The Family Man: Growing Good

Every once and awhile I can annoy one of my friends enough that he'll watch a show a movie I've been raving about. The past couple of weeks has been one of those victories, as my friend finally binge-watched The Walking Dead and texted me his thoughts. He was most impressed with Shane and The Governor, the two main villains of the series so far, summarizing his thoughts:

"Contemporary media is so much better at portraying evil than it is at portraying good."

The observation is astute. As a culture, we're kind of obsessed with evil characters, at least on television. A few recent villain-cum protagonists are Dexter's Dexter, House of Card's Francis Underwood, and, of course, Breaking Bad's Walter White. They share similar personalities and plots, and viewers rally around them for some reason, hoping for their redemption. The question is why? Why are we, as a culture, so good at portraying evil and so ready to embrace evil characters? It's a topic so worth of heavy consideration that I intended to sit on for awhile.

Then I saw Nicolas Cage's 2000 Christmas drama The Family Man. The story of Cage's every-man Jack Campbell is nearly the same as Bryan Cranston's White, right down to the cynicism towards American empire-building, Capitalism, and living to maximize your own talents and desires. The similarities between the two made my viewing of the movie equally as uncomfortable as my viewing of the show--and revealed the answer to my friend's question.

Whereas White turns himself from a family man into the king of a meth empire, Campbell starts at the top of the finance mountain and works his way down it. He's the president of a company who lives in a Penthouse on Wall Street and thinks he has everything he needs. The only "problem," according to the movie's universe, is that he lives alone and is so wrapped up with work that he calls for an emergency strategy meeting for a $130 billion merger on Christmas Day. One chance meeting with a magical Don Cheadle and Campbell finds himself where White was in the first episode of Breaking Bad (minus the cancer).

In the suburbs of New Jersey, Campbell wakes up on Christmas morning in bed with his college sweetheart and current wife Kate, a character so close to Skyler (White's wife), I would've thought she was ripoff if not for the fact that this movie was released nearly a decade before the series about meth-making. Lacking memories of his marriage and the two children that came as a result of it, Campbell rushes into the city to return to the life he knows, only to be thrown out of his apartment and office buildings because the doorman don't recognize him. Magic Cheadle confronts him again, telling him he must accept his situation and learn from it.

What Campbell learns from the situation is what makes the movie so disturbing. The difference between his lives is extreme. His neatly organized and modern penthouse has been replaced with a messy, chaotic suburban home. His challenging and exhilarating job has been replaced with a retail sales position at Kate's father's tire and auto-parts store. His free time is spent participating in a sport he hates, bowling. This issue isn't of kind, it's of quality. If the movie portrayed a man learning the values in a different type of life (which it may have been trying to), it'd likely be enjoyable. Instead it portrays a man learning to accept a life well below what he desires in exchange for love.

The most revealing scene in the movie follows Campbell's hard-fought effort to regain elements of his empire-conquering life. His other-life-boss randomly ends up in the tire shop and Campbell sweet talks his way into a job. He then brings Kate to the city and reveals his plan to move there, double both their incomes, and send their children to private schools where they'll receive a better education--a completely reasonable proposition. The family would stay together and have an improved quality of life.

Kate doesn't respond as if it is reasonable at all. In true Skyler style, she hysterically objects to Campbell's plea, demanding he explain why he'd want to rip their daughter from the school she loves and doesn't care that she pictured them growing old in that house in New Jersey together. Campbell attempts to argue, but eventually acquiesces for some reason I forget.

The rest of the movie progresses predictably. Campbell comes to love his family and  realize he's lonely, wakes up in his real life, and rushes to pursue a still-single Kate. It's all lovey-dovey rom-commie (pun intended) and meant to demonstrate that the character has finally become good. In fact, he even spurns the emergency strategy meeting (and trip to Aspen to woo the merge partner) to reveal his loneliness to the love-of-his life. At this point the plot is propelling purely on emotion because if you stopped and examined Campbell's situation, you'd realize that he's throwing away a life that stimulates and challenges him in favor of the life that literally destroys everything he prides himself on (unnecessarily!) in favor of someone else's (namely Kate's) happiness.

