Orphans

The foul rag-and-bone shop of the drafts folder

Last week, I wrote a whole post, revised it, and scheduled it to go out first thing the next morning. Then I wondered if people from my professional world would take it amiss. And I wondered if people from whatever this world is would find it pointless. Being perfectly honest with myself, I decided it was not a necessary addition to the world’s superabundance of text. So I unscheduled it and returned it to the drafts folder. I’ve done that a few times this year.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been on sabbatical since the beginning of November. I have so far adjusted to the absence of my work more smoothly than I expected to (I have only dreamed about church twice in two weeks). Not everything has been as smooth, though. For vocation, it may always be said that it gives you endless avenues of escape. By barricading those thoroughfares, I force myself to think about things I have often excused myself from thinking about.

Though this publication has been a sporadic hobby rather than a vocational pursuit, I don’t want it to be lying open as a route of escape right now, either. For about a year in 2015-16, I kept a regular series of daily writing exercises on a rotating schedule of prompts: a psalm in the morning prayer lectionary, a chapter of The City of God (which I was reading at morning prayer at the time), and each of my three kids. It was just a paragraph or two, trying to hone my eye and my writing instincts on a vignette each day. I’d forgotten all about this until a few days ago when it popped into my head and I pulled them out to read again. I skipped all the Scripture and Augustine entries but read each one about my kids. At one point they stopped and were replaced with drafts for what would become my book. It wasn’t a trade, not consciously and not inevitably, but if it had been, I would regret it. So I’m going to try to live a little more in my notebooks.

All the same, I want to move on from the clutter of drafts without consigning them utterly to oblivion. I cobbled together some orphaned paragraphs from unfinished work a couple of years ago and liked the results. More importantly, I’ve never been tempted to go back and finish them. Maybe one of these will see the light of day eventually, but these snippets will more likely be their epitaphs.

Read on for Nancy Pelosi * clergy sabbatical ideas * defining slop * the wounds of Good Friday * allegorical senator * Graham Green and the Blues Brothers * American Christianities power ranking * patriotic degrowth * the Ignatius Reilly monument in New Orleans * mainline virtues listicle * Christianity as a sin license * Thief (1981)

First They Ignore You. Then They Laugh At You. Then They Fight You. Then You Win. Then They Get Bored With You. (Then They Laugh at You Some More. Then Maybe You Win Some More. Then They Ignore You.)

I come from an erstwhile political family and probably for that reason I’m interested in the psychohistory of American politics. This was a post about Nancy Pelosi, Zohran Mamdani, and what it means for your faction to win an intra-party contest.

… Most of the major media outlets—and in those days, the Washington Post and CNN and so forth really mattered, along with a whole ecosystem of local media and nerdy policy magazines—expressed a grave conviction that Democrats would have to provide their own plan to “fix” Social Security, either by plundering it à la Bush or calling for unpopular tax increases or benefit cuts. The finance industry was salivating. The editorial boards were thumping their tails on the floor, pleading with canine earnestness for the Democrats to propose a plan. Pelosi’s answer was nothing. Not only did she not take the bait and put out a plan to cut Social Security ahead of Bush himself, but she didn’t counter even as the outlines of a Bush plan started to take shape. It was implacable, unyielding opposition. And it worked. Bush’s plan never made it to the floor of the House because Republicans were afraid of the backlash. Before the bungling of Katrina and the total collapse of the situation in Iraq, it was the defeat of Social Security privatization without even reaching a vote that marked the beginning of the end of the Bush era. Only months earlier it had looked like an unstoppable juggernaut.

I see I am indulging in what the late, great Rep. John Dingell would have called “‘back in my day’ rocking chair stories,” and believe me, there are more. I’ll try to be brief.

Not brief enough though.

Considered and Rejected Clergy Sabbatical Proposals

I was more annoyed than I let on about not getting this grant and this was part of how I coped.

This spring I applied for the one big clergy sabbatical grant program in America. It’s generous and, whether because of or apart from that fact, prestigious, and I didn’t get it. Oh well. These things happen. My actual proposal was too personal to share (especially after being rejected), but I thought about all the great ideas I had but didn’t apply for.

