by Michael Buozis

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film The Master, Freddie Quell, a drunken World War II Navy veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix, secretly boards a ship commanded by Lancaster Dodd, the Master of the film’s title played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  In the immediate postwar period, Quell worked as a department store photographer before nearly strangling a customer with his own tie and then as a harvester living in a camp with migrants before being accused of poisoning a fellow worker with a strange, homebrewed hooch of lemons and gin and household chemicals.  Quell crashes a party on Dodd’s ship and wakes up the following morning in a sagging bunk.  Dodd asks Quell to join the crew and shows a peculiar interest in Quell’s psychological damage.

Quell asks, “What do you do?”

Dodd replies, “I am many things.  I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher.  Above all, I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.”

But beyond this, Dodd is a man in need of Quell’s hooch.  Quell obliges and brews more in the ship’s engine room.  This batch contains turpentine and both men drink it with relish.

These scenes, and indeed the rest of the film, work in a haze of credulousness, a sour-headed moonshine funk of washed-out color and numbness.  Quell, emotionally lost but never gullible, resists the Master’s powers of persuasion.  Dodd processes Quell, performing a perverted version of a familiar form of psychotherapy.  By forcing Quell to repeat, again and again, phrases that reveal his most hidden secrets, Dodd offers to help his subject move beyond his psychological hang-ups, to go clear and gain the Master’s own undeniable social powers.

Quell’s disciple-hood leads him to follow Dodd into the desert, to a grand estate in England, to posh parlors in big cities, and a suburban home in Philadelphia.  In Philadelphia, Dodd dictates a course of therapy for Quell in which Quell runs back and forth, for hours day after day, between a wood-paneled wall and a window.  Quell must do this with his eyes closed and he must describe the surfaces he touches each he time he touches them.

Dodd’s followers include, almost solely, beautiful well-educated middle class white people.  They thirst for Book 2, a promised revelation of Dodd’s dictates to his followers.

Whatever the film’s merits – and they are many and great – and however liberally Anderson used compression and fictionalization to create his vivid characters and setting, the source material is obvious.  It’s discomfiting, though, that Anderson’s thoroughly disturbing film does not exaggerate the strangeness of the events that inspired it.

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Of course there are many cults that, as the cult of The Master does, manipulate some anxiety in the American zeitgeist of their particular period to attract adherents.  The spread of Mormonism, in great part, rose from the promise of the American West, of new territories where the inhuman conditions of the industrial cities of the Northeast and Europe could be escaped.  The Manson Family and Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple took different tacks, both with horrific ends, in dealing with heightened anxieties about multiculturalism, civil rights and social revolutions in America.  There are countless lesser known American cults – the Millerites, the Church of Bible Understanding, Heaven’s Gate, the Branch Davidians among them – not to mention cults founded in other countries, with similar origins in the societal conflicts of their ages.  These cults, and the mainstream panic they engender, have a particularly important place in American culture. The American myth, even if history doesn’t fully bear this myth out, is of a country founded by religious dissenters.  What greater affirmation of one’s righteous dissent than being chastened as illegitimate and dangerous?

The older cults – we call them religions – may derive their legitimacy less from their ancientness, the distance in time and place of their foundations, and more from their generality.  The old religions offer solace from everything, for all time, and cults often offer the same, but for the very specific here and now.  In 1919, the Reverend W.F. Cobb, writing in The Living Age, compared the difference between new cults and old religions to that between American and European secular philosophical thought of the era.  “Whereas your orthodox philosopher is concerned only with asking of any proposition he encounters whether it is true, this new and callow professor (the American pragmatist) proclaims that all that matters is whether it works.  Truth, he affirms, is secondary….”  Though Cobb had an obvious vested interest in the argument, he might have been on to something.  The American cult is pragmatic in a way that European religious traditions of Judeo-Christianity are not.  Cults function like a mystical form of psychotherapy, the practice much maligned by L. Ron Hubbard, Paul Thomas Anderson’s inspiration for Lancaster Dodd.

