A certain kind of helplessness has always been part of our arrangement at the movies. After all, we did nothing to save Marion Crane. That poor, pretty woman had been set up from the start. Don’t we feel that as she keeps undressing? So it’s hardly a surprise after 40 minutes that she steps into a shower and finds a knife waiting for her. Not our fault, we said, as we staggered out of Psycho. And there was no one in the lobby waiting to arrest us as accessories to murder.
Well, of course not, you are saying — don’t be silly; don’t be absurd! How were we responsible, or able to intervene in that beautifully calculated slaughter? It was just a movie, spasms on a screen, in another realm. The motel called itself Fairvale in northern California. Try looking that up. It doesn’t exist.
But I can’t help wondering whether watching from the dark has groomed us in our cold-blooded helplessness. Is it that in preferring to watch, we have felt the advancing grip of our distance, or apathy?
***
It was the summer of 2026 — so hot in so many places, with the water running low — but there was a chill in the air.
This is how it felt. On some mornings you could say, it can’t be long now. In every amiable Fairvale we told ourselves the writing was on the wall. His approval ratings were slipping down, in the mid thirties by then. His iron support was turning rusty. His people were growing bored with him. So many were feeling short of money while he kept boasting of how rich and golden he was. His crucial gift, his energy, was on the blink.
The best year we’ve ever had! He said.
Wait for the next election, we promised ourselves, and see the joyous return to order. Is that what you said to your children, in your shower, or to yourself? As if all the spilled water and blood could be coaxed back in the bottle, and the screwtop made tight again. The way things always worked in the past.
After all, how could the greatest nation on Earth (that phrase is copyrighted, but I’ll take a chance with it) sit back and let a monster of greed and self-glory run amok? How could we not see that he was a champion in the contest for the worst ever, reliable only in being wrong about everything, a leader who hated us (because we were not him — the gravest offense in the gaze of Narcissus)? How could we stand living with him when our one protection was not a court or a congress but his constant incompetence?
No one could deny much of this. We had had time enough to get to know him. Hadn’t we voted for him twice? Hadn’t that made our idiocy clear? Wasn’t that a glimpse of our apathy, just sitting in the dark watching it all happen? Saying there’s nothing I can do.
In that summer of 2026 there was a lassitude, as if it was hard for us to get up out of our seats in the dark. We were so accustomed to whatever went on, like people in a theater watching the movie play, and knowing that some machine was grinding it out so that there was no point in crying “Stop!” or intervening. You see, no matter how profoundly the spasms on the screen may move us — and we have had lovely moments; remember Fred Astaire — still we cannot get into the picture and dance with Fred. We are only onlookers when maybe we went into the dark and took our seats hoping we were significant.
So we would be alright again (never mind great) — because to be alright is so sweet, and a chance to relax. The most annoying thing he had done was simply to block the alright and the have a nice day. He had killed ease and relaxing. He had imposed a suppressed nervous breakdown on all of us, a mixture of dismay and exhaustion, a broad daylight darkness that was always there as our phone — that faithful screen — broke the news and our hearts every day.
So lassitude set in, and we told ourselves to make the best of things before he was over, before proper transmission was resumed. And sometimes we were a little wry and fatalistic — irony can be rather cute, and it passes the time — as if to admit we knew, beyond reality and metaphor, how we were truly in the dark.
And it was part of that dark that the forces on our side could seem fragile or achingly tired. So many of us were reduced to “unsubscribe” just to be free of the daily plea of candidates who wanted a mere but constant $3, our signature, or a hundred stallions (with a matching grant for oats and the blacksmith), to maintain the fight that had to be fought. There was a decline in the number of people who turned out for more protest marches, and even marches themselves stopped happening. After all, it was a hot summer and there was allure in going to the beach and watching the endless ocean. A worry had arisen, who knew if it might be the last beach of your life? It was the summer of The Odyssey, but we stayed home.
Home was not going well, however. The organization of the opposition party — our people? — was reported in disarray. The party, the official set-up, had funding troubles. Candidates were abandoned because dead bodies and ideas had been sniffed out in their closets. The possible leaders (those who might be a new HE!) were measured in their drawbacks. And in the anxiety to win whatever contest it would be, we realized that so many suitors to Penelope were actually unsuited — because they were gay, female, black, old, young, radical, alive. Was there not one person, halfway photogenic and vacant, who could be reckoned charismatic enough to fit the bill? “How can anyone be charismatic yet vacant?” you ask. We’re getting there.
Hadn’t Joe Biden once slipped a notch or two past cognition — past being able to admit that he was no longer equipped to be our leader? Vacancy is a tricky thing. How was our opposition and vitality to get over that fatal failure, and face itself in the mirror as fit to be on a screen delivering the speeches?