That realization reveals a hidden definition of "good:" suffering for the sake of the people you love--and no one with an ounce of self-respect would enjoy watching a character who allows himself to suffer unnecessarily. The Family Man likely only survived on the fumes of love and the Christmas spirit of giving, two things which can be enjoyed without harming yourself. Breaking Bad thrived on White's self-empowerment. Though it was ultimately used to kill and corrupt in a misguided quest for wealth and power, viewers witnessed a defeated man attempting to break free of the straps his wife (and other circumstances) had tied him with. In that sense, White's end was much more victorious than Campbell's.

The reason contemporary media can't portray their definition of good is no one would watch. Watching someone intentionally lose is too painful and depressing of an experience. Imagine a Die Hard where John McLane has to sacrifice his life at the end to prove to his wife he's not a jerk, a 300 where Leonidas agrees to kneel to Xerxes to stop the bloodshed, and a Man of Steel where Superman gives himself over to Zod for the greater good of the Kryptonian people. If any of these heroes did as I described, they'd be throwing away what they think is right in favor of someone else's worldview.

I'm not suggesting what makes a character good is sticking to his ideas no matter what. That stubbornness can quickly turn any hero into a villain. Rather, sticking to the right ideas no matter what makes a character good. McClane refuses to die because doing so would see the elitist robbers get away with the money, Leonidas won't kneel because doing so would mean accepting an oppressive dictatorship, and Superman won't surrender to Zod because doing so would mean the end of a world and culture based on self-determination and freedom.

In Breaking Bad, White turns evil because his bitterness towards to the world causes him to embrace an any mean's necessary approach in building a meth empire. In The Family Man, Campbell turns "good" because his newly found loneliness causes him to embrace an any mean's necessary approach (which includes flouting the empire he built) in pursuing Kate.

Like Two-Face, these characters two sides to the same coin, and if we flip it, there's no real difference. Either way, we lose.

Track Tales Tuesday: What are your Blank Pages?

As a genre, Nerdcore is usually pigeonholed. The most frequent culprit is, unfortunately, the artists who identify with and accept the label. Their songs tend to be: video game, movie, television, video game, etc. Or, as intellectual-diss rapper Kabuto the Python spits in his song "Reference Desk:"

"Refer to shit that nerds like and you're the best in they mind
so the references are effortlessly peppered in mine." 

While Buto's outlook may be cynical, it's also true, and he manages to do something in those two lines that the large majority of nerdcore artists fail to do--fill the trappings they repeat with meaning.

Creating on a high-level requires more than outlines and mimicry. To a certain extent, what's inside the lines is what's lost in our culture. Nerdcore is just another form of this issue. Most people can roll with references, quoting lines and sometimes seeing parallels to their everyday life. Very few can understand what those quotes or parallels mean. It's the difference between Family Guy and American Dad. While both can be deathly amusing, American Dad is consistently funnier because the references add depth to their conflict. In contrast, Family Guy seems as random as manatees and beach balls.

Due to this tension, the more talented nerdcore artists are sometimes at odds with their ascribed label. Voice artist and rapper mc chris once created a controversy for trying to distance himself from the genre. Stanford graduate and nationally recognized MC Lars stirred another by declaring "Nerdcore Died." Beefyness, the self-declared crown prince of Nerdcore, questioned whether the genre was worth defending. The most recent artist to join this list is San Diego resident Dr. Awkward.

Like most nerdcore debuts, Doc's first album Unlimited featured video game reference after video game reference. One song was about meeting a girl at a LAN party, another was a love-song ode to three female Final Fantasy characters. While the album was enjoyable and had some shining moments (such as Timid and Geekquilibrium), it mainly felt like the labor of a quest for approval--the key word being labor. Since that album, Awkward has gained a loyal following, shed a record label, and re-evaluated his reasons for writing raps.

