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But Who Tells Them What To Sing?

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Adrian Daub | Longreads | September 2021 | 21 minutes (5,894 words)

When a new trailer for the Marvel film Black Widow dropped in April of this year — after the movie had been repeatedly moved back due to the pandemic — the producers seemed intent on reminding people about why they’d been excited about the movie before the lockdowns started. They did so by closing the promo with a new version of the theme from The Avengers, probably to call back viewers to a different, less socially distanced time. How could you know this was a new version of the motif? It was choral, but that was a well Marvel had gone to before. This time it had lyrics. As best I can tell, for the first time.

As fans welcomed the callback in online comments, I was brought back to a question that I’d had when Game of Thrones did something similar at the end of its fourth season and again at the very end of the show. It’s something of a trend these days to take a highly recognizable instrumental theme and make it choral. And I get why: The gesture is big and bold and epic. But my question concerned something comparatively pedestrian: Who decides what the lyrics are? What language are they even in? And who writes them? I decided to find out.

Those of us who listen to soundtracks obsessively do so knowing that that’s not how soundtracks are intended to work on us. Whoever mixed in a chorus for a few seconds of the Black Widow trailer was going for an emotional reaction, not some new layer of meaning to be disentangled. “When I do a film score,” the late James Horner said in a TED talk in 2005, “I am nothing more than a fancy pencil” executing the vision of a filmmaker. You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.

You’re not meant to listen to a soundtrack in isolation from the image. It is music in service of the moment.

But one place where this fancy pencil has more autonomy is when it comes to the text that a chorus sings. Perhaps it’s better to say that the pencil is condemned to freedom. When the composer John Ottman was hired to score the 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, he realized that he needed a break in the texture of the soundtrack at the very end of the film. That’s because in the final scenes of the movie basically all of the even remotely redeemable characters get executed. After they had all died and the credits rolled, Ottman decided he wanted a “sense of release, because there had to be a different feeling as the audience walks out of the theater.” So he hit upon the idea of a self-contained choral piece. “The problem was though, what on earth would they be saying?”


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What on earth indeed? It’s a moment where blockbuster filmmaking — always so anxiously in control of its meanings — seems to be at a bit of a loss. And it’s a moment where we as an audience suddenly get a sense for how films make meaning, and how it isn’t always the meaning they intend to make.

So who decided what the lyrics to the theme from The Avengers were? The short answer is that I still don’t know. But the long answer to my pedestrian question leads into the high-pressure, highly collaborative world of film scoring. A world in which composers often have just a few weeks to write music that pleases the studio and the director, and potentially even test audiences. And in which they toil with assistants, orchestrators, sound editors, and many, many session musicians to find a sound for a film that is still in the process of evolving. I wanted to find out who among this massive group would be the one to say “hey, let’s add a chorus and have it sung in Sanskrit” or something along those lines.

The answer turns out to be: Pretty much any of them can and sometimes do. What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place. It’s as likely that a director had the screenwriter invent specific lyrics early in post-production as that a subcontractor, assistant composer, or orchestrator jotted down some words or went on a Wikipedia deep-dive eight weeks out from release in a desperate late-night quest for a non-copyrighted text to use with a cue that might please a bunch of suits half a world away.

What film choruses offer us is a perfect synecdoche for the collective, frenzied, and deeply mercenary magic that creates movies in the first place.

***

Choruses have been part of film scoring for over a century. People have been singing on screen since the earliest silent reels, and with increasing technical wizardry we could even hear them doing it. But something like the Black Widow trailer is what we call an non-diegetic chorus: These are voices that viewers aren’t supposed to somehow locate within the screen action. In early cinema you had to have musicians physically present, first in the cinema with a viewer, eventually in the scene with the actors. Both of which pretty much ruled out the use of a choir. And, as film music historian Mervyn Cooke points out, once technologies existed that allowed films to have at least a partial soundtrack, filmmakers initially avoided non-diegetic music — precisely because they needed to sell the illusion that the sound was coming “from” the scene.

Non-diegetic music started to become the norm only in the early ’30s. And even then the limitations of recording technology meant that non-diegetic voices were not usually worth the trouble. By the late ’30s this had changed. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) had its choir chime in even when it wasn’t for the explicit musical numbers. (Snow White was also the first soundtrack issued as an album, so choruses were part of how film soundtracks traveled semi-independently from their films from the very beginning.)

Alfred Newman had begun relying on wordless “heavenly choirs” going ooo and aaa in the background, in films like Wuthering Heights (1939), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Song of Bernadette (1943). As the music historian Donald Greig, who is also an active session singer on many modern scores, has pointed out, in the beginning choruses had to be at least somewhat motivated by theme or screen action — they were there to speak for ghosts, to intimate religious dimensions to the screen action.

And then there was Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). The film concerns the discovery of Shangri-La in the Himalayas, and when we finally get to the fabled land the soundtrack accompanies the matte-painted wonderland with a chorus singing in … well, in a language that isn’t English and doesn’t seem to be Tibetan either. And thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction.

And thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction.

Both types of choral performance have never left the Hollywood lexicon. In thinking through how film choruses make meaning, I became obsessed with what the process of recording a soundtrack looks like today and at what point in that process someone actually writes lyrics in fake Tibetan. In the Golden Age, studios kept their own choirs — professional singers would show up at the lot and ooo and aaa for a Miklós Rósza score today and belt out a ferocious battle hymn for Erich Wolfgang Korngold the next. Studios also had their house orchestrators (usually several), and while laypeople remember the composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, there are other figures that probably shaped the way films sound just as much if not more, all the while just quietly collecting their paychecks.

Speaking with modern singers about their experiences, I was struck by how little their day-to-day job description had changed since Tiomkin’s day. But the world in which they are performing is altogether different. As part of my research for this article I made a massive choir belt out the most menacing rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” ever, and all it cost me was $199 plus tax. The EastWest Symphonic Choirs software allows you to make a virtual choir sing in just about any style imaginable. Want your ooos and aaas to sound like a whisper? More Broadway or more classical? All of that’s in the package.

But there’s more: Due to a system called WordBuilder, you can have this choir sing pretty much anything — you can type in text in English, in phonetics, or a proprietary alphabet called Votox, and the software will assemble it out of a massive databank of vowels and consonants. This is a commercially available product, but there are even bigger sample libraries kept by individual composers: If you’re wondering who’s dropping by to supply a quick “agnus dei” for a Hans Zimmer score, well that’s almost certainly a proprietary sample owned by Zimmer’s film score workshop, Remote Control.

All the professional singers I spoke to were keenly aware of products like EastWest Symphonic Choirs and the sample libraries — because more likely than not they’re in them. If you’re in the business of singing on film, these days you won’t always be asked to sing for an actual score, but instead you might get booked to record samples. There’s a scary possibility that these artists are slowly eroding the industry’s need for their labor — that the fruits of their one day of paid work will perform for the studios in perpetuity and with no extra residuals. Their disembodied vowels are putting their vocal chords out of business. But that possibility hasn’t been fully realized: Often enough when they arrive in the recording studio, singers will find that there is a vocal track already, but it’s done by computer. And yet, the composer wants a live version. Almost all the singers I spoke to expressed some surprise that Hollywood still bothered.

Their disembodied vowels are putting their vocal chords out of business.

One possibility why they do: Composers simply like working with live humans and consider it part of their job to do so. As Jonathan Beard, who has been composing and orchestrating in Hollywood for over a decade, put it to me, choirs are an easy, effective way to give dimension to a scene — “because you have a human body as one of the instruments, and there’s a power the human voice [has] over us in general.”

Composers are highly trained musicians, and a lot of their training has involved singing. The composer brothers Harry and Rupert Gregson-Williams (Harry composed for films like Kingdom of Heaven, the Narnia-films, and most of Denzel Washington’s films of the last 15 years, while Rupert is best known for DC Universe films like Wonder Woman and Aquaman) were both choirboys at St. John’s College in Cambridge — it makes biographical sense that choral textures and their creation would be important to them. And that they might like to think through music with a live chorus rather than a computer. Another surprising preference that speaks to a kind of sweet traditionalism: While sometimes vocal tracks get doubled in recording (meaning what sounds like 16 singers is just eight overlaid onto each other), this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Clearly someone in the process enjoys working with large groups of people and thinks they give you an aesthetic payoff that engineering wizardry would not.

But there’s a more cynical reason as well, and it’s the reason why automation hasn’t displaced human labor in other fields: The process of booking some freelancers through a fixer, having them record for a day, and then paying them no residuals isn’t actually much of an expense. That’s how London became a preferred place for Hollywood to record: a large population of well-trained musicians, whose union doesn’t insist on residuals. Several London-based singers I spoke with suggested that the reason Hollywood doesn’t record in, say, Germany as often is that singers in continental Europe have steadier income and are less dependent on session work. And once a producer decides that even London-based musicians are too demanding — well, then there’s always Prague or Budapest. The gorgeous voices you heard in a John Ford Western were the sound of unions and full-time employment; in a Hollywood score today they are monuments to the globalizing power of the gig economy.

***

So that is the world from which these vocals emerge. Imagine you are a classically trained singer in, say, London who has done some previous work on soundtracks. You get a call from a fixer, who is assembling a chorus, or soloists, for a production company. You book the gig, and you show up for the recording session knowing which film you’re singing for, probably knowing the composer you’re recording for, but nothing else. Most recording sessions take place in the famous Abbey Road Studios, which are expensive, so you’re usually booked for no more than a certain number of union-approved hours.

Importantly, by the time you show up for the recording session, the film is pretty much “in post post production,” as one session singer put it to me. The film is basically finished, the wrangling over what the score is supposed to sound like is over. By the time you record, whatever orchestral parts you are supposed to accompany are fully assembled — you usually have them in your headphones as you sing. When you get there, you are handed a large stack of notes to sing and, according to all the singers I spoke with, you get through some portion of them in the next few hours — never through all of them. Some cues you sing will never be in the finished film, some cues you might do 10 versions of. And then the studio time the composer booked is over, you hand over your stack of notes, sign statements agreeing not to divulge anything about what you just sang, and you are on your way.

As the soprano Catherine Bott said: “You enter a studio and you open the score and off you go. You sing what you’re told, and it’s all about versatility, just being able to adapt to the right approach, whatever that may be for that conductor or that composer.” And part of that, singers told me, was singing the words — whatever they may be. As Donald Greig pointed out to me, a lot of these singers have training in classics; they certainly know their way around a Requiem or a Stabat Mater. And yet often enough when they step into Abbey Road they’re being asked to sing perfectly nonsensical phrases in pseudo-Latin — but the studio is booked, the clock is ticking, and as Bott put it, “that’s not the time to put up your hand and, you know, correct the Latin.”

Or the English: Bott sang on the soundtrack for the 1986 animated feature An American Tail. For a cue where the little immigrant mouse Fievel first lays eyes on New York harbor, composer James Horner had the choir intone the famous Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. As she was singing through the cue — “Give me your tired, your poor” — Bott realized that whoever had put together the score had written down “your huddled masses yearning to be free” rather than “breathe free.” She was pretty sure she knew better, as did some colleagues, but out of English reserve, deference to the Americans, or professionalism, no one felt it was their place to say anything. The misquote stayed in the picture and you can buy it on CD today.

Perhaps part of what made me look for the meaning behind the lyrics on some of my favorite soundtracks was exactly this professionalism. A good singer sells the emotion and the conviction, to the point that a listener sort of has to believe that it all means something. Interestingly enough, early in this long tradition of made-up languages, Hollywood felt the need to pretend that it did mean something. When Lost Horizon was released in 1937, Columbia Pictures claimed in its publicity material that Dimitri Tiomkin’s score “includes authentic folk songs of Tibet.” The same press sheet noted that the Hall Johnson Choir, a popular gospel choir, “will sing the folk song arrangements in the native Tibetan language.”

Film music historians agree that this is hogwash. There is no evidence Tiomkin researched Tibetan folk songs for his score — what the ad men were selling as “authentic folk songs” were almost certainly newly written pieces in a made-up language. Tiomkin had started out as a concert pianist and relied on a small army of orchestrators to turn his melodies into actual playable scores. Someone in that group put a pen to paper and wrote these pieces, and either that same person or someone else seems to have made up some fake Tibetan text to distribute to the singers.

But for whatever reason Columbia Pictures’ publicity department didn’t want to frame the vocals in this manner. Perhaps extradiegetic voices were still sufficiently new that they wanted to tell an audience what these voices were doing on the soundtrack. Or it had nothing to do with the soundtrack itself, and was just another way of selling the broader spectacle of filmmaking: Look at the lengths we went to.

At the same time, lyrics have a pesky way of clarifying the intended audience. After all, it is not altogether difficult to imagine why Tiomkin and company wouldn’t have bothered with actual folk songs and actual language. Lost Horizon is one of those movies that stars noted non-Asian persons H.B. Warner as “Chang” and Sam Jaffe as “the High Lama of Shangri-La.” The broad and bogus claims to authenticity are also making a point of who the movie is for. The fact that the Hall Johnson Choir was an African American group best known for singing spirituals, amplifies the sense that Lost Horizon turns non-white people’s authenticity into charming window-dressing for white audiences. Like Shangri-La for its white visitors, even when its lyrics were incomprehensible film music was still “for” white English speakers.

At other times when Hollywood filmmaking relied on choruses, the point was the opposite of exoticism: hyper-comprehensibility. Decades later Tiomkin wrote a rousing score for John Wayne’s jingoistic epic The Alamo (1960). At the end of the movie, with the siege over and one lone survivor and her little daughter leaving the ruined fort, a chorus drifts faintly onto the soundtrack, almost as though the singers were standing somewhere far away in the field of battle. Over the movie’s final shots, the choir takes over the soundtrack, singing a version of what would eventually spend some weeks on the pop charts as “The Ballad of the Alamo.” The first lines a viewer is able to clearly hear are: “Let the old men tell the story / let the legend grow and grow. / Of the thirteen days of glory / at the siege of Alamo.”

This music explicitly tells us why it needs to turn human voices singing in a language the viewer is supposed to understand. The “Ballad” tells us what to do with the story we have just heard: Pass it on, let the legend “grow and grow.” Also — since this was made by John Wayne in the ’60s — the message is probably also don’t be a communist. But note how the movie has to treat three things as essentially the same: the singing has to be audible for the casual moviegoer, over people getting out of their seats early or finishing off their popcorn; the words have to be comprehensible on a purely linguistic level to an audience that has been taught to tune out the music on some level for the last two hours; and the reason why these words were included in the movie has to be clear.

Also — since this was made by John Wayne in the ’60s — the message is probably also don’t be a communist.

The fact that these three factors are separate can be easy to forget for an English-speaking audience reared on American pop culture. I grew up on Hollywood films in dubbed versions — though those didn’t typically dub the music. Meaning, as a kid who didn’t speak English, I became pretty used to following a plot in German, then the music would swell and I’d sort of tune out for a few minutes as the soundtrack, and the English language, washed over me. I’d get the basic idea of course — the characters were happy, or sad, or patriotic — but I had no idea what they were saying, and I was okay with that.

