Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the essay of the week - a kind of survey of artists’ attempts to grapple with evil in the Putin era. I actually wrote this a few years ago and have updated it only slightly. It’s interesting to me how much I was working to justify some reading of the macro-importance of Putin - at the time he just seemed like some far-off problem. This essay takes an approach that I’m fond of - which is to pick up on a similar idea in a few different inspired works of art and to see if that idea threads together into some coherent shape.
Best,
Sam
WOLVES AT THE GATES: A WAVE OF ARTISTS GRAPPLE WITH THE VORACIOUSNESS OF POWER
There’s a curious character in the third season of the FX show Fargo – V.M. Varga. Varga is pasty Britisher, a rumpled luftmensch, given to historical anecdotes and passé attitudes – the demeanor, generally, of a functionary holding forth in a Colonial bar. Varga runs an international criminal enterprise dedicated to strip-mining companies for their wealth, which he converts into offshore profits. He is a pure capitalist with an ironclad view of how-the-world-really-works: “human beings have no inherent value other than the money they earn,” is a typical pronouncement. At the same time, he approvingly quotes Vladimir Lenin, he keeps a portrait of Stalin over the desk in his villain’s lair, and it is implied that his organization has had its roots in Russia – “Putin’s done some great things, but you have to know which palms to grease” (a line, incidentally, that was censored out of the show when it aired in Russia) – before branching out internationally, and, at the moment the show begins, setting up shop in Minnesota.
Fargo, in general (both the original Coen Brothers movie and the FX series), is a kind of case study on the nature of evil, and Varga, in the third season, isn’t meant to just be a conveniently hateable villain – he really is an incarnation of evil itself. In the movie and the first couple of seasons, evil is linked to the woods and the land – it’s Peter Stormare’s strong, silent character in the movie mashing up his ex-partners in the woodchipper; it’s Lorne Malvo, the wolfman from the television show’s first season, with his insatiable appetite either to kill or, best of all, to manipulate others into killing (“I haven’t had a slice of pie like that since the Garden of Eden,” he says at one point, and, in the context of the show, you’re meant to take him literally). In the third season, evil is on the march. It’s not just sociopaths stalking the fringes of society – it’s an ordered system, interwoven deep into capitalism (Varga refers to his operation, only semi-facetiously, as a private equity firm), and it’s able to rule an entire society, which, as Varga implies, is already the case in Russia.
Of course some of the portrayal of Varga is just Hollywood characterization – concocting a politically-relevant villain for a television series – but Fargo is an intelligent, perceptive show, and, in Varga (and a few other popular characters like him, most obviously Frank Underwood), it’s possible to detect a distinct way of talking about evil and power, which sees politics as pure power, and pure power as pure greed, and evil as nothing more complicated than the application of power without scruple – and, to this way of thinking, Putin’s Russia is a clear illustration of what’s coming (or of what politics is at its deepest level): the state as pure kleptocracy, with the minimum window-dressing of democracy, and with all real power inevitably in the clutches of the most ruthless. In these shows (which include Twin Peaks and True Detective along with Fargo and House of Cards), evil is demonic and elemental. There’s not much interest in analyzing the roots of evil, or figuring out the subtle moment when power crosses over into evil; and it’s largely a matter of indifference even what the political system is or who is in power. “You know what power is, it tends to corrupt,” says Francis Urquhart (Underwood’s character) in the original House of Cards, when a protégée wants to know the inner workings of power. “Under the show – the struggle for power,” Urquhart continues. “Deep down below it all; deeper than honour; deeper than pride; deeper than lust; and deeper than love – is the getting of it all, the seizing and the holding on, the jaws locked, biting into power.”
