Max Dunbar

Much has been written about our love for true crime, most of this framed as a modern morbidity. True crime documentaries proliferate on streaming. Perfectly normal people get home from their ordinary jobs and settle in for an evening watching representations of assault and gore and the slaughter of the innocent.

I don’t look down on this at all because I, too, love shows about murderers, no matter how badly produced. I have a ton of true crime books at home. But I only knew Ed Gein as a name in the murder books – a name included in a string of others, Ted Bundy, Richard Speck, and on – until I watched the Netflix drama about him.

So I have no idea whether the Netflix portrayal of Ed Gein’s life is truthful, or if the reality was sacrificed to an auteur vision of twentieth century America. The eight episodes are heavy on gore with acts of violence rendered in loving detail. To many people Monster: The Ed Gein Story will just feel gratuitous, its themes swinging wildly in the air.

But there were elements of this drama that, for me, touched on an understanding of the attraction of violence to the spectator. First it reminds us that we were not always spectators. Ed Gein was born in 1906, so he lived through the First and Second World Wars. He sees a newspaper in 1945 that details the horrors of the Nazi death camps, but the vendor doesn’t believe a word. Because the Allies had so exaggerated German crimes in the first war, civilians grew sceptical of what they saw as propaganda from the second. They dismissed the very real industrial killing process as lies.

But Ed Gein is fascinated with the camps. He reads pulp WW2 books featuring Ilse Koch, the wife of the commander at Buchenwald concentration camp. I don’t know how big this pulp magazine culture was, but I believe it existed because it comes up in a 1982 novella by Stephen King, ‘Apt Pupil’. In this story a teenage boy, Todd Bowden, finds a stash of true war magazines in a friend’s house and loses himself in them.

Here was Ilse Koch. Here were crematoriums with their doors standing open on their soot-clotted hinges… The smell of the old pulp magazines was like the smell of the brush-fires burning out of control on the east of Santo Donato, and he could feel the old paper crumbling against the pads of his fingers, and he turned the pages, no longer in Foxy’s garage but caught somewhere crosswise in time, trying to cope with the idea that they had really done those things, that someone had really done those things, and that somebody had let them do those things […]

When Todd recognises a genuine Nazi war criminal in his neighbourhood, he doesn’t turn the old man in but goes straight to him for the details he can’t get out of magazines. Among his first questions is: ‘Did you ever meet Ilse Koch?’

‘Ilse Koch?’ Almost inaudibly, Dussander said: ‘Yes. I met her.’

‘Was she beautiful?’ Todd asked eagerly. ‘I mean…’ His hands described an hourglass in the air.

To which Dussander snaps: ‘She was fat and dumpy and she had bad skin.’

Todd doesn’t care about the wars of his own time – ‘the stupid one going on now, where the Americans had gotten the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of gooks in black pyjamas’. Monster devotes hours of screen time to Ilse Koch – her life in the Third Reich, and the conversations Ed Gein hallucinates with her when both monsters have been locked up for life.

Vietnam doesn’t interest him. The only time I remember it mentioned – I could be wrong – is when the director of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre says that Vietnam is inadequate as a war because it never had that totalising effect on society that the world wars did. The director was outraged by the war crimes committed in Vietnam and wanted to make horror movies as a way of bringing the violence home to America. And this is a good point. The distancing of violence from the civilian over time.

In Our Own Worst Enemy, Tom Nichols recalls the years immediately after 9/11:

For all the talk of ‘war weariness’ among Americans, citizens who are not in the military or who are not part of a military family or community have not had to endure even minor inconveniences due to U.S. military activity and commitments, much less shoulder major burdens such as a draft, a war tax, or resource shortages. Aside from the occasional indignities at the airport, most people would be hard-pressed to describe themselves as living in a country under threat. Little wonder that the soldiers who served overseas in those first years of major operations soon felt forgotten. ‘America’s not at war,’ went a common complaint among the troops. ‘The military’s at war. America’s at the mall.’