That’s sort of how most of us feel when we listen to the theme to the 21st-century version of Battlestar Galactica — unless we happen to be familiar with the mantras of the Rig Veda. Still, it’s a culturally specific experience. These days we can’t watch fantasy or science fiction without being sung at in Sanskrit, Old Norse, Dwarvish, Elvish, Uruk-hai, Klingon, and so on. When composer John Williams returned to the Star Wars universe for 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he composed an amped-up piece for the final duel — and over its churning ostinatos he overlaid a chorus belting out a … Sanskrit translation of a Welsh poem. And apparently the syllables of the Sanskrit text were rearranged to the point of incomprehensibility. Clearly, these shows and movies are not addressing us as potential speakers of Klingon or Sanskrit or even Welsh — they’re interested in the feel and a sound of a language rather than its meaning. At one recording session, Donald Greig told me, “they spent ages telling us how to pronounce the Russian and then we realized, ‘well this doesn’t actually mean anything.’” This turns out to be both a pretty new and pretty old way of listening to music.

When composer John Williams returned to the Star Wars-universe for 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he composed an amped-up piece for the final duel — and over its churning ostinatos he overlaid a chorus belting out a … Sanskrit translation of a Welsh poem.

***

Hollywood scores come in waves. The film industry isn’t known for being particularly fond of risk taking, and film scores in particular often build on previous scores. The director will often cut the film to a temp track consisting of existing pieces, and it’s easy to imagine that the filmmakers would eventually want something that sounds like their temp track to accompany the finished film. Choirs have never really left Hollywood, but there are certainly moments when producers and directors seem to have almost reflexively sought them out and others when they have avoided them. The Omen (1976) with its massive latinate choral opener, “Ave Satani,” kicked off one such wave. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy kicked off another.

This new chapter in the way films sounded started in the Town Hall, a storied concert venue in Wellington, New Zealand. That’s where composer Howard Shore recorded the earliest parts of his soundtrack for The Fellowship of the Ring (the rest would be recorded in London). The recording involved a full orchestra on ground level and rotating choirs in the balcony. It wasn’t lost on the composer that the scene was weirdly traditional: “The orchestra,” Shore explained, “was set up very much the way a pit orchestra was set up in an opera.” The collaborative process around the composition, too, felt like something Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte might have recognized. The screenwriters wrote the text the choir would be expected to sing, an on-site translator would translate them into Tolkien’s languages, and Shore would then set the Dwarven or Elvish text.

Somewhat counterintuitively it’s not actually choral music with incomprehensible lyrics that is novel and needs explaining, it is choral music with comprehensible ones. For a long time, and for far longer than instrumental music, choral music in the West belonged to the church, to the mass, and that meant to Latin. A language as native to Christian religious life as it was foreign to most Christians. The Lutheran Reformation did a lot to hand church services over to language the congregants could actually understand, but throughout Europe the experience of being talked, and in particular sung, at in Latin persisted. That’s of course not to say that people didn’t sing in their vernacular languages — just that the experience of singing words you don’t, or don’t fully, understand would have been very normal to these people.

For a long time, and for far longer than instrumental music, choral music in the West belonged to the church, to the mass, and that meant to Latin. A language as native to Christian religious life as it was foreign to most Christians.

For the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer choral music was meaningful only insofar as the words were not the point. In his The World as Will and Representation, which appeared first in 1819, was republished in 1844, and strongly influenced composers like Richard Wagner, Schopenhauer claimed that music was the purest expression of reality because it didn’t linger with “representations” — words and the things they represent — but tapped automatically into something deeper. Choral music would seem to fall short of that standard — being pretty centrally concerned with words and the things they denote — but Schopenhauer didn’t think so. After all, you shouldn’t listen to sung music primarily for the words, and often you may not even know the words. And Schopenhauer thought this was for the better.

Latin still works that way for most modern audiences: You might argue that there isn’t much of an expectation on the part of an American film composer circa 1989 (or on the part of the filmmakers who hired him) that the audience should be able to follow along with the Latin lyrics — in fact, it might well be distracting if they did. What text is included, both singers and composers confirmed to me, has far more to do with the flow of phonemes and how it interacts with the raw sound of the vocals. The words are simply yet another instrument in the repertoire the composer has at their disposal. But it’s an instrument that comes freighted with all the complications that inevitably arise when our loquacious species uses language.

The words are simply yet another instrument in the repertoire the composer has at their disposal. But it’s an instrument that comes freighted with all the complications that inevitably arise when our loquacious species uses language.

After all, unlike a humming chorus, a Latin chorus does create extra levels of meaning for those who want to listen more carefully. Composer Jerry Goldsmith wrote “Ave Satani” for The Omen as a deliberate transposition of various Catholic masses. While the individual Latin may have been hard to pick up on (and wasn’t entirely correct to boot), listeners who were Catholic likely would have recognized what was being inverted here, given that they’d spent most Sundays around the actual Latin texts. It’s not clear how seriously Goldsmith (or the choirmaster who jotted down the Latin lyrics for the composer) grappled with that dimension of the score — for one thing, the very title of the piece messes up the declension of Satan. But that dimension was there nonetheless —The Omen was part of a kind of religious revival in Hollywood, and though it plays as camp today it was taken far more seriously then.

James Horner’s score for the 1989 film Glory relies heavily on a Latin chorus, and in the film’s climactic moment that chorus sings recognizably in Latin. Glory tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment, an all-Black unit during the American Civil War, and the film ends with most of the unit being mowed down by Confederate soldiers while assaulting Fort Wagner in South Carolina. The piece in question relies on a text drawn from a Latin mass, frequently incorporated into the classical canon in various requiems from Mozart to Verdi. But, as so often, Horner (or his orchestrator) doesn’t stick to the actual text, but rather seems to create a mashup of snippets from the traditional requiem mass.

So is Horner just using the text of the requiem mass the way layout professionals use the phrase “Lorem ipsum?” Hard to imagine. After all, it makes a lot of sense to have a requiem text being sung as your characters are dying one by one. But more importantly, precisely because the text is so garbled, certain words stick out all the more: “Recordare,” Latin for “recall,” “stricte” (severely), and “judex” (judge). These pieces are largely taken from the Dies Irae, the part of the requiem mass that tells of the end of the world and God’s judgment, albeit with admixtures from just about every other part. The text, though hard to parse, is remarkably consonant-heavy for a Hollywood soundtrack, and a lot of it seems to be due (and I hope I’m hearing that right, as no actual text exists for this piece that I was able to track down) to the text’s overreliance of the future active participle, which ends in “-urus”: just in terms of pure grammar, the threatening hissing in the text is literally about what is to come.

So is Horner just using the text of the requiem mass the way layout professionals use the phrase “Lorem ipsum?” Hard to imagine.

So maybe the text, and the fact that it’s in Latin, isn’t about pretentiousness on the part of the filmmakers at all. It’s a mass for the dead and a tale of divine wrath, and it seems to make — over the heads of most of the film’s audience, admittedly — a point about retribution. It is remarkable how sophistic (white) Americans, who are frequently so proud to deal in moral absolutes, get when it comes to their Civil War. Horner’s grammatically challenged remix of the “Dies Irae,” I think, makes a point that is stark and simple and remarkably rare in American depictions of the country’s most bloody conflict: The Confederacy is evil, those who kill on its behalf are committing a sin, and they are bringing God’s wrath (and future judgment) upon themselves. There is, then, in this particular instance something to be gleaned from a text that otherwise we’re not meant to pick up on.

Which gets at an interesting disconnect — namely, that different constituencies will experience the same song differently. The choir members know what they’re saying, even if they have no clue as to what any of it means. And the composer, director, sound designer, etc., although they live with a soundtrack far longer than either the performers or even the most devoted audience, don’t tend to get to the words that go with the music until fairly late in the game. They often have to rely on orchestrators and assistants, or a helpful choirmaster who claims he really knows Latin. Their budget, and thus their time, is not tailored to their needs, but to the dictates of the director and the studio. The prose simply appears, like a ghost in this immense machine. And — in spite of the fact that most parties involved seem to be content to have it not mean very much — it winds up signifying something.

One example: An “exotic” text can only be understood by very specific listeners. But, very much to the point, they are not therefore the intended listeners. Lost Horizon wasn’t banking on a particular reception in the Tibetan community — rather the opposite: Dimitri Tiomkin and his collaborators seem to have counted on not having any actual speakers of Tibetan in the audience.

This gets a lot more troubling in the case of the phrase “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba,” likely one of the most repeated, parodied, and bowdlerized lines of text in any soundtrack. It’s clear that it isn’t addressing the average viewer with the intention of being understood. The very fact that it is in Zulu, but the story of The Lion King appears to take place in the Serengeti, thousands of miles to the north, suggests that the language is here to signal one thing and one thing only: African-ness.

For contrast, look at the way composer Michael Abels’ score for Jordan Peele’s Get Out features Swahili voices: Outside of the considerable number of Swahili speakers in the world, most people watching Get Out won’t know what the singers are saying. But what they’re saying does matter, in a way: Literally “listen to your ancestors,” but as a saying meaning something kind of like “you’re about to be in danger.” The viewer who doesn’t understand this line is missing an important warning about what is to come in the film. As is, of course, the film’s African American protagonist who cannot listen (or at least understand) his ancestors. Peele and Abels manage to wring from this small decision a whole range of subtle points.

***

But as with all exoticism, there’s a strange tug of war between condescension and appreciation in these kinds of borrowings. When Ottman decided to use a choral piece at the end of the 2008 film Valkyrie, he clearly needed a German text, and I suspect any German text would have sufficed. But he didn’t pick any German text. The film stars Tom Cruise as Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, a historic figure who led the only attempt by members of the Nazi state to get rid of Adolf Hitler. The text is “Wandrers Nachtlied,” one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s most memorable, well-known texts, and if it’s a little bit treacly by the great poet’s standards, it’s hard to deny it’s a deeply appropriate choice for this moment. Not overtly about politics, it is nevertheless about history, about reflection, about resignation. And about a different use of the German language than one is used to in Hollywood films.

For any German person it’s weird to hear bad guys so consistently speak (and butcher) your language. I’m not complaining, mind you, it makes perfect sense. But what’s remarkable about Valkyrie is that it seems unusually careful for a Hollywood-film in how it deals with the German language. Earlier in the film, Cruise’s character says that “people need to know we were not all like him,” and this final poem seems to do something similar for the German language — the filmmakers close their movie by pointing out that this language is capable of beauty and deep humanity. The poet Paul Celan — himself a Holocaust-survivor — pointed to the strangeness of writing in a language that was both “my mother’s tongue” (Muttersprache) and “the murderer’s tongue” (Mördersprache). Ottman seems to want to recover the former after showing plenty of the murderers.

The strange thing is: I am pretty sure Goethe’s “Nachtlied” is the first utterance in actual German in this film about Germany. Cruise sort of tries a German accent every other scene, the largely British supporting cast doesn’t even bother. And no one speaks any German, the way Sean Connery does with Russian at certain moments in The Hunt for Red October, or Alan Rickman in Die Hard. The film’s supporting cast is stacked with Germans who belt out accented English throughout. It almost feels like the film wants to bend over backwards a little too much: remind us what beauty and thoughtfulness this language is capable of — even though it never shows us the barbarity, which the film renders in English.

I suppose it’s moments like that one that made me obsess over what choirs sing in movies, and who decides what they sing. Because it’s a moment when blockbuster film or TV, which increasingly is created for the greatest possible global audience, which has been focus-grouped and test-audienced within an inch of its life, manages to speak far more directly, more improvisationally to a much smaller audience. All of us are sometimes in that smaller audience, sometimes not. But we’re aware it’s there. When cinema is literally speaking in tongues, how could we not? And to be the person who hears a call the object of fascination never knew it was putting out there — what better definition could there be of what a fan really is?

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Adrian Daub is professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of four books on German thought and culture in the nineteenth century, as well as (with Charles Kronengold) “The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism” (related story here). He tweets @adriandaub.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

‘What’s Covid?’ Why People at America’s Hardest-Partying Lake Are Not About to Get Vaccinated

Longreads Pick

“Like other places with low vaccination rates, there is a deep distrust of authority that exists among those at the Lake of the Ozarks. Politicians have agendas, the press loves controversy, even data can’t be believed. Some here cast hospitalization spikes as fictionalized. Others spin conspiracy theories about microchips.”

Source: Politico
Published: Jul 27, 2021
Length: 8 minutes (2,194 words)

Mormonism’s Sci-Fi Swan Song

The Book of Mormon on display by young LDS members attempting to persuade members of the audience at The Hill Cumorah Pageant to become believers and followers of the faith, prior to the dress rehearsal of the pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019. All photos by Heather Ainsworth.)

Andrew Kay | Longreads | July 2021 | 35 minutes (9,917) words)

This story was published in partnership with The Point Magazine.

 

Friday evening 

On a July evening in upstate New York, in a field long ago nicknamed “the Bowl,” a dozen men of divergent builds and ages line up in a row. They are wearing street clothes, and they stare — some at the ground, others at the sky — with the studied demureness of people who know they are being watched. Some 10 yards away a huddle of people acting in an official-seeming capacity size them up with laserlike intentness, shielding their mouths as they mutter impressions to one another. And all around them a hundred hushed onlookers have gathered, sharing whispered speculations about the outcome of something plainly momentous.

This is the culmination of casting day for the 2019 Hill Cumorah Pageant, a production put on by Mormons each summer and likely the largest outdoor theater event in America. It’s a spectacle that from the vantage of 2021 seems doubly alien: first because it is among the most bonkers, if least-known, of all pieces of Americana; second because it is an immense gathering of bodies, so my mental pictures of it, when I conjure them amid the pandemic’s late stages, appear like negatives of a vanished world.

The pageant is best described as cosmic cosplay: a volunteer cast of 770 Mormons from across the continent — electricians and nurses and adjunct professors, selected from an applicant pool of thousands — acts out key scenes from the Book of Mormon, the faith’s foundational text, before an international audience. (In 2019 that audience will total 43,000.) It has been happening since 1937, but in late 2018 the Mormon prophet, Russell Nelson, decreed that it must end; the last show, pageant organizers decided, would happen in 2020. Because of COVID-19, though, the finale will get postponed to 2021, and in time that too will be canceled — meaning this, the 2019 pageant, is the actual finale. That no one knows this now gives the events of this week a strange retrospective poignancy.

Since morning they have cast all 770 souls — all but one, that is — assigning parts both major and minor for a mythic drama that sprints through the panicked flight, from Jerusalem, of a party of fugitives in 600 BC, repulsed by that city’s godless decadence; their journey by ship to the Americas; their multiplying in time, then fissuring into two rival tribes; the appearance, hundreds of years later, of the just-resurrected Jesus before them — here, in the Americas, where Mormons believe Jesus walked and preached; the killing-off of the more virtuous tribe by the wickeder one, but not before the good tribe has buried a history of its doings through the centuries, inscribed on gold plates, for posterity; and finally, the unearthing of those plates 1400 years later by a young Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, at the urging of a being named Moroni, on the very hillside (the Hill Cumorah) where the pageant is performed.