Ok, so nothing in there is exactly a new idea, but it is a departure from a sort of core assumption that I (at least) had in my devout liberal upbringing, the assumption being that questions of morality are essentially about ideology. Everybody thinks that they are doing good, is what I used to believe. “Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking that they will commit evil that day,” is how a college friend of mine put it when we were sitting around a dorm room, being idealistic. The murderous Communist regimes of the 20th century were, famously, paved with good intentions (and it’s a sort of central modern tragedy that so many brilliant, brave, well-meaning thinkers and theorists contributed to and then apologized for so many horrific regimes). Even Hitler, runs that line of thinking, was convinced that he was doing good – he had reams of theory to support his vision – and it was a sort of tenet of a proper humanistic education (at least the way I conceived it for myself) to understand where Hitler was coming from, which meant reading books like The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eichmann in Jerusalem and understanding Nazism as a logical, if deranged, extension of certain undercurrents in mainstream European thought. That way of thinking informed what was the dominant literary genre for me and for most people I grew up with: the dystopian. A dystopian imagines an upside-down world. There has been some underlying flaw in the social structure – generally the adoption of a misguided ideology – and, as a result, everybody in power is actually evil; everyone doing the ‘right thing’ according to prevailing social norms is in fact an instrument of an evil power and, consequently, evil themselves; and the only possible safeguard against evil is to be adamantly non-conformist, to be skeptical of authority, to trust one’s own conscience, and to choose the right moment to rebel in the event that society becomes irremediably corrupted by a flawed ideology. What I’m describing is something like the mid-century liberal consensus: there are no bad people, goes that thinking, only bad systems, and sometimes, through some confluence of events, the bad system seems appealing and pushes out all other mores. Accordingly, what’s important is to retain a free press, free elections, and adversarial court system, in order to prevent any one ideology from becoming predominant. Should the institutions fail and the society close itself off, responsibility for social well-being rests on heroic individuals (dissidents, partisans, refuseniks, etc), who, listening to their conscience, reset the upside-down world and put society back on track – and there were endless quotes (Martin Niemöller, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, etc, etc) about how, in the end, it is always individual choice whether to accede to a corrupt regime or to fight it. In this view, where evil is a matter of mistaken ideology, there’s a kind of implicit forgiveness towards human nature – people are fine, it’s just a matter of getting the right government, and there’s a certain pathos in everybody who, through no real fault of their own, finds themselves on the wrong side of history.
I can trace for myself how I started to become suspicious of that whole way of thinking. I was struck by the early critics of Hitler, who encountered him in Munich and believed the Nazis were fundamentally just a criminal gang (and no need to delve too deeply into their ideology); and I was surprised by the general derision of people who lived through the Soviet Union towards Westerners who persisted in seeing Soviet history as having anything to do with Communism, whereas anybody who had experienced the USSR knew that the Bolsheviks were essentially a gang, and their ideology just a smokescreen for the kleptocratic appropriation of all possible resources. I was perturbed by Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, his parable for Fascism, in which one by one all the inhabitants of a town are transformed into rhinoceroses, with the exception of the hero Bérenger – who would, it’s important to note, like to be a rhinoceros as well but somehow can’t quite achieve the transformation. His non-transformation isn’t a matter of individual courage, it’s that, when the evil comes, it is always irresistible, and has a suprahuman quality (it is, in other words, a type of possession), and it is really a matter of luck more than anything else whether or not the evil takes root in you. I was startled also by James Dickey’s description of the villains in Deliverance. “My story is simple: there are bad people, there are monsters among us…..who would just as soon shoot you as look at you,” said Dickey, which, to my liberal sensibility, seemed an abhorrent thing. How can you not look for the cause of why people are bad? ran my internal argument; how can a capable, intelligent novelist just assume that a person is bad and of themselves? But something about what I was reading in Ionesco, Dickey, etc, squared with what I was observing in adult life around me – that people don’t passionately pursue their vision of the good as the organizing principle of their lives, that people tend to adhere to the status quo and to align themselves with the powers-that-be, and not only is very little self-justification involved in the process, but there is a thrill in identifying oneself entirely with the dictates of power (just as, in the moments when the rhinoceroses proliferate in town, Bérenger’s friend, Jean, and his girlfriend, Daisy, suddenly start praising the beauty and ferocity and ‘naturalness’ of the rhinoceroses before they transform themselves).