…

Digital and Despair Detox

Like everyone else these days, pastors look at their phones all the time. We are prisoners of the algorithm, even though most of us don’t exactly know what the algorithm is. We need to detach from our social media feeds and find some quiet space and time for reflection.

This proposal starts with $5,000 to build and install a lead-lined, coffin-sized chamber deep enough underground to be cool during the Texas summer. I intend to spend a minimum of ten hours each day in said chamber to detox my brain from the algorithm. An intern will be paid to read Training in Christianity, The Sickness Unto Death, and For Self-Examination to me through the air holes during those hours.

My Slop Problem—And Ours

When I started writing this, it felt important to state a working definition of “slop.” Now I think that’s pretty much redundant, and certainly you can find better people to read on it than I could ever be (I highly recommend Max Read). I wanted to get beyond the sheer volume and mimicry of AI-generated slop to the deeper aesthetic of “satisficing,” of making things “good enough” in a way that constantly presses down on the concept of “good.” I set up this paragraph by talking about mediocre audio on fancy podcasts.

…This can be true of narrative and storytelling, too. House of the Dragon and Rings of Power are nicely made, visually striking, and reliably watchable. But they’re badly paced—seemingly designed to draw out short passages in valuable IP to maximum length—and like Companion they lack anything like voice or perspective. Peter Jackson’s perspective on Tolkien may not be to your liking, but he had a perspective. The severity and cynicism of the original Game of Thrones series was not for everyone, but it was, so to say, an ethos. The streaming prequels are slop. They have a reminiscent visual sheen but no viewpoint. They grab hold of whatever interest you have in the world-building of fantasy stories and mimic the earlier iterations well and inoffensively enough to get you to say “yeah, why not?” Slop doesn’t produce buyer’s remorse because it doesn’t linger, if one is even conscious of “buying” it in the first place.

On this definition, of course, most Substack content also participates in Slop, this newsletter not excluded. I take time and care with most of what I write here, I revise and cut and reorder, but I only share drafts with friends when I think I might be about to offend people to no legitimate purpose. If I really really cared enough, I’d try to get these notions put through a proper editorial process and published by an outlet with standards more exacting than my own. I write with earnestness and devotion but is the section head gag on Norman Podhoretz anything but a cheap gimmick, a meaningless remix of a famous essay title? Could it just as well have been “The Algorithm Has a Cold”? The imp of “eh, why not” haunts all of us.

The Algorithm Has a Cold

The case could be made—presumably has been made, by humans and computers alike by now—that all the technological advances in publishing and the reproduction of art have had a downward effect on quality.

Puncture Wounds

This was from my Good Friday sermon in 2024.

…I found myself as I was reading the story this week thinking about the soldier who pierced Jesus’ side. Doesn’t have a name, we don’t hear anything else about him but, and this is a cliche but I found myself thinking he was once somebody’s baby boy. He had once experienced love in whatever imperfect way a human being will experience it, he had wept when he was hurt or when he saw people he loved being hurt. He was endowed with that basic human desire to help and protect from harm and something in his life, in his circumstances, in his training, in what he had been through, in what he was required to do, in his place in the world had taught him to overcome it; to overcome that last little voice which must have been somewhere inside of his head saying, “Don’t do it, don’t jab the corpse like it’s some kind of piñata.” Something in him that must have been overcome because here’s the truth: we do not, deep down, want to do this to each other. We do all kinds of cruel and violent things to our fellow creatures all the time, but at heart we want to love, we want to protect, we want to see ourselves and others be whole. And that that is what we remember and what we are loyal to today.

The pain happens and we as Christians enter into that pain, we find ourselves in it, we meditate on it but we cannot complete the sufferings of Christ. And we want our lives and our deaths to matter, and they can and they do and they will, but they matter because of the miracle; the body that even in death brings forth life….

The Senator: An Allegory of Ambition and Sloth

This was from an attempt at fiction (please note), starting with a future senator as a pious boy who has to confess in front of the church after being caught playing “Birdhouse in Your Soul” on the church organ.