Blank Pages is the title track off of Dr. Awkward's second album. While the album still contains songs about cartoons, Star Wars, and superheroes, it also has songs about the difficulties of expressing love, the power of forgiveness, and yearning for a better world. Through it all, Awkward exposes the irony of his first album's title--"Joshua [his given name], truly you are limitless." On display is a man's fight to live the life he wants. He opens the song:

I feel this isn’t who I’m supposed to be
According to expectations of those close to me
This isn’t how I make the most of me
The man in the mirror is nothing but the ghost of me

Nerdcore carries with it a host of expectations. Awkward is talking about much more than that label however. In the first verse he delves into the expectations we place on ourselves due to family, culture and society, "Go to college, get a wife, and live the bored life." He ends the verse by turning to blank pages as the escape from that formula. The hook then declares that he's "breaking free of who he's supposed to be."

The second verse is a mediation on how to find direction when you're staring at nothingness. Cleverly he points out that there's no use in considering yourself as lost because happiness isn't a destination. He follows it up "Don’t have to search for happiness, it’s born of your creation." Part of the reason what's inside the lines is lost in our culture is we accept that the lines themselves have already been defined by other people. Doc is challenging that assumption, and us, when he ends the verse, "Don't let those be your blank pages."

The final verse, split in two by repetition of "I'm looking to these blank pages," is a declaration of motivation and passion. In it, Awkward lays out in a few lines what can only be truly understood through the process of constantly creating:

Take what you want this life is for the livin’
It won’t be handed to you, only death is givin’
Shake it off, shake it off, self-pitying is useless
There’s no endgame in your excuse
If you want something, it is you who must create it

Mimicking, repeating, referencing, these tactics can only get you so far--where everyone has already been. Don't misunderstand my point. I'm as big of a fan of a references as anyone. I love integrating them into my work. I do so though mainly as a source of humor, to point out the absurd parallels in our lives. Ultimately, despite all our similarities, we're each unique, so the lives we want and need haven't been lived or written out before us. That fact means we have to create our own paths.

With his second album Blank Page and its title track, Dr. Awkward is declaring "these are mine." He's proudly and admirably making the album he wants to, as he recently revealed, "I love everything on Blank Pages because it represents my life now wonderfully."

With the statement, he's also challenging his listeners: What are your Blank Pages?

Call Me Casual (Not an Apostle of Tyson)

Survivor: Blood vs Water threw me for a loop. The season was the tale of the pain brought about by bringing deeply personal relationships into the game. The players who suffered the most became the focus of the story, yet the player who turned his pain into the fuel for victory was relegated to a footnote, especially in the finale.

Each episode was "these two are struggling because of their love #bigbadwolf." Yes, #bigbadwolf was an actual Twitter hashtag the editors put on screen. If you used and followed that hashtag, you would've been right in the middle of a conversation about how great of a game eventual winner Tyson Apostol was playing. Yes, it's almost like they were leveraging the "superfan" community to write that part of the story.

Or were they letting them write their own?

I'm not a fan of Tyson. It's nothing personal. I don't know the guy, only his edited character on television. I've followed him on Twitter since Heroes vs Villains and felt the same way about most of his tweets that I've felt about his confessionals. Every once in awhile I chuckle, usually I shake my head and appreciate the intent.

As a communicator, the way Tyson says things intrigues me. He works hard to create an ethos of nonchalant investment through subtly deriding some absurdity of what he's doing or likes. His favorite target of these quips is himself. The day of the finale he tweeted, "Pretty sick on the day of the #Survivor finale. Similar, I would suspect, to Michael Jordan during the '96 NBA finals." Surely it's meant to be taken in jest because there's no way he'd be calling himself the Michael Jordan of Survivor...except he is calling himself the Michael Jordan of Survivor. Saying it in jest makes it easier for the audience to accept it. It's a clever approach that I enjoy a lot more than the content inside of it.

