Rehabilitating the Cliché

I saw Les Miserables for the first time in December, in a theatrical production at the National Theatre in DC. I have been well acquainted with the songs for years, as my friends and I had grabbed ahold of the cast recording in high school as a window into the larger world of culture closed off to us in our small South Dakotan city. It wasn’t until I saw the actual production that several plot questions were answered for me, and only then did I realize how much of the show really couldn’t be understood by singing along to the sum of its parts. Speaking of ‘the sum of its parts,’ this post is about clichés. But I’ll get to that. Only when I sat in the theater and saw, for the first time, familiar songs acted out within their context did I realize the broader and powerful message stitching together the characters and their stories. What seemed by sound to be only a tragedy was also a tremendous story of hope and an admonition against false dreams of earthly happiness. I found truth in the well-known, concealed from me by its familiarity.

This brings me to clichés. There are clichés, and clichés about clichés all about how things are said because they’re true and they will keep on being said because they’re true, and really the only way to deal with them, especially if you’re a writer, is to avoid them altogether or else burn your pages over a ritualistic altar to Hemingway. There is certainly some truth to clichés not belonging in great writing (if nothing else but for the very fact that repeating a cliché isn’t really writing at all). But I would like to take a moment and give clichés their due, for I feel they’ve been shortchanged in pursuit of the idea that truth can only be revealed in the new. Clichés are particularly tough because most of the time, they seep into our cultural consciousness long before we face the complex circumstances that gave rise to their existence.

Wikipedia considers a cliché to be “an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel” (much like my use of a definition to illustrate a point of contention).  So writers are advised to avoid using clichés, because they are a way of expressing something that has been expressed many times before in precisely the way it has been expressed many times before. But it is exactly my point that through overuse, clichés lose their original meaning. By avoiding the phrase, you avoid the idea, and in doing so, the meaning itself thought to be so common is lost. It’s as if the entire wisdom of collective human experience is hidden in plain sight around us and we sit, oblivious, confined by the commonplace.

There are many true things that we learn before we’re ready. Often they are very hard things that we must face before we know how to deal with them. Sometimes, though, it is a truth just doesn’t matter yet, and we become inoculated to the words that could make the chaos of our lives assume meaning. The burden of our struggle is made all the harder by feeling alone in our misery and we isolate ourselves in the singularity of our circumstance. How comforting then it would be to know the roadmap to perseverance is laid out in speech, the proof of the outlasting preserved and reduced in the maxims and tropes written on cereal boxes and motivational posters hanging on the walls of high school gym teachers all across the country. Usually, however, this clarity only occurs after we have made it on our own, learned the truth slowly and stubbornly and at great personal cost. When we then encounter the cliché, it serves only to mockingly remind us of the simple truth behind the battle ours alone to face.

Sometimes the most difficult thing to accept is the commonness of our problems. If we feel overshadowed by the great things that make us unique, it is easy to fetishize our problems and hold on to them even as they unmake us, because it seems better to be a flawed somebody than an adjusted no-one-special. I am not suggesting that clichés can teach us anything new, but rather aid in our understanding of old and common things, the things that are the hardest perhaps because they happen to everyone. Words can take on new meaning when you realize they apply to you and give rise to an entirely new perspective. Sometimes we know the words so well it’s impossible to know their meaning. 

A Short History of Physical & Ideological Distance in America

At this particular moment, most people in America feel as though some key decision for the future of our nation has been met and passed. Some greet this with remorse, decrying the end of western civilization – the death knell has sounded on the Great American Experiment. Others breathe more easily, knowing that at last we have chosen the path towards righting the injustices greed and manipulation have wrought on our nation.

The only thing our odd assortment of experiences and knowledge tells me is this: we are all as right as we want to be. Political beliefs, like economic beliefs, are myths that only become true if they are believed long enough by enough people. This is why, on the very short list of truly great American presidents, the only common factor among them all is that they were president. They did not all have the same political beliefs, or practice the same economic policy. There is no master key to unlocking the perfect set of words and actions that can make everything good again. Sometimes trickle-down economics work; sometimes increased social programs can provide the helping hand needed to aid a bruised workforce to its feet. The only thing that has consistently helped America to recover from the inevitable troughs and valleys in economic growth is the faith of the people in the chosen course, the commitment to their country, and the renewed belief that even though your neighbor might not look or sound or think like you, he or she is more like you than not like you.

The great land expanse of America has always been joined by a web of some kind, connected by a smattering of cities. Those strands have altered through time, and have required physical reinforcement when the ideological bonds have faltered. Transportation was difficult in the time leading up to the Civil War, and it was not uncommon that many Northerners would never see the South, and many Southerners would never venture North. The steamships and waterways were limited to the rivers and coasts. The Southern states could and did feel as disconnected from New York as the colonists had felt from London. Their revolt grappled with a distance that felt far greater until the Northern soldiers appeared on their doorsteps. After (and during) the Civil War, the Pacific Railroad Acts sought to rectify the growing ideological distance throughout the nation by connecting trains to shorten the physical distance throughout the nation.

In the mid twentieth-century, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways came as a result of the realization, brought on by World War II, that we were not as far from the rest of the world as we had thought, and it was time to fortify our infrastructure. Roads and bridges connect more than places: they connect ideas and goods. This gave rise to the homogenization of the 1950s. Suddenly, a living room in Indiana might look identical to a living room on Long Island, and both would be tuning in to the same television show and being exposed to the same ideas. The Cold War compelled a unified cultural front. The government had a vested interest in winning the cultural wars with the Soviet Union right along with the space race. For a push like that, everyone had to be on board.

The 1960s and Vietnam shook up whatever complacency our nation had been stewing about in, until Ronald Regan came along and reinvented the American Dream: the white picket fence, financial and physical security, and a chance for lasting peace with the Soviet yin to our ideological yang. That era of new hope sailed on through the prosperous Clinton era until the Supreme Court carved out a V-shaped continental divide between Bush and Gore supporters. Even though on September 12, 2001, nearly every person in America was glad George W. Bush was president, in January of 2009, he was booed on the steps of the Capitol just moments before Barack Obama was sworn in.

So here we are again – at the point where upheaval and discord threaten to tear our country apart. The ties the bind our nation are the most theoretical they have ever been. We are connected through technology and communication, nebulous waves of data that cannot depict the nuance or momentary shared exchange necessary to feel in accord with another person. Physical encounters between rural and urban life are one-way or not at all. Generations of farm kids and would-be townspeople are drawn to cities for jobs, glamour, or opportunity, but few urbanites escape much farther than the suburbs.

So frankly, no wonder the places that vote Red vote very, very Red, and the places that vote Blue vote very, very Blue. No wonder you have a hard time understanding how some person you have never met might not believe the same things you do. Probably, most people you know were raised where you were, or got out for the same reasons you did. But the biggest mistake you could make is thinking that you and the person living a thousand miles away amidst very different surroundings have nothing in common. If you believe that, it is the result of ratings-driven media and single facts, taken out of context – the worst examples used to depict a type of person, which then becomes a placeholder for the hundreds of thousands of people you will never meet. When people are types, welfare might mean only crack addicts who refuse to work, or conservative might mean racist bigots.

All I know for sure is that any category you can put another person in that allows you to spend less time thinking about him, or questioning her motivation is, at the very best, only part of the story – and the part of the story any novelist might lead but never end with. In this cold and chilling age of the individual, we can choose the community we belong to through the means of our computer or phone, adopt any identity we wish if we are not thrilled with our own, or embrace our family and friends and fortify our own stronghold against the rest of the world. Pictures of natural disasters happening in our own country do not have to evoke any more emotion in us than pictures of natural disasters happening anywhere else in the world.

But if the strength of our nation is only as strong as our ties as a nation and if we are all as right as we want to be, the dream of America can fizzle and fade. As tempting as it may be to think, the results of the most recent election are not a sign of where we are headed, but rather a sign of where we are now. If we believe the other political party is trying to take advantage of us, or lacks heart, and we respond in kind, our actions will bear that truth out. But the future of our country will not be decided by any elected official: it is entirely on us whether we choose a future for a nation, or for the separate individuals who happen to be living there.

Jaded Killers: Innocence/Experience

On their first album, Hot Fuss, The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” grapples with jealousy and the loss of innocence resulting from a betrayal. The Killers’ fourth and most recent album, Battle Born, revisits that time and place in the song “Miss Atomic Bomb.” A superficial connection between the two songs is immediately obvious. Not only do both songs’ titles bear honorifics, but strains of the melody of “Mr. Brightside” are audible in the “Miss Atomic Bomb’s” penultimate verse.

“Mr. Brightside” captures the spirit of youthful idealism, impatience to experience the world. A relationship goes wrong and evokes powerful feelings of jealousy and betrayal, but he is willing to see the positive and consider it the price of experience that comes along with wanting to have it all.