…As the years went on, it seemed that he saw himself more and more in his colleagues, at first very close copies and then copies of copies of copies. They were unfunny insult comics, insightless pundits, charismaless podcasters. They put their names on ghostwritten books about manhood or the Old Testament foundations of the American Republic in preparation for presidential runs that wouldn’t happen. They were anything but legislators. What was the use of an honor-roll kid who broke bad when there were honest-to-goodness idiots available? Why settle for antagonizing and needling a committee witness when someone could just offer to fight them? The Senator had never offered to fight anyone. He had colleagues who said they’d pay good money to see him do it. The Senator had gone from ahead of the times to behind them in a moment and there was no road back or forward. They were now all reality-show contestants abandoned on an island by their producers. He raised his fist in solidarity with a mob about to storm his workplace, just in case the cameras were still running (they were). But it’s all for nothing. You could convince a comic’s audience that you were “all right,” or a demagogue’s angry mob that you were on their side, but you would never, ever get them to fear you, love you, or admire you. He wrote and passed a bill or two, much as a man in a newly empty nest might take up model trains, to the grudging respect of the commentators back home. “Thou has nor youth nor age, but as it were an after-dinner’s sleep, dreaming on both.” He started a podcast.

---

What they don’t tell obedient boys from pious homes in the provinces is that you don’t get to kill your conscience all at once. You have to do it every day. It gets easier, of course. In the first days it’s like God himself, vast and irrefutable, a blazing sun on the horizon of your soul. Getting your arms around it and strangling the life out of it sends dazzling jolts of pain up your arms. But it shrinks as the days go by. It’s an Indian elephant or your own father or yourself, amiable, properly scaled, and liable to dispatch with a few focused and savage blows. Loved ones, half-forgotten teachers, characters from your favorite books. Then it gets smaller and uglier: a gnome with asymmetrical eyes and extra ears, a three-legged cat, a shapeless blotch of goo. You’re glad to be rid of them. Eventually you’re swatting flies and slow-buzzing moths. At one point it becomes invisible, like the prickle of sandfly to be brushed off your leg. You’re merely closing your eyes against the dark or rolling over in bed away from the cold. But it still has to be done. That part never stops. “Like the Longines Symphonette, it doesn’t rest.”

---

Over time the Senator recognized himself, too, in his own constituents. Not in the people he met in the rolling fields or treeless exurbs where he ran up his biggest margins, but in the metropolises. He could go to any softball game or State alumni tailgate and hear variations on his own droning, stalled-out theme in those dads who stood around the home plate or the grill, displaying a subtle excess of forced good cheer. Unlike the Senator, they seemed to have been swaddled as infants in polo shirts with sunglasses dangling from the neck. Time was, he’d have despised them. But they, too, came off as boys unexpectedly snared and encased in the fly-trap flesh of prosperous manhood. They were successful but not secure, aging but not distinguished. Go to the big city and you’ll fit in, the Oracle had said. If all of them could be real with themselves and each other for even ten minutes and acknowledge their pain, they might unlock a human beauty more powerful than any Gothic cathedral…

The Power Chords and the Glory: Chicago Diarist

I read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and watched The Blues Brothers right before going to give a talk to ethicists in Chicago.

…I quite liked the book; I can live with disastrous theology if it comes wrapped in a compelling psychological portrait (see also The Heart of the Matter). It’s about an itinerant “whisky [alcoholic] priest” trying to do ministry in a Mexican state that was enacting a severe anti-clerical crackdown. It galls me, of course, that the main character is more appalled at his act of creating a child than he is at his abandonment of her, but it’s of a piece with his worldview that has no real room for grace (“I know nothing of the mercy of God,” he says, late in the story, and truer words etc.). But the stifling atmosphere of fatalistic dread and stubborn duty—the stripping down of a vocation and a suite of rituals to its squalid essence—that part plays. The world as a shipwreck foundering between two eternities plays. Greene was altogether too enamored of despair, but he did get it down on paper.

…

All the way along, [the Blues Brothers] are not merely pursued by the cops. They are up against an unholy alliance of Nazis, wives, redneck musicians, a bar owner, and Jake’s jilted fiancée, the last of whom spends the entire movie trying to kill the brothers by escalating measures. And oddly enough, it made me think of a recent appearance by my friend Dorothy on the Know Your Enemy podcast. The whole conversation is gold, but two things stood out in my memory: that a lot of movies and television shows play on a conflict between guys who just want to party and hang out and the authority figures, usually uptight women, who are trying to ruin the fun (with an obvious-once-you-see-it significance for how political storytelling in America intersects with gender); and that Elon Musk, among others, seems to genuinely dislike women. He “strikes me as someone who would cross the street to get away from a naked woman” were her specific words and I think she’s on to something. Aretha Franklin belts out “Think” in the Blues Brothers after pointing out that Jake and Elwood owe them money, but her husband strides right out the door, guitar in hand, to hang out with the fellas.