And that surely is as it should be. The distancing of violence from everyday life is a good thing and should be celebrated, while we pay our respects and tributes to those who volunteer to face it on the front line – soldiers, paramedics, and detectives chasing the twenty-first century counterparts of Ed Gein and Ted Bundy. The decline of even banal, quotidian violence has been palpable. An essay by Twlldun explains this – an essay I’ve never forgotten:

It changed slowly. Visibly. The black eyes and bruises became less common-place. You can track the change culturally, in how we talk of these things – what in the 60s and 70s what would be a ‘fiery celebrity relationship’ had within a few decades become ‘abusive’. The ‘hellraisers’ became what they were all along, no longer shielded by language, abusive drunks (of course, how much of this is now hidden, and how much a problem there still remains is a matter of discussion, and I’m not for one moment suggesting that we should rest on our laurels, but the feeling that this is normal, how the world should be, that has changed). But I saw the change in real time.

The only point missing from Twlldun’s essay is what remains in our hearts when the violence has gone – and that, even in a safer world, lives can go off the rails. In his novel No Good Deed John Niven writes that ‘As children we think adults walk in a sunlit grove of reason and sanity. At some point we come to realise just how narrow that grove is, how easy it can be for some people to stumble off it and into the shadows beyond.’

As the war crimes investigator of ‘Apt Pupil’ theorises that ‘Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right – or wrong – set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them’, then maybe part of our fascination with crime is from the versions of ourselves that want to find those paths in the shadows and walk them. Beyond the walls that keep morbid symptoms from becoming fevers.

Edward Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks appears to have had a recent makeover. Using an AI programme (I don’t understand the science, so don’t ask) you can revolve your view of the painting and see what’s going on outside the famous frame – mainly, it seems, lampposts and shadowy houses. A Washington Post writer commented on this: ‘You know that classic Edward Hopper painting evoking isolation and despair? We used AI to make it look terrible for no reason’.

But I never thought the picture was sad. The customers in Nighthawks looked safe, and free, if they weren’t exactly happy. The painting works because it’s a world you can imagine yourself in.

I had the same reaction when I watched Cheers as a young man. Back then I drank enough to maybe keep up with Norm Peterson himself. I’d get in at midnight, open a bottle of wine and watch Cheers on freeview for a couple of hours. Two decades later, I have moderated my drinking but could not resist rewatching Cheers in its entirety when I found it on streaming. And I found the same sense of a comfortable world you could step into.

Perhaps that’s the happy predictability of great sitcoms. The bar feels like home because for some characters it practically is home. Norm and Cliff seem to get to Cheers when it opens at ten, they sit and chat and order lunch from the restaurant upstairs and they won’t leave until the place shuts at two. One morning they organise a stag night for Frasier (when he is about to marry Lilith) and Frasier goes home to rest and shower and change and he arrives back in the bar that evening to find that nobody else has left in the meantime. It’s nice to think of staying in the bar all day and night and running your life from there. As Al Swearengen says: ‘As far as a base of operations goes, you cannot beat a fucking saloon.’

Reviewing Cheers, which he was watching along with contemporary show The Bear, Padraig Reidy writes: ‘There was something intangibly great about both shows, but Stephanie Boland – one of the smartest culture writers out there – has made it perfectly tangible: in a world where we are used to laughing at silly or weird characters, the Bear offers characters – especially Richie – who actually are funny themselves, who tell good jokes, rather than are good jokes. Likewise Cheers! would have soon become unbearable if it was about a bar full of social inadequates. The point of Cheers! Is that at least half the characters are exactly the kind of wisecracking clever genial people you want to have a beer with.’