All this they will reenact just six days from now, when the pageant’s directors will elevate this ragtag army to theatrical competence. Then, on opening night, in costumes ranging from 19th century Yankee garb to whatever fugitive Israelites living in the pre-Columbian Americas might have worn, they will dramatize these scenes on a 10-level stage overlooking the Bowl. Striding about, they will trace memorized movements and lip-synch dialogue to a soundtrack from the ‘80s featuring an epic, John Williams-esque score. Many will dance, embodying that double helix of the sacred yet campy that Mormons have mastered. And when the show is over, per tradition, they will go forth to meet the crowd, and the actor playing Joseph Smith, a perennial fan favorite — this year, a cherubic grocery-store consultant with an MBA — will get mobbed as if he were Freddie Mercury or Kesha.

All of that, though, is yet to come. Now they must cast Jesus — or rather, the Jesuses, for though there is only one Jesus in Mormonism, he is played in the pageant by two men. The first role, by far the less prominent, is the Jesus who appears early in the show, in a vision to the prophet Lehi in Jerusalem, foretelling his birth centuries later; he is called “Vision Savior.” The second is the Jesus who, at the pageant’s pinnacle, visits the Americas: “New World Multitude Savior.”

The men in the row mill about now, striking sheepish smiles or mumbling quips. Then they take turns stepping forward and pacing back and forth, waving magnanimously and exclaiming, “Bring me your children!” while the directors assess their resemblance to the Son of God. One is a friendly-faced man with auburn hair and a dad bod, perhaps 42; another, 23 or so, has a thick middle-parted mane and looks like a young Eddie Vedder. Still another, about the same age, looks to be a disciple too of CrossFit — and when it is his turn to stride to and fro he teeters backward in his cross trainers, as if burdened by his own pecs. It is unclear whether Jesus can be jacked, but the answer would appear to be no: he and the Vedder look-alike are politely waved away by the directors.

Evening advances, and the sky turns a providential pink. The directors confer, engaging in an act that they understand, by their own account, in miraculous terms. They cast everyone based on spiritual hunches: as Mormons see it, every human is a kind of telegraph that clicks, at intervals, into clarity and articulacy, alive with vibrations from beyond. (Mormons call these intervals “personal revelation.”) They await this clarity together now — and I have the sense, viewing them and the anxious would-be Jesuses, that I am seeing something I am not supposed to see: that the powers that be in Salt Lake City, who know of my trip to the pageant — who have stipulated that I must be accompanied by an escort at all times and have, I keep imagining, reviewed my criminal record and even my browser history — would not want me witnessing this unchoreographed scene.

At last the pageant’s artistic director, a Brigham Young University theater instructor named Shawnda Moss, hastens alone toward the remaining men, dismissing all but two — one the man with the dad bod, the other a slender kid in his early 20s with blond hair and dark eyebrows. The crowd coos. Moss looks up at both and, on the verge of tears, declares, “I would like to cast the two of you as our saviors.” Then she turns to the younger of the two and says, “I would like to cast you as our New World Multitude Savior”; to the middle-aged man: “I would like you to be our Vision Savior.”

 

Interlude; or, What the Hell Am I Doing Here

 

All that summer I had been sleepwalking. Mornings I woke, and with a glazed-over slowness, a boredom, slouched through my workaday round. Long after work I slouched down streets, familiar streets, which in darkness came to seem projections of my own neural pathways — a circuitry I was sick of. “I feel like I’ve lost the ability to be surprised,” I told a therapist. I tried edibles — chocolates — and when the first did nothing ate a second, then a third, and then all three arrived at once, a stampede that left me rocking back and forth, repentant, ready to moonlight as a D.A.R.E. speaker.

It wasn’t “depression,” exactly; it was spiritual, a staleness that, as an irreligious person, I’d fought with all my life. Except this time was different: I was glimpsing it all around me — in my students especially, college kids to whom I taught writing. The boy with the 142 IQ who went full Brian Wilson and stopped getting out of bed one day. The girl who confessed to me, in chillingly dispassionate tones, that she saw no point in living out the rest of her days. Something was afoot: some gathering despondency, strongest in the young, that had no shortage of worldly causes — planetary, economic — and yet exceeded these. It was a ghostly deficiency. All the Christian faiths in America were hemorrhaging members — and panicking. Fewer than half of millennials now identified as Christian, while Zoomers had just been declared “the Least Religious Generation.” “Nones” outnumbered Catholics and equaled evangelicals.

Meanwhile, a host of weird pseudo-religions like QAnon had sprung up to fill the void, which terrified me. One morning I drove out to the country and, cresting a summit, saw a giant Q mowed into a hillside.

One day I saw a headline that woke me up: the penultimate Hill Cumorah Pageant was approaching. I knew about the pageant because, though I live in Wisconsin, I grew up half an hour from where it takes place. I’d never attended, but knew that once a year a wormhole materialized down the road, something akin to J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9 ¾ that bore you not to Hogwarts but a parallel universe of mature make-believe. The headline kindled my curiosity. I pictured Mormons — a pair of missionaries clacking their way down the street in those white short-sleeved shirts, black pants, and dress shoes, facsimiles of Gallant from Highlights — and it struck me that they were the antithesis of what afflicted me and those I knew. Something in their door-to-door deportment, their earnestness and brio, seemed a soft rebuke to my own disenchantment.

I would go and walk among them, discover what they were plugged into and even absorb something of their radiance. In the process I would return to where I was from — and where, I should explain, I first knew the jolt of something higher.

I would go and walk among them, discover what they were plugged into and even absorb something of their radiance. In the process I would return to where I was from — and where, I should explain, I first knew the jolt of something higher. I’m an older millennial, one of the legions of “nones”; my upbringing was an experiment in godlessness — secular and scientific, shorn of euphemism. My mom was an ex-flower child, my dad an alumnus of the original Woodstock who made kombucha and jogged on our home treadmill in just tighty-whities and blue Pumas. To teach my brothers and me about origins, they read aloud from that candid seventies picture book, Where Did I Come From? In it were illustrations of a plump, ruddy-cheeked couple with thicket-like pubes who, in one image, were in bed together, locked in a coital embrace. “It’s a little like a sneeze,” the caption read, “but much better.”

What happens when you raise a child in a vacuum of religion, untroubled by sin, bereft of any metaphysical framework? I spent Sundays watching MTV and playing outside; I discovered masturbation at around age 8 (privately dubbing orgasm “the super feeling”), then, convinced anything so delightful must be injurious, renounced it. At night I lay awake, brooding on eternity. The worldview of Where Did I Come From, however clear-sighted, reduced human life to biology alone; there were no sequels entitledWhy Am I Here? or Where Am I Going? What dogged me most was the endlessness of death: an electric shock coursed through my body when I tried to grasp the infinitude of it, how all the eons I could think of were, joined together, the briefest prologue to whatever lay beyond the grave. How was everyone I knew just going about their affairs — talking on the phone, dawdling at the mall — when it was obvious they were hurtling toward that blankness? Shouldn’t they be screaming?

At some point, to divert my brain, I took to reading late into the night. The books were science fiction and fantasy — and because I shared a room with my younger brother who fell asleep easily, I read them by the glow of a Nintendo Game Boy accessory called a Light Boy. I sat up reading, at first, Orson Scott Card’s Ender saga, Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet and the requisite Tolkien novels, then weirder stuff: David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

The books drilled a hole through my world of Saved by the Bell reruns, and through that hole I could peer at a widened reality where good and evil lay as clearly demarcated as oil from water. Supernaturalism abounded: people died and rose again, often many times over. It was possible to believe that the sensible world was a fraction of what was — that a numinous realm hovered behind it where other life forms dwelled, watching and invisibly swaying us.

I now know that nearly all these writers — and with them heavyweights like Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, and C. S. Lewis, plus recent voices like Stephenie Meyer — were, or are, ardent theists. I think I leapt at them because they were smuggling in religion under the guise of science fiction. Or was there a difference? I see myself sitting up in bed like a miner in darkness, equipped with the Light Boy and holding it, lamp-like, over books that together formed a vein of something — some ore of strangeness, of wonder, that I hadn’t known I’d needed but couldn’t now ignore.

 

Tuesday morning

 

It was a luminous July morning. I was being driven about the grounds in a golf cart by Neil Pitts, the pageant president, a man of 68 with the benignant and fatherly air of an elementary-school principal, who was indeed wearing a white short-sleeved button-down and black pants. We drove past the 10-level stage, an enormous Chichen Itza-like structure with a steel frame and façade of gray fiberglass sheeting, built into the lower half of the Hill. Pitts explained that the pageant began in the ‘30s, when Mormon missionaries living on the Joseph Smith Family Farm, down the road, put on impromptu skits from the Book of Mormon to amuse themselves. In 1937 it became standard and they moved it to the Hill Cumorah.

I see myself sitting up in bed like a miner in darkness, equipped with the Light Boy and holding it, lamp-like, over books that together formed a vein of something — some ore of strangeness, of wonder, that I hadn’t known I’d needed but couldn’t now ignore.

We entered Zion’s Camp, crammed with RVs and tents, deserted just now. We passed one tent with a huge banner-like photo draped across the front; pictured was a family of eight, arms around one another — good-looking, Rockwellian people who sparkled. Then we cut back across the Bowl, and Pitts described the seismic power of the sound system, complete with speakers below the stage that rumbled during the show’s most action-packed sequence — a scene called “Destruction,” when earthquakes and flooding rock the Americas as Christ is crucified. Though I knew this from my reading, I turned to Pitts and, with the artless fascination of a child, said, “So the consequences of the Crucifixion were felt here?” He nodded: “Big-time.”

We passed a pavilion called the Study Shelter, where meals and hymns happened, then skirted the cast area, full of tents where youths hung out when not rehearsing. At last we made our way back to the stage, where some 200 cast members had gathered for morning rehearsal. Pitts dished me off to my next chaperone, associate director Shelby Gist, a straight-talking woman in a streaming floral blouse and jorts. Gist stood at the center of a throng of players, telling them with the exasperation of a JV hoops coach when to depart the stage after a scene: “The exact line is, ‘Then he will pour out his spirit abundantly upon you.’ Then you can move!”

The cast dispersed to their stations about the stage. Many were clad in BYU merch, others in a popular T-shirt that read AIR MORMON, featuring a silhouette spread-eagled in space — but instead of Michael Jordan dunking it was an angel blowing into an apocalyptic trumpet. They ran through a “boat scene” depicting the fugitives’ voyage from Jerusalem to the Americas, in which they reared up a mast nested in the stage while spray geysered up. As the brassy space-opera soundtrack blared, I watched an attempted mutiny as Nephi — the Book of Mormon’s extremely sincere protagonist, its Frodo — got ambushed, only to shriek, “Touch me not!” in tones that would’ve made Elijah Wood blush; and, magically, the mutineers flew backward and collapsed.

I started laughing at this, adult live action role-playing that it was, yet found it captivating: it was the strangest cocktail of old and new, ancient yet American. The pageant was conceived as America’s answer to Oberammergau, a passion play performed in Bavaria since 1634 — it continues to this day — in which local people reenact Jesus’s last days. With this in mind I began to see this spectacle for what it was: the last vestige of a centuries-old tradition of outdoor religious theater, the heir to the medieval morality plays in which an “Everyman” faced some great temptation, undergoing a trial in which his soul hung in the balance — the creaky entertainments of the English countryside that Shakespeare watched as a child.

Yet there was something undeniably contemporary about this play and the religion it celebrated. I found it impossible to forget that this story had been written less than two centuries ago: the whole religion was as recent an invention as the lawn mower. And in its modernity it kept reminding me of that genre in which I’d taken refuge as an insomniac kid. It wasn’t just the soundtrack or the apparitions being staged; it was the terms I heard people casually using, like “spirit prison and “Melchizedek Priesthood.” It was the fact that the Jesus statue at the Salt Lake Temple visitors’ center is backed by a huge mural of the Milky Way — an outer-space Jesus.

A scene during the opening night of Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 11, 2019.

So when I learned the pageant’s script had been written by Orson Scott Card, the controversial sci-fi novelist I’d read by the glow of the Light Boy, it rather put me over the edge. Card told me, when I tracked him down: “I’m on the record many times over, calling Mormonism a ‘science-fiction religion.’” He meant Mormon cosmology, an interstellar system graced with a lore to rival Dune, which crystallized in the 1820s — the decade that brought Mary Shelley’s best-known novels — and continued to be built out in the decades that followed, which saw luminaries like Jules Verne and, later, H. G. Wells.

What was the point of this sci-fi faith? All around me were clues: the fact that the cast saw themselves as creators of a celestial city on earth, here in this field. They called that city Zion, an ancient name for Jerusalem that Mormons have revived; they believe themselves charged with forging New Jerusalems now, modern microcosms of the ancient one that take shape wherever people gather, commit to the greater good, and thereby grow godlike. Mormonism is filled with such cobwebby concepts — and rites — dredged up from antiquity and given strange new life in contemporary America: they believe the Garden of Eden is in Jackson County, Missouri. The earliest Mormons performed exorcisms in the age of the first fax machines. And this was key, to faith and pageant both. They depended on a furious effort to resuscitate what was buried in a premodern past — ritual energies, characters, symbols — in the midst of modernity: a landscape of decaying interstates and shuttered malls, where these antique constructs sat as awkwardly as mastodons. Keep going, those around me seemed to say, arms outstretched like so many Gatsbys toward a dream of divinely charted existence. It can persist even here.

Morning bled into afternoon. I followed my next handler, an ebullient Filipino-American woman named Cherlyn, toward the outer edge of the Bowl. There, by the road, I watched a group of teens practice a scene called the Harvest Dance. The soundtrack featured a jaunty Disneyish waltz, which the directors played on a boom box while the teens cavorted. Here I noticed something I would go on observing during youth rehearsals: the directors called out, “This actually happened.”

An outsider might have perceived all this as akin to, I don’t know, the Middle Earth Festival, but to the cast, of course, it was tantamount to a Gettysburg reenactment: not fiction but received truth, a kernel of vision they had internalized and that, acorn-like, ramified into all they said and did. They were meant to emerge from this with the pivotal episodes of the Book of Mormon lodged in their muscle memory. (Surely no attendee at the Middle Earth Festival marvels afterward, “I finally get what Gandalf went through at Moria.”) What did it mean to sacralize a science fiction, ramping up its imaginative plot points to the status of historical fact?

An outsider might have perceived all this as akin to, I don’t know, the Middle Earth Festival, but to the cast, of course, it was tantamount to a Gettysburg reenactment: not fiction but received truth, a kernel of vision they had internalized and that, acorn-like, ramified into all they said and did.

Standing at the roadside, I saw a line of 18-wheelers parked beside the Bowl, their cargo spaces open. They held chairs. A coordinated army of cast members approached the trucks, took hold of the chairs, and carried them to the Bowl, wave after wave, trundling them by the thousands and fixing them in rows on the grass. A small city was taking shape here in a matter of days. It was a huge extrusion in the physical world of one guy’s imagination, of a wild saga inscribed in the brains and bodies of his followers. The kingdom, I saw, was here. Whether the vision that had birthed it was fact or fiction, historical record or fever-brained concoction, hardly seemed to matter.

 

Interlude: The Vision

 

Two hundred years ago, in a wood three miles from this field known as the Sacred Grove, a teenager arrived on an early-morning walk. He was shy and apparently unremarkable — poor, uneducated, the fifth of 11 kids. Joe Smith. He’d grown quieter of late, tormented by his sinfulness and the hypocrisy of those around him.