“Miss Atomic Bomb,” seven years later, is a haunting ballad of regret and self-knowledge, mourning now the loss of the innocence he was so eager to give away, uncertain if it was worth the cost. His eager eyes have been opened. The dust has settled and he has seen past the innocence of youth. He reflects that “This love that I have cradled, is wearing thin.” – Experience’s promise of memories always worth the pain is proving hollow. The truth, terrible and unavoidable has been thrust upon him. In his dreams it is the alluring strains of a time before clarity that now haunt his sleep. The destiny that called him, urging him ever onward, led to the inevitable and certain end: to know.

The desire for truth, the eager eyes that feasted on all there is to see, to learn, to know - devoured without taste or discernment until like all appetites, it has been sated and left behind only a regretful fullness. All that he wanted was tenderness and a little truth, but the shockwave whisper has unleashed a truth too great, one that cannot be unknown. These hard and little realities learned from experience while in the pursuit of a particular kind of truth, don’t reveal themselves to be nothing more than perspective until that perspective has been irrevocably altered.

Where once he begged “Let me go,” the passage of time has tempered with the warning, “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.” But it is the innocence that in “Mr. Brightside” he was begging to be freed of that will be missed, who he was then, vulnerable and innocent, still able to be affected by the toll of the unexpected, still believing all experience necessary for him to become the man to whom destiny called.

“Mr. Brightside” opens with:

I'm coming out of my cage
And I've been doing just fine
Gotta gotta be down
Because I want it all

And the closing lines of “Miss Atomic Bomb” answer:

But you can’t survive
When you want it all
There’s another side. 

The final line casts in relief the folly of youth too ignorant to fully comprehend the darkness that accompanies fading innocence, that no matter how positive the outlook, some experiences are too great to escape unchanged, to survive unscathed, nor is any light so bright that it cannot be blotted out by the shadow of a larger explosion.

Full Lyrics:

Mr. Brightside

I'm coming out of my cage
And I've been doing just fine
Gotta gotta be down
Because I want it all

It started out with a kiss
How did it end up like this?
It was only a kiss
It was only a kiss

Now I'm falling asleep
And she's calling a cab
While he's having a smoke
And she's taking a drag

Now they're going to bed
And my stomach is sick
And it's all in my head
But she's touching his chest now
He takes off her dress now
Let me go
And I just can't look it's killing me
And taking control

Jealousy, turning saints into the sea
Swimming through sick lullabies
Choking on your alibis
But it's just the price I pay
Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
‘Cause I'm Mr. Brightside

I'm coming out of my cage
And I've been doing just fine
Gotta gotta be down
Because I want it all

It started out with a kiss
How did it end up like this?
It was only a kiss
It was only a kiss

Now I'm falling asleep
And she's calling a cab
While he's having a smoke
And she's taking a drag

Now they're going to bed
And my stomach is sick
And it's all in my head
But she's touching his chest now
He takes off her dress now
Let me go
‘Cause I just can't look it's killing me
And taking control

Jealousy, turning saints into the sea
Swimming through sick lullabies
Choking on your alibis
But it's just the price I pay
Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
‘Cause I'm Mr. Brightside

I never
I never
I never
I never

Miss Atomic Bomb

You were standing with your girlfriends in the street
Falling back on forever
I wonder what you came to be…
I was new in town, the boy with the eager eyes
I never was a quitter, oblivious to schoolgirls' lies

When I look back on those neon nights
The leather seats, the passage rite
I feel the heat, I see the light

Miss Atomic Bomb
Making out, we've got the radio on
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone

Racing shadows under moonlight
Through the desert on a hot night
And for a second there we'd won
Yeah, we were innocent and young

Cast out of the night, well you've got a foolish heart
So you took your place
But the fall from grace was the hardest part
It feels just like a dagger buried deep in your back
You run for cover but you can't escape the second attack
Your soul was innocent, she kissed him and
She painted it black
You should have seen your little face, burnin' for love
Holdin on' for your life

All that I wanted was a little touch,
A little tenderness and truth, I didn't ask for much, no
Talk about being at the wrong place at the wrong time…

Miss Atomic Bomb
Making out we've got the radio on
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone

Racing shadows under moonlight
We're taking chances on a hot night
And for a second there we'd won
Yeah we were innocent and young

The dust cloud has settled, and my eyes are clear
But sometimes in dreams of impact I still hear

Miss Atomic Bomb,
I'm standing here
Sweat on my skin
And this love that I've cradled
Is wearing thin
But I'm standing here and you’re too late
Your shock-wave whisper
Has sealed your fate

It feels just like a dagger buried deep in your back
You run for cover but you can't escape the second attack
Your soul was innocent, she kissed him and
She painted it black
You should have seen your little face, burning for love,
Holdin' on for your life

But you can't survive
When you want it all
There's another side





THE KILLERS lyrics are property and copyright of their owners.

