand the lifestyles, wants, needs, and dreams of the average rice farmer in Thailand? Why, hire someone else to do it for you! There are many companies that specialize in asking and figuring out what people want, and they can employ many methods: simple questionnaires, walk-in surveys, focus groups, etc. This can uncover new information about groups of people that people’s preconceived stereotypes have had no room for before, and it can be valuable in figuring out how to appeal for people to buy something. Advertising, however, is not a very certain field. Psychology is an unstable field, and what people want is not always clear. When thinking up ideas of campaigns, you always have to take a leap of faith in some areas, like how Howard Schultz took a chance in wondering whether people would want to pay $4 for some tiny double shot of caramel macchiato. If you spend your entire time trying and testing little variations to see which one is the most effective, you’re going to end up broke and old.

9. It's a tough world--most of your ideas will be cut even before development, your events can be rarely attended by publicity, most ads don't achieve much--don't give up. Evaluate every campaign at the end and think about how you can change it

The client says, ‘Think of a way to get people to think creamy cheesecake as healthy.” Your team is eager, thinking up of ten different ways to do so. Your boss comes in. “This is stupid, this is lame, this is dangerous, this is just lying.” He slashes five of the plans with a red pen and scowls at the rest. You bring them to the client meeting, and they slash two of the remaining five plans. The remaining three plans are quickly developed, but only one works under the budget and on time. This often happens, but with a higher ratio of rejected ideas. And rejected ideas is something common in the advertising world. You write up a press release for a revolutionary product and only Newsome Town Daily News, serving a population of 294, picks it up. You dish up a wonderful event, invite the biggest media names in town, and none of them show up. Deal with it. If your idea gets developed, count yourself lucky. Your idea should be at least good enough to stand up as it own without much publicity. And if your event or campaign does fail, (or succeed) you should evaluate every component so as to see where you went wrong or right, so you can further advance the information people have about what people want to experience to make them buy something.

10."What a company does will scream so loud that people cannot hear what it says."

In the end, most people don’t listen to what official documents and press releases from companies say. They make up their own judgments about what they have seen the company do. So if you want to make something popular, don’t just write florid essays. Go out in the streets and distribute some samples among the people. Have your company publicly support a known charity aggressively. Have your CEO shake the hand of a kid with leprosy. On the negative side, no matter how impressive your employees’ credentials are, but if one of them is caught cheating other people’s money, your company will be tainted red all over. Advertising used to be just words, but over the years it has branched out into so many other things. It’s not enough to just say. You gotta do too. Be proactive! Show people that Microsoft can be cool, that though McDonalds is clogging up the arteries of the bourgeois, it’s also providing housing to victims of domestic violence. To change your image and sales, you gotta show that you care about what people want. That, and do something about hugging kids.

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Review: The Wrestler, Rematched

I’ve always disliked wrestling. The first time I remember seeing wrestling was when I was about seven, bored, and addicted to TV. One afternoon I was flipping through the channels when the image of an enormous man jumping on top of another showed up on the screen. The man proceeded to pick the other guy up (“To help him get to the hospital?” I thought) and then ram him against the nearest steel pole. With Wilhemina-Slater-eyes he then trumpeted a triumphant “Hell yeah!” while holding down his opponent’s head with size ten feet and having a referee slam his hand down three times beside them. Having tinny speakers for my TV diluted the effect this show of utter masculinity had, but even I thought it looked kinda cool when the winner body-slammed the loser again and again. Unlike the roaring audience in the TV crowd, however, I hated myself for admitting to any positive feelings at all about the fight I had just seen. Even at that young age I knew gratuitous violence was just wrong, and after the camera zoomed in on the winner’s massive cuts, causing a massive roar from the audience, I just had to change the channel.