The Things Men Do to (Avoid) Women

This is all to say that if Graham Greene had gone to Chicago at the right time, and not been as much of a misanthropic bastard as he seems from his writing to have been, he could have written the script for The Blues Brothers. It’s a story about guys who just want to be dudes and play music together, to save the church, break all the rules, and do it as far away from the women in their lives as possible. Greene, at least in that phase of his career, simply could not write a female character; they are all neurotic, or bedridden with mysterious (fake?) illnesses, or overweight and lascivious, or prostitutes. There is a sanctified child here and there (usually dead by the end of the book, if not before). But the adult women are almost uniformly appalling. Aretha is not appalling, and neither is the head nun. Even the murderous Carrie Fisher is a more compelling character than any woman in The Power and the Glory. They’re just, well, no fun. Shrewish. No competition for the prospect of knocking back some beers with the fellas and ripping through the greatest hits of Sam and Dave, especially if it’s for God…

American Christianities Power Ranking

Gnocchic Apocryphon posted something about America’s character being essentially Puritan and Calvinist and that annoyed me, so I decided to create a definitive ranking of Christian influences on American life.

1. Holiness/ Revivalism

…It’s here, and not in Puritanism, that we really see an emphasis on individual vice (the Puritans danced and drank beer) and redemptive virtue, the dominant role of inner experience and conviction, and the purely associational model of the church. It’s also where we get our weird attraction to sanctified showmen and charlatans. This movement didn’t produce a lot of high art—if anything, American literature thrived on mocking and diagnosing this suite of religious movements—but it has had a vast an ongoing effect on mass culture. The Crucible won’t tell you much about America but Night of the Hunter is worth a hundred scholarly monographs.

…

4. Black Protestantism

In literature, the influence of this tradition is vast, and in music it is unequalled—the only American Christian tradition with any musical footprint internationally (do you find Let it Be to be a listenable, even a very good album? That’s the musical legacy of the Black church via Billy Preston). It’s the only homiletic tradition that matters outside of itself. In the 20th century, the influence of the Black pulpit reached national politics, and to the extent that there has been a fruitful engagement between Christianity and American politics at all, it comes from #3 and #4 on this list. The church helped sustain a distinctive Black culture and political consciousness during slavery and Jim Crow, and as such, I think the case can be made that it is the normative American expression of the faith.

5. Radical Reformation (English Trajectories)

This is a probably indefensible grab bag of heterodox movements stretching for Unitarianism and Quakerism to, say, Seventh-Day Adventism and Christian Science. Ralph Waldo Emerson goes to the gym. Lots of inner light, spiritual power, health and wellness. This is why Americans have dreadful breakfasts and probably why we get more freaked out than anyone else about, like, radon.

American Edens: Cherubs, flaming swords, and patriotic degrowth

I was annoyed at the romantic mythologizing of the “industrial heartland” in the run up to and aftermath of the 2024 elections, and tried to find the source of my own resistance to that myth.

…My father grew up on a dairy farm, prosperous for the time but impossibly small today, in the next county north. My mother came from a rural area, too, though her family didn’t own a farm. It wasn’t my world, but I got to visit it—someone still rented the pasture from my grandmother to run his herd on—and I absorbed the curious mix of nostalgia for farm life and deep relief at it being over that my parents expressed in countless little ways. When I was a child, the farm crisis that had whipsawed over the previous decade was really biting and a lot of small farms just couldn’t make it any more. From 1997, the year I graduated high school, to 2022, the number of dairy farms in Wisconsin fell by 74%. It makes sense—cows yield so much more milk today (herds are milked three times a day now instead of two), humans drink less of it, and more dairy herds are raised elsewhere. As a sector, agriculture does fine through ups and downs, but as a basis for small-scale land ownership and mass owner-operator employment, it has utterly collapsed.