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Tony Ortega of The Village Voice drew early attention to the parallels between Dodd and Hubbard, and Paul Thomas Anderson has admitted that Hubbard has fascinated him for many years and served as the inspiration for his screenplay for The Master.  However, many participants in the film, such as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, who plays Dodd’s wife, as well as the film’s producers, have denied the connection.  Scientology, the pseudo-religious self-help institution Hubbard founded in the 1950s, is well-known for attacking its detractors in the media.  Recent events, more than 50 years after the fictionalized events in The Master, bear this out.  In July 2012, Alexander Jentzsch, the son of Scientology president Heber Jentzsch, died of an overdose of methadone while battling pneumonia.  Jentzsch’s mother, years before, went public with the Church’s treatment of her husband, who was confined for years to “The Hole,” a torturous boot camp for failing Scientologists.  The Church required Alexander to cut off all ties with his parents and may have prevented him from receiving proper medical care for his condition. Then in September, Marc and Claire Headley, former members of Scientology’s clergy, the Sea Org, revealed that Scientology officials attempted to bribe the couple by promising to forgive court costs in a recent lawsuit if the Headleys would provide information about vocal ex-Scientologists and their media contacts.  Later that month, Mike Rinder, a former Church official, commented on the dedication of the Scientology National Affairs Office in Washington, DC:

I have no idea who or what they are going to put in that building. Maybe some animatronic Miscaviges that will spout puffery when you push a button “Fastest growing religion on earth with more than 10,000 churches and 10 million members. Being led into the future under the brilliant, benevolent guidance of the ecclesiastical leader of the religion, Mr. David Miscavige, a man who cares deeply for the well-being of mankind and demonstrates it every day by personally keeping a large number of people employed hand-making his clothes, washing his cars, recording and typing his every word and keeping him tanned and manicured….

The Church’s membership numbers are contested.  Some estimates are as low as 25,000 members.

In February of this year, Jenna Miscavige Hill, the niece of David Miscavige, published an account of the abuse and slave labor she witnessed in the Sea Org.  In March, Elspeth Reeve wrote on The Atlantic’s website that she had been contacted by a writer from the Church’s mouthpiece publication, trying to get dirt on Ortega, who left The Village Voice to write a book about Scientology.

But these are only some of the recent controversies surrounding Scientology.  Lawrence Wright, in his new book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief reveals the origins of the Church, its early troubles and the way its current leadership has attempted to control its image and defeat the individual will of its most ardent adherents.  Nicole Kidman’s response when asked about the book’s claim that the Church of Scientology forced Tom Cruise to divorce her is emblematic of the paranoia and fear created by a belief system structured to remove its members from any skeptical influence.  “I’ve chosen not to speak publicly about Scientology. I have two children who are Scientologists–Connor and Isabella–and I utterly respect their beliefs.”

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Going Clear is, in large part, a biography of L. Ron Hubbard.  In the first section of the book, dealing with Hubbard’s formative years and his founding of Scientology, Wright’s aim is similar to Anderson’s in The Master – to place his subjects and their marginal beliefs in a broader cultural context.  Hubbard’s charisma and ability to conjure a flock began early.  In his twenties, he took fifty young people on a seafaring expedition to the Caribbean, all funded by the participants, in the hopes of starting a stock footage business.  As with his later exploits in Scientology, Hubbard knew little about what he was doing or where he was going, but he was able to convince intelligent, responsible people to fund and follow him, if only for a short while, into oblivion.  However, Hubbard’s early adulthood also exhibits evidence of psychopathology and abusive tendencies.  He neglected his first wife and their children, exploited the Veterans Administration’s largesse and beat his second wife.  In the 1940s he dabbled in the occult, wrote a ton of pulp science fiction and pursued a career in the Navy, failing to act on any of his heroic dreams.  He left the Navy, much as Freddie Quell does in The Master, as a broken man and developed his own method of self-hypnosis which he claimed had remarkable results.  He wrote Dianetics not long after and the early self-help text was a best seller, spawning clubs across the country that practiced Hubbard’s unique form of therapy.  In the meantime, Hubbard’s ambitions grew and he turned the fad of Dianetics into the cult of Scientology, producing further revelations which could only be accessed by invested members of the Church.

Like the Catholic Church – and many smaller religious institutions – Scientology operates as a spiritual pyramid scheme in which the average practitioner pays for guidance and access to higher powers, supporting a hierarchal structure that does little more than guard that access to salvation or self-realization.  The laughable, and sometimes evil, attitudes of Scientology toward humanity, call into question many of the assumptions of not only other organized religions, but also psychotherapy.  What value can there be in any system of belief that is so weak that outside influences must be questioned at every turn?  Don’t the defined terms of psychology, in particular psychotherapy – the id, the ego, the superego, the psyche, mindfulness – which we often learn as science, sound remarkably like Hubbard’s terms in his own system of therapeutic exercise?  This is not to discount the usefulness of either of the systems, but only to question the privileged status of religion and psychotherapy compared with other methods of dealing with emotional or mental trauma.  Hubbard’s denial of the benefits of psychiatric medication is another thing entirely.  These beliefs, which prohibit Scientologist from using medication to treat mental illness, endanger not only Scientology’s adherents but also reduce the quality of public discourse about mental health.  To deny the chemical component of our thoughts and behaviors is to deny science in a way that denying the existence of an id is not.

