Volume 3, Issue 5: We Aren't the World
"Have you seen any mention? It’s been quiet in detention all week."
Thank you, everyone, for all the stories you’ve been sending for the daily CV Stories version of this newsletter. Please keep them coming. We are dropping down to two installments a week rather than four; they will run Mondays and Wednesdays. Email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. If you missed Thursday’s, you will like it.
The movie Dogtooth, the breakthrough film from The Lobster and The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos, is about two demented, dictatorial parents who are so overprotective of their children that they raise them in a fenced-in compound cut off from the rest of the world. The entire film grows out of their desire to keep the children convinced that the outside planet does not exist. The parents make up a language that gives incorrect vocabulary definitions for things that exist outside the compound so they will have no concept of what they are; “Sea” is the leather chair with wooden arm rests like the one in the living room. Example: don’t remain standing, sit down in the sea to have a chat.” (The word “phone” means “salt shaker.”) A stray cat wanders into their garden, and the father describes it as a monster who has eaten their unseen, actually fictional brother they’ve never met. When the kids see a plane flying overhead, the parents explain it away by throwing toy planes into the yard; the ones up above, you see, are just ones that haven’t fallen yet, like leaves. The parents justify it all as necessary protection of the ones they love the most—the only way to keep them safe. The primary conflict of the film comes when the children, now in their early 20s and no longer children at all, begin to finally question this reality. It is the first time in their lives they have done so.
For obvious reasons, this story about a family locked in a house together, cut off from the outside world, has been on my mind in the last few weeks.
In many ways, we are all in the Dogtooth family’s ideal circumstances. With the world undergoing a cascading tragedy of public health crisis, the most effective remedy is to do the one thing obsessive parents already want to do anyway: Keep their children home, close … near. There is no outside world to corrupt or imperil the children. As long as they stay in here with us, they are safe, and we can control their environment and circumstances in ways we’ve never been able to before. They are stuck in this house with us for the foreseeable future. We are the medium and the message.
That crazy Dogtooth home now has more than passing similarities to everyone’s home. And while Lanthimos’ universe has a terrifying logic to it that inevitably leads to madness—the film culminates in someone knocking out their own tooth with a hammer, and it actually makes rational sense in the moment—it is worth noting how quickly, in this real world, that children adapt to their new reality. They’re much, much better at it than we are.
People have constantly been talking about adjusting to the “New Normal” of this pandemic. But children are adjusting to New Normals all the time. There isn’t a day in a kid’s life that doesn’t feature at least one paradigm-shattering realization that alters their entire worldview, whether it’s understanding object permanence, learning that the people on their favorite television show are actors and thus only pretending, finding out that great-grandpa can’t live forever or simply getting stung by a wasp. There is an undeniable urge for all of us adults to find our way through this and then get back to regular life, The Way It Was Before; I have found as I get older that it has become much less important to obtain than it is to maintain. Thus, as I mentioned last week, we all feel frozen in this moment.
But the children aren’t frozen at all. They’ve already moved on. They’ve already adjusted to whatever this is. Sure, they’re a pain in the ass like all children are children can uniquely be. But they’re a pain in the ass like they always are. They’ve already reverted back to who they were. This is just another thing.
I feel what they are missing much more than they do. It is heartbreaking to me what my kids have already lost. They are in the second grade and kindergarten, and they're sociable and outgoing and silly. They have a wide circle of friends, and already, when I’d take them to school, they would both run far ahead of me to hug them and dance around and scream and just act like little kids. They also have incredible teachers at a wonderful, diverse, welcoming public school I’m proud to have in my neighborhood. William had organized a surprisingly complicated basketball league for the kids at recess; Wynn was taking taekwondo lessons after school and could not wait to “get the yellow belt.” They were thriving, and they were thriving in an environment that I considered perfect for them. Just walking through that school every morning made me feel better about the universe, and my children’s place in it.
That has been taken away from them, and it kills me. But the thing is: The kids are fine. They really are. Their entire reality has changed. They’re doing most of their classwork on the computer now. They haven’t seen any of their friends in weeks. Their parents are around all the time. (And every once in a while they’ll see those parents, after these parents look at the news, get really, really quiet for a while.)
But they’ve just rolled with it. They just nod, accept it and get on to the next thing. They’re not just resilient; they’re downright malleable. They just mold into whatever they need to be at the moment. Yesterday, the world was like this; now it’s different, now it’s like this. That constant disruption is terrifying and disorienting for the rest of us. But that’s the reality kids face all the time. This is what they’re best at.