People were mad about this process, and sad about it, and it was an urgent public policy issue at least through the 1980s. Areas that were organized around small holdings were utterly transformed. They weren’t necessarily impoverished, but their economies changed and their politics and culture with them. No one is mad about it any more, though. No politicians try to tinker with financing schemes and subsidies and trade policies geared at reviving mass farm ownership. No one, as far as I know, treats the structural transformation of agriculture in America as the original sin from which all present evils descend, even though it has a lot to do with the rightward shift of rural areas in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, to say nothing of the Plains states.

That’s reserved for a different American Eden—the Rust Belt, the industrial heartland, the great working-class redoubt of hard hats and flying sparks and things that go BRRRRRRR. That wasn’t my world, either; the bag factory was a big deal in town—big enough that the owner, before my lifetime, was said to be singlehandedly responsible for keeping Black families out of the local home market—but it wasn’t running three shifts of hundreds of workers churning out paper bags. When it closed down for good in 2010, there were sixty workers left. Presumably paper bags are made more efficiently now than they were when the plant opened. The factory moved, not to China or Bangladesh but to Kentucky. It’s not a racially-exclusionary sundown town any more, an asylum of quiet genteel racism like something out of a Flannery O’Connor-Garrison Keillor collaboration, but just another exurb with the usual mix of people protesting against racism and people making insane threats against people protesting racism.

Our Eden wasn’t the farm and it wasn’t the factory. It was both older and newer. It was the voyageurs who mapped the river, hunting and gathering and trading all the way down from the St. Lawrence. And it was the organization-man job in “the Cities,” where you could plausibly work behind an ascending series of desks for a career…

Theology and Geometry in the Crescent City: New Orleans Diarist

I think I had some observations about the 2024 ELCA Youth Gathering in New Orleans but they never made it into the draft. It started with a story about buying my copy of A Confederacy of Dunces at the Faulkner House book shop in the French Quarter in 2017 and then going back with the youth director of my church.

…Certain sections of New Orleans, even blocks at a time, have been swallowed whole by their legends. The past is an apex predator in a storied city, especially in North America. But the Faulkner House remains undigested, even though it sits on “Pirate Alley,” whose cobblestones one imagines were trod by actual pirates for a very small portion of its very long history. It is tiny, one room and a vestibule, but its collection reflects angelic taste. When I remarked on this to the woman working there during my recent—second—visit, she told me matter-of-factly that because the space was so small, she only stocked things she liked. Of course, she acknowledged, she stocked some things she didn’t like because they sell, but she’s always honest about her opinions so they don’t end up selling all that well. She’d met some of the other Lutherans in town for the Youth Gathering, she said, in an offhanded way I associate with Southern ladies whom, I suspect, like to talk but are always assessing. She leafed through some bills of sale. Someone had bought Emma. Someone else had bought a Sherlock Holmes volume.

I admired a first edition Adventures of Angie March before settling more sensibly on Toole’s other novel, The Neon Bible. Like Confederacy, it was also unpublished in his short lifetime and only saw the light of day after the death of his mother who, the proprietor told us, hadn’t wanted his father’s family to get any royalties. It’s about a character on a train, she said, who sees the eponymous Bible in a church sign with the words “God said it, I believe it…” at which point the youth director and I completed the syllogism in unison: “That settles it.” “This book does for the people in Mississippi what Confederacy of Dunces does for the people around here,” she said. That settled it. She made a sale. My colleague bought Confederacy. As we left, the lady told us to be sure to stop at the place in front of the shop where a scene in the novel takes place.

As it happened, our hotel was just across the street from the Ignatius J. Reilly statue on Canal. I led our church’s contingent to it on a side quest to find it. Packing my best “Professor Ben” routine into what I guessed was the modal attention span, I explained that there were at least two great American novels of the 20th century set in New Orleans: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy and A Confederacy of Dunces. I gave a quick history of Toole’s illness and death, the strange publication journey his book went on, ending with Percy realizing to his surprise that a grieving mother had asked for his help in publishing a masterpiece.¹ The book begins, I told them, with the main character in this spot, looking across Canal at the building that now houses a CVS. It’s a funny book and they should all read it—that was my preacher’s take-home point, I suppose. As we walked back to the hotel on the other side of Bourbon Street, one of Canal’s regular residents (to judge, admittedly, by appearances), followed me to ask for more information about the book. Was it about fishing? No, I said. It’s about a guy who tries to sell hotdogs from a cart in the French Quarter (this is only part of it, of course). Like the guy pedaling by in a hot dog cart across Canal at that very moment. Are you from here, I asked him. He was. But he never knew about the statue. I asked his name, I gave him mine, we fist-bumped, and then off he went, tilted slightly toward the bow, down Bourbon Street….