Across the region people were starved for the supernatural, for more than the standard church service could provide. Unlettered hicks spoke in tongues; farmers saw stuff in cornfields, preached the Second Coming of Christ in the flesh — and soon. The Smiths were steeped in that enthusiasm, practitioners of a backwoods occultism that led them to scour the land for buried treasure. He had a divining rod — a forked hazel branch he carried through the countryside, which he believed pointed toward riches in the earth — and with it a seer stone he held to his eye for the same purpose. Ludicrous and Tom Sawyerish, maybe — but then, the Western world was in a cusp-moment, caught between premodern magical thinking and an Enlightenment rationalism whose conquest was far from complete.

So: a teenager awash in magic, on an early-morning walk. He came to a clearing in the woods, knelt down to pray but couldn’t speak. Suddenly he heard footsteps behind him, shot up, and spun around, only to find no one. He stood there unable to shake the thought that he was being stalked, tracked down “by some actual being from the unseen world.” He would die. Just then, a pillar of light tunneled through the trees and staggered him. You’re forgiven, said a voice. All the churches have grown putrid. Go off and live virtuously.

What happened next is either unutterably enchanting or unsuitable for adult discussion. He went up to bed one night and began to pray, and as he did so his room flared with light and a paranormal being in a white robe hovered before him. He stated his name as Moroni; he had come to tell Smith of a new gospel buried in a hillside nearby — he specified where — inscribed on gold plates and bearing “an account of the former inhabitants of this continent and the source from whence they sprang.” Buried with the plates was a pair of seer stones like those he’d used to hunt after gold, which he would need to translate them. Go and find them, the thing urged him, dig them up, and translate them for the world. Then he vanished and the room grew dark.

That was how it started: as a poor boy’s dream of treasure, transmuted into divine longing. Gold gave way to God. He bided his time — got married — then set out one night with his new wife, Emma Hale, toward the hill. He found the appointed spot and began to dig — and while he toiled the being materialized again, watching over him. Hours later Smith descended the hillside with the plates swaddled in his coat like a live thing. Hale never saw them directly, but rather caressed them under cloth, feeling their metallic hardness, the grooves of their inscription.

The characters on the plates, he said, were written in something called reformed Egyptian. They needed translating. So he retired to a room with an assistant and, placing the covered plates on a table and one of the seer stones in a top hat, gazed into the hat and did something oracular. In the darkness of the hat the seer stone glowed, and above it a parchment materialized, upon which the characters appeared, and below them their English translation. Smith spoke what he saw while the assistant, rapt, transcribed. He unspooled a saga of ancient American tribes from Jerusalem — their feudings, visit from Christ, the better tribe’s extinction. The work was finished by June 1829, hitting the shelves at a local bookstore as the Book of Mormon the following year. It was a feat of magic: Smith pulled a world religion out of a hat.

Whether you find the product unreadable (Mark Twain called it “chloroform in print”) or discover in it a mystical document on par with the Bhagavad Gita is a matter of personal temperament. If you are like me, you are apt to see in Smith an early writer of speculative fiction. It’s not just the supernaturalism of his saga; it’s that it has a strong element of the seriality that typifies the genre: whatever Smith’s plates really consisted of — and no one outside his innermost circle ever saw them — he used them as the basis for a sprawling piece of Bible fanfic. The Book of Mormon is a superfan’s paean to the King James Bible: there’s a reworking of Exodus, but instead of Moses there is Lehi, leading his people not to Canaan but to America. An ark of sorts bears them there. There are ancient submarines worthy of Jules Verne. Above all there are Jesus’s dealings in the Americas post-resurrection — The Further Adventures of Jesus Christ.

There’s a term known to lovers of science fiction — namely, retroactive continuity (“retcon” for short). It describes how writers take an existing series and reinterpret its details to make possible the series’ continuance. At its best, retconning can breathe new life into a stagnant franchise; at its worst it’s a cringey affront to the audience’s memory and intelligence, the author scarcely acknowledging some preposterous contradiction with what came before. Think of Star Wars: in The Return of the Jedi Palpatine dies decisively, hurled down a reactor shaft by Darth Vader. But in The Rise of Skywalker, in a WTF-caliber retcon, he’s simply…back. (“Somehow,” a character remarks airily, “Palpatine returned.”) Mormonism constantly retcons the Bible: in John 10:16 Jesus tells his disciples cryptically, “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring.” Does he mean the Israelites in the next county over? No, Smith revealed; he means he has to go materialize amid chocolate, maize, ocelots, preaching before Native Americans. For that matter, Adam and Eve lived in the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area.

Transposed to the religious realm, retroactive continuity becomes a gesture of defiance, a refusal to let the series — the Judeo-Christian franchise, nearly two millennia old — come to an end. The U.S. into which Smith was born was undergoing a spiritual stagnation not unlike our own: in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, religious participation was shockingly low. Just 17 percent of Americans in 1776 belonged to a church. In his “Divinity School Address” a few decades later, Ralph Waldo Emerson bemoaned “the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society.” “Half parishes,” he noted, “are signing off.”

How do you thwart a large-scale decay of faith? It is as a response to this question that Smith and Mormonism speak pressingly to us now. Smith’s answer was to insist that revelation was ongoing, that ancient scripture could be opened up and revised — continued — with new visions that drew on the old but retreaded them for a nascent U.S. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead,” Emerson complained. So Smith revived it, retconning the Bible into a new myth, a sequel with America at its center: America was the site of Eden, of a Christ visit; in the end, it would be where humanity gathered to await the Second Coming.

“He waged a resistance movement against disenchantment,” Richard Bushman, Smith’s 90-year-old biographer, born into the church, told me. That was the conceptual engine at the heart of this sci-fi faith and the pageant that celebrated it. They were modern re-enchantment projects, huge sweaty efforts to counteract disbelief with the jumper cables of a resuscitated myth. Here, in the middle of contemporary life — on a hill in upstate New York — God was fully, thrillingly alive.

 

Tuesday late-afternoon

 

The cast Wi-Fi password was “ComeUntoChrist.” It was 4:30 now and hot, and I was tired and irritable. There was no coffee to be had on pageant grounds, I was beyond the reach of my 4G LTE service and, worse, weary of the constant supervision. They were so damned nice, the escorts — but their niceness couldn’t conceal the fact that I was being surveilled. It was odd: there’s a thriving subreddit called r/exmormon, where apostate Mormons vent and defiantly proclaim their indulgence in masturbation, Jim Beam, lattés. Had I been after dirt on the church, did Salt Lake City really think I needed to travel halfway across the country to get it?

But there was a Hill Cumorah Wi-Fi network, and it was cool if I used it (I imagined 90 percent of the internet being blocked) — and I was walking now with a handler named Kristin a stone’s throw from a restroom hut. I decided to stage a mini-rebellion: I would go into the hut and camp out, getting my internet fix and some alone time. What if Kristin gave up and left before I came out?

She walked me to the hut and I went inside, entering a stall where I stayed forever — answering texts, checking all the things. At last I washed up, drew a breath and left the hut, glancing about. The coast was clear. I felt an influx of giddiness that was choked off when, some 25 yards away, I spotted Kristin beaming at me and waving. I plodded my way to her like a guilty spaniel, but when I reached her she showed no sign of annoyance. “Hey!” she cried. I half-expected her to add, “How’d it go?!”

She handed me off to my next chaperone, Scott, the middle-aged ex-CEO of a street hockey league. Scott’s kindness was more than skin-deep, a preternatural goodwill that made me briefly forget my annoyance at being monitored. His affect was fully Fred Rogers, his eye contact unswerving as a Mack Truck. What was my background? he inquired. Former academic, I said. Scott gazed mutely into my eyes and thence my soul for some five seconds. “That’s why you’re so thoughtful,” he said at last.

We headed toward the stage. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the greatest organization in all the world,” Scott said, “because it can pull people together to get great things done like this, in such short periods of time.” He cited the church’s readiness to aid communities stricken by natural disaster: when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, droves of Mormon volunteers rushed to the scene, bringing food and manpower well before the U.S. government had lifted a finger.

He cited the church’s readiness to aid communities stricken by natural disaster: when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, droves of Mormon volunteers rushed to the scene, bringing food and manpower well before the U.S. government had lifted a finger.

When we got to the stage I saw that dress rehearsals were underway. Here I had my first glimpse of the costumed ancient Americans. The latter, I should pause to explain, are the reason the pageant and the Book of Mormon can make for distressing experiences. The book posits that two tribes, the Nephites and Lamanites, lived in the pre-Columbian Americas, and that the Lamanites, having killed off the Nephites, became the peoples now known as Native Americans. What makes this origin story especially painful is its timing: the Book of Mormon was published in March 1830, two months before President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the U.S. government to force Native peoples off their ancestral lands and relocate them west of the Mississippi. And it was marketed as a history of the Native Americans, who came, it revealed, from Jerusalem. While Indigenous people were being shunted westward in death marches like the Trail of Tears, their history was being quietly overlaid by the visions of a white kid from upstate New York. It was its own Indian Removal.

I should clarify that however gruesome these origins, the LDS church is now a multiethnic phenomenon with more members outside the U.S. than in it — and plenty of these members balance clear-eyed critique with a regard for what they find redemptive in the faith: often, its contention that revelation is continuous and anyone can have it. Still, this much is clear: Mormonism is a modern re-enchantment project that took shape on a continent populated, to begin with, by people who never saw themselves as bereft of wonder. “We as Indigenous people never were kicked out of our Garden of Eden,” Elise Boxer, both a practicing Mormon and an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, told me. “That’s where we live.”

Gazing at the stage now, I saw that on either side, two groups of about 20 teens — white as Wonder Bread, clad in skirts rather like Navajo quilts — practiced a battle dance while the soundtrack blared. They brandished spears. One group played the Nephites, the other the Lamanites; it was a call-and-response. At its close the two groups chanted, “Hah!”

A couple take a selfie in the golden, end of day light, just prior to the start of the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.

Closer at hand I saw other players decked out as ancient Americans. Some wore headdresses containing feathers, plus beaded necklaces and shirts decorated with pelts; another wore a kilt studded with turquoise. Still others were clad in a different sort of outfit that looked not Native but vaguely biblical: gem-filled headdresses, purple and emerald robes that undulated in the breeze. These were the fugitives who flee Jerusalem toward the start of the pageant. At one point I saw the (partially costumed) man playing Joseph Smith stroll by in a khaki nineteenth-century tailcoat and wig, plus cargo shorts; he paused to share a joke with a Nephite man in a feathered headdress and kilt. Watching them chortle together I wondered if I might be on whippits.

The redface, though. It was in such cartoonishly bad taste, it was hard to balance with the extreme kindliness, the charity, that the cast radiated. (Later I asked one of the escorts, “Is it okay for a nearly all-white cast to dress up as Native Americans?” She replied, “Please don’t ruin anyone’s day by asking them that.”) I thought of the Boston Tea Party, whose dissidents dressed up as Mohawk Indians. Writing now, I think of the storming of the Capitol — of the Q Shaman, whose aesthetic was less Viking than Native. Why, in precisely those moments when they wanted to trumpet their identity to the world, did Americans play Indian dress-up?

The redface, though. It was in such cartoonishly bad taste, it was hard to balance with the extreme kindliness, the charity, that the cast radiated. (Later I asked one of the escorts, “Is it okay for a nearly all-white cast to dress up as Native Americans?” She replied, “Please don’t ruin anyone’s day by asking them that.”)

Scott turned to me: “How would you like to be in a scene?” Over his shoulder I saw two teens in Native gear, at ease during a lull in rehearsal, doing the “Raise the Roof” dance. “We’re going to do a run-through of the New World Multitude scene. You can be a Nephite.” Processing this, I felt my visage crumple into a constipated expression. This was the climax of the pageant, when the risen Christ appears among the Natives. For an instant I pictured myself — tired, angry, emanating B.O. — unwillingly donning a headdress, then being embraced and kissed by Jesus. That image, in turn, being uploaded to the pageant’s Instagram, then picked up by the Salt Lake Tribune and going low-key viral. My alarmed friends blowing up my phone: “Yo, call me as soon as you get this.”

But it was to be a street-clothes rehearsal (aside from Jesus), which seemed less risky. Soon cast members, hundreds, began congregating at the foot of the stage. They arrived in waves. It was early evening and the atmosphere had grown expectant, alive with the ambient power that can only come from a concentration of bodies outside. And, of course, Jesus was coming.

Together we trekked up the hill, taking our places at stations on either side of the stage. I was a knot of anxiety: Was this okay? The Nephites were a made-up people; wasn’t it impossible to appropriate a culture that hadn’t existed? But then I recalled the faux-Native getup I’d just seen, the chants. I couldn’t possibly go through with it. Also, wasn’t I partaking in a sacred myth I didn’t believe in — and didn’t that mean I was appropriating Mormon culture? I felt mired in layers of wrongdoing; I was losing my shit.

Suddenly they flipped on the soundtrack and the scene started. All around me cast members were looking toward the top of the stage as if entranced, and I followed their gaze and stopped cold. It was him: it was Jesus Christ. Shoulder-length auburn wig with middle part. Synthetic beard. White robe, brown sandals. He looked like the Jesus from the gaudy religious pictures I’d seen in older relatives’ homes — except he was standing atop Chichen Itza.

He had a beam of light trained on him, and stood motionless with arms outspread and palms turned upward, a radiant wisp against the New York sky. He could have been a superhero. “I am the light and the life of the world,” he lip-synched. Joyous choral music ensued; the voice of God sounded through the speakers: “Behold my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased.” As the carol continued, the hundreds of cast members filtered onto the stage, a massed and carefully patterned congregation. Scott, beside me, nodded: it was our turn.

We found our places and stood still. Jesus, still at the top of the edifice, dropped his hands. There was a central staircase leading down the stage, and he began to descend it, the beam of light staying with him. “Arise, and come forth unto me,” he mouthed. I scarcely recognized him from the casting ceremony. His name was Austin Reid, and he had gone from an early 20-something who ran an online outdoor-gear company to a sort of ghost, lordly and wraithlike and totally self-assured. “Thrust your hand into my side,” he pronounced — and a lone player walked up the steps and did just that. “Now you know that I am the God of Israel,” he said. “The God of the whole earth.”

Players rushed to greet him, in keeping with the script, but it seemed they were hardly acting — just viewing him as the thing he represented, genuinely magnetized. Some he touched, healingly; others he embraced. The chorus swelled to a refrain of “Hallelujah.” Near me a young mom held a toddler who cried, “We have to go! Take me to Jesus!”

I looked out across the landscape to the road below, where an SUV drove by, and imagined the driver sipping a coffee and glancing up at us innocently and then spraying the coffee. The road was Route 21, which I’d lived off of growing up. Then I glanced back at Jesus, encircled by players who, by tomorrow, would be dressed in the Native costumes I’d seen earlier. I felt full-force the scene’s terrible ambiguity. You could have called it, rightly, a disturbing symbolic drama in which a white Jesus literally descended to dispense wisdom and salvation to Indigenous people. In that sense it was the epitome of a colonial mindset that had produced the Indian Removal Act.

At the same time, it was a stunning piece of outdoor religious theater: ordinary people were acting out ultimate things amid gnats, birds, trees — and doing so despite a wider culture that had mostly abandoned outdoor theater and, increasingly, ultimate things. They were ushering in a new reality: the scene’s title meant not just the premodern Americas but life now, made annually novel, alive with ghostly energy, by this hillside ritual. It was a defibrillator to the heart of an old and disenchanted world.