I’m not saying that one way of understanding evil is more correct than another, but that I can feel that this transition in myself parallels a shift in the wider culture, that it has something to do with the great political case study of my life (Russia’s choice of an undemocratic, retro-totalitarian path in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s fall), and that it’s not an accident that the vision of evil-as-possession, as opposed to evil-as-misguided-ideology, keeps appearing in serious, thoughtful art. Take Twin Peaks – which, for me, is the great contemporary representation of evil (and which had such a pronounced influence on Fargo and on virtually every serious television show for the last 30 years). In Twin Peaks, the evil is ‘Bob.’ Bob is a demonic force linked to the woods, much like in Fargo. “There's a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods,” explains Sheriff Truman in the original (1990) show. “Call it what you want. A darkness, a presence. It takes many forms but….it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember.” Bob emerges from the woods by possessing people, and once the possession takes effect, there’s not really anything anybody can do, and the unfortunates possessed by Bob are capable of the worst imaginable crimes (crimes that their normal selves would be appalled by). At the next, metaphorical level, the possession is really an internal event. Even a very good person – Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks or Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet, Lynch’s breakthrough movie – can tap into the source of evil in themselves, and, once it runs through them, it’s essentially irresistible (c.f. Bad Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return or Leyland Palmer dancing giddily in the original show). The battle against evil, then, isn’t really about conscience or even strength; it’s more a matter of faith – good people (like the doughty cops of Twin Peaks and Fargo) fighting their rearguard action against the onslaught of evil and idly inquiring, when they catch a free moment, whether or not the arc of the moral universe does in fact bend towards justice. (In the various iterations of Fargo, the climactic moment features, always, a conversation between a cop and their villainous adversary. The villain has been temporarily corralled, but, from the villain’s body language, it’s clear that they expect to get free very soon and to continue to wreak havoc, and the cops, even in their moment of triumph, find themselves tongue-tied. “For what? For a little bit of money?” expostulates the cop Marge Gunderson in the original movie. “There’s more to life than money, you know. Don’t cha know that? And here you are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand it.”) In an old-style, liberally-minded show (say, The Americans or Homeland), there might be an attempt to reform the evil or get to its source – fundamentally, there is a right system and a wrong system, it’s just a matter of cracking the case or changing one’s preconceptions or in some way sorting out the grey zone in the middle – but in Twin Peaks or Fargo or True Detective, evil is a fact of nature and the best the heroes can hope for is to hold the perimeter for as long as possible.
Back to Russia. For a long time after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was the party line among Westerners writing about Russia (artists as well as wonks) to be cautiously optimistic that Russia was soon to join the community of liberal nations. There was great fun to be had in the image of the ex-Soviet Union as a Wild West, undergoing its period of disorder before a mature, dull democracy would eventually take root (c.f. Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, the Lithuania sections in Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated). Now that Putin’s bizarre kleptocratic state is showing no signs of disappearing, there’s a round of Westerners reckoning with what it means – with the general assumption being that there is now a challenger to the Western democratic capitalist state, and even with everything that’s hard-to-understand about Putin (the link to the Orthodox Church, the simultaneous celebration of Stalin and of runaway capitalism, the mischievous foreign policy), what’s very clear is that it’s a state modeled as a vision of pure strength. Putin, in this model, is an unassailably strong leader; vertical integration is complete throughout government infrastructure in a way that it’s not in the fractured West; and the image of strength (strength leavened with intimidated) accounts, far more than any pretense at good governance, for his unshakeable popularity.
Of the different attempts to explain Putin’s Russia, my long-time favorite is Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov, part-biography, part-novel, part-memoir, part-political science essay, dedicated to the rollicking career of Eduard Limonov, a Kharkov poet and thug, who became a bum in New York in the ‘70s, then wrote a book about it that made him a literary sensation in France in the ‘80s, then returned to Russia to head an extreme right-wing political party. In Carrère’s telling, there was never really a democratic spring even in the moments of euphoria after the Soviet Union’s fall. “You have to understand that we didn’t have a choice between an ideal transition to a market economy and a criminalized transition,” said Yegor Gaidar, a prime minister of the early ‘90s. “Our choice was between a criminalized transition and civil war.” For a wild man like Limonov (who would have preferred the civil war to the criminalized economy), the interesting models were Bolshevism or Nazism – his party, the National Bolsheviks, was a tongue-in-cheek amalgam of the two – and only a vanishingly small Moscow elite would have seriously considered anything as soft, unappetizing, and unmanly as Western-style democracy. By the mid-1990s, with the economy collapsed, the national lifespan plummeting, and criminal gangs shooting it out for control of whole industries, Russians had given up on democracy and the ‘open society.’ The only question was which leader – an establishment pick like Putin or a radical like Limonov – would be able to return to the Soviet Union as fast as possible; and the sole criterion for selecting a leader was whether they would be able to radiate fear far enough through the society to bring all the second-rate criminals to heel – and, through a series of brutal acts, the imprisonment and assassination of the oligarchs, the war in Chechnya, Putin proved himself to be what Russians wanted. “Like Limonov, Putin is cold and cunning,” Carrère writes. “He knows that men are wolves; he only believes in the right of the strongest and that values are relative; he prefers to make people afraid rather than be afraid himself. Like Limonov he despises whiners who believe human life is sacred.” As a description, it could just as easily be applied to Lorne Malvo or V.M. Varga.
Carrère’s Limonov is a clever attempt to explain the rise of Putin’s Russia, but for all its merits it’s basically just a candy. Carrère himself doesn’t take it particularly seriously: Limonov is an opportunist, an entertainer looking to put on a good show. It’s as useful in understanding Putin’s Russia as a fringe player like D’Annunzio would be in getting to the heart of the rise of Fascism. There’s a glimpse of the real thing in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film Leviathan – which was for several years sort of the anthem for the beleaguered opposition to Putin. The movie is set in the benighted north, near the Arctic Circle. The main character, Kolya (a gifted mechanic), lives in crushing poverty. To make ends meet, his wife cleans fish on the assembly line at a local factory. For entertainment, the people in the town drink and smoke and get into fights, and for a real celebration, like a birthday, they go to the outskirts of town, and, with automatic weapons, shoot up pictures of Russia’s ex-presidents. The town’s mayor, a drunken bully, has taken it into his head that he needs possession of Kolya’s house – the house Kolya built himself. The two of them argue and fight. The case between them wends its way through the court system – portrayed always as judges reading out verdicts in detached monotones. Kolya appeals to an army buddy, a handsome hotshot Moscow lawyer with high-level connections who promises that he can grab the mayor “by the balls and give them a twist.” But the lawyer gets intimidated and is frightened off. One day, Kolya’s wife throws herself into the Arctic – and her death is pinned on Kolya. The eminent domain case goes against him and his house is demolished. The criminal case goes against him and he is sentenced to prison for 15 years – and his adversary, the mayor (who, when he gets the news, is eating by himself in an expensive restaurant) celebrates matter-of-factly by ordering another round of vodka for himself.
The alleged controversy surrounding the movie is that it perpetuates stereotypes about Russians and portrays ordinary Russians in a bad light – all the shots of vodka-drinking and the general decrepitude of the town, etc – and that’s what prompted the Minister of Culture to create new rules, directed against Leviathan, that would limit state funding for films that ‘defile’ the Russian character. The real reason, however, for the furor around the film was its portrayal of the Russian state as a pure kleptocracy. The mayor is fat and gluttonous – a representation of avarice. Behind him are the corrupt judges, reading their verdicts in their sleepy monotones. Behind them is the Orthodox Church – in a twist (which really rankled Russian sensibilities), it’s revealed that the mayor’s patron is an Orthodox bishop, giving his blathering homilies in the same detached monotone as the judges, and that the land grab that ruins Kolya is all to build a new church. Behind all of them is Putin, seen as a photograph hanging over the desk of the corrupt mayor. And behind him is the Leviathan. As much as there’s a local attraction in a town as bleak as this one, it’s the skeleton of a giant, mysterious sea creature on the beach (it’s never discussed in the movie, although it’s featured on the poster and of course in the title). We know that, symbolically, a leviathan always means the strong political state, and that’s the idea here – that, beyond Putin or any of the other presidents shot up for a weekend’s target practice, there is a pure power, that that power is elemental (a demonic natural force), and that the whole kleptocratic power structure is in place to serve it. Against this system, this seamless vertical integration, the individual is entirely helpless – and the movie unfolds as the story of Job, with Kolya an everyman in the grip of government, beset by one injustice after another, and waiting patiently, helplessly, for a miracle.