Over the years I’ve probably seen less than ten minutes of wrestling. Channel 29 a cooking channel, the next−what the frick was that? As I’ve grown and developed and cultivated myself to become a pseudo-intellectual interested in weepy indie music and dramatic indie movies where nothing happens, I found myself increasingly at odds with what the wrestling world represented, or what I thought it represented. It was so flashy, cheesily so, with the rough-looking font you could barely read, the huge blinking lights, the 80’s and early 2000’s rock n’ roll music with expletives and wanton guitar riffs, the huge slabs of steroid-injected muscles that made up a wrestler, the wrestlers themselves emitting a caveman bellow and wearing gaudy clothing that was always stretched to the maximum. I was entrenching myself in detecting and participating in the art of subtlety, where a description of a character’s breath could signify existentialism, where a single number determined an entire theorem, where a sideways look meant the guy was madly in love with me, or where my sigh meant that I would rather become bosom buddies with Kim Jong Il to nuke her than say hello.

The overt rawness of wrestling almost offended me−everything interesting had to have a metaphor, a reason, an underlying cause and effect, had to be complicated so I could slowly unwrap the strings and reveal the true humanity underneath. (That’s what I used to want to say when people asked what type of movies or books I liked.) By “humanity” I meant a small tap on the shoulder or a secret smile, the little things humans do to show that they’re human and relatable (especially when acting). I loved talking about the little things, questioning all the different parts of what to ask what it meant.

Wrestling, on the other hand, challenged you to not think. Drop your moral compass for a second. Forget compassion. Charge yourself up with animal instinct and a desire to see someone win and lose, a desire of us against them. It’s a hundred percent a gut pleasure, and it was so blatant, something everyone could understand as there’s nothing behind it or in front of it. Just two guys (sometimes more) beating each other up. With blood flying. And chairs. Little elitist me saw the crudeness and was disgusted. Are we all just a pack of aggressive chimpanzees?

And then came Oscar Season 2009, and little elitist me flew in a tizzy over the wonderful movies that came out the previous year. I made a checklist of movies I had to see, and was among them. After all this, you might be surprised at how excited I was to see it. Yes, there are people being slammed and necks being choked, but critics were saying Mickey Rourke was made for this character, that he infused Randy “The Ram” Robinson with so much humanity (oh, it’s that wonderful word again) that through all the conflicts you manage to feel and understand him. Marisa Tomei, playing the “stripper with a heart of gold” (say the Oscar writers) also supposedly adds so much humanity to her performance too. With so many reports of the movie practically overflowing with humanity, I had to give it a shot. Bruce Springsteen’s song for the movie was pretty good motivation too.

Well well well.

was one of the most electrifying movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t know another word but electrifying. It really made me experience so many emotions that I had long since resigned to memory. Squirming disgust, at the staple gun that was copiously used on human flesh in one of the matches. (For the first time in a long time, I just had to look away) Truly delighted, at all the bantering and friendly exchanges Cassidy and Randy have. Fear, because I was so sure Randy would find some new and improved way of cutting himself up (my fears were realized when his thumb was shorn by a cheese cutter at a deli). Shock, at the complete cruelty these wrestlers have to endure just for a few bucks and a good show. I knew before that wrestling is evidently all a show, that the aggression and fights are really just orchestrated friendly competition (ok, that’s a bit much). But it never seemed that way−if they were just acting, they were damn good actors, because I completely bought into the whole charade of gore. Yet, faced with the intimidating wrestlers who melt into honey baked ham backstage when they pay homage to Randy and discuss strategies to rile up the audience, I saw through, and realized just how much of an illusion wrestling is. And it surprised me so much. This apparently improvisational exercise in the primitive was practically a musical aimed at getting people to shout, scream, and pay money for the experiences they themselves could never hope to achieve in their boring, dulled up lives.

The difference between the show and reality was also the cause of the most overwhelming feeling of all, and that was misery. “Sic transit gloria. Glory fades,”as Max Fischer succinctly summarized in another excellent movie, (but I’m getting ahead of myself.) The few strums of the score always evoked the sad grayness of the town, and the story, though built up like a happy ending (The Ram returns!) is essentially one a terrible one, because he loses everything. His daughter, who he was getting close to, bans him from his life after another mistake. Cassidy, who showed up for the final match, supported him but went away in disgust at the grunting and risky disregard Randy had for himself. Randy himself, whose failing heart was the crux of the movie’s conflict, slows down in the end and is shown clutching at his heart. He manages to do his signature Ram Jump on his opponent, and the movie ends at that glorious moment, but it strongly insinuates that might be his last moment ever.