This can be weaponized, and not just by Dogtooth parents. Children will believe whatever world you put in front of them, and that can leads to trauma that lasts the rest of their lives. It’s a large part of our job to try to remain as calm as we can so we don’t have them internalizing the anxiety that we’re feeling every minute of every day.
But they may need less of our help than I think. Wynn drew a picture the other day of him punching “Coronavirus” in the face. (Coronavirus looked like a dragon, or maybe more like fusilli with wings.) He then laughed, pulled down his pants and started doing My Booty Dance. It’s becoming increasingly clear who’s helping whom here.
You learn all sorts of things you didn’t know about yourself when you’re a parent, and my discovery has been that I’m more overprotective than I would have thought. William has started riding his bicycle around the neighborhood by himself, and he and his mother have learned just not to tell me when he does this because Daddy gets so antsy about it. I hear a story about someone being mean to Wynn on the playground and until I get calmed down I want to burn down the entire world even though Wynn simply told the kid he was a jerk and moved on with his day. It can get disturbing: When we lived in Brooklyn and pushed him as a baby in a stroller down the Promenade, I used to have this insane fear that a random deranged stranger would attack us, pick up the stroller and fling it onto the BQE. It’s not one of my favorite qualities about myself. But it’s real. I get this. I deeply understand the desire to shelter them from the scary outside planet, to isolate them from all the sadness and suffering that is out there, suffering that is impossible to escape from right now. There is that part of me that sees utility and value in this bubble. They are home, and they are near, and they are safe … or at least as safe as I can make them.
But they are fine. They do not need me to save them from anything. They are strong boys and they are proud and smart and kind and ready for whatever the world can throw at them. They are more powerful than I realize. They are more powerful than me.
The bubble is imaginary, and probably harmful. And even in quarantine, they are poking their heads outside this bubble in ways I could not control even if I wanted to. William’s new school-issued computer has Google access, and he called me into his new makeshift classroom while he was working the other day.
“Daddy … you have a Wikipedia page?” Discovering the molten world of online discourse was something I’d always dreaded my children doing. All it took was a pandemic.
You can try to protect the children from the outside world. But they don’t need protection. They just need trust, and love, and a whole lot of faith. Everyone’s realities are going to shift even more than they already have in the coming weeks. I don’t need my children to look to me for guidance. I need to be looking to them.
Though I’ll be sorting through those Google filters anyway. These kids don’t need to learn everything just yet.
Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.
Baseball Year in Review: 2003, MLB.com. Remember years in which there was, in fact, baseball is doing me a lot of good these days.
Sports Has Reached Its Biodome Phase of Desperation, New York. As much as I’d love to watch football games in a floating city in the sky, if the NFL can make one of those, I think the rest of us could use one a bit more.
Better Know a Ballplayer: Wally Joyner, MLB.com. Actually got a nice email from Mr. Joyner about this one. He was raving about his grandchildren, which made me feel way too old.
What To Watch Instead: Mulan, Vulture. Eventually we will run out of movies they have postponed.
What To Watch Instead: The New Mutants, Vulture. But not yet!
The Thirty: Every Team’s Best Player of the Last 25 Years, MLB.com. These are of course almost always the most popular pieces I do.
PODCASTS
Grierson & Leitch, we looked back at the movie year of 1989, and also “Crip Camp” and “Margaret.”
Seeing Red, no show this week
Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.
LAUGH THAT I NEEDED THIS WEEK
New feature! This is just something that made me laugh this week, which is coming in handy these days.
This isn’t new, but it knocks me over every time: Jared Kushner with Gilbert Gottfried’s voice, from “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.”
Now that Jared is apparently in charge of saving us, I beg Oliver to do this feature every week.
MAILBAG
We take one question a week around these parts: Send yours to williamfleitch@yahoo.com. This one, sent last November, comes from Dan McCue, Grinnell, Iowa:
Will,
What’s one thing that’s giving you hope right now for 2020?
I included this one just so we could all ruefully shake our heads.
ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!
I’ve caught back up. I find value in having tangible letters during this time. So send 'em:
Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO
“Someone to Love,” Fountains of Wayne. Yeah, these guys are obviously in heavy rotation right now.
We’re making a quarantine album. Here’s the cover:
Voices of a generation.
Be safe out there, everyone. We can do this.
Best,
Will