 

Wednesday pre-dawn

 

I woke at 5:00 a.m. the next morning in my Airbnb, a rural guesthouse, peeled back the sheets and found a large white spider beside me. I barked, shot out of bed and, unthinkingly, dressed and set out driving.

It was still dark. It is strange to drive the roads of the region where one is from when one’s family is gone from there; stranger still if the region is western New York. If you are from this place, you can understand how a religion started here. There’s a feral rawness to its woods, and the roads that lead through them are lonely and trance-inducing. The fields are limitless: you ramble through them, and when you get to the end, seemingly, there is only more field, as in a dream or a prefiguration of eternity.

A woman recalls her story of deciding to join the LDS faith (being saved) during ‘Devotional’ at the days end, but just prior to the dress rehearsal performance of The Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.

I was thinking about Joe Smith. On a morning like this he’d had his first vision. What got me, though, was what came after: how he spent his life expanding this Bible fanfic into a cosmology that millions lived in. The way he disclosed that cosmology — it reminded me of nothing so much as the pulp science-fiction magazines that, a century later, marked that genre’s golden age: Amazing Stories. Other Worlds. (Scientology, itself a sci-fi faith, began in one of these.) Smith revealed his cosmos one mind-blowing installment at a time. His visions were serialized in a sense, separated by months sometimes; converts awaited each with the bated breath of cult fandoms biding their time till a new issue, volume or episode drops. Only the stakes were everything: their destinies, the nature of the universe, and of their souls.

Here is what he revealed: God was an embodied extraterrestrial who lived near a distant star called Kolob — and if by some marvel we could see him, “if the veil were rent today,” we would find ourselves eerily mirrored. It was the 1840s and telescopes had grown more sophisticated. People peered through them expecting to see God, and when they didn’t, they merely concluded he lay beyond the reach even of these new instruments. Smith’s story was of its time in that sense, but added a crucial wrinkle: God had been one of us but upgraded himself into a superior being. The purpose of our own lives was to replicate his ascent, becoming ourselves gods who would populate our own planets after death, parents of new creation. “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” Smith thundered to his followers just before his death. “That is the great secret.”

Smith’s was an extremely American drama — bootstraps individualism given mythic form by a man who’d spent his youth in poverty, hunting treasure. How could you get more upwardly mobile than to become a god? There was a catch, though: no one could attain godhood singly; we got there as units — by marrying and having children — which sounds like a championing of the nuclear family, and is, to an extent. Beneath this, though, lay something more poignant: an insistence that we need each other, that we’re interlocked by spokes of dependency, our souls’ progress conjoined. The Mormon heaven is social: in death we find ourselves surrounded, in thriving celestial hubs, by the people we loved in life. To the extent we perfect our bonds with them here, now, we are already there.

I went on driving, watching woods give way to drumlins, remote roads to residential ones. I made my way by instinct down one such road, scudding by silos and houses just lighting up, and veering at last onto a steep street I climbed and then pulled over. I looked at the silhouette of the house I’d grown up in, warm now with other lives. I’d not seen it in 15 years. In the stillness I heard our voices as they’d sounded when we were gathered in this place: children’s screaming laughter, my dad belting out Grateful Dead songs, my mom in her bathrobe laughingly chiding him. It occurred to me that in the Mormon heaven I would never lose these people. I saw my bedroom and me in it at night, already dogged by the insomnia that would rack me as an adult and driven, for distraction, to books. The reading was a kind of prayer, as all fiction-reading is. Hands close together, I lay summoning what was invisible, miraculous: aliens, unfathomed planets, unseen forces that governed all we did.

The memory of these stories blended in my head now with Mormon myth, and I had the sense that they had sprung from the same impulse. Mormonism and science fiction were modern inventions that responded to a new reality, one increasingly dominated by scientific thinking and the technology it bred. People found themselves in a Copernican universe far vaster and more impersonal than the biblical heavens, and one way to react to this new normal was to discover in space itself — its stars and planets and imagined denizens — the stuff of religious awe. So in science fiction, the wonder and terror long inspired by the Judeo-Christian God, and by angels and devils, gets remapped onto aliens; visitations become visitors. In Mormonism, God is an alien; we are all incipient aliens, bound up in a project of collective deification.

In the stillness I heard our voices as they’d sounded when we were gathered in this place: children’s screaming laughter, my dad belting out Grateful Dead songs, my mom in her bathrobe laughingly chiding him. It occurred to me that in the Mormon heaven I would never lose these people.

Why did it matter, this drive to enchant? I thought again of that spiritual desiccation I had glimpsed in myself and my students. And of what I’d seen on the ground that week: people supercharged by a modern myth that insisted on the sociality of salvation, a retconning finally of redemption itself, which held that we are delivered as collectives or not at all. It was a mythos for the era of disasters. It lay behind the Mormon response to Katrina, and lately COVID-19, which saw bishop’s storehouses, positioned around the globe, bring nearly one hundred million pounds of food to beleaguered populations in 2020.

Was the culture I belonged to — a culture of unbelief that wanted, nonetheless, to confront the catastrophes ahead, which threatened to tilt reality toward science fiction — capable of such feats of social strength? My time here had made me skeptical. Because belief was the crux of it, the impetus behind the directors’ calling out to the young cast: this actually happened. That was what elevated their story from sci-fi to scripture, from Dune to an architecture of revealed truths in whose image they remade the world. What did I or my friends — secular, overeducated, climate-terrified yet basically inert — have to rival that?

In order for people to abandon their self-interest and commit to a grand cause, writes Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life, something has to happen to their aesthetic being — that part of them that is sensory and emotional. They have to fall in love. “One must be enamored with existence,” she writes, “to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.” Put baldly, “You have to love life before you can care about anything.” Enchantment turns out to be the precondition for committed political life together — a way of charming people toward self-transcendence with a vision of existence that pulses with animacy and purpose. Ethical codes are stillborn without such visions; they can’t catch unless people are inflamed by some story of their lives capable of drawing from them, again and again, virtuous performances.

 

Thursday

 

Opening day. Morning.

Across the grounds people bustled. Some drove golf carts. On the Bowl, cast members did last-minute run-throughs while directors, clutching at walkie-talkies, fine-tuned and fretted. The air crackled with promise.

I had arrived late. There had been a dry run of the New World Multitude scene and I had played hooky, having decided against the part. Now I strode with Scott through the cast area, where a mood of serenity had set in. People were finding each other. They sat in clusters outside the tents, playing guitars and singing, touching each other reassuringly and laughing. I had never witnessed a pilgrimage. I saw people divorced from their workaday lives who — bathless, deviceless — had been deprived into clarity.

“Everything else is stripped away,” said a girl named Emily.

“It’s a very similar feeling, I would imagine, to when people converge on disasters, and they’ll sacrifice of their own to give to some cause,” added another kid, Jonathan. “Everyone’s made some sacrifice to be here. And love is at the center of that.”

I went on walking, surveying all I saw with the attention one bestows on something about to vanish. No one knew, of course, that this was the last pageant — that the pandemic would obliterate the planned finale — but there was something valedictory about it all. The show needed revision — the redface had to go — yet it seemed a pity that this huge, weird piece of Americana, which had survived into the age of TikTok, was ending because a 94-year-old man in Salt Lake City had demanded it should. The church’s official line was that it wanted people focusing on their home lives — scripture-reading, prayer — not theater. This sounded like a cover for wanting to save money, issued by an institution that as of 2020 had $100 billion in assets.

Morning blurred into afternoon, afternoon into evening. Somehow, the premiere was close at hand; the cast left to change.

For once unchaperoned, I followed a party of players toward a costume house at the hill’s southwest end. Here, as players disappeared behind curtains, I took in a scene that included an entire wall stocked with boxes containing beards, each labeled. There was NEW WORLD MULTITUDE SAVIOR and, beside it, UNBELIEVER #1. “They’re all made of human hair,” said a voice beside me. It belonged to a spectacled seamstress named Jackie. “A beard can take a year to make.” There were hundreds. She plucked a box off the wall — VISION SAVIOR, the lesser Jesus — and opened it. “Church members donate their hair for these,” she murmured, dangling a reddish pelt before my face. I gaped at what was at once the beard of God’s son and the Norelco trimmings of some ginger guy in Utah, then turned away.

All emerged from the costume house dressed and I followed, watching as they rambled down the hill. There they were joined by the clad players from the other houses, several streams of people made suddenly mythic, who came together in one teeming body aimed, I saw, for the devotional pavilion. Beyond them I glimpsed the Bowl, swarming now with spectators — thousands—staking out chairs. With a giddy solemnity the cast crowded into the pavilion, ranging in rows — characters from a Mesoamerican past brushing shoulders with those from Jacksonian America. A director led them in a last prayer, after which they sang a hymn called “God Speed the Right,” then marched out to meet the crowd.

I walked with them. The premiere was slated for 9:00 p.m., and it was 7:30; this time had been allotted for the players to mingle with the audience. I watched the graying cherub playing Joseph Smith — Willy Wonka-ish in top hat, tailcoat, and breeches — get swiftly engulfed by stans seeking selfies. Vision Savior, who worked in Big Oil and lived year-round in Saudi Arabia, flashed me a beatific smile, then turned to greet a family of eight.

I surveyed the acreage of people before me and, in the gathering darkness, ventured in. It was the most international of crowds. I met a family that had flown in from Honduras that day, and when the show was over would return by red-eye flight. I met a party of women from the Sichuan province of China who’d been born into Buddhism but converted as adults to Mormonism, enticed by the emphasis on family.

At this point I became aware that the weary cynicism that had steered me to this place was being dislodged by something else. A doubt about my doubt? The energy, the immense shared electricity coursing through this outdoor cathedral, unmoored me. A man in the missionary getup — mid-50s, indefatigable as a jackrabbit — pulled me aside, training laserlike gray eyes on mine. “I teach economics and finance at Columbia. These are not individuals lacking in intelligence,” he said, gesturing across the crowd. “They’re brilliant.” He had fused his spiritual and logical intelligence, he needed me to know, into “an incredible technicolor understanding.”

Whatever unsteadiness I was feeling, it seemed a consequence of being inundated by thousands of worshippers. I suppose I would’ve felt the same approaching the Kaaba at Hajj. I met two women from Massachusetts who spoke to me of the afterlife with such passionate certitude, such detail, they could’ve been returning tourists. “The amazing love that exists on the other side of the veil is outstanding,” one said. They spoke of becoming kings and queens in death — of deification — and with gentle firmness stressed how I needed to pray to receive personal revelation. When I asked how — was there a wikiHow? — they laughed: “Just talk to God. Just ask Him.” (Earlier, in private, the pageant president had told me the same, more forcefully: “You have to kneel down and ask!”)

At this point I became aware that the weary cynicism that had steered me to this place was being dislodged by something else. A doubt about my doubt?

All at once the cast vanished, full night came on and the show started. I found a seat. In the dark, a cluster of robed women appeared atop the stage, flourishing apocalyptic trumpets they pretended to play while an epic fanfare sounded through the speakers. The cast marched onstage, an army, some bearing flags — and as they assumed their places in an opening tableau there were whoops and whistles in the crowd.

All went semi-dark. A group of players danced and jumped while the narrator, an omniscient father-figure who sounded like Charlton Heston, set the scene: Jerusalem, 600 BC. Depravity reigns. Lehi, the Mormon Moses, and his son Nephi have visions foretelling Jerusalem’s destruction and Jesus’s coming. They need to flee. The visions took the form of “water curtains,” big cumulus mists plumed up from understage, through which apparitions shone: a manger, a tree, a middle-aged angel high above the stage who for years dangled from a cable but in 2019 stood on a hidden platform. The production quality lay between full-on professional and DIY.

It started raining; babies cried. Someone farted. I watched the fugitives cross the Atlantic in that wooden boat, limousines-long; their arrival in the Americas and campy harvest dance; the fracturing of the party into rival tribes.

The show’s climactic sequence kicked into motion. “Far away, on a hill outside Jerusalem, three crosses rose,” the narrator announced. At the upper-right corner of the stage a trio of crucifixes swung into view, thronged by flames, then vanished. A stage-wide inferno followed — the cataclysm that killing Jesus triggered here. I watched as firebombs burst, geysers shot up, and waterfalls plummeted; I saw the silhouettes of a few hundred cast running about screaming while, below us, the earth convulsed with subterranean sound.

Total darkness and silence ensued. Then the risen Jesus appeared, this little refulgent being clad in white and perched at the pinnacle of the stage. It had always borne the seeds of sci-fi, the Christian story — an otherworldly emissary, the logos incarnate, sent here on an errand to save us — and here Jesus looked like nothing so much as a lone visitor. His person was mediated by streaks of rain. It was so quiet across the Bowl, a deep and babyless silence. Lights slowly came on, and I watched the scene I’d acted in two days before: Jesus descending the staircase, the cast filtering onto the stage, all surrounding and venerating him. Around me, people started crying.

The scene ended and they told of the two tribes going to war afterward, of the Nephites’ dying off — but not before one of them, Moroni, had buried their history in this hill. It’s hard to convey the all-out weirdness of the next, final episode. “Centuries later, in the spring of 1820,” the narrator declared, “the Lord heard the earnest prayer of a young man named Joseph Smith.” There was Smith excavating the hillside while Moroni supervised; there he was sharing the good news with a bunch of New Yorkers in bonnets, corsets, suit jackets. It was impossible to ignore how meta — how postmodern, really — it was: the abrupt fast-forwarding 14 centuries, the found text which is the very text you’re watching, the author inserting himself into the story. It was at once deeply moving and reminiscent of a senior thesis by a screenwriting major.

The show concluded and the Bowl resounded with cheering. Anxious to beat the crush, I got up and hastened away. Rain fell more heavily. When I reached the roadside I turned and took in the scene a last time: the multitudes gathered on the grass like groundlings, as they’d gathered here nearly a century; the cast advancing to meet them; the whole thing an international city, the shadow-image of the ones they hoped to form in death. And the driven rain deluging it, in effect, out of existence.

The character of Jesus Christ rises above horn players at the end of the The Hill Cumorah Pageant in Manchester, NY, July 10, 2019.

I found my car and drove off, making my way back to the guesthouse, where I peeled off my wet clothes and stood a moment savoring the silence. Then, warily, I approached the bed. What I wanted to do I had never once tried, despite being almost 37 — and couldn’t at first. What brought intelligent people, brilliant people, to kneel?

Nevertheless, I lowered myself, placing my knees on the tile and feeling the soreness in my nearly middle-aged body, no longer that of the boy who’d arrived to bed each night seeking communion with the spirit world. To whom or what was I even kneeling? Jesus Christ? The phrase embarrassed me. The embodied God who’d preceded us in space?

A line from Wallace Stevens came to me: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” I couldn’t decide whether this was sublime or Orwellian. Still, I brought my hands together and asked — to be more inspired, surprised, tuned to a godly frequency that as yet I hardly heard — and felt something unfamiliar: a peace that was either grace itself or the relief of giving up control. This I let linger, studying it, till it got really late — till the imprint of the day, of the whole mad pilgrimage, began to weaken, eroded by the sound of rain hitting the guesthouse, great percussive drops that drew me by degrees to sleep.