Were we watching different programmes? Or am I drinking to excess again? The Cheers regulars were certainly social inadequates: Cliff Clavin lived with his mother for most of his life, and despite his bombast had little to no experience with women. (The writers walked a fine line with Cliff: he thinks the world of himself and never stops talking, but there was no real wickedness in him and the show managed to make him endearing rather than annoying to us – even if he drove Carla up the wall.) Norm was a lazy and predictable man who seemed to find it impossible to spend time with his wife Vera – who, like Maris Crane, we never see. But Norm had the self awareness Cliff lacked and we get the sense that deep down he adored Vera, to whom he remained faithful if not present in her world.

The bar helped them be the best version of themselves. An early episode features a strange Englishman who walks into Cheers claiming to be a spy. The waitress Diane seeks to expose him but her boss Sam, a sober man who acts as a counsellor to the others, tells her not to: ‘Look, listen, why do you suppose people come to bars in the first place? They come here to shoot off their mouths and get away with it. Listen, in this bar everybody gets to be a hero. Now, what’s the harm?’ Watching the show in the mid 2020s this resonated for me. Cheers has dated, but in a way that makes it seem legendary. The styles, talk and decor of this 1980s Boston seems as strange to us now as the baroque portraits of the show’s opening titles must have been then.

Perhaps it’s better to say that the bar makes you more yourself. I’m haunted by the lines in Joseph Moncure March’s long poem The Wild Party when near the end of the night, ‘a white-faced youth, with a battered hat’ and ‘eyes that saw no wall at all’ listens to a song on the Victrola, tears streaming down his face, and then when the song was done: ‘Carefully, With a face of pain, He would start the same tune over again.’

And that brings us the show’s real theme. No matter how much fun you have nothing stops the dawn from coming, or the cops from rushing in, and in the cold light these are lives of disappointment and sadness. Frasier says in the 2023 reboot that ‘I left Boston with my tail between my legs’ and Kelsey Grammer expanded on that: ‘Frasier is going back to Boston to put himself back in a place where he didn’t feel like he had quite made it, where he left with his tail between his legs a little bit. He wants to feel like he’s conquered it again. He had such high hopes for Boston in his life. Fell in love, fell in love again, got divorced, had a child.’

Erudite to the point of pretentious, Diane dreams of literary fame but when an opportunity falls through she weeps in the bar, saying: ‘A waitress. A waitress. A waitress’ – because she’s convinced that’s all she’ll ever be. Bar manager Rebecca Howe spends her life chasing wealthy men but eventually marries the guy who fixes the bar taps. Sam is famed for his womanising, but womanising is all he can do – he can’t drink, can’t play baseball any more, and as he grows older he only looks more ridiculous. When he criticises Rebecca’s choice of husband, Rebecca hits back at him, calling him a cliche and a joke. Only then does she realises Sam’s genuine unhappiness, and quickly backpedals, saying ‘You’re great, you’ll find someone…’ and it’s an awful, tender moment because we know her earlier words were the truth. (Not that settling did Rebecca any good: when Sam catches up with Frasier in Seattle, we learn that her husband dumped her after getting rich from a trade invention, leaving Rebecca back at the bar… but not working.)

So the bar was where everyone knows your name, where you could be the best version of yourself, where friendship made life easier and more interesting. And one of the greatest sitcoms because it’s a world you can imagine yourself in.

And in that, now, what’s the harm?

When William Shatner went into outer space on Jeff Bezos’s Orbit shuttle in 2021, he became a member of a very exclusive club. After many years playing a spaceship captain Shatner was finally getting to experience space for real. Rushing to the nearest window, he didn’t feel what he had expected to feel: ‘there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.’

I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.

The actor’s voyage beyond is a cautionary tale echoed in literature. Imaginative novelists have interrogated the idea of boldly going. I explored some of these stories in my review of Luiza Sauma’s Everything You Ever Wanted, which remains one of my favourite novels. (Sauma’s book is about a young woman who travels through a wormhole to another planet, though as it stays on my mind I wonder whether the main character actually took her own life and everything that happens is just this character’s mind breaking apart as she dies. I’ll never know for sure.)

