Hey folks. I’ve missed you all!

It’s been an bananas couple of months—travel, Viable Paradise, the annual post-cancer medical circus—but I’m back, and I have enough time, energy, and brain space to start having opinions again. (Sometimes, opinions are the first thing to go.)

Today’s opinion involves the perennial discourse about the moral valence of characters who are not necessarily monsters (though perhaps some of them are monsters), but just people who are, as Emma Bull once put it, not Good People or Evil People but getting-by people. Doing-their-best people. Products-of-a-sick-society-and-generational-trauma-people.

The sort of people, in other words, who have questionable opinions and trigger issues and make bad decisions and hurt themselves and others because people (especially people who don’t have access to modern mental health resources or don’t understand that they might need such things) sometimes have questionable opinions and trigger issues and make bad decisions and hurt themselves and others.

There’s a prevalent opinion in certain quarters that one of the jobs of fiction is to be Moral with a capital em. That to show any kind of “deviant” or antisocial behavior is to condone it. (Hayes Code, anyone? Can't have any gays in the movies. It might give people ideas.) That characters, especially sympathetic characters, must perforce reflect certain idealized ethical stances and standards of behavior. That they must be perfected, in other words, or at least perfectable.

I rather think this binary moral absolutism is cruel.

We are all, on this earth, sublunary creatures. (Except, briefly, the crew of Artemis II, one supposes.) We are broken, fallible, scarred. Trying to heal our past hurts, some of which we might not even be aware of. We’re struggling: sometimes more than others; some of us more than others. We’re striving and straining, making mistakes, learning better. Sometimes failing to learn, which I maintain is the structure of a tragedy.

And if we’re only given characters who always make good choices, who only hold approved opinions, doesn’t that leave most of us out in the cold? Feeling the inadequacy of our existence and performance acutely, without a wink of compassion, acceptance, or forbearance? That’s as stifling as the idealized heteropatriarchal 1950s of a world where Ward Cleaver never went cottaging on a business trip and June wasn’t taking the edge off her asphyxiating existence with a mother’s little helper or three.*

We’re already measuring ourselves against influencer Instagrams and those showroom-clean houses in the movies. Do we really need to be told that you have to start at the top of your personal growth curve, no matter where you’re coming from? And that there’s something wrong with you if you write or read about complicated people who do complicated things for complicated reasons they themselves may not even begin to understand?

Part of being accepted as fully human is not having to be and seem a model of perfection to qualify for approval. (“There’s good ones and bad ones, you know.”) And I think that’s part of the appeal of the disaster gay as character archetype. It accepts that we can be fucked-up, broken, struggling… and still matter.

It seems to me that if we can find ourselves reflected in imperfect characters, allow ourselves to identify with people who make mistakes, that’s part of the path away from self-hatred and fronting and toward accepting who we authentically are. You cannot fix a problem until you identify the problem, and pretending it’s not there doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

There’s hope in a trashfire.

Anyway. That's what kept my brain busy on my run this morning. I blame my exercise playlist, and more directly Shirley Manson.

How are you?

Best,
Bear

• That’s entirely without considering that sometimes the portrait of a monster makes interesting and incisive art. Whether it’s Thomas Ripley, Walter White, or the self-consciously awful first-person narrator of David Bowie’s “Cracked Actor,” examining monstrous people through a nuanced lens provides compelling perspectives. But that’s a different essay.