It’s unapparent however, even in Wright’s thorough examination, whether Scientology’s appeal arose from Hubbard’s significant charisma or from some internal self-reinforcing tenet.  Hubbard was certainly driven to create something immense.  In many ways, he succeeded at that.  Though the Church’s membership figures are disputed, the press coverage and popular fascination with the cult, encouraged by vocal celebrity Scientologists, has established Scientology as a serious presence in the dialogue about freedom of religion in the United States and abroad.  The Church of Scientology deftly plays the public relations game, turning any criticism of its practices into a matter of religious discrimination.  The German government’s anti-Scientology measures did little to affect the organization as a whole, and, ironically, added credence to the image of the Church as persecuted and misunderstood.  And the pyramid scheme, which funds all of this expensive PR, works brilliantly.  Hubbard died a rich man, and the wealth of the Church only grows, even as more critics and former members speak out against some of its more questionable practices and beliefs.

One of the most controversial practices is the isolation and abuse, at the hands of the Church’s top leaders like David Miscavige, of the Sea Org, the most devoted members of the Church, Scientology’s version of a sacred order.  The isolation of the Sea Org, in places like Gold Base – Miscavige’s remote palatial estate, which is being maintained for Hubbard’s return from the dead – facilitates a brainwashing similar to that in the insular and tightly controlled societies of small communist countries like North Korea.  Sea Org members sign away their lives for – and I’m not making this up – a billion years.  No information gets in and little gets out.  The collective reality is controlled by the few in power.  The severity of this cloistering increased after Hubbard’s death, when Miscavige took over the Church.  Miscavige’s abuse of his followers makes L. Ron Hubbard’s lunacy seem quaint and innocent in comparison.  Wright’s most important achievement in Going Clear is to reveal, to a wide audience, the sinister aspects of a group that could easily be laughed off as a bunch of nut-ball narcissists playing games with electronics and self-hypnosis.  But the very lunacy of Hubbard’s teachings is fascinating and makes the story of Scientology one of the strangest ever told.

One of the faith’s most bizarre beliefs was a much guarded secret until a judge ruled, during a lawsuit in the 1980s, that some of the Church’s confidential documents be admitted as evidence and thus published in the public record.  Though the Church does not comment on the most basic structure of its belief system, it’s now well-known that a Scientologist, having invested tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars on auditing sessions and the written works of L. Ron Hubbard, reaches a level of spiritual awareness called OT (for Operating Thetan) III.  When the Scientologist reaches this level, he or she is given access, for a brief period of time and only in a locked room on Scientology property, to a document, written by Hubbard, stating, in so many words, that an evil alien warlord named Xenu enslaved his people, brought them to earth, placed them in volcanoes and dropped hydrogen bombs on them.  This traumatic, apocalyptic event is the source of all of humanity’s social ills and of each and every human being’s each and every personal problem.  Remarkably, Hubbard’s real life and the Church of Scientology as it exists in the world – plotting takeovers of small countries, evading authorities, torturing and enslaving its most devoted adherents – rivals, in sheer bizarreness and unlikelihood, Hubbard’s science fiction revelations in OT III.  Operation Snow White, the largest infiltration of government agencies in history, exhibits how powerful and paranoid the early Church of Scientology was.

The following celebrities are members of the Church of Scientology and believe, it must follow, in the existence of Xenu:  Kirstie Alley, Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart Simpson), Chick Corea, Jenna Elfman, Doug E. Fresh, Beck, Jason Lee, Priscilla Presley, Kelly Preston, John Travolta, Greta Van Susteren and, of course, Tom Cruise.  They have every right to believe in Xenu, and when you get down to it, I don’t question the validity of that particular belief more than I question belief in God or Zeus or Apollo or Krishna or Vishnu or Superman.  But these celebrities do not have a right to turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses committed by their leaders, just as Catholics have no right to ignore the pedophilia rampant among their priesthood or the corruption evidenced by the Vatican bank scandal.  No member of a system that self-perpetuates abuse, slavery, or hidden usury is above reproach.