The travellers of Here and Beyond have escaped on a ship bound for a planet called HD-40307g, a tabula rasa with all the elements and resources needed to sustain life. The planet is quite a way away: the voyage is expected to take 360 years. Generations will be born, grow old and die without even glimpsing their destination. Shipworld doesn’t sound like a fun place to live in the meantime. It’s a small community of just 600 souls, so every decision can have enormous consequences (as the troubled Jan Oort-Ruiz finds out to his cost.) Governance is opaque and there are a great number of meetings. There is no internet, no phones, no television, and no music apart from a hundred songs selected by the ship’s founder, including ‘My Blue Heaven’. (Dark Tower fans might read something into that choice.) There seems to be no alcohol of any kind. I think the survivors would envy the dead.

We get glimpses of the home planet Shipworld has left behind – mass displacement, climate crises and unreliable strongmen. There is also a very twenty-first century consensus that the Enlightenment went too far: ‘the toxic conversion of healthy individualism into techno-enhanced narcissism that had nearly destroyed Earthworld.’ Big tech is to blame: on Earth, ‘People had become obsessed with their devices, stuck in tribal silos, and addicted to pornography, conspiracy and triviality. Social media pushed them to extreme positions, and they stopped using their own minds to assess situations. Stopped listening to each other, barely knew their neighbours.’ There is a contemporary conviction that our time is uniquely apocalyptic, a world balanced on the edge. Extreme solutions such as interplanetary flight become conceivable.

Yet individualism doesn’t simply go away. In year 118, Shipworld has a rebel: Brenz Oort-St George, a young man who tries to alter the trajectory of the ship. Later generations portray him as a revolutionary or a traitor, but he’s just trying to work things out for himself, inspired by a 1500 self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer, one of the few artifacts from the legacy planet and apparently the first artist to paint himself. (The First Chronicler, an early pioneer named Marcus Marte, is astonished by the audacity of this: ‘One day a man just decided, yes, me? Finally, me?’) Brenz jumps on the Tube – a kind of floating corridor suspended above a public square – and tosses around hundreds of postcards on which he has written out his philosophy like a sci-fi Martin Luther. In his declarations Brenz affirms his support for Shipworld in general – ‘Our Mission to HD-40307g is noble and worthy’ – yet he also proclaims his individualism: ‘my life and my choices are also for myself… survival without growth or risk is not sufficient.’ His actions cause a generational schism in Shipworld but it’s quickly superseded by later generations with their own myths, conflicts, rituals, legends, dark ages and collective dreams.

There is something to Shipworld’s life of service. The pioneers, standing on the bridge, live their lives to build a better world for future generations. It’s not like joining a religious order, which offers you the promise of an afterlife. Shipworld is a life lived only for others, a life of true service.

Hal LaCroix does a fantastic job interrogating the nature of choices: how much our decisions are made by ourselves, and how much is already decided for us, by custom, environment, family and peers. His lessons are not for space alone and the spirit of generational sacrifice goes beyond science fiction. Here and now, climate change is a complex and abstract subject for most of us, yet apart from a handful of crank deniers most ordinary people have recognised this as a threat to our future, and participated in small, individual actions to bring emissions down. When COVID-19 arrived, people began to modify their behaviours weeks before the official lockdowns.

So it can be done. There is grandeur in this view of life after all. Or perhaps it’s just the little details that won me over. Midpoint in the novel the engineer Karlsen, himself born from the artificial iron wombs, creates robotic birds, and long after this engineer is dead the birds are still developing, chirping, talking, and evolving. And Simpsons aficionados will easily visualise the Olmec Head that becomes a central gathering point of Shipworld.

When William Shatner returned from his trip into space, he found that he was not alone in his epiphany of terror and sadness. He wrote: ‘It is called the ‘Overview Effect’ and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner.’

He went on to say this:

It can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart.