Terror | Terroir

 I've recently watched the Jordan Peele produced The Twilight Zone, and thoroughly enjoyed Get Out when it came out a few year's ago.  I've long made the case that horror is as (or more) necessary as terror, in our daily lives, and I think Peele's horror ouvre, as it continues to unfold in front of us, will provide an object lesson for my argument.

The other night, I watched Us, and was profoundly moved by it (and close to bowel-moved as well it was so freaking scary).  It is the story of a fear of an under-class rising up.  But this under-class is not comfortably something other.  Rather, they are us.

The notion is terrifying (as opposed to horrifying).  I do not love the quickly accessible distinctions between the two (including the one in my post linked to above); a more fulsome account, if desired.  The fear of the revolutionary uprising is something that the progressive / liberal-defining bourgeoisie want to mask.  We support (in principle at least) the overthrow of power, and watching these upper middle class families get their come-uppance is, I would argue, a terror movie rather than a horror movie.

But then, Peele does what he has done so marvelously in much of his recent genre work, he extends.  If you relish the terror of bourgeois families at their vacation houses getting terrorized and chased around by unknown baddies, then by extension you will cheer to yourself similar harassed and displaced.  Of course this (generally) does not hold true, and becomes where we enter the horror genre.  The apocalypse for everyone else and adventure / free to wander tale for ourselves is at the heart of the good old 'merican terror story (The Stand, The Road, Revolution, The Postman, et cetera et cetera).  We love these tales of terror as long as we are in the less than 0.6% who get to survive Captain Trips.

In Us, when we begin to see the masses of underworlders holding hands in lines across streets, in and out of buildings and over mountain roads, forming an echo (but what's the word for an echo that's louder - more heard!?) of Hands Across America, the implications begin to be horrifying.  They are coming for all of us: children and adults, black and white, rich and poor.  

For me personally, Hands Across America was already a horror-laden event.  In 1986, my two brothers and I piled in to the family station wagon with my dad, leaving my mom at home, and drove south toward central Illinois to join in the not-so-nationwide chain of humanity.  On the drive down, the three other boys in the car (7, 14 & 40 years my senior) were discussing apocalypse as some kooky preacher on the radio (and billboards I seem to recall) was predicting Armageddon in the coming days or weeks (evidently it wasn't high-profile enough to make this list, unless perhaps my memories are conflated).  My brothers and dad were discussing the concept academically (or at least the childish version of academically; my family, and in particular my dad, are textualist bible-y people, and while they didn't go in for specific predictions of any moment, I do have the sense that they all kind of generally believed in it 'eventually'), and my 8-year-old mind was swallowing it whole, and I was terrified that the end of my existence was mere days away (hours of it to be wasted in the way back of this damned car!). 

I don't believe that Jordan Peele tailored his horror story specifically to me, but I am curious (and it's probably too late to note, spoiler-alert) as to what the implications of the film might have been had it not been for the twistNotSoTwist ending.  Would Adelaide's (Lupita Nyong'o) doppelganger (Red), who in fact was Adelaide, have seemingly led the uprising had she not come originally from the top side. Revolutionary artists (or perhaps it's more often horror makers) often wind up creating works that actually make arguments quite the contrary to what they themselves believe or would espouse in the real world.  

• Thus, is the argument of Us that in order to make revolution, the underside need a spark (inspiration or perhaps permission) from a member of the ruling class?
• Just as the hippie horror-makers (Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter) wound up making conservative arguments warning about the dangers of teenage promiscuity...
• And a work of horror fiction as seemingly revolutionary as Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves winds up making a very very conservative argument (albeit circuitously).

It's not to say that it's the fault of these brilliant creators that their works wind up making conservative arguments that they'd rather not be making.  Rather it's the tricksy nature of working in the media of terror and horror and trying to bridge the gap.  It's why a filmmaker like George Romero was less susceptible to falling into the same trap, because he started with the horror and embraced it for its own sake, and the meaning came afterward.  When you try to wield the ephemeral (which is what you're doing when you're creating a work of art), it gets slippery, and doesn't always go where it wants.

It's why when the artistic mockery of religion that is televangelist doomsayers like Jack Van Impe and publishing powerhouses like Joel Osteen and religiosity-based "university" educators like Jerry Falwell Jr... 

• Ply their craft, they wind up arguing against their personal ownership or understanding of church doctrine, and their political and moral arguments (not to mention their continuing calls for their own personal enrichment) wind up making the case for exactly the opposite of their intent.

Star DNP

On this date in 2007, I reported to my first day of (temp) work at my new job at Mahler Private Staffing (MPS).  I had been given a 3 - 4 week assignment, through Manpower Group, to work as an Administrative Assistant to a private service search firm.  When I took the job, I didn't know what "private service" was, and I have to say, it seemed all pretty weird.