What’s Right in the Mainline?: Answers to a question no one asked

I bellyache a lot about my church body and the wider world of mainline Protestantism and once upon a time I worked on a post about why it’s my home and what it gets right. I didn’t get very far—draw your own conclusions. But I did make a list!

1. Gender egalitarianism is correct and good. [contra the patriarchal complementarians]

2. The church of Jesus Christ, in its visible and material expressions, is not an alternative political community. [contra the “polis ecclesiology” and “Benedict Option” ideas]

3. Christian theology is also not an alternative public discourse. [contra the sectarians and postliberal theologians]

4. The social practices of Jesus Christ among his followers (table fellowship, inclusion of people with ritual impurity or social stigma, etc.) are, in some sense, normative for Christians. [contra the people who prioritize the boundaries drawn by the law over the actions of grace]

5. Religious pluralism is a given and a proximate social good. [contra the Christian nationalists and certain strains of evangelical exclusivism]

6. Church discipline is intrinsically non-coercive. [contra all of the above]

The Sin License

I get annoyed at the ways people talk about Christianity, especially as it relates to sexual ethics. In this case, it was Ross Douthat talking about how liberalism tried with #MeToo to create a “mechanism to constrain sexual misbehavior that’s more effective than the traditional emphasis on monogamy and chastity.”

…I don’t know what led me to the realization—some combination of the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, the news that Shia LaBoeuf was discerning a call to diaconal ministry in a trad Catholic community, or one too many local megachurch scandals resolved with a tidy “restoration committee”²—but it finally hit me that Christianity functions in America not as a religion of minimizing sin, or even of convicting and forgiving sin, but rather, at least in some traditions and contexts, as a sin license. That is to say that Christianity works by granting, at least to certain people, the license to do pretty much whatever they want so long as they pay a necessary rhetorical franchising fee to the appropriate authority.

…

One interesting thing about #MeToo is that it tended to put women’s agency, subjectivity, and responses to male acts at the center of ethical reasoning, and that it did so partly as an expression of women’s real political power in workplaces and in law. There are plenty of ethical discourses that idealize female chastity and emphasize male discretion but nothing until very, very recently that asked “what do women think about having their butts grabbed by strangers/professors/coworkers?” and “what exactly are men supposed to do if women, for whatever reason, don’t like it?” These questions got asked from the margins in the last century but now their answers could be implemented, and for a brief period, that implementation frightened people with its ferocity.

It was the first attempt in my lifetime to cobble together a real public ethic of sexual conduct that did not admit of special pleading—in that sense it was totally unlike the Clinton wars, in which a lecherous president was pursued by a party rife with serial adulterers and absentee fathers (and defended by a party home to most self-described feminists). And maybe it will be the last. Which makes me think of Douthat’s solecism, and the very bad job “the traditional emphasis on monogamy and chastity” has ever done to “constrain sexual misbehavior.” Because what was at work in that “tradition” was not—and as far as I can tell, never has been—a system of restraining sin but of licensing sin. The legal structure of monogamy never meant that men were expected to refrain from sex before and outside of marriage. At most, it levied an expectation of reasonable discretion. One could play the role of the solid family man, or even the weeping penitent, as often as needed without breaking the dispensation. As long as you paid the behavioral tax (discretion, moderation, keeping up appearances, going to confession, being publicly pleasant and deferential to your wife) you could do more or less as you pleased.

Go further back from the heyday of the mid-century American adultery novel and the story seems much the same. It’s one plausible way to read the sacramental system of the late Middle Ages, after the Constantinian settlement made the old harshness toward penitents practically impossible and locked the whole thing up in monasticism. Depending on who you were, you could do anything you wanted as long as you acknowledged the authority of your local bishop or, in special cases, the pope to wield the keys of eternal and temporal forgiveness. That’s probably what the Grand Inquisitor meant, anyway, when he talks to Jesus about allowing the people even their sins. The inexcusable act was not any crime, but denying the judge’s right to judge.