My favorite moment from the finale was when Tyson broke down and cried after the vote reading. Most winners whoop and jump around. The moment is the realization of a joy they knew was possible and made happen. For Tyson it seemed more like a release. He openly admitted at the Final Tribal Council that he didn't think he had a chance at winning at the start. Many of his confessionals echoed that belief, as he discussed the game getting away from him in previous seasons. As he wept, he seemed to let go of all the frustrations and apprehension that I'm accustomed to seeing from him. I enjoyed the moment because I finally understood and appreciated what the victory meant to him, I just wish that I was told the story of him building to that release.

The story I was told was a Culpepper sandwich with the Morretts and Baskaukases between the bread. Early on, we saw Brad Culpepper struggle to become the shield he promised Monica he would be (and surely has been during their entire marriage). His aggressive play and claim on a leadership position thrust Monica into the spotlight until he left. Similarly, Vytas Baskaukas excelled in letting others take the spotlight and the axe but it was his brother Aras' strong leadership skills and history of success in the game that did him in. Post-merge, Laura Morrett saw her game end when her daughter Ciera decided she couldn't win as long as her mother was there attracting attention to the two of them.

At the end of their games, each pair was given a catharsis by the editors. The Brothers Baskaukas seem to have worked through their rivalry to a new found respect. Laura witnessed her daughter blossoming into an independent and confident woman. What happened to the Culpeppers? Their dynamic became the subject of the finale.

As the numbers whittled down, Monica became the swing vote and only player who could possibly stop the Big Bad Wolf from blowing houses down. Over and over she asserted that she was playing for Monica, sometimes following up that claim with a contradictory assertion of selflessness. All her posturing culminated at the Final Tribal Council when the jury forcefully confronted her with a seemingly basic question, "Who is Monica?" In her own way, Monica admitted that she didn't know. It was truly compelling, and sometimes difficult, to watch.

I completely felt for Monica. I wanted the jury to lay off of her. I didn't understand what more Laura wanted when she asked for "vulnerability" after Monica had just bared her soul about her role in her husband and son's lives. I was relieved when Hayden had the class to explain to Monica what they were all confused about (and pained when Monica took it as another attack when it wasn't). At the end of it all, I wanted Monica to win so she could have the title of Sole Survivor to start building her independent identity on, but she was never going to. Regardless of my feelings on Tyson, this season was his and the story should've been his too.

Many of the "superfans" (a self-ascribed label that seems to mean a much-deeper-than-typical engagement with the show) did see the story as being Tyson's from early on. Similarly, they saw One World's story being about Kim and Redemption Island's story being about Andrea early on. Two out of three times now, they've correctly uncovered the winner. Zero times have they done it by taking the show as it is.

Tyson's win, like Cochran's the season before, is a superfan's dream come true. The game has had a huge impact on his life yet he never thought he'd win it. Hell, host Jeff Probst never thought Tyson would win it. He said as much pre-game, asserting people wouldn't respect Tyson enough because he is mainly about having fun. That persona is exactly what he cultivates to belie what it all means to him.

Just like superfans, Survivor means more to Tyson than I suspect we'll ever know or understand. It's why they wanted him to win. Before this season, he wasn't a historic Survivor legend like Boston Rob Mariano. His inclusion in his second season Heroes vs Villains was curious and his performance in it short lived. Now after his third season, he is a legend and a victor--and it took him one less season than Rob to become the latter. That fact is what the superfans will remember this season for.

Me? I'll remember Aras and Vytas' parallels with Jacob and the Man in Black on LOST, Laura's struggle to balance her desire to win with her desire to see her daughter win, and Monica's tears that came with her fight to assert herself. All of it taught me what helped Tyson win--you have to make sure your relationships in life fuel you, not cause you anguish.

That was the story of Blood vs Water. Maybe I'm a superfan for analyzing the editing on such an in-depth level to uncover themes (and for meeting players like the tall-as-fuck Aras). Maybe that means I'm supposed to be happy Tyson won. Though I tip my hat to and congratulate him on the feat, I'm still glad I'm not glad. Maybe that means you'll call me a casual derisively under your breath (or in secret Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms groups).

Say what you will. I love the balance I've found. Twice a year I'm told a story that enriches my life on a professional and personal level--a story that shows me what it truly means to survive.