Sympathy for the devil

(This post is about Black Swan Green and doesn't really apply to Sag Harbor. Sorry about that. I had this 90% written about three weeks ago but never had the time to finish until now.)

I have to admit I'm a sucker for the sad villain. There's something a bit crushing about seeing the person who's just been making our hero's life hell get too caught up in their own problems to bother. For one thing, if our hero is already feeling down, it nullifies any chance of getting out -- even the worst people in the world aren't any freer or more powerful (or whatever else it is we admire in the truly awful) than the rest of us schmucks. More positively there's the cliche of a villain revealed to be doing his evil in response to some sadness or loneliness or trauma that they aren't able to otherwise deal with. This is the one that always offers the possibility of the good guys and the bad guys making up once the heroes are able to fix whatever it is that ails the baddies.

The point is that it's an emotional affair whenever the facade slips from our bullies. We surge between disappointment, relief, and vindictiveness. Just think about when Jason finds Ross's wallet. At first he doesn't see anything wrong with it, because to him Ross is just this heartless monster. He's excited to be able to stick it to him like this. Then, he sees the argument with Dawn, where Ross stands like "a man in a movie." After that he hears about how violent Ross's dad is, and finds out why there's so much money in the wallet. With each step in this process, Jason starts to sympathize more and more with Ross, to the point where he gives the wallet back. But it's not because he wants to -- in fact, he spends the whole chapter trying to convince himself not to do it. "Why should I feel bad... After what Wilcox's done to me?", that kind of thing. When he finally does it, his only real explanation is to say "As usual, I didn't know how to reply to him. Poor kid." The confusion that Ross has always made Jason feel turns from something intimidating to something pitiful, because Jason has gotten a glimpse of what's underneath.

There's a Stephen Fry interview I saw once where he explains that the difference between American and British comedy is that Americans want to see the hero put himself above everyone else, and show the villain up, whereas the British want to see someone pathetic drag everyone else down with him. I actually don't think is entirely true anymore (the interview was fairly old), but it's definitely a trend I've noticed. Extending it to protagonists more generally, we can see Mitchell sitting firmly on the "British" side of the argument. Just compare the angles of attack from Holden and Jason: both are deeply insecure, but Holden deals with it by putting himself above all the "phonies" around him (at least to us; he talks big but it's made clear that he doesn't necessarily think he's much better than any of the people he criticizes, which is what makes Catcher very different from a John Wayne movie or whatever), whereas Jason tries to find what's actually similar between himself and the people he dislikes -- usually pretty successfully. He does have his one big moment where he smashes Neal Brose's calculator, but aside from that he's able to find sadness in everyone from Mr. Blake, to his dad, to Ross Wilcox.

What's scary about popular masculinity -- what ultimately bothers Jason about Margaret Thatcher, or Cousin Hugo -- is the show of limitless confidence. Its a wanting to know everything, to win every argument, to be wanted by everyone, to come out of every fight without a scratch, and beneath it all the belief that you deserve it. It means believing that you are the person on the top of the pyramid, and that no matter what other people do they'll never even be able to budge you. It means winning effortlessly. The problem with that is that Jason tries, from the very beginning. He wants to be the Pluto Noak or Tom Yew, but he knows that to get to their position he'll have to hide the parts of himself which don't measure up, and which will never measure up. If somehow he actually got to be where Ross Wilcox is in the middle of the novel, he'd be constantly paranoid about being found out for the maggot he is. He knows all of this already, which is why he mostly settles for the middle, but every time he has a chance to elevate himself he starts to play the part, telling off Dean and saying "bugger" in class.

What ultimately allows him to escape this hierarchy is his realization that self-hatred is implicit in "incomplete" masculinity, and that it'll never will never go away because you'll never reach a "final" masculinity. There's always someone smarter, there's always someone tougher (as Grant Burch discovers repeatedly), there's always someone to suck up to. It's a bleak world if you want to be a man. What ultimately lets him see this is the lapses of the two people who most threaten his masculinity, his dad and Ross Wilcox. If they can't do it, nobody can -- and maybe that means it's okay to be like Dean.