***

Andrew Kay is a writer, editor, and teacher who lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

***

Editors: Ben Huberman and Jon Baskin (The Point Magazine)
Fact Checker: Julia Aizuss (The Point Magazine)

Road Grad

Getty Images

Jill Talbot | Longreads | June 2021 | 9 minutes (2,508 words)

The showers had been steady for days. Even when the rain broke, the weather app on my phone showed another coming storm. At night, lightning scarred the sky, jagged answers to the crack of thunderous questions. A relentless deluge, like so much else last year.

***

In the spring of 2020, the bottom corner of TV screens broadcasting news channels recorded the rising numbers of deaths and cases, along with Dow numbers shifting, sometimes in seconds, from green to red.

During the spring break of my daughter Indie’s senior year, her school district announced they would close schools the week following the break, with plans to reopen on March 23. On March 19, the governor of Texas temporarily closed schools until April 3, then later extended the order to May 4, and on April 17, he closed all private and public schools for the remainder of the year, while initiating steps to re-open the state for business. Indie would finish her senior year in her bedroom. She would not step back through the front doors of her high school, and she would not place her hands in purple ink and press them to a wall or write her name and 2020 beneath her handprints. There would be no Bronco Walk, when seniors paraded the school halls behind the drum corps in their caps and gowns as teachers and students came out of classrooms to cheer, while parents lined the main lobby boasting signs of celebration and congratulations. I would have cried, I am sure, standing there, holding a sign for Indie.

During those first weeks at home, Indie told me more than once how she wished she had known that the last day she left school was the last time. She grew up with so many goodbyes, so she knows the importance of looking back in those moments before leaving.

Up until that week in March, as Indie left for school each morning, I’d stand beneath the canopy of an oak tree outside to watch her go. She’d always look back as she pulled away, and I’d blow kisses and wave my arms wildly. I mourned those mornings. They ended before I knew they were gone.

I raised Indie on my own.

After her father left, disappearing one July morning when she was 4 months old, I understood the most important thing I would do in my life was raise Indie. When she was 2, I promised myself not to date until she was grown. I worried about men coming and going through her life, but more importantly, I recognized my responsibility, and while I have a history of being irresponsible in my life, I wanted to get this one right. The promise kept.


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Through the years, I went to every parent-teacher conference alone. I taught Indie how to ride her bike. How to drive a car. How to dive into a pool. I watched her write her first word, apple. Heard her first word, juice. I decided punishments, and I chose rewards. For every birthday, I woke her by walking into her room with a lit candle in a pastry and singing, “Happy Birthday.” On the days when daycare was closed or I couldn’t afford it, I took her to my office or into my classrooms. I explained to every pediatrician and one ER doctor that no, I don’t know the father’s medical history. I shook hands with the boys who picked her up for dates, set her curfew at 11:30, the same one I had had in high school. Then that morning three years ago, when I had to tell her that her grandfather was suddenly gone, and two months later, when I waited for her to get home to say the words, “Gramma has cancer. Stage IV.” I taught my daughter how important it is to apologize, and I told her, “I’m sorry,” every time I made a mistake or yelled or we had to move, again, because for 11 years, the academic job market awarded me only visiting positions. The first time we moved, from Colorado to Utah, Indie was 16 months old, and by the time she entered eighth grade in Texas, we had lived in nine states.

And because of that, we are most who we are when we’re on the road.

As the weeks went by, I worked at our kitchen table teaching my creative writing workshops on my laptop, while Indie studied on her bed in her room. Around six each night, we’d meet on the couch to watch our shows and visit, often agreeing how lucky we were that we get along so well, that we enjoy each other’s company. Because that’s what we were for months, each other’s company.

And because of that, we are most who we are when we’re on the road.

We stayed up late, and we slept late. For the five years we’d lived in this apartment, I’d hear the wail of trains in the middle of the night, and in the mornings, the roar of planes in their descent to the DFW airport, 25 miles south. That spring, no train whistles called out in the night, and the morning skies were empty.

After a while I could sense a looming sadness and restlessness in both of us, so one night I asked Indie if she wanted to go the next day to see what the World’s Largest Casino looked like closed. Her face lit up. The next morning, we drove 45 miles north, crossed the Oklahoma border, and took Exit 1 to WinStar. We drove slowly around the sprawling property the size of a community college campus, if one were to have a three-tower hotel and 600,000 square feet of gaming centers. No cars or people in sight, except for a security guard patrolling on a bike. I rolled down my window and snapped a few photos of the desolation, an eerie site. On the way back, we saw an abandoned one-story motel and pulled over to wander among the empty, exposed rooms, the diamond-shaped windows, most of them broken. That out-and-back drive would turn out to be our first half-tank trip.

After that, every two weeks I’d pick a place for us to go, somewhere a half-tank of gas away. Far enough to get away, but close enough not to have to use a gas station restroom. Only after we were in the car would I tell Indie where we were heading — a hotel on a corner square where Frank Sinatra once stayed and Bonnie and Clyde had been spotted, a vacant Futuro house (orange, shaped like a spaceship), a drive-in theater, an empty hotel featured on Ghost Adventures, and once, an abandoned post office with a collapsing porch. Along the way, we’d reminisce about all the places we’d lived, as if touring unknown towns reminded us of all the towns we’d known. Or maybe it was facing the ending to the 18 years we shared, so we wanted to remember those places and houses and rooms, to honor them as we passed mile markers and took exits along with Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits.

***

The forecast for that Friday read like all the other days before that week. Rain chances at 100% for 7:00 p.m., the hour of Indie’s graduation. Instead of the traditional ceremony inside the coliseum of the university where I teach, graduation would be held at the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, where parents and families would park on the infield to watch graduates cross the checkered finish line on a big screen. The world’s largest at 218 feet wide and 94.6 feet tall — 21 stories.

Indie wanted a white dress for graduation, and even though Texas reopened on May 1, I told her I preferred she order a few online. We’d return the ones she didn’t choose. I think I’ll always see it in my memory, the afternoon she stepped out of her room in a dress rehearsal. A sleeveless, above-the-knee dress, falling in folds between the panels of her purple gown. Cap on. And because the instructions for the ceremony advised against heels because of the long procession around the track, she decided on her white platform Vans.

Over the previous few months, Indie and her friends had had to accept everything that was gone — classes and crowded hallways, prom, playoffs, end-of-the-year concerts, award ceremonies and banquets, yearbook signings, the senior walk, the senior breakfast. The senior walk was the only one that didn’t hold any meaning for Indie, a day when DHS seniors put on their caps and gowns to walk the block to the elementary school to thank their first teachers. If Indie were to walk to the elementary schools she attended, she’d have to head north to Oklahoma, on to New York, and back south to Ray Elementary in Chicago. 3,412 miles. Miles she and I drove together over the years, one road after another.

While Indie got ready that Friday, I ironed her dress. I took my time, and every now and again secretly checked the rain chances on my phone. At 4:00, 80%. Students were to arrive at the Speedway by 5:30 to have their temperature checked, to answer questions, and to turn in their signed health waiver. If it rained, graduation would not be rescheduled. It would be canceled. I stood there ironing, wanting to ask, “What if it rains?,” but I held the question in my throat, knowing Indie already carried it and that she was pushing it to the far back of a drawer of the year’s losses.

The first school event of Indie’s I attended was when she was in first grade at Will Rogers Elementary. It was a morning assembly, each class from K-3rd performing. When I got out of my car and started walking to the school’s office to sign in, I remember whispering, “I’m coming, Indie. I’m here. I’m coming.” Inside, I joined other parents leaning against the walls of the gymnasium/auditorium. The students, cross-legged and squirming, sat in rows on the tile floor. When Indie got to her spot on the stage, her blonde hair a bob, wearing a sweet dress my mother had mailed, she began searching for me. I raised my right arm and held my hand as high as it would go. I stretched out my fingers and held them still. I thought my motionless hand might be easier to see among all the waving ones. “It was,” she told me when I picked her up from school that afternoon. I told her it was also a secret message — you are strong, you are steady, I am here.

Through the years, in the stands of volleyball and basketball games, the auditoriums of plays and choir concerts, the stadiums of band half-time shows and contests, I have sat alone and raised my hand high for Indie, still and steady, even when I knew she couldn’t see me because the auditorium lights had already lowered, or I was too far away in the stands.

A few days before graduation, Indie picked up her car passes in a drive-through procession at school, the same way she had returned her textbooks, picked up her yearbook, and turned in her drum major uniform. Each senior was given only two passes — a Student Pass and a Parent Pass. One car for each student, one car for each family.

By 6:00 that night, a reprieve. Blue sky. I got in the car I had been driving for 11 years, one my parents had given me. I headed toward I-35 West for the 20-mile drive, my Parent Pass on the passenger seat:

VILLAGE OF CHAMPIONS
at Texas Motor Speedway
Parent Pass
Class of 2020 Graduation Ceremony
Present this pass for entry into the infield of
TEXAS MOTOR SPEEDWAY

As I joined the line of cars into the Speedway’s massive parking lot, I whispered, “I’m coming, Indie. I’m here. I’m coming.” I know she can’t hear me when I do this, but it always feels like she does. I showed my pass to an attendant, drove through the south tunnel, and followed the directions from orange vests to turn into a gravel space between two pylons.

As the massive screen directed, I tuned my FM radio to 97.7. All around me, the families of 459 graduates. As we waited for the ceremony to begin, the screen featured the graduation photos and activities of each senior. Suddenly, there was Indie, her long blonde hair, her smile, and her accomplishments, including the name of the university in New York she had chosen. I clicked a photo with my phone.

The following Monday, NBC’s TODAY show would feature the Speedway graduation, showing a long line of seniors in purple DHS masks as “Pomp and Circumstance” played, the rows of white chairs on the track placed six feet apart, and a parking lot of vehicles on the infield facing the 22,000-square-foot screen, honking in celebration.

Imagine the largest drive-in theater in the world — that’s what the Speedway became that Friday night, the temperature 90 degrees — a 1,500-acre facility, hundreds of trucks, SUVs, and cars lined up inside an oval track of 1.5 miles ending in a checkered finish line.

What a fitting end — to watch Indie cross a finish line on a road after all the roads we’ve known. Sitting in my car by myself, ever at the wheel, felt like an honor I had earned by raising her alone.

The students were allowed to remove their masks only as they crossed the checkered line where the superintendent, wearing a mask and gloves, shook their hands and gave them their diplomas. As each graduate crossed, some bowed, some gave a thumbs up, some did a funny dance. I wondered what Indie might do.

As the T names approached, I shifted in my seat, looking for blonde hair, a pink stole, a white dress, Vans. When I heard Indie’s name, the first time I had ever heard her full name announced in public, I pressed on my horn and held it, shouting, “Indie! Indie!” She accepted her diploma with a nod, then turned to the camera with a big smile and a wave. Full of joy.

If memory proves anything, it’s that we always miss something. Either we can’t call up a detail or someone tells us what we didn’t see. I suspect there are times when we take in the meaning of the moment more than the details of the moment itself.

Because later that night, when Indie rushed through the front door, still in her gown, she asked, “Did you see it?” She plopped down next to me on the couch, scrolling through her phone. “I figured out a few days ago what I wanted to do. Hold on, someone took a picture of me and got it.”

I stared at the photo of my daughter crossing the finish line, beaming, mid-stride.

“I couldn’t see you,” she explained, “but I knew you could see me.”

And then I saw it.

Her right hand held high.

Still and steady.

***

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays for the past four years in a row and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, LitMag, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, and The Rumpus. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

 

***

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

PARIS, FRANCE - NOVEMBER 06: Model Loulou Robert (L) and Roberto Eggs, President of Louis Vuitton North Europe, take part, along with Dumba (C), a female African elephant, in a ceremony to switch on and unveil the Christmas decorations by luxury brand Louis Vuitton for the Galeries Lafayette department store on November 6, 2012 in Paris, France. (Photo by Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel, Arno Kopecky, Isaac Würmann, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and Laura Spinney.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, Paul Kiel | ProPublica | June 8, 2021 | 5,717 words

“ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.”

2. Three Days in the Theater of Old-Growth Logging and Protest

Arno Kopecky | Hakai Magazine | June 1, 2021 | 6,100

“A drama 150 years in the making is playing out as logging companies and police clash with First Nations and protesters over one of British Columbia’s last remaining stands of unprotected old-growth forest.”

3. The Men in Apartment 4C

Isaac Würmann | Maisonneuve | May 11, 2021 | 5,738 words

“When Isaac Würmann’s relationship began to crumble, he started seeking out examples of queer love elsewhere. It turns out, he didn’t have to look far.”

4. La Cancion de la Nena

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal | Oxford American | June 1, 2021 | 6,937 words

“He sits on the edge of the bed to compose and work through songs, facing an amp, while I curl into his velvet-lined guitar case and listen…I have called up this memory so many times I feel the gauze of fiction starting to overlay its details. But it is a memory so dear, I reanimate it against the heaviness of the present—my father, full of promise and possibility, years before the shell he would become, now shut away in my childhood bedroom in the graying light of ever-closed blinds.”

5. The Elephant Vanishes: How a Circus Family Went on the Run

Laura Spinney | The Guardian | June 8, 2021 | 5,455 words

“Today, many circus elephants in Europe are reaching old age. Campaigners want them placed in specially built sanctuaries, where they can enjoy retirement with their own kind. But their owners insist that for the elephants, being separated from their human “families” would be traumatic.”

La Cancion de la Nena

Longreads Pick

“He sits on the edge of the bed to compose and work through songs, facing an amp, while I curl into his velvet-lined guitar case and listen…I have called up this memory so many times I feel the gauze of fiction starting to overlay its details. But it is a memory so dear, I reanimate it against the heaviness of the present—my father, full of promise and possibility, years before the shell he would become, now shut away in my childhood bedroom in the graying light of ever-closed blinds.”

Source: Oxford American
Published: Jun 1, 2021
Length: 27 minutes (6,937 words)

The State of Waiting

Photos and artwork throughout courtesy of Wafa Almaktari. Background image of Sana'a by Santiago Urquijo/Getty Images. Illustration by Cheri Lucas Rowlands.

Caitlin Dwyer| Longreads | May 2021 | 22 minutes (6,168 words)

 

This story includes audio interludes. Listen to Wafa talk about her life, her relationship, and Yemeni culture through cherished objects.

Read an interview with Caitlin about her reporting and writing process for this story.

She is in a Toyota RAV4, somewhere in the mountains of south-central Yemen. It is hot, desert hot, and the AC doesn’t work. There is no road. The driver maneuvers the car through dry riverbeds, which show the cracks of prior floods. 

In the back seat, Wafa Almaktari tries not to throw up. She tries not to think about the men with guns who will stop them, demand money, and search their baggage over 50 times in the next 16 hours. If they don’t like her, or she cannot pay, she may disappear in these hills. She tries not to think about the fact that the driver, hired privately for $300, does not have a map.

How the hell does he know where he is, in the middle of the mountains? she wonders. But the alternative — a bus that blunders at even slower speeds, and attracts even more attention at armed checkpoints — was unthinkable. She has to get through the mountains as quickly as possible, because Moutaz is waiting for her.

