Friends and Monsters
Thoughts after visiting with old friends, playing pinball, and reading Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
[Content warning: this post references the horrific abuses committed by Roman Polanski, Pablo Picasso, and Woody Allen against girls and women.]
Last week, old friends visited for a few days on their way to a college reunion. Since they live far away, this visit every 5 years is the only time I see them in person (except for that time I visited them and brought a bad cold). It’s always a delight, but it was even moreso this year because they were my first non-family houseguests since the start of COVID. Over cups of coffee at the kitchen table (half-caff because we’re old old friends now), we talked about books, movies, politics, and various alarming trends in American life. Since they’re both doctors, I also brought up my recent chronic insomnia. It seems connected with my thyroid meds; or maybe it’s the result of too much late-night screen time, or too much history roiling together with current turbulence.
Along with the food for thought, we ate plenty of real food and spent a fun afternoon at the Pinball Museum. I’m not very good at pinball, but skill doesn’t matter when you have unlimited plays. The machines, which date from 1932-2019, are lined up wall to wall with their start buttons unlocked. M. noted that the tilt alarms seemed to be turned off, too. (My grasp of triangulation is frail enough that I declined to try shaking the machines.) Some of the oldest machines were cringe-y in theme, while the newest were so darkly flashy that they should carry a seizure warning. The ones in the middle were just right. My favorite was the Dr. Who TARDIS with its familiar, spooky-cheerful soundtrack. Bouncing from machine to machine, I felt like the sidekick of a Time Lord sampling the past: when a monster roared and the last ball fell down the hole, I could always start over. It was fun without stakes. And yep, you can go out for fish tacos and then come back to play more.
Back to the food for thought: one of our kitchen-table topics was real-life monsters. How should we live in response to the threat of evil strangers? Though we were all on the same page about the preventable madness of school shootings, M. thinks kids should be able to walk to school in the fresh air instead of traveling in a sealed car between sealed buildings. Statistically, he noted, child kidnappings are far rarer than the clickbait media wants us to believe. And factually, that’s true. I’d still err on the side of caution, though, if I had a school-age child. Somehow, fear trumps statistics in the U.S. when it comes to the relatively rare threat of kidnappings but not the exploding threat of school shootings. On the other hand, that division may be an illusion, too: most Americans support stricter gun laws.
Another hard question is what we should do when our heroes turn out to be monsters. A couple of weeks before their visit, M. and J. sent me a copy of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by critic Claire Dederer. It’s based on her viral 2017 essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” Since I didn’t read it in time to talk about it during the visit, I’ll offer some thoughts here at the virtual kitchen table.
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