"Want to see a magic trick?" The Prestige & Nolan's Dark Knight

First off, if you haven't seen The Dark Knight Rises, stop reading this. Also, what are you possibly doing on the internet instead of inside a movie theater right now? Even if Warner Brothers manages to reach deep enough into its pockets to find the unfathomable combination of money and creative control that it would probably take to convince Christopher Nolan to do a fourth Batman movie, The Dark Knight trilogy will still be a trilogy. I (like everyone) would welcome and watch the hell out of another Nolan/Bale Batman. But the magic trick is complete. In 2006, I was generally underwhelmed by The Prestige. In the intervening years, I’ve changed my mind. Not only is it a solid film in its own right, it also lays out the course of the entire Dark Knight trilogy – in 2006. The Prestige opens the way every movie should: with a Michael Caine narration. His character, who we soon learn is an ingénieur (magician’s engineer), lays out some magician's theory:

Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't.The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back.That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige."

The Pledge: Batman Begins

The ordinariness of Batman has always been one of his most compelling features. Unlike Superman or Spiderman, he does not possess superhuman strength or agility. The only thing separating Batman from you or me is several years of martial arts training and about $6.9 billion (Forbes). Batman Begins came out in 2005. In the midst of the comic superhero movie craze following 9/11, Batman could have been sentenced to mediocre ignominy with the likes of Superman Returns and Catwoman. Sure, Batman has always had a strong fan base, but Joel Schumacher’s be-nippled travesty of Batman & Robin (1997) had burned up a lot of the gravitas and masculine mystery of Bruce Wayne. His story was played out.

Enter Christopher Nolan. The story he tells is ordinary – Bruce Wayne, orphaned by crime, turns to vigilante justice. Batman Begins isn’t just exciting – it’s plausible. Each aspect of the Bat Man is inspected, from the initial fear that incited his identification with bats to the personal inner turmoil that resulted from his parents’ death. His very fear of bats leads to the unfortunate mugging that orphans Wayne, forming an inextricable link between bats and injustice. But Nolan’s Batman isn’t as normal as he appears.

The Turn: The Dark Knight

Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker takes a character that by its very nature is something of a punchline and forms a place for him in possibility. Batman has, by this point, grown into his role as Gotham’s protector. Wayne Manor and Ra’s al Ghul are gone. Batman’s only misstep comes as the result of Rachel Dawes’ death. Following Harvey Dent’s murder spree, Batman assumes Dent's guilt in fear of what might happen with the destruction of Dent's legacy with the means-justifying line, “Because sometimes... the truth isn't good enough. Sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” Although this is the noble action, it is dissatisfying for Batman to shoulder the blame of Two-Face’s actions, and for both Gordon and Batman to agree to a lie based on what they believe the people of Gotham can handle. In doing so, they inadvertently prove their assent to the words of the Joker, that people are “only as good as the world allows them to be.” Batman – and everything the world thought of him – disappears.

The Prestige: The Dark Knight Rises

Everything that has been lost must return in the third act of the Dark Knight trilogy. In this post-Batman Gotham, crime is down, Batman has been branded a criminal, and Bruce Wayne has disappeared deep into the east wing of Wayne manor in a pre-Belle-Beast of a move. Only Gordon knows the truth about Harvey Dent and clearly struggles with the Faustian deal that has enabled him to clean up Gotham’s streets. Wayne Manor has been restored, and Bruce must once again possess the young man’s rage that first led him to the mask, the fear that must accompany him to sustain him, and the genuine wish for a life outside this burden.

This great magic trick concludes true to form: Nolan brings back all that has disappeared. In order for Nolan to complete “The Prestige” element of the trilogy, he has to bring back the Batman of the first act and all must truths be revealed. The shared lie of Harvey Dent proves to be the undoing of order. Batman must once again confront the specter of Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows.

The opposite of hope in Nolan’s Gotham is not despair, as Bane would have us believe, but expectation. Hope has no place where certainty resides. The idea that Batman must be a symbol more than a man has been used throughout the three movies, but we, like Bruce Wayne, only understand at the very end that the great trick of Batman has never been one man's fight against injustice – it has been to give hope to carry on in the face of certain despair, and that the truth of ordinary people is more than they have shown.