It is June 2019. Moutaz Al-Qershi, her fiancé, lives in the northern Yemeni capital city of Sana’a. He was going to meet her when she landed in the port city of Aden. But she knows she can’t trust herself not to fling her arms around him and kiss him. In the U.S., where Wafa has lived for the last four years, public affection is normal for young couples, but in Yemen, unmarried couples can’t publicly embrace. She told him to wait at her family’s home.

Not that Wafa cares about what other people think. She’s waited too long. She has a lady in Sana’a baking her wedding cake (she found her on Facebook). There is a butter shortage, but she’s got connections. She’s even got a female DJ lined up.

“If Moutaz was not in Yemen, I would not go. I would not even visit,” she says. But he is here, and so she has returned — enduring the heat, the nausea, the armed checkpoints —  to a country in the midst of violent civil war. She does not know if she will be allowed to return to the U.S. after her wedding.

“Home is where Moutaz is,” she reminds herself. She twists the ring on her finger. She hopes — no, she knows — coming back was the right choice.

* * *

In 2021, the small Middle Eastern nation of Yemen ranks as the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. Civil strife has mired the country in famine, cholera outbreaks, and violence. Since 2015, a complex set of combatants has battled for control: armed rebels in the north, known as the Houthis, who rule the capital; Saudi Arabian forces, who are determined to stop the Houthis; Al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula, who rose up briefly to fill a power vacuum; and southern separatists in the port city of Aden.

Wafa and Moutaz met before the war. Although a poor country, Yemen had been a democratic one. During the Arab Spring, protesters had demanded reforms, leading to a transitional government. In 2014, the transitional president was struggling to stabilize the country. Soon, international embassies would begin to close, and the militant group Ansar Allah, often referred to as the Houthis, would take the capital. Saudi Arabia would step in to oppose the Houthis, whom they saw as Iranian proxies. By 2015, ports would be blockaded, airports closed, and cities bombed.

But politics mattered very little to two young people who, despite societal restrictions and the potential scandal, were falling in love. 

Wafa and Moutaz exemplify the long-haul love story of many immigrants, whose children, parents, and spouses remain on the other side of geopolitical barriers.

At the time, she was in high school and he studied electrical engineering at Sana’a University. Wafa had a huge, trusting smile, expressive eyes, and a laugh that rose up out of her chest. Moutaz was a serious, slender introvert, prone to long conversations on mathematical concepts. He was detail-oriented; she was all big ideas. She recalls how taken aback he was during their first interaction: “All the ideas that I tell him, and my hijab is not very on point. … I don’t have makeup on my face. So he’s like, you’re not normal.”

Despite the differences in their education, Moutaz didn’t intimidate her.

“It was this very weird chemistry that was between us,” she says.

They kept their relationship secret. Young Yemenis couldn’t date without being engaged or married, but the two of them did “all the crazy things in a very conservative society,” Wafa says. On one of their dates, Moutaz thought it would be romantic to ride Arabian stallions. The huge horses terrified Wafa. They were out in a sunlit field, beyond the city limits, far from prying eyes. She remembers watching him feed the animals, showing gentle care. “Although I was scared, around him I was very safe,” she recalls.

At the time, she had been suffering from tonsillitis and had been told not to eat any ice cream to avoid a possible surgery. On the way home, Moutaz stopped for a treat.

“I was like, oh, this is love. You’re giving me ice cream that I’m not supposed to eat, so I know you love me,” Wafa recalls with a smile.

That subtle spirit of rebellion would permeate their relationship for the next seven years. Soon what divided them would not be family objections, but the policies and decisions of world nations: who allied with whom in the war, who offered visas for Yemeni citizens, who blocked the airports. Surrounded by immigration restrictions and bound by national policies they cannot control, Wafa and Moutaz have refused to give up on each other. For them, love has become a kind of defiance of boundaries, borders, and rules. Separated for years, they search for ways back to each other.

* * *

In the movies, love resolves itself quickly: Two chemicals combine, and either reject each other or dissolve into a single solution. It’s more difficult to convey the reality on screen. Love hits, and we wait, watching the colors creep up the pH strip, waiting for the hiss of reaction. Sometimes we know what the result will be, but still must wait for proof.

Most people wouldn’t watch a film of all those empty hours. We like the catharsis, the moment of triumph, the release of tension: a climactic kiss in the rain. But for many people whose loved ones live across borders, separated by visas, wars, or financial circumstances, there is no such easy resolution. Patience becomes the story.

Sometimes — as in Wafa’s case — waiting feels unendurable, and migrants buck against the helpless hours, months, and years. They might act to gain a sense of advocacy or autonomy, but rarely do the massive national circumstances that surround their situation shift.

Wafa and Moutaz exemplify the long-haul love story of many immigrants, whose children, parents, and spouses remain on the other side of geopolitical barriers. They want to be together. They long for the normalcy of family dinners, daily commutes, and coffee dates. And so they wait.


 

* * *

Wafa arrived in the U.S. in 2015, joining her mother, Susan Kassim, and leaving her secret boyfriend behind. The two had been separated for a year, first by visa processing and then by war.

Kassim hoped her spirited, outgoing daughter would acclimate well. Three weeks after arriving in Oregon, Wafa started college, taking ESOL and math classes at community college. She then transferred to Portland State University to study business. 

But Kassim soon noticed that Wafa locked herself in her room for hours a day, talking on the phone to a “friend” back in Yemen. Like many moms of teens, she became suspicious. It wasn’t that a romantic connection back home was bad; in fact, if the phone kept Wafa from staying out late and going on unsupervised dates, Kassim was all for it. But she didn’t want secrets. 

So she watched. She saw that Wafa didn’t clean her room or make her face up for video dates. She noticed that they laughed a lot. She liked that Moutaz had a calming influence. Afraid he would get frustrated with Wafa’s sass, Kassim urged her to be more demure.

Wafa didn’t agree: “This is me. If I change then I’m not going to be me. It’s like fooling somebody.”

Satisfied, Kassim gave her blessing — but required that Wafa finish college before any marriage could take place.

So they waited. Donald Trump became president. Anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S.  rose. And in January 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, which banned U.S. entry for several Muslim-majority countries, including Yemen. Before the ban, the wait time for a family visa to the U.S. could range from months to several years — and Moutaz hadn’t even proposed yet. After the ban, they were faced with an indefinite wait.

Wafa knew she had only one choice: “I’m going to fight.”

Trump’s travel ban worked the way it was intended; it forced immigrants to choose between their families and their visas. It deterred. It broke hearts, if not spirits.

Her defiance shifted to her new country, which seemed to be rejecting her love and her future. She became more outspoken about immigrant rights. At her job, she began questioning a manager about microaggressions. She joined her school’s Muslim Student Association and developed her campus activism, starting her own student coalition in 2017.

A few years before, Saudi Arabia had begun an aerial bombing campaign called Operation Decisive Storm. Originally planned to last only a few weeks and drive the Houthis from the Yemeni capital, it instead became a prolonged aerial bombardment of the city. Sections of old Sana’a, built before the 11th century, were destroyed. Thousands of civilians died in those and subsequent airstrikes. The Houthis remained in control of the city.

Moutaz was working on an MBA when Operation Decisive Storm began. Bombs fell while he commuted to and from classes.

“At first it was intimidating and scary, but with time I got used to it so quick because the airstrikes would last for long hours and would occur daily,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message. “It took me two weeks to get used to the fear, the loud bombing, and accept the reality that I was living in.”

He adopted an attitude many Yemenis would come to embrace: If he was going to die from a bomb, so be it. If it wasn’t a bomb, it would be something else. Life had to go on.

“Although it was hard to be lonely during that time, when Wafaa left the country I felt much better. I worry about her more than myself,” he wrote.

They spoke every day on WhatsApp, sometimes trying seven or eight times before they could get a connection. When she heard about a new bombing, she would often call, panicked, to make sure he was all right. Video dates helped Moutaz get through the stress of school, separation, and airstrikes.

While Wafa grew more outspoken, Moutaz developed a stoic endurance. “I never saw our separation as a goodbye; rather I saw it as ‘see you soon in better circumstances,’” he explained.

In late 2017, Moutaz sent her a ring — ostensibly to ward off interested men from whom Wafa got a lot of attention. But along with the ring came 365 handwritten reasons why he loved her. A proposal came the following year.

“Hell yes, I want to marry you,” Wafa recalls thinking. They both knew what that meant: He was banned from coming to the U.S., so she would go to him, perhaps putting her green card in jeopardy. On the day that she submitted her last final exam to graduate, against the best advice of nearly everyone, she flew back to Yemen.


 

* * *

Americans often think of immigration policy as a grand national project. Politicians wax hopeful or fearmonger, drawing broad statements about the way we view ourselves as a nation, or the way we think of the Other. Such thematic strokes capture the immensity of the issue, but they fail in the details. 

Details like these: One day, Wafa walked into a grocery store in Beaverton, Oregon. There were tulips in pots, cheap sweatpants on racks, and sale bins of candy. Behind the standard smells of rotisserie chicken and plastic was another scent: Moutaz’s cologne. Someone in the store was wearing it. The smell overwhelmed her, and she collapsed on the floor in grief.

Starting in 2017, Donald Trump’s immigration policies explicitly used family separation as a means to discourage migration to the United States. This was a new twist: not just to separate families currently in violation of immigration law, but to use separation as a deterrent against future migration. 

Soon what divided them would not be family objections, but the policies and decisions of world nations: who allied with whom in the war, who offered visas for Yemeni citizens, who blocked the airports.

But for many years prior to Trump’s administration, U.S. immigration policies had been de facto separation policies. Undocumented parents could be deported, while their U.S.-born kids remained in the country. The parents often had little legal recourse. Long processing times, high fees, and complicated paperwork have meant that husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, kids and parents, are often separated for months or years while they wait. In Moutaz’s case, and the case of thousands of other applicants sidelined by the travel ban, the separation became indefinite.

“I talk to a lot of people every day [about] how hard it is,” Wafa says. “It’s just emotionally draining. It is expensive, it is risky.” 

Wafa has filed an I-130, Petition for Alien Relative, for Moutaz. It costs over $500. Add an international flight: When his case finally comes up for processing, he will need to fly to Malaysia, Algeria, or another transit country; the U.S. embassy in Yemen has been closed since 2015. Add $300 to hire a private driver for the 16-hour trip through mountains to Aden, which has the country’s only functioning airport.

“The Yemenis who have fled the country are very often from the middle and wealthy classes. For the most vulnerable, there are very few opportunities to leave the country,” write Solenn Al Majali via email. Based in Jordan, Al Majali studies Yemeni emigration at Aix-Marseille University and the French Institute of the Near East, and is a non-resident fellow at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.

Wafa knows she is lucky. Her dad studied abroad in the 1980s, and her eldest brother was born in the U.S. He was able to sponsor some of his family members and help them escape the worst of the war. As a U.S. permanent resident, she has some leverage.

“If I didn’t have the resources or the money, I would not be able to apply for him. If he didn’t know how to speak English, he’s not going to come. If they see him at the embassy and he is not dressed well or he doesn’t speak well or he doesn’t have a career, you know, anything, they can just reject it,” Wafa says.

Since 1965, the U.S. has been relatively open to family immigration, mostly as a result of the Immigration and Naturalization Act. That legislation got rid of quota systems based on current U.S. census data. It opened the country up to immigrant families from more diverse countries. Thought about generously, the 1965 act was “driven by recognizing that family units are critically important for happiness, well-being, economic prosperity,” says Duncan Lawrence, the executive director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. (Full disclosure: Lawrence is a friend of mine.)

Support for families — from permission to find work to early access to ESOL programs — are the backbone of healthy immigration policy, according to Lawrence. But there’s one overwhelming factor in the health and well-being of families: keeping them together.

“If you had this magic wand of tools that you could use to positively impact families, I think that is probably one of the most powerful things you could do,” Lawrence says. Kids are especially vulnerable to separation from their parents, but all families suffer from the threat and reality of being apart.

No matter where we live, we take refuge in those we love.

There is a kind of helplessness to this process that overwhelms Wafa. Despite her defiance of the travel ban, which was lifted by President Biden in January 2021, she remains at the mercy of international law. She cannot speed Moutaz’s visa interview or guarantee that he will not be rejected. Will U.S. Customs and Immigration Services see their relationship as one of convenience? How does she prove that she truly loves this man who she has seen only twice in five years?

There have been times when she felt like giving up and going back to Yemen. At least they could be together. In that sense, Trump’s travel ban worked the way it was intended; it forced immigrants to choose between their families and their visas. It deterred. It broke hearts, if not spirits.

That kind of heartbreak leads a young woman to collapse in a grocery store. It sends her, desperate, back to a war zone.


 

* * *

Wafa arrived at her family home in Sana’a at night, after a harrowing 16-hour drive through the mountains. She still had the taste of vomit in her mouth. The smell of sweat clung to her. She dropped her bags off inside, briefly greeting her father before running out the back door.

Moutaz was waiting. Completely forgetting where she was, she burst out into the street and hugged and kissed him, not caring they were in public.

“I kept telling him, ‘This is a dream. This is not real,’” she says. “I think that night was the best night of my life.”

Planning a wedding in a war zone posed challenges. In 2019, four years of fighting had cost many Yemenis their businesses. Moutaz told Wafa that Houthis demanded a cut of private sales; the extortion, combined with the high price of goods, forced many people to move their businesses online. A 2015 Saudi-led blockade of the port of Hodeidah, where most Yemeni food had been imported, created massive shortages. Women especially had become Facebook entrepreneurs, making sweets and doing makeup from home. 

If he was going to die from a bomb, so be it. If it wasn’t a bomb, it would be something else. Life had to go on.

Wafa recalls the mixed emotions of that moment: “You feel guilty because you’re celebrating and you’re doing all these plans, and people are dying. People are dying out of hunger. People are dying in the airstrikes. Even the availability of things like who’s going to do the wedding cake. … I was telling him, should we downsize it? And he was like, ‘I loved you for five years. I’m not going to downsize my wedding and the celebration of love that we have.’”

Wafa also struggled to adjust to her Yemeni relatives. Her naturally ebullient personality, combined with years of living in American society, made her relatively intolerant of strict traditions. She invited Moutaz to tea at their family home, only to have her father kick him out. When an aunt complained that Wafa shouldn’t see her fiancé before the wedding, Wafa bristled: “I don’t really care what you think.”

Despite the tensions, a week later an imam proclaimed them married.

After the religious ceremony, she hugged Moutaz freely in front of others for the first time. It no longer felt wrong. “It just felt like, here we are. We worked hard. We waited. It was beautiful. And then we just danced the night out.”

More celebrations followed: a spa day for the women, donations of food to the poor. Wafa and Moutaz were still required to keep their distance from each other, a tradition they mostly ignored. They weren’t trying to anger their relatives; this formal celebration period just felt like another barrier to being together.

Finally, they had a party with hundreds of guests. Wafa wore a white, sparkling off-shoulder dress with a sheer cape. Moutaz wore a black tuxedo, his beard shaved close, and a dapper chain clipped to the vest. Their initials hung on the wall in huge gold letters, the W and M intertwined. They went back to a hotel afterward, without secrecy or shame.