This is to say nothing of the Church’s insistence that members must sever contact with Suppressive Personalities, or anyone, no matter how close a relation, who pisses off the Church in some way.  Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear sheds light on all these beliefs and practices with very little judgment about the believers and even the founder of the religion.  Wright is fair enough to let the reader make up his or her own mind, though he never shies away from the visceral and alarming nature of David Miscavige’s treatment of the Sea Org and the prison of belief that Scientologists willing admit themselves into, investing their money in an organization which exists only to support itself.  He is brave in doing this, as the Church of Scientology holds grudges and knows how to persecute its enemines.

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Discussed in this essay:

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright. Knopf. 2013. 448 pages. $29.

The Master, directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson. 2012. 144 minutes.

Michael Buozis’s work has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Adirondack Review, Down & Out and other journals and websites.  He is the editor of The Philadelphia Review of Books.

Photo: L. Ron Hubbard conducting Dianetics seminar in Los Angeles, Calif., 1950. Los Angeles Daily News.

by Ben Nadler

When I worked at the Museum of the International Center of Photography my favorite shows were always those that included salvaged photographs. One such show featured 35mm negatives that a group of photographers shot during the Spanish Civil War. The loyalist-friendly photographers fled quickly when the fascists took Barcelona, and entrusted their negatives to a friend at the Mexican embassy, who was able to get the negatives out of the country thanks to his diplomatic immunity. An anonymous filmmaker found the negatives sixty years later, in a cardboard box in his grandmother’s Mexico City attic. Another show featured photographs that the United States Strategic Bombing Survey took to document the damage to Hiroshima in 1945. The classified 4×5 contact prints were taken home by an engineer from the team, survived a house fire, and decades later reappeared in a trash can in Watertown, Massachusetts. What attracted me to these exhibitions was the feeling that the photos had been snatched from another time. ­They were not just images, but physical artifacts. They had survived war and flame, and reemerged to connect us to viewers of a largely forgotten moment.

I had a similar sensation when I encountered the photography book, Hard Art DC 1979.  To be fair, the images in the book – which document four shows in the early days of the Washington, DC punk scene – were never truly lost. For sixteen years, though, the negatives remained buried in the archives of the photographer, Lucian Perkins. Perkins had taken the photos during his days as an intern with the Washington Post. He later went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, and aside from a few images published in the Post, the punk show photographs were forgotten. Most of them were never seen by the people they really mattered to – the punks.

In 1995, Lely Constantinople was hired to organize Perkins’ career-spanning archive. She came across the punk show negatives, and was surprised to spot her boyfriend (now husband), Alec MacKaye. MacKaye is known for playing in early hardcore bands such as The Untouchables and The Faith. He is also known for appearing on the iconic cover of the self-titled EP by a more famous band, Minor Threat, which was fronted by his older brother, Ian MacKaye. In 1979, Alec was just a fourteen year old kid, tagging along to shows to see Ian play in his first band, The Teen Idles.

Constantinople made contact prints of the negatives, and showed them to Alec and Ian. “They were amazed by the discovery,” she writes. “…the brothers had always wondered whether more shots existed from these pivotal shows.” Perkins allowed Constantinople to retain control of the photographs from the shows, but nothing was done with them until 2007, when Constantinople was approached by the curator Jayme McLellan about mounting a show. By the time the project fully came to fruition, 1979 had receded twice as far into the past.

Hard Art is divided into four sections, each one featuring a different show. Each section is introduced with a reproduction of the actual flyer from the show, which serves both to reinforce the idea of the book as an artifact of the time, and to help draw the viewer into the experience of attending the shows.

The book takes its name from the venue of one of the shows, The Hard Art gallery. The gallery was apparently not a usual punk venue, but it served for the Bad Brains, who were not welcome at many other venues. As the song says, they were essentially “Banned in DC,” due to the intensity and violence of their shows. Not many hardcore shows are held in art galleries these days, but it’s important to remember that in its early days, punk was much closer to the worlds of art and bohemianism. The Hard Art show was the last Bad Brains gig before the band first left for New York City (they would make the move permanent in 1981), and they gave it their all. Considering that H.R. is so closely associated with the Rastafarian look he later adopted, the images of him doing his full punk show, in Sid Vicious ’77 style, are unique sights.