Randy could have found some means of supporting himself out of wrestling, and was starting to do so before he came back to the ring. The movie shows with a restless but accurate eye the trouble shambling, unassuming Randy has in the real world, with his dead-end job at the supermarket, his inability to get together with Cassidy outside the club she works (“I don’t contact my customers after work,” she replies with a tight smile, after Randy kisses her) and his constant failure at being a responsible dad to his daughter Stephanie. Even Cassidy envelopes into the assumed role of a sensuous and perky prostitute to forget how old and undesirable she’s becoming to her customers. It’s only when Randy’s pretending to be a monolithic Hercules, or Cassidy’s pretending to be some exotic dancer twenty years younger, that all comes together and all seems all right. It’s this account of the wash-up, the has-been, the guy/girl who’s lost whatever chips he/she had in life and is still willing to gamble some more that makes up the humanity I love to experience. “Foolish man,” we say, “you just had heart bypass surgery, nearly died, you’ve got scars all over, an increasingly deaf ear, meddled brain, and the body of a fifty-year old, and you still want to fight?” Randy made a mistake, his whole life was full of mistakes, yet he still reached for the glory he had twenty years ago. The constant mistakes of humans, oddly enough, is basically what humanity is, and forms some of the best movies, books, music, and art.

Stylistically, the movie was unique because for long periods of time, the camera follows the back of Randy’s head. Randy has hideously bleached blonde hair, and even in the darkest scenes you can still see the bobbing up and down of his Sunkist dye. At first it was a bit discomforting, because you keep thinking the camera should vary its shots and is going to switch to something else, but after a while it forces you to think as to why the cinematographer had this decision. It reduces most of Randy’s surroundings to a blur, and the people around him are not often shown their heads. There’s a scene where Randy is being treated by medics after an extremely bloody fight, and though they dab his wounds and talk many lines you never see their heads. Maybe this is because reality is mostly a blur to Randy, with people either hassling him or helping him with no other differentiations. As he often says, he is all alone, and showing him in the middle constantly does reinforce that fact.

Even when he is in the ring, the audience around him gets reduced to an ecstatic blare. But unlike reality, the audience is different. In reality he goes to the town hall where he and five other retired invalid wrestlers sit around and have five people a month ask them for a signature. In the ring, everyone cheers for him and badmouths his opponent, and every step he takes is another roar of approval from the crazy crowd. And they are crazy. From what I knew of wrestling and later, of this movie, I didn’t know who to blame the insanity of wrestling on−the wrestlers, or the audience. True, the wrestlers get glory and fame by wrestling, but you could say the wrestlers were selfless by sacrificing everything else they have to appease the audience’s hungry wants. Even in , a movie sympathetic to the sport, the audience seems like a Hummer, consuming so much blackness and always needing more. I couldn’t believe they cheered like thunder after Randy’s opponent staple gunned a dollar bill on his own forehead. The only palpable enemy, yet also the protagonist’s greatest ally, is the audience, always urging Randy and other wrestlers like him to sacrifice their lives for the money and attention the crowd holds.

There is such a large market for wrestling, and even after this movie I’m not joining that group. Wrestling still leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, this act of torturing yourself and others so civilians can enjoy the spectacle. There are differing perspectives on the issue, however, and I’m glad has exposed me to it. I’ll end by posting the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s song for the movie, and hope this somehow offered you a different perspective too.

Have you ever seen a one trick pony in the field so happy and free?
If you've ever seen a one trick pony then you've seen me
Have you ever seen a one-legged dog making its way down the street?
If you've ever seen a one-legged dog then you've seen me

Then you've seen me, I come and stand at every door
Then you've seen me, I always leave with less than I had before
Then you've seen me, bet I can make you smile when the blood, it hits the floor
Tell me, fan, can you ask for anything more?
Tell me can you ask for anything more?

