DEAR PORCH: AMERICAN UTOPIA - Morgan Meis

Hi Porch!

Sorry it has taken me some time to write back. Your last letter was amazing. But boy, you kind of opened up a can of worms for me with the request in your previous letter that I watch Spike Lee’s film of David Byrne’s American Utopia. Maybe can of worms is the wrong phrase for it. There aren’t worms in there, or not only worms. And also, what’s wrong with worms? Worms are quite fascinating and wonderful creatures, actually, with their physicality that is, in a sense, just a simple stretch of linearity. A thing stretched out from here to there. What clarity to be a worm! And yet, the bendiness of the worm, the slimy twisty structurelessness of the super-mutable worm puts the lie to this simplicity. Linearity is never simple. Getting from here to there is always a wild ride.

I must say that I especially love how you managed to worm-wiggle your way from my rambling thoughts about Éric Rohmer to your own about David Byrne. I’m going to go through the steps once more just so that we can appreciate it, Porch. You said that my comparison of Rohmer’s The Green Ray with Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! reminded you of a documentary about Linklater you once saw and in that documentary he teaches a film workshop with Jonathan Demme, or something like that, and they both just loved the work of making films. This makes you think a little bit more about Jonathan Demme, not necessarily a maker of heart-centered films, as you put it, Porch, with some tongue in your cheek, but nonetheless someone who was attracted to characters with heart and that, finally, makes you think of the concert films, the music-based films that Demme made, especially Stop Making Sense, the 1984 film that Demme made about a Talking Heads concert. So, the worm finally turns from Rohmer all the way to David Byrne. 

The first couple of times I read your letter, Porch, I wasn’t sure how we’d gotten to David Byrne, nor was I clear on what American Utopia has to do with the films of Éric Rohmer. I wasn’t mad or anything, Porch, I want you to know that. I think you are great and I trust you implicitly. I was just finding myself confused, in the throes of a non-sequitur, as it were, and unsure how to proceed. Also, I didn’t really want to watch American Utopia. Why not? Well, that’s a good question, Porch. Why didn’t I want to watch American Utopia?   

I liked your non-story about David Byrne, by the way. I have a couple of non-stories about him too. The simplest one is that growing up in the Hollywood Hills, we lived a couple of blocks above Timothy Leary’s house. My Dad became friends with him. One day, Timothy called and told my Dad to come over. When he did, David Byrne was there, paying a visit to the guru of psychedelia. “He was weird,” my Dad reported of Byrne, “and didn’t say much.” And thus the story ends. 

But there is, maybe, a small point to this incredibly not-very-interesting story. The weirdness of David Byrne. It is an unusual weirdness, you might even say a weird weirdness. It’s like he is an alien trying desperately to convince everyone, including himself, that he’s a normal guy. He wants to be terrestrial. He mimics all the motions. He tries to get the language right and the intonations. He sees people and he gets them. He loves them, even. “I’m just a human being,” he declares, “I’m a human being participating in our shared musical activities.” He even writes songs that more or less declare this. This is a regular, enjoyable pop song! But, of course, normal terrestrials do not declare themselves to be such and do not write songs that declare themselves to be music. So, the gestures toward normalcy become, actually, extremely weird, double weird. 

Another thing about David Byrne, and this gets to the heart of my nervousness about watching American Utopia, is that those songs are wrapped up with the history of my life. Various people and events from my life as a teenager in Los Angeles and then in New York City in my 20s. Those years of my life are pockmarked with David Byrne and the music of David Byrne, which plays in the background, even if it did not play, literally, in the background. And there is someone in specific. My dear friend K. One of my closest friends in those days. K. He did not make it, as you have probably already guessed. Some years ago, he drank himself to death in a lonely apartment in Stockton California, a place that I will always hold a grudge against, a place whose name brings me to the darkest thoughts about everything, a sense of hopelessness and misery that cannot be reconciled with anything good. A terrifying place. Not long before I’d found out that K. had died, I wrote to a mutual friend J. J., I wrote, we have to go find K. We have to track him down. He’s cut all his ties, he’s run away from everything. We have to bring him back. But we didn’t do that. I didn’t do that. I know that it is not possible to be responsible for another person’s life. You cannot save another person unless some small part of that person wants to be saved. K. was not yet ready. And before he got ready, he slipped away, alone and quietly desperate in his isolation. I’m told it was some days before anyone came looking for him, before they finally found his body. 

There are many things I will always remember about K. But one of them is that he had a quite good singing voice. And he was good at mimicking the gestures and body language of certain people. Especially David Byrne. He did a good David Byrne. The Stop Making Sense David Byrne, especially. The herky-jerky motions. The controlled robot fritzing out. The raw nerves that cannot quite be contained even within the giant suit. There are many hours driving around the nameless backstreets of Los Angeles with very tall K. stuffed into the driver’s side of his tiny car and there is an indistinct brown tinge to the air on the horizon because it is Los Angeles and perhaps the Santa Anas are blowing hot and dry over the hills and rustling the foliage of all the trees and bushes along the streets we’re traversing and all the circuitous routes we’re taking just to avoid getting on the 405, because no one wants to end up on the 405 if you can avoid it and there is scent of eucalyptus on the breeze and our car windows are open and K. gets excited because this is my favorite part in the song coming up, he says, and I know he is going to say this because he always says this, and notice, K. says, how the register shifts right here, he says, and then the moment comes and K. sings it and he nails it just right as he always does and I see what he means, I always see what he means, and I appreciate that he noticed this, that he was able to pinpoint this miraculous moment in a deceptively simple pop song when everything changes and everything becomes just right.   

There are many David Byrne songs, many Talking Heads songs that I am not eager to listen to now, I must confess. They’re just too hard for me. And some of those are in American Utopia. And when I listened to them all I could do was cry. And so I did. And that turned out to be a good thing, Porch. So I thank you for that. Certain things needed to be released and certain ways of saying goodbye to K. that I hadn’t yet completed inside myself. Some final letting go, or at least a next important step in the process. And of forgiving him, actually, for dying in such a horrible way, for having inflicted that death on the rest of us. I forgive you, K., for that. 

There is something you said about being focused on characters with heart, Porch, that sticks with me. You said that about Demme and also it relates, of course, to Rohmer and to David Byrne. The staging of American Utopia is the whole deal, really. And the way that Spike Lee films that staging. Byrne says it himself. That this performance will strip it down to the main thing we are interested in, which is people. Just people. And the simpler you make that focus, the more you strip things away to the core of just human beings standing before other human beings saying and singing stuff, the more you do this, the more it becomes clear that this simplicity collapses into infinity. Simplicity is the secret route to complexity, or one secret route. There are, no doubt, many routes. I think, though, of the almost non-existent plot and structure of Rohmer’s My Night at Maude’s. Could any movie say more clearly that we do not, in fact, know who we are or what we want or even, in the most basic sense, what we are doing? And that this is the very core of human experience and that it is actually beautiful. That this terrible fact is beautiful. We’re on the road to nowhere. 

I’d like, Porch, to watch with you Rohmer’s film series, Tales of The Four Seasons. I haven’t seen any of them yet. I know they can be hard to get hold of. I can’t seem to find the first, Tale of Springtime, anywhere online or in any collection I have immediate access to. Perhaps you have advice on that. But let’s watch the first film or two, whatever you like, and then you can write to me about that and we’ll see where we go. Yes? 

Your friend,

morgan

Morgan Meis is a contributor at The New Yorker. He has a PhD in Philosophy and has written for Slate and Harper’s Magazine, among many others. He won the Whiting Award for nonfiction in 2013.