Two of the shows featured in the book took place at Madam’s Organ Artists’ Cooperative, an art studio turned squat house that provided a hangout for everyone from Corcoran students, to hippies, to members of the Pagans motorcycle gang. The first of the two Madam’s Organ shows featured a non-DC band – the legendary DOA from Vancouver, Canada – and Trenchmouth, a band that is as much a part of the book as its more famous contemporaries.  Trenchmouth’s lack of enduring reputation is due to the fact that they never managed to make a record. Though their sound was never captured, singer Charlie Danbury’s writhing movements are captured beautifully by Perkins in a four-photo spread. The second Madam’s Organ series features The Teen Idles, looking like the awkward high school kids that they were. Both series contain lots of images of kids hanging out, just being punks.

The most interesting series of photos is from Valley Green Housing Complex, a public housing project populated by low-income African Americans. As Alec MacKaye explains, the show was conceived of by Bad Brains front man H.R. as a Rock Against Racism action to break down social barriers: “Part of HR’s plan was to get punk rockers to step out of the embrace of the downtown art scene and take it to the streets.” It’s not clear that H.R. had any lasting success in this mission, but he accomplished his goal for at least this one night. MacKaye writes, “the very fact that these shows happened at all changed the memories, and in some small and large ways the lives, of some of the people who witnessed them.” The Valley Green series elevates, and in a sense justifies the premise of, the book. The subtitle is, after all, DC 1979. In the Valley Green series, we go beyond the small, cerebral DC punk scene, and enter into interaction with the greater city of Washington, DC.

Perkins would later become known for going into warzones – in places like Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iraq – and creating empathetic portraits of individuals caught up in the conflicts. I would venture that for Perkins, the DC punk scene was an early conflict zone. Unlike other photographers who captured the first days of hardcore – such as Glen E. Friedman and Edward Colver – Perkins was not there to develop or mythologize the punk scene. He was not a participant in the scene. He was a photojournalist-in-training, and attended the shows in that capacity.

One of Perkins’s most famous photos is of a young Chechen boy looking out the rear window of a bus, as he is evacuated from the fighting during The First Chechen War in 1995. The boy’s hands are pressed against the glass, and he looks back at the place he is leaving with a hard stare. Ostensibly, there are many other refugees on the bus, but by framing the shot in such a way that one small boy’s despair is isolated, Perkins enables the viewer to relate directly and emotionally to the situation.

This signature technique of focusing on individuals amidst broader situations is on display throughout Hard Art.  Though many of the images in the book are crowd shots, none of the photographs depict crowds as monolithic groups. It is always possible to focus on individual faces. Images of Bad Brains sets – of which there are many in the book – often focus on the exchange between H.R. and a single audience member. These are simple and human, though highly pressurized, interactions. The Valley Green series, in particular, makes effective use of the drawing out of individual experiences. While Bad Brains and Trenchmouth are playing, children from the community respond with expressions ranging from confusion, to open mouthed amazement, to genuine excitement. In one shot, a child is seen crying, while two punks enthusiastically embrace a few feet away.

Many punk fans will purchase Hard Art for the novelty of seeing H.R. as he was before Bad Brains moved to New York and became legends, or Ian MacKaye as he was before he shaved his head, and formed Dischord Records, Minor Threat, and Fugazi. The book deserves a wider readership than that. Perkins’s skill as a portraitist is such that you can see the energy and potential in these young men’s faces even without the context of their future roles as icons. Equally worthwhile are the portraits of those who did not become icons, but participated in the shows.

In a way, though, this is not truly Perkins’s book. Generally, monographs represent the photographer’s vision. Hard Art, on the other hand, largely represents the vision of the subjects. The book was edited by Constantinople. The project is contextualized with introductions by Constantinople and McLellan (who served as project manager), but not by Perkins. Mackaye is credited with “Narrative,” and it is indeed Mackaye’s story that makes the book.

We are in the era of hardcore reunion tours, and I am as wary as anybody of packaged punk nostalgia. Punk was always about destroying the past, and there is an absurdity about overly glorifying a punk past. The strength of MacKaye’s narrative, however, is that he speaks largely from the perspective of the excited kid that he was in 1979. He inhabits the moment, and allows the reader/viewer to inhabit it with him. Partly, this is achieved through a sort of ekphrasis; MacKaye is experiencing the moments through the photographs, not dredging purely from memory. “Shirtless and burly,” writes MacKaye, in the present tense, of Danbury:

his body is slicked with beer and sweat. His left arm is draped over my shoulder, my right arm around his waist, in a mutually ensured embrace. He has just lifted me from the audience and onto the stage, which it turns out was exactly what I wanted him to do.

MacKaye’s words are interspersed amongst Perkins’s work, guiding us through the images. His excitement carries the viewer inside the photographs, many of which are printed full-bleed, and some of which sprawl across two pages.

The book closes with a short essay by Henry Rollins. In 2013, Rollins has become something of a cartoon character. In fact, a comic book featuring Rollins as a character, Henry & Glenn Forever, is currently probably more popular than any of Rollins’s own work. Rollins was an intense and brilliant, but severely damaged, kid, and rather than getting the help he needed, he retreated deeper into his constructed tough-guy character. This process of calcification began when Rollins was in Black Flag during the Damaged era, and is documented in the most recent issue of Erik Lyle’s zine, Scam. “The cover shot of Damaged is the ground zero of Rollins’s heavy public persona,” writes Lyle, referencing a violent image staged by Colver.

The shows in Hard Art took place took place two years before, and 2,000 miles away from, the recording of Damaged. As he writes of those early DC days, Rollins is not a neckless cartoon, but an excited teenager. In his essay, Rollins describes a photograph of The Teen Idles, another example of Perkins’s ability to pull out distinct individual experience: “Check out Lucian’s portrait of the band. The way Nathan is staring off into the distance and Ian is looking right into the lens. There’s so much in that shot.”

Most important, perhaps, is Rollins’s own placement: he is not in the frame at all, but rather, he tells us, standing next to Perkins, watching. He has not stepped in front of the lens yet. In what is perhaps the most earnest thing Rollins has published in decades, he describes the excitement of watching his friends: “They were the first band I ever saw record in a studio. I saw them do their first demo. I was amazed.”

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Discussed in this essay:

Hard Art: DC 1979 by Lucian Perkins. Edited by Lely Constantinople. Narrative by Alec MacKaye. Akashic. 2013. 100 pages. $24.

Scam #9 – Damaged: The Story of Black Flag’s Classic First Album by Erik Lyle. Fall, 2012.

Ben Nadler is the author of the novel, Harvitz, As To War (Iron Diesel Press, 2011) and the poetry chapbook, The Men Who Work Under The Ground (Keep This Bag Away From Children Press, 2012). He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at The City College of New York.

by Tom McAllister

One of the hardest things to do these days is to convince people that what they’re seeing and consuming is actually a real and true thing. Plastic surgery, photoshop, autotune, genetically modified foods, easy access to video editing software, and news organizations that don’t even pretend to report the facts anymore have all fostered a culture in which authenticity is a prized commodity but is almost impossible to claim. Every new technology first promises a chance to better know one another (and ourselves), and then people find ways to use it to obfuscate. Social media gives you the opportunity to present a carefully constructed version of yourself to the world, to only share the photos of you in the perfect lighting, the ones where you look thin and healthy and self-actualized. You edit yourself to look more real.

It’s all a show, and everyone knows it.

So one of the central paradoxes of 21^st century American life is that while we’re claiming to be so much more connected than ever before, we’re further alienated than ever. We’re too jaded to celebrate something until we’ve watched fifteen instant replays. We need to see documentation to prove the President is from the same country as us, and then we need to see documentation to prove the documents are real.

These two threads – authenticity and the changing role of technology—overlap and become obsessions for the narrator of Ron Currie Junior’s novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. Before you even get to the first sentence—which promises “everything I’m about to tell you is capital-T True”— the book’s mission is made clear. The cover claims it is “a true story” but on the title page the word “true” is asterisked and footnoted. The footnote, four paragraphs long, details Currie’s uneasiness with the term “a true story” and tries to explain how this commonly accepted phrase is more complicated than it sounds, noting: “I’d even venture to suggest that your life, or at least the narrative you have of it in your head, is ‘based on real events,’ rather than objectively true.” It’s an interesting, if oddly defensive, strategy to begin a book by challenging the reader’s notions of reality before they’ve even read the full title. Next, we get a full page of explanation from Currie about his discomfort with using epigraphs because it feels too much like “high-lit posturing” to quote someone like Seneca, for example, when he hasn’t read Seneca, and so “the whole enterprise sort of stinks.” He also takes a moment to beat himself up over the “juvenile metafictional stunt” that he is nonetheless in the process of pulling, which means he is actually briefly engaged in meta-metafiction, until then he does conclude with an epigraph from the movie Rocky, which choice is begging to be read as self-consciously non-literary, an attempt to distance himself from what he views as intellectual vanity.

All of this preliminary stuff may strike you as some light postmodern gimmickry, distracting gamesmanship, and the truth is, if I were reading this review right now, I would have already written off the book as being a little too in love with itself, too much like Dave Eggers at his worst, the kind of writing that is clever but for which I admit I have little patience. The text itself opens with ten uneasy pages marked by hemming and hawing about the nature of truth and other gear-spinning that seems like it’s trying too hard to establish a unique voice rather than tell a story.

But here’s the thing: Currie quickly dispenses with the games and once the story gets itself rolling, it is anything but gimmicky, quickly settling into an intense, testosterone-fueled depiction of a youngish man in the depths of an existential crisis.

Aside from the preliminary materials, this novel is a pretty traditional linear 1^st person narrative about a dangerously self-absorbed man who is drinking himself to death because he can’t have the woman he loves. The narrator is named Ron Currie Jr. and he’s a writer, which, yes, is an invitation to draw comparisons between author and narrator, and it’s impossible to tell where one’s personality begins and the other ends. But I don’t particularly care whether any of the narrator’s characteristics are shared with the author, because his primary job is to be an engine to drive the narrative. The voice alternates between fierce machismo and unabashed vulnerability; Ron is essentially an open wound, ugly and festering and daring you not to look away, even as he falls apart.

The reason for his crack-up is simple: he’s in love with Emma, always has been, and Emma doesn’t want to be with him. Emma’s failed marriage still trails her, “like a rusty muffler dragging behind a car” and she needs time alone to sort herself out. He has a book to write—a follow-up to his middling debut novel—and so he decides the best course of action is to exile himself until Emma chooses to come to him. He flies to a Caribbean island, rents a small house, and hits the self-destruct button.

Ron’s life in the Caribbean is hardly glamorous. It’s one cheap drunk after another. It’s bar fights and nights spent on the floor of a windowless prison that even the cockroaches are trying to escape. It’s a group of malevolent caballeros itching to pound him into the dirt as revenge for having injured one of their friends. It’s loneliness and dead space and general misery. Ron is bruised and filthy for most of this time; one gets the sense that he smells terribly. He’s living a grittier version of the familiar Hemingway fantasy: a writer who drinks and fucks and fights except with actual consequences that we see and feel viscerally and relentlessly.

At some point, a college girl on spring break decides to shack up with Ron, and he treats her with cruel indifference, dragging her down into his alcoholic stupor. He condescends to her and loses patience with her efforts to cater to him and hates her for not being Emma. When Emma calls to say she’s going to visit, he kicks the girl out without regret.

Ron would be a difficult person to tolerate over the course of a novel if not for the fact that his worst acts are frequently buffered by unflinchingly honest introspection and an acknowledgment of his own culpability. In discussing an emotional distance he felt the first time he dated Emma, he says,

But might that distance also be my fault, in part? Did I lie by omission to avoid her displeasure? Did I censor and groom myself out of desperation to have her, and did she intuit that the me I presented was an ill-fitting flesh suit, a character from one of my books who defied the laws of both his own nature and nature at large?

A book that wants to investigate issues of authenticity, by necessity, has to have a voice that seems deeply self-aware, and so it serves the book well to allow us to see every ugly detail of Ron’s consciousness. Late in the book, when his life is beginning to turn around, he laments—in a way that seems a mixture of profundity and teenage myopia—that he can’t be sad anymore, says he would give everything up to feel that sadness again, because it feels more real to him to endure the world unhappily than to be blithely content.

Ron’s desperation to feel genuine emotions is often at the root of his problematic behaviors. Nearly everything he does, at least for the first two-thirds of the book, can be read as an attempt to achieve authenticity through the physical: fighting, drinking, sex. The love story with Emma is preoccupied with violent, consensual sex, beginning with the scene when Ron demands that Emma punch him in the face while she climaxes. Later, he writes:

With Emma and me our problems started, or at least were made most manifest, in the bedroom. We punched and clawed at each other, fought like animals… I took beatings from her that rivaled anything the caballeros did to me. The sheets were almost always spotted with blood…  Neither of us seemed to know why we did it. We couldn’t stop hurting each other, and we couldn’t leave one another alone.          