Have you ever seen a scarecrow filled with nothing but dust and wheat?
If you've ever seen that scarecrow then you've seen me
Have you ever seen a one-armed man punching at nothing but the breeze?
If you've ever seen a one-armed man then you've seen me

Then you've seen me, I come and stand at every door
Then you've seen me, I always leave with less than I had before
Then you've seen me, bet I can make you smile when the blood, it hits the floor
Tell me, friend, can you ask for anything more?
Tell me can you ask for anything more?

These things that have comforted me, I drive away
This place that is my home I cannot pay
My only faith's in the broken bones and bruises I display

Have you ever seen a one-legged man trying to dance his way free?
If you've ever seen a one-legged man then you've seen me.

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Turtles and Responsibility

For those of you who know my brother, “responsible” is never the word to describe him. His lack of it is an amalgamation of his unwillingness to be tethered to material goods, his unwillingness to take liability for anything, and his subconscious unwillingness to remember where he put things. If you lend him a pencil, he will lose it by seven months, an eraser, three. When I keep something he will fire back, “It’s not mine!” and proceed to play on his Nintendo DS, which in three months he will blame me for losing. Many of his homework assignments get sucked into a black hole in his backpack, and the ones that survive that mysterious cavern inevitably have not been done, or are handed in late. He’s often late to school too. He’s a very nice guy−he’s just not dependable at all.

So it was very surprising that on his birthday a close friend gave him six scuttling turtles and a small container to house them in. I was very worried, as everything tends to die under his care, whether it be a goldfish or a camera. Turtles are not as hard to take care of as dogs or cats, but they are alive nonetheless−and that entails consuming, wasting, breathing, and drinking. Every single day.

Watching him fuss over them on their first day in our house reminded me of the electronic dog an uncle gave him four years ago. The dog yapped, flapped his ears, sang songs, even moved by its own! My brother was transfixed with it, pressing the “on” button everyday to pet it, virtually feed it, and shower it with attention. This lovely behavior continued for a week, and after that it was neglected. I hardly ever paid attention to it−after all, it wasn’t mine−but the times that I turned it on, it would immediately sigh and growl sadly. Four months after my brother first unwrapped it, we did our own type of “mercy killing” on it−we threw it away.

That experience was painful, and something I did not want to happen again−especially since I have a huge phobia of animals that have recently died. I did not want to intervene in my brother’s pets, however, until they were really almost dying−I wanted to see how long my brother’s attention span was.

It’s only been a little more than a week since his birthday, but my brother’s caring attitude toward his turtles has shown all signs of permanence. After the initial excitement died down, my brother has dutifully fed the turtles and cleaned them and the tank everyday. The way he does it is not showy, as in the “I’m-more-responsible-than-you-who-has-not-written-a-Virb-entry-in-three-weeks” way of energetically doing the mundane tasks and looking over cheerfully at me. When he holds the frantic turtles upside down and washes water over them, the clenched jaw and soft eyes suggest that it has become an established duty for him−a necessary action, like eating.

All the pet turtle websites I visited suggest loving them like man’s best friend−the dog−but it’s kind of hard when these “dogs” are amphibian, smaller than your palm, and respond to your touch by waving their limbs like mad. Rather, my brother shows his “love” by sometimes crouching down to observe them. He might readjust the mini-palm-tree if it falls down, move the huge (compared to the turtles) stones dotting the tank if they are blocking the turtles’ paths, and immediately take a turtle to the vet when it starts to look sick.

You could say this change in my brother was because of him growing up and becoming more adult, or because this time the magnitude of six lives are on his shoulders. You could say that it’s because the turtles are so unbelievably cute when they climb on top of each other to beg for food. I say it’s a little bit of all three and more. Though a bit late, that feeling of responsibility for actions and lives is now instilled. If only this newfound outlook applied for other parts of his life too.

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