In a film like Leviathan, there’s no question really of resistance – the whole plotline with the Moscow lawyer turns out to be a red herring – and there’s nothing to be gained from discussing causation (Kolya’s sole mistake is that his house was built where the mayor’s bishop wanted a church). Evil here is a force of nature, just as much as it is in the woods surrounding Twin Peaks or Fargo, and it’s understood, in a very Manichaean way, that all of society (or at least all of government, and the church as well) is there just to feed the beast. That’s a very bleak way of looking at things – and it’s hard to imagine an American movie or television show with an outlook as relentlessly grim as that – but what’s clear, from the wave of dark shows (Fargo, Twin Peaks, True Detective, House of Cards), is that there’s a new willingness to grapple with evil as a force in itself, not just as some ideological miscue. In this way of thinking, power (and especially political power) isn’t something that can be healthily manipulated, the way it’s supposed to be in the democratic ideal; power is as a Russian would see it, as something to be endured.
Sam, you have me thinking of Kieslowski now, the kind of senseless evil in Dekalog #5. Lieutenant Sam Robinson referred so something similar in a recent episode of Ear Hustle, referring to a death row inmate committed a despicable act with no known motive other than a sudden impulse. I'm not sure that evil is the word that neuroscientists would use, but certainly what you describe here runs counter to the notion that human nature is either fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, which is consistent with Paul Maclean's explanation of the triune brain: that we have a reptilian core, shared in common with the most primitive life forms, that is the source of violence and selfishness; that rather than replacing older models, evolution adds on top of them, layering the limbic system over the R-complex, and then the neocortex over that. Carl Sagan has a nice essay on this idea where he uses Plato's idea of the charioteer trying to keep two horses from running in opposite directions. Only the brain has at least three horses, and any one of them can override the others and turn them toward its ends. The most pernicious forms of what you call evil are examples of the reptilian brain turning the limbic emotions and the neocortical reasoning faculties toward nefarious ends. Thus the ghastly mathematical calculations of the Nazis. This is a matter of some debate with my wife, who subscribes to parenting philosophies that encourage parents to think of their children as basically good and just in need of encouragement in finding the better angels of their natures. I don't think any biologist or neuroscientist would really agree with that: power dynamics in parenting trigger some of those ancient reptilian modes, and I don't think denying that they exist in my children does them any favors. In fact, I think it can be liberating to recognize that what we think of as evil in others is not an unthinkable, inhuman behavior, but something that is coded, to varying degrees, into all of our cognitive and physiological systems. Sometimes chemical interventions help, other times mindfulness can make a difference.
I meant to start with the thrill I felt at seeing Twin Peaks invoked. It is rather unfortunate that David Lynch appropriates a fundamentally Puritan view of the woods as the source of evil. This is straight out of John Winthrop and William Bradford: Satan as the Black Man in the forest, indigenous peoples as hellhounds in what Bradford saw as a "howling wilderness." But it's true that there is a melancholy in the Northwest that comes from those shadowy fir and pine stands and that is common to many other places in the North. I find resonance and beauty in that landscape, so I rather resist Lynch's characterization of it, even as I admire the big questions he engages about human nature.
SawLeviathan. Norther as I am inheritors of hunting c amps in the UP you wld think alcoholicly I wld be ready to take up the mantle. Somewhere in agent Cooper's transition admittedly j'accuse , to the mirror side is the small scale modeling that "everybody thinks they are doing the right thing" . I this moment think that is my social bowel movement- to blast people with 24hours of home made and not even Aadam Curtis reasoning at night while they are sleeping. That is reasonable. We gather garner and garden solution finding pleasure chemicals from working problems to their terms verms s u bstack style also in our sleep. Blast people with easy to solve social Trouble type discourse like ddt and we will all get well. Thank you for your granular loose, and fast discourse