Sex with other women is limited in its utility and intimacy for Ron because they’re not free to express themselves as clearly and primally as he and Emma are.

Every time the world becomes too much for him to manage, Ron indulges in his other obsession: The Singularity, which he describes as “the moment when a computer (or more likely, computers, plural)… wakes up, becomes self-aware, gains consciousness.” He has convinced himself that someday, sooner than later, the machines will rise up and assert themselves as the superior race. Confident that The Singularity will not resemble sci-fi horror stories like I, Robot, he believes the machines will be benevolent rulers who will simplify our lives, streamline our relationships, and eliminate all the messy emotional baggage from the world. The machines will render humans useless, but will still be “indulgent toward us, as a gifted child toward a beloved, enfeebled grandfather.” He anticipates The Singularity like a Pentecostal does the apocalypse, because although it may lead to the end of humanity as we know it, it will be a salvation from this world with all its uncertainty, dishonesty, and anxiety. The humans may fuse with the machines, but they may also simply “die by increments, as does anything that finds itself completely bereft of purpose. We will die slowly, of shame.” This vision perfectly illustrates the tone of cautious pessimism that permeates this book: the circumstances are bleak, but they’re described with a wry smile and the offer of a slim hope that someday, when the machines take over, they’ll fix everything for us and let us get back to the business of trying to get by.

Not much of true consequence happens while Ron is in the Caribbean, so for all the pleasures of the voice, the narrative does occasionally meander. The book is reinvigorated first when Emma arrives in the Caribbean and then again when she leaves him, to which Ron responds by driving his Jeep off a pier.

The suicide doesn’t take; he washes up on a shore somewhere, but is presumed dead. Authorities searching his island home find a novel manuscript, and through a long chain of good fortune, his story goes viral and his book is soon the biggest literary phenomenon since Harry Potter.

But he doesn’t know any of it. Because he chooses to stay dead and goes into hiding in a lonely outpost on the Sinai Peninsula, working simple jobs and forsaking his past. The voice here changes, loses much of its energy and the verve that drove the book to this point. It makes sense that as Ron finds some measure of inner peace, his life will slow down and be less violent, less wild, but the gritty, bone-on-bone action of his Caribbean exile helped to counterbalance the book’s frequent abstractions and digressions.

Four years later, he finds out that he’s famous. Even in the remotest desert, one cannot outrun celebrity or the internet. And so he reclaims his life. As one might expect, his return enrages those who have fallen in love with the legend of his lovelorn suicide, and so, even though his book was marketed as a novel and even though he had nothing to do with any of it, he finds himself under attack for having defrauded readers. Essentially, he’s playing the role of James Frey, whose fall from grace is best described by David Shields in Reality Hunger:

In the aftermath of the Million Little Pieces outrage, Random House reached a tentative settlement with readers who felt defrauded by Frey. To receive a refund, hoodwinked customers had to mail in a piece of the book… Also, readers had to sign a sworn statement confirming that they had bought the book with the belief that it was a real memoir or, in other words, that they felt bad having accidentally read a novel.

Author and narrator seem to merge at this point, as Ron is called upon to defend his choices and the nature of art itself, questioning this societal desire to have stories be true in some pedantic, fact-checking way as opposed to adhering to an emotional truth. Currie’s argument for the sanctity and value of capital-T Truth is a popular one among literary types these days, but not in the culture at large, as any fiction writer has learned when talking to strangers who “only read real stories.” We live in a culture that claims to value authenticity but that works constantly to subvert it, to redefine it in confusing ways. Scripted reality TV shows, wildly popular yet more artificial than the wildest fictions, perhaps illustrate this duality better than any other medium. The insistence of referring to them as “reality shows” despite all evidence to the contrary is an insult to the nature of reality itself.

Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is ultimately a compelling reflection on an issue of increasing importance: how does one distinguish between fact and fiction, and is there even a need to distinguish anymore? In a time when something is only as real as we want it to be, how does one establish something fundamental like authenticity?

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Discussed in this essay:

Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, by Ron Currie Jr. Viking, 2013. 352 pages. $27.

Tom McAllister is the author of the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey, and his short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Unstuck, FiveChapters, and some other places. He is the co-host of the Book Fight podcast, and is on twitter @t_mcallister.

Photo: Mount Horeb – Sinai by Francis F. Frith