The Big Score: Three Small Movies on Going Big or Going Home

Never finished my capsule review of Whiplash and didn’t remember what I wanted to say anyway. I also wrote a capsule on Europa Report, which I heartily recommend.

Thief (1981), written and directed by Michael Mann

At first glance, Thief seems so perfectly of its time (James Caan, Tuesday Weld, safecracking, crooked Chicago cops) and so unaccountably obscure that one almost suspects a Goncharov-style spoof or an AI-generated retro stunt. As I paused the film to look up its Chicago locations, which are really perfect, I never quite shook the sense that I really ought to have known about this movie. And it’s a pulpy plot with no big surprises. It just has director Michael Mann’s stylistic flair and gift for pausing the action at the right time for the characters to understand each other over a cup of coffee at a diner (in this case, at the no-longer-extant O’Hare Oasis, which doesn’t work for the geography of the previous scene but absolutely works for the film’s aesthetic and themes).

Released in 1981 but aesthetically and spiritually a 70s movie, Thief is about a guy (Caan) who is really good at breaking into safes. He’s an outlaw of the professional, hardworking, unromantic variety—it’s just a job that he does for money. We see Caan cutting and burning his way into safes in gritty, lengthy close-ups which elevate the craft and exclude any glamour. I think my favorite single moment in the movie comes after Caan’s piece of the job is temporarily done and he sits down in the lobby, face smudged from the metallurgy, to light a cigarette. After the take from the robbery that opens the film is stolen by a mob enforcer, Caan’s determination to get the money back leads him to a business arrangement with the enforcer’s boss. The mob guy provides the scores and the resources, Caan and his guys pull off the heists. Along the way, the mob guy arranges an adoption for Caan and his wife (Weld), who’ve been turned down by a public agency because of Caan’s past conviction and incarceration. Caan’s character wants to make one big score, enough to provide for his new family, and then get out of the thieving business. His mob handlers have other ideas.

“One big score before going legit” is one of the oldest tricks in the crime-movie books. I don’t know if actual career criminals ever think this way, but it’s easy enough to see both the temptation (big score, life-changing money, a can’t-miss proposition) and the nearly-inevitable failure. We all have the capacity to desire more than any security will offer; we do things out of compulsion or mere habit; we get entangled in contingencies that we didn’t expect and can’t simply exit. Crime movies, especially organized crime movies, are usually shadow versions of day-lit stories about work, family, the American Dream, and all the rest of it.³ Caan’s character owns a car dealership. He’s not on the fringe of society. He just wants more than lawful enterprise will get for him and convinces himself that there is an attainable sufficiency for his mundane, suburban aspirations.

While you can predict the whole course of the movie after about the first fifteen minutes, the ending is legitimately suspenseful and up in the air. It’s not much of a spoiler to say, however, that things don’t work out as anyone intends. I think Mann has a habit of going a little easy on his anti-social characters and letting their personal code substitute for simpler virtues like “doing honest work” or “not stealing diamonds.” Nevertheless, in Thief as in life, the big score is an illusion, and a clear personal code enforced by willfulness and bravery can’t make it real.

TPB verdict: GO HOME

1. Critics have disparaged Confederacy as “pointless.” In his 2016 memoir, Robert Gottlieb (who rejected the manuscript at Knopf and experienced Toole’s decline first-hand) describes re-reading it after it became a sensation and still finding it wanting. And it’s true that if you want a novel to have a point, you’ll probably be disappointed. But that, in my opinion, would be your fault.

2. I subscribed to this Substack entirely because of its running bit about “the restoration committee,” which just doesn’t get old for me. Here’s my favorite: “Also, the restoration committee said I am not allowed to do any baptisms after “the Mother’s Day Incident.” It’s like I’m always telling Kate Shellnutt whenever Christianity Today is reporting on my latest scandal: If I could do it all over again and not get caught, I would.”

3. It took me several viewings and watching The Sopranos to figure this out, but taken together, Martin Scorsese’s mafia movies and Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfather movies are really about the American experience of assimilation and suburbanization (among other things).