In those early days, I was writing ads and candidate profiles and conducting strange specialty research projects (I'll just say that I know a lot more about ornamental gardening than anyone who has a yard like mine!).  I was invited to stay on in a permanent* part-time role, and spent a few days a week at their office, which became the mid-point of my normal bus commute (in those days it was the pre-Green Line, which I think was #11) from the Colonel to UW-M.

I spent that first school year back in Wisconsin alternating between my academic/teaching brain & my officeTeam persona, and I wasn't too terribly disappointed when May came around, and I was summarily dismissed with no reason given - I just went and found another temp job - first as a receptionist at a home health care company (where I was able to stream much of the Euro 2008 soccer tourney during work), and later as the global economy crumbled around us, at Northwestern Mutual (where internet surfing was restricted, so I read the company's financial newsletter and had a front row seat to the inner workings of the financial crisis, in between planning corporate events such as baseball-themed ice cream socials and 5-, 10-, 15- & 20-year service honoring ceremonies).

When I was called back to MPS in August 2010 to work on a project, and later invited to take on a permanent** role in November as the "Candidate Librarian" (my invented title - never over the course of the subsequent decade was I ever clear about what my title was), I was intrigued and also delighted to see how much had changed.  What I loved most about my work over the last decade, other than the people I got to know and work alongside, was the commitment to quality.  Doing all aspects of the work well felt like a fundamental shift from 2 years earlier, when the whole company felt very transactional.  A client of ours, who I met in Manhattan in 2013, perhaps said it best: "MPS is the best, because they actually give a shit."

There were some new faces, and some old familiar folks, and in my first year back in the role a lot of sweeping changes occurred, which thrust me more to the fore, and I began take on significant search and recruiting work, in addition to my continuing librarian role.  In August 2012, shortly before starting my final school year of teaching at UW-M, I took my first work trip.  I was working on a housekeeper search for a client with a home in Palm Beach, FL, and we decided I would travel to South Florida to meet the finalist candidates.  I stayed at the Brazilian Court Hotel, and 10 minutes after my arrival it was clear that I was an impostor... but it was was fun to be so.  I'm not monied, and will never be so no matter what fortunes the future permits.

More than anything, what my decade plus at MPS has shown me is that the presumed distinction that the monied believe in is a last desperate charade.  Not all of our wealthy clients (UHNW - as in ultra-high net worth) were, in fact, monied.  They had money, of course - obscene amounts of it - but some understood the arbitrary stupidity of it.  Most, though, prefer to construct mythologies wherein their privilege is anything but.  Their wealth was worked toward, earned, a just reward for the cleverness and astuteness and wherewithal of them or their forebears.  What I learned was that this entitlement most often took the form of elaborate narration.  

We construct the world around us by telling its story - to ourselves or anyone else who will listen - and my time at MPS helped me develop the skill of listening to those narratives and finding ways to accommodate them.  There was a more sycophantic version of this accommodation, where it is largely accepted, but my method was more to understand it, act as if it were normal, and then find the right people who could fit into the story that was being told. 

And so I spent the next decade of my life at work trying to be a part of building something.  I remained myself (which was fundamental to my undoing in the end... and in the middle), but also came in to myself, and when I started running most of the East Coast search work in 2013 I had to opportunity to begin creating and inhabiting my own mythologies.  When I would walk into the UES apartment of a client of ours (say the founder of a company that is a household name), and they would often look at me and wonder just what, precisely, I was doing there.  (On only one occasion, though, did the client actually voice this question).  

Mostly, we would shoot the breeze - on the more enjoyable occasions finding common ground (a connection to Wisconsin, or an interest in my dissertation work on Haiti), but more often than not, they would talk about themselves.  (Not terribly surprising, as I was there to learn them, but it was equally easy to learn them regardless of the topic of conversation).  There were a lot of variations on a theme, but mostly they all wanted someone to take care of them.  The idiosyncratic part was the matchmaking, the fit and feel of who they would want around them - in their homes or sitting right outside their office.

That's the part that I am best at.  I can do all the rest, but offering bespoke assistance in the form of people and advice.  Maybe this is what my new company does... Seeger Enterprises?  It's motto (or mission): Do Good.  Be Better. (DGBB Enterprises?)  Offering Consulting and Coaching, Bespoke Search, and Project Management and Development.

"It might be nice, it might be nice..."

* It was not news to me, but I was surprised in May 2008 to receive an object lesson in the truism, "Nothing is permanent," when I was let go for the first (but far from last!) time by MPS..

** Among the strangest phenomena of working at MPS is that fact that every 4 years (2008, 2012, 2016 & now 2020) I was fired from my post.  In 2008, it felt fairly arbitrary (in fact wasn't!), but by 2012 and thereafter, I have come to realize, my penchant for speaking my mind, even when it is outside the norms for the room, was not well received by leadership.  My skeptical mind was in fact the greatest strength of my tenure, because it was precisely counterpoint to leadership's tendency toward mythological thinking, but it was rarely well received, despite its proven effectiveness.