THE CRAFTMAN'S EGO

WARNING: The following post is quite possibly the most self-indulgent post I've ever written... and that's saying A LOT! If you're not in the mood to contemplate the vast watseland that is my psyche, please skip this. Thank you.

I watched one of my favorite movies last night-- Rushmore with Bill Murray. I'm a big fan of Wes Anderson-- Bottle Rocket was great, The Royal Tenenbaums was cool, and I have yet to go see The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou or whatever it's called...

Rushmore is great because the lead character, Max Fischer (played by Jason Schwartzmann) is almost exactly how I pictured my favorite original character, Fabian Rourke, to look and act: bespectacled, egocentric, delusional, arrogant...

...narcissistic.

Max stages plays for the kids at Rushmore (a prestigious private school) that are extravagant, over-the-top productions; he has a crush on one of his schoolteachers and honestly thinks that he stands a chance with her; Max thinks very highly of himself but glosses over the "flaws" in his background, such as the fact that his father is a barber; and it turns out that Max doesn't even really go to Rushmore.

I instantly liked Rushmore because I could relate to Max. There but for the grace of God go I, I thought to myself when I first saw it. I was like that as a kid. I remember being told I was precocious, thinking myself on the same level as the adults in my life. In many ways, I was on their level, but it didn't take away from the fact that I lacked life experience.

Before I ever saw Wes Anderson's movie, I constructed the character of Fabian Rourke from the ashes of my adolescence. I used him in my short stories and had him fall prey to the naivete that befell so many kids like myself who think themselves a legend in their own mind as a defense against cruel reality (Max never seems to catch on to his own dorkiness, and it gets explained eventually that he lost his mother to cancer at an early age)...

Fabian Rourke was based on myself at age 16: matted long hair, thick glasses, surly attitude, projecting intensity, armed with a quick wit and a need to shock and infuriate everyone around me. I defied expectations on purpose, because it was so easy. For example, my peers thought I was a stoner because of my long hair, but I didn't even try drugs until I was 17 going on 18. I was seen as a ticking time bomb, but upon reflection I don't think I could've hurt a fly back then...

The first short story I wrote with Fabian Rourke as a main character was called "The Good Life", which also introduced other characters that I had crafted in my mind, characters I still use today: Robert River, Kelly Paper, Rachel Edison, and Tom Fargo are a few. Robert was the main character, and the story revolved around his relationship with his father, James River, and his girlfriend at the time, Rachel. Fabian was the comic relief, designed to steal the scenes when the humor was lacking. After a while, I started to like Fabian, and decided to delve into his background a bit.

I wrote my next short story, entitled "Little Girls", but it never got past the second draft. This story focused on Kelly, Rachel and Fabian's early high school years, and their respective coming-of-age sexual dilemmas. It was supposed to be a satire that poked holes in America's prudish view of sex, especially among teens. Rachel has an affair with an English teacher; Kelly discovers that her good looks make her "popular"; and Fabian gets picked up and seduced by an older woman, but finds that none of his friends believe him when he tells them of his encounter.

Once again, I found myself pouring the majority of my emotions into Fabian, and so I decided to start the third story in what was supposed to be a "trilogy"-- do you see the comparisons to Max Fischer already? Such lofty aspirations for a bunch of short stories that I never even bothered to shop around to publishers or agents.

The third story would be told strictly from Fabian's POV, in the first-person. But as I started writing this story, in my mid-twenties, I realized that I had a lot more to say. The story evolved into my first full-length novel, "Free Time", the first third of which I have had linked to this blog for the past two years or so.

The story ran away from me. It got bigger than I ever intended. The third story in the trilogy ended up being a trilogy within itself, and changed from a first-person to a third-person narrative about halfway through. The story is Fabian's story, written as he begins a transformation into one of his own fictional characters, whom he named Jimmy Drawers...

Confused yet?

Anyway, I bring all of this up because, as I watched Rushmore last night, I thought about how I was relating to what is possibly the narcissistic reflections of Wes Anderson himself, mixed in with Owen Wilson's contributions to the script. Let's face it-- very few fictional characters are born of their creators independently. Obviously, not every character ever created is necessarily an autobiographical extension of the author, but at the same time everyone who writes knows that there are autobiographical elements in every character, no matter how much of a distance is placed between the creator and his/her creation.