***
How was any Fairvale to digest the whispered rumor that our defining laws — the documents of the great project — were like a cheese with so many holes. It was not just a matter of repeating the adage that democracy was the best of all the worst forms of government. Was it a matter of understanding that our electoral system was poised for corruption, interference and all the injunctions and dead ends that would nullify a fair election? Was it possible that the foundational principles of American originality were humbug?
More than that, wasn’t it likely that he — under pressure — would see that his only move was to declare some state of emergency. With a court that would back him up, as was its habit, or in an emergency so complete that the court itself might be retired?
There were Fairvales that said this was impossible, or ought not to be allowed — or what are we meant to do? In Fairvale the majority opinion was that it would prefer not to. Prefer not to do what? Whatever. The lassitude overlapped with a premonition of defeat or concession. Some said the protest marches are beside the point. The only thing that would impede the monstrousness was a general strike. What is that? It is a time when some kind of “everyone” takes to the street, abandons their role in the economy, and sits down on the ground to block the intersections in traffic, business and social media presence.
“You mean I have to get up and not sit down?” we ask. “I can’t stay seated in the dark? I have to take the chance that I will be seized and beaten by uniforms, that I may be arrested and put in hideous cells? That’s not very nice.”
But it may need to be done in such numbers that the arrests make their own jam of bodies as they become more than all the ICE camps can contain.
By then, or even a little sooner, he may have addressed the nation, and said he had the answer — hasn’t he always had the answers so that we were supposed to ignore the science of questions? But what he needs is an ultimate state of emergency, one that trumps all the others. A United States of Emergency. And he is not always an idiot. So he may come to the sad conclusion. “That’s what they’re telling me,” he’ll say (he can do gravity in his lamentation sing-song voice) “that the best thing about a war in a shithole desert region is that you can drop a big one without the damage getting out of hand.” Do you believe he has the grace, the charity and forgetfulness, that would hold back from that? That would prefer not to? Having to decide is a big gamble.
Yes, you’re right, you can smell satire in the morning, like napalm. I’m playing at Apocalypse – and that movie genre is more popular than ever. (We can kill millions now that it’s only CGI; aren’t you nostalgic for Michael Corleone telling Robert Duvall they could kill anyone?). So summon your last courage in taking on the gamble of saying it won’t really happen, will it? Isn’t it pretty to think so?
If that amounts to realism, or madness (at the end, we won’t know one from the other), it may be clear that since 1945 at least we have been playing a game called Distractions. It has amounted to a steady face off between those who have and those who have not, between a handful and the multitudes. Or even him against all of us. I know, it’s sort of Marx Brothers that the American project should come down to a God against the rest of us. Christopher Nolan guessed it: the gods are coming home for a finale.
In our rising dismay, we don’t have to go to the movies. The big shows are out there all around us, with simple punchy titles, like Epstein or Iran. They have all been blockbusters for a weekend or two, before they get edged out for the next coming attraction, that might be Warming, or AI, or … the latest comedy? I’ll predict, it’s Arizona getting 40% less water. Let’s call it Dry.
Of course, this is fantasy, a noir romance. It could have its weekend. But the desert is waiting and watching our show. It knows it has always prevailed.
***
“Let me get this straight. Are we talking a movie or a series?”
“We’re still open at this point.”
“Open makes me nervous.”
“These are unsettling times. Christian Bale is interested in playing the producer.”
“The guy who’s putting the show together?”
“And we open it just as Trump goes into retirement.”
“This is farce, noir farce? Help me with the concept.”
“We’re saying screwball disaster.”
“And the producer, our guy, he’s having a breakdown?”
“When he has the time. Being on deadline keeps him busy.”
“Tell me about that.”
“It’s high comedy with a shot of horror. Or vice versa. We’re going to fit Olivia Wilde in.”
“Who does she play?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll cook up a girl.”
“I don’t believe I’m sitting here talking about this.”
“Got it. That’s why we want Seth Rogen playing you.”
“You’re sure Trump would do this? He looks so tired now.”
“For a ton of money he’ll do it. He wants to keep his movie going. You know how many twenties there are in a ton?”
“He’ll want script approval?”
“Know what he said — he can make you laugh — he said, ‘Makes no difference. I never follow the script.’ ”
“How many is it, in a ton?”
“Nine hundred and eighteen thou.”
“I am seeing it as a movie.”
“How so?”
“You can’t do the end of the world as a series. Not if you want to be renewed. That’s 18 mill?”
“He’s cheap at that price…”
***