Take Thomas Harris as an example: he is not a cannibal or a serial killer or an FBI profiler in real life, but he infused his characters with his own personality. As a result, Hannibal Lecter is one of the most memorable fictional characters in recent literary history. When Silence Of The Lambs was made into an excellent movie, Anthony Hopkins' performance seared Lecter into the collective consciousness of the cinema world, but it's the character of Lecter that people like. It can be argued that Lecter is simply a wish-fulfillment on behalf of Harris, a uniquely amoral personality that defies description. Lecter is not a villain nor a hero in the traditional sense. He is not a mere psychopath or sociopath-- this is made clear all throughout Harris' Lecter novels. Lecter is noble and savage at the same time, an anti-hero who commits horrible atrocities and elicits no pity.

It's clear that Harris likes Lecter just as much as his fans do, because Lambs was the second book that featured the good doctor. The third book, Hannibal, was written with an eventual screen treatment in mind.

Like Anne Rice's Lestat, Hannibal Lecter has a mass appeal that even the authors themselves cannot deny. If the authors didn't admire their creations in a narcissistic fashion, they would feel no compunction to revive them for subsequent stories. Only hacks and authors who are "only in it for the money" ever do things that like, whoring out their popular creations for the filthy lucre: Mickey Spillaine's Mike Hammer and Ian Fleming's James Bond come to mind in this respect.

But then again, I suspect that Spillaine and Fleming also saw their popular creations as extensions of their own narcissistic tendencies. Indeed, the late great Terry Southern wrote a great piece of gonzo journalism entitled "I Am Mike Hammer!" back in the '60's, which centered on a film adaptation of one of Spillaine's detective novels... with the proposition of Spillaine playing the hard-boiled Mike Hammer himself!

This led Southern to humorously ruminate over other authors who might do the same. Indeed, the character of Guy Grand from Southern's classic novel The Magic Christian could be seen as a stand-in for the mischievious author, and perhaps Southern knew this implicitly.

So last night I found myself pondering my own reflection in the mirror that is Max Fischer, whom (I suspect) was designed as a mirror for either Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson... or both of them.

And that's the power of art in our popular culture, people. We find ourselves gazing lovingly into mirrors that were crafted not only for our entertainment but for the edification of the craftman's ego.

And then I thought about this passage, culled from the introduction of my novel, written many years ago:

"...I can't seem to tell a decent story because they all lead back to me. They say write what you know, but I doubt if I really know myself. So why am I constantly writing about myself? Because I'm a narcissist, that's why. I want to propagandize more than entertain. I want to see the lovers in the balcony of the theater of life swoon as I dictate passages and cast the audience in the part of passive listeners who are also narcissists. I want to turn the mirror that I gaze at myself with onto everybody else within eyeshot, so that they may also feel as guilty as I do about loving themselves for no reason that the world can give."

I think that sums it all up for me. I am self-indulgent not only for my own navel-gazing purposes, but also because I want to tap into that intersection of thought where your thoughts are aligned with mine. Yes, you may not have anything in common with me as a human being, but somewhere in the mix there is a tangential point where we all agree upon at least one thing, and my stories are attempts to map out those points so that others can relate and touch something that is both alien and familiar to them.

The challenge of an author or writer is to create as many of these points as possible, provided that they all come together at one all-encompassing point. I try writing different characters from all walks of life, but in the end they all come out sounding like me. The trick is to make them seem like I wrote them to sound like you.

I don't know if I've ever done that. I don't know if I've ever been able to make a reader think about their own self instead of me.

But I guess I don't have to worry about it, as long as I keep writing and enjoying it. And believe me, I do enjoy it. Writing gives me immense pleasure. It functions as therapy, yes, but really-- I like telling stories. And if it seems like all I ever do is tell stories about myself, keep in mind that the stories and scenarios I have to tell have happened to others who were here long before me, and will continue to happen to others who come around long after I'm dead and gone.

Until my time is done, please do me a favor and take a look into this mirror that I have created. Hopefully, you won't just see me-- you might see yourself as well... at least, that is one of my fondest hopes.