They had agreed to write their own vows, but to read them privately. In the hotel, Moutaz pulled out a sheet of paper. To her horror, Wafa realized she had forgotten to write hers.

“He was like, ‘babe, you crossed the ocean for me,’” she recalls, smiling. “‘That’s your vow.”’


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* * *

As Solenn Al Majali points out, Wafa and those like her, whose families have emigrated to escape violence, make up a small and privileged minority of Yemeni citizens. Most remain stuck in Yemen. 

Bordered by only two countries, neither of which is accepting refugees, Yemen remains geographically isolated. Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s neighbor, has been a main player in the conflict. The United States and other Western countries have supplied Saudi Arabia with weapons, tactical assistance, and training. The bombs that fall on Yemen are American-made. In turn, Iran has given some tactical and financial support to the Houthi rebels.

For those who remain, safety has shattered. The United Nations has found that all parties in Yemen share responsibility for war crimes, including “arbitrary deprivation of life, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, gender-based violence, including sexual violence, torture,” and more. Children are greatly at risk for death in airstrikes, but also from common childhood diseases and hunger, for which there is limited medical assistance. Saudi and United Arab Emirates blockades of the ports where Yemenis import food have created famine conditions. According to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “More than 16 million people are expected to go hungry [in 2021]. Nearly 50,000 Yemenis are already starving to death in famine-like conditions.”

Back in Yemen, she faced physical risks unimaginable in Oregon — but she also had a sense of worth and belonging. She wondered if the two of them could make a life in Sana’a. Could survive, with just each other.

Before leaving office, the Trump administration designated the Houthis as terrorists, making international aid delivery trickier. While the Biden administration has reversed this decision and pledged to end support for the conflict, it remains to be seen how much they can disentangle themselves from Saudi allies.

For many Yemenis, the conflict no longer seems to have a foreseeable end. The civil society they knew is gone. There is only endurance and the slender hope of escape. For Moutaz, that hope is Wafa: “She always find[s] a way out,” he told me.


 

* * *

In the past, Yemen had coffee shops where people could gather and chat. There were seaside towns with beaches along the Indian Ocean. Men chewed qat at house parties, sharing the news. Ancient rammed-earth buildings were beautifully inlaid; brick minarets and winding stone streets were part of a long, proud history of Arab culture, from the Queen of Sheba to rare Islamic manuscripts.

“I keep that beautiful image for my country inside me,” Susan Kassim says.

When she flew back for her daughter’s wedding, the first time she’d been home in five years, her beloved Yemen had been transformed by war. The seaside towns where she had vacationed were destroyed. Community institutions struggled to operate. Buildings had been destroyed in aerial bombing campaigns, leaving swaths of ancient cities in ruins. The highway between Sana’a and Aden, formerly a brisk six-hour drive, was blockaded, forcing her to endure the same harrowing mountain journey her daughter had taken. More than anything, the guns scared her. Armed men patrolled the streets and stopped cars. There was no government, only martial law.

“But people there, they accept the reality. They are not afraid,” says Kassim. Her local relatives teased her that living in the U.S. had made her soft. “And I say no, it’s normal to be afraid. This is horrible.”

To her newlywed daughter and son-in-law, however, the summer of 2019 was bliss. They seemed so elated, Susan asked if they had been taking drugs.

“I’m like, ‘everything is perfect,’” Wafa says. Airstrikes hit a building nearby, and the couple slept through it. 

Being together had made them immune to fear — or perhaps it was a deliberate blindness. If they paid attention to the reality of their situation, they could see the precarity of it all. Wafa only had six months of travel allowance before she had to go back to the U.S. Despite court battles, Trump’s travel ban still stood in modified form, and visa processing for Yemeni citizens had ground to a near-halt.

For many Yemenis, the conflict no longer seems to have a foreseeable end. The civil society they knew is gone. There is only endurance and the slender hope of escape.

Ten days after the wedding, Moutaz got called back to work. Every six months to a year, he was given a new project-based contract by an NGO. He traveled outside the city to small villages, interviewed tribal communities about their needs, and attempted to provide infrastructure: bathrooms, running water, menstruation products, housing. The work fulfilled him, but it was dangerous. Soldiers often stopped his car, demanding to see travel authorization and receive bribes. He would make a few phone calls, and he could keep driving. But Wafa worried about a time when his answers didn’t satisfy them, when his bribe was insufficient, when he didn’t come home.

“It’s living without a government. It’s crazy I would say, because nobody is held accountable at all,” she says.

Moutaz didn’t have much choice. Humanitarian work, paid for by foreign NGOs, was basically the only viable income in Yemen in 2019. Government officials were paid sporadically; teachers had worked for years without pay; private businesses had suffered from ongoing power outages, infrastructure damage, and a shrinking economy.

He knew the risks. This is war, he figured; to survive, Yemenis have to support each other. Against those who threatened his safety, he bowed his head, then persisted. Mostly, he refused to be afraid — a form of defiance that Wafa tried to imitate, especially when her mother begged her to return to Oregon.

“It broke my heart to leave her in that situation that I saw with my own eyes,” says Kassim. Other than official wedding events, Kassim had refused to go out of the house for most of her visit, refused to acknowledge the changed city. She flew home, hopeful that she would reunite with Wafa at the end of the allotted six months.

Wafa wasn’t sure. She felt like she was living in an alternate reality: “We don’t have gas. So what? We walk. We don’t have electricity, so what? We have candles.” 

As the day of her U.S. flight approached, Moutaz refused to say whether he thought she should go. He wanted the decision to be hers. Once, when she woke in the middle of the night, he was sitting up in bed, tearing up. He would miss her, he said, but he felt relief knowing she would be somewhere safe. “So I’ll just trust you,” he told her.

She considered staying. Like so many emigrants, her heart was torn between her old home and her future in the U.S. In the end, she left Moutaz and was allowed back into the United States.

* * *

Love can blind us to reality, binding us only to our beloved — a person, a nation, a memory. We might refuse to see danger, or turn away from transformation, because to acknowledge the horrors of the world would be to betray a beloved relationship. We want to ignore everything except that sweetness.

No matter where we live, we take refuge in those we love. They shelter us, protect us, comfort us. When those people live far away, the best we can do is pretend. We wrap their late-night texts and dropped phone calls around us like a blanket, and rapt in a combination of memory and expectation, we close our eyes.

But love can also clarify. For many families separated by national borders, there are hopes of happy endings, but no illusions. Brokenheartedness can become a kind of resting state, which isn’t to say it hurts less — simply that it becomes a kind of ever-present harm. And as anyone who has ever hurt before knows, pain wakes us up. It focuses us, fixes us to the present moment. For some, the pain becomes a kind of a beloved, a stand-in for the real thing. For others, like Wafa, it becomes an itch you can’t stop scratching.

* * *

Wafa struggled to readjust to the U.S. A six-month newlywed, she felt more like a widow. Reckless, angry, she started graduate school and also a full-time job. She was trying, she thinks, to numb herself with endless work.

It wasn’t just missing Moutaz. Going home also meant resuming a role as an immigrant, rather than a citizen. It meant accepting a status shift that she hadn’t realized she resented so much.

“Back in my country, I live in a villa. I have a driver. I have people that do shit for me. Yet when we move here, people don’t know that. We start from zero,” she says. “It hurts … I’m this established person back home, yet here I’m irrelevant.”

That pain had started early. During her own emigration process in 2015, she had flown to Algeria for an interview at the U.S. Embassy. As the passengers disembarked, an officer in the airport asked who was a Yemeni citizen. Without further questions, he told them to get back on the plane and fly home.

“Just having the idea that an officer has the power to kind of humiliate me, target me, and say, ‘just go back to your country,’ I can’t go through that again,” she says. “If I ever have a child, I never want them to get the feeling that [they] are nothing.” 

Wafa wanted to give Moutaz the safety and freedom of the United States, but she increasingly wondered if the process was worth it. Back in Yemen, she faced physical risks unimaginable in Oregon — but she also had a sense of worth and belonging. She wondered if the two of them could make a life in Sana’a. Could survive, with just each other.


 

* * *

She had four brand-new iPhones in her bag, including two for the man with the ghost ticket. She dialed him when she landed in Cairo, but he didn’t respond. Airport security took her passport, and she had no ticket forward. 

It was July 2020. COVID-19 had transformed the world, including immigration routes. Countries tightened their borders, citing health and safety concerns. One of two routes to Yemen, through Amman, Jordan, closed down. Traveling through Egypt remained the only way back.

Wafa had a ticket to Cairo, and no farther. And now she was stuck in the Cairo airport with no passport.

After eight months of separation, she was trying to get back to Moutaz. She had quit graduate school, thrown herself into work at a bank, and saved her money. She applied for U.S. citizenship. Trump was still president, the travel ban was still in place, COVID had changed the rules, but she had to see her husband again.

If you could die from an airstrike, there was no time for distress about a virus. It raged, invisible, behind the more immediate dangers of war.

Following a nebulous web of diasporic Yemeni connections, she contacted a man named Khalid in Egypt. He strung her along for a week, promising a ticket in exchange for large amounts of money. Reckless and desperate, she agreed: “This is my last paycheck. I’ll just spend it all and go to zero balance.” She sent him $750 to buy her a Cairo-Aden ticket.

The limited flights from Cairo to Aden were coveted by Yemeni migrants living in Egypt. Over 500,000 Yemenis live in Egypt, according to the Yemeni Embassy in Cairo, more than a 700% increase from before the war. They often come to Egypt or Jordan on two-month visas for medical necessity and remain, applying for refugee status. Many see Egypt as a temporary refuge. They are often stranded in legal limbo, hoping for resettlement, but not recognized as refugees by the United Nations for geopolitical reasons, says Solenn Al Majali. As such, they have little access to resources like jobs, schools, or humanitarian assistance.

Wafa’s class and nationality privilege did not endear her to those she contacted: “I am a lady living in the U.S. trying to go to Yemen, when they [Yemeni refugees] are freaked out.” The people she spoke with had more pressing issues than leisure travel. They were worried about paying rent, buying food, and finding employment. Wafa understood their bitterness.

A few days later, Khalid created a ghost ticket: It looked like a real flight but did not guarantee her a seat on the plane. She would have to trust that someone would cancel so she could fly standby. In exchange for the ghost ticket, he asked her to bring two iPhones to his relatives in Sana’a.

If her first time going back to Yemen had been inadvisable, this time was worse. COVID-19 had killed several members of Wafa’s Yemeni family, including three relatives in a month. People had worn masks for perhaps the first month of the pandemic; after that, a mindset of numbness took over. If you could die from an airstrike, there was no time for distress about a virus. It raged, invisible, behind the more immediate dangers of war.

Wafa flew to Cairo in July, having spent the last of her money, clutching the ghost ticket like a talisman. After a few terrifying hours, airport security returned her passport, and Khalid texted her a link — for a real ticket to Aden.

* * *

Wafa had been in Sana’a for four months when it came time for Mawlid, the birthday of the Prophet. A traditional Islamic holiday, the 2020 Mawlid celebrations took a different turn. The city was bright with lights (Where did this money come from? Wafa wondered). The Houthis paraded tanks through the streets, and soldiers stood on every corner.

“I felt like they came out of a grave. They had guns and they had paint of green all over them,” she says. The soldiers frightened Wafa; to her, it wasn’t a celebration, but a show of military force. She was beginning to see how deeply the war had infiltrated everyday Yemeni life. Last summer’s newlywed blinders were finally off.

Airstrikes hit a building nearby, and the couple slept through it.

There were other signs of change, too. In 2019, Moutaz and Wafa had gone out to coffee shops and enjoyed their favorite snacks in the markets. Now, even married women and men could not associate on the street. Nonprofit work had become more difficult, as the Houthis refused NGO authorizations; Moutaz found himself unemployed for long periods. Due to a Saudi embargo, there was no fuel except at exorbitant black market rates, so they couldn’t drive anywhere. They stayed in their apartment and watched TV.

After the wedding, they had considered staying together in Yemen. A year later, that life seemed impossible. Wafa told Moutaz, “I can’t have a family here where education is corrupted. They teach kids what they want them to know, and it’s all about sacrifice, sacrificing themselves, and it’s just toxic. People don’t have dreams.”

Moutaz knew his wife would not survive long in Yemen. She had always been too big, too bold, too unwilling to follow the rules. Even if she ducked political trouble, her spirit would wither from the restrictions on daily life. He saw it happening already, in the shrinking of their ambitions: Find food. Find a good movie to watch, and an internet connection to watch it.

She told him, “I wanted to go into politics. I wanted to go into law school. I had dreams. But I don’t have dreams here because there’s not even space for dreams.”

* * *

As of winter 2021, Wafa is back in Oregon. Rain falls softly and constantly on the pavement outside. Home is no longer where Moutaz is, as she once thought. Home is the state of waiting, of not acting on her worst impulses to scream in frustration and cause a huge fuss and fly back to him.

The easy route would be to give up on the U.S. Move to Egypt together, or Jordan. Make a new life. The harder, lengthier, more painful route is continued separation. Despite her desire to be with Moutaz, she has chosen not to give up, because his future is more important than her own immediate happiness.

“I want him to have an opportunity to get out and see the world, or just have the power to choose,” she says. 

She wants to give one thing to him and their future children: a U.S. passport. She never wants them to be humiliated, or trapped, or in danger because of their papers. She wants to give them the space to dream.

For them, love has become a kind of defiance of boundaries, borders, and rules. Separated for years, they search for ways back to each other.

He, too, wants more. He doesn’t want to apply every three months for a new NGO job and then face another bout of unemployment. He doesn’t want to take another application test on his Excel skills, or endure invasive background checks, or bribe armed militants on his way to get villagers clean water. He wants to work in engineering, but more importantly, he wants to be his own boss, set his own hours, have power over his future. He wants to see Wafa smile.

“Your smile is the best thing [to] happen in the universe,” he wrote her in a message. 

Does love always resolve? Perhaps a cross-border relationship is less about cathartic reunion than the slow, patient intention to help someone else find joy. Like Wafa, Moutaz says migration is about the fight for his partner’s dreams. National policies may require a shift in how we imagine our futures, but they cannot negate the audacity of wanting a loved one to be safe and happy.

Perhaps love means deferment. Or the refusal to defer. Or the unshakable belief that someday, you’ll walk together to get coffee, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

* * *

Caitlin Dwyer is a writer from Oregon. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, Narratively, Creative Nonfiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Quartz, and Oregon Humanities, among others. She holds an MA in journalism from the University of Hong Kong and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She also hosts the podcast Many Roads to Here and teaches at Portland Community College.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Nora Belblidia

You Robbie, You Baka

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Brian Trapp| Longreads | April 2021 | 26 minutes (7,917 words)

 

At the request of the families involved, some names in this essay have been changed to protect privacy. It includes depictions of bullying and cruelty and contains language that some people may find upsetting.

***

When I first saw him, I thought for a second that it was my twin brother sitting in his wheelchair. It was the beginning of sixth grade, and I was on the dirty gym floor trying not to hyperventilate. I had just moved from a small Catholic school in Baltimore with a class of 25 gentle Christians to a large public school outside Cleveland, and our whole class was crammed into the gym for orientation. 

I spent the summer of 1994 studying MTV with my older sister, taking precise notes on how to be cool, and came that first day armed with a binder covered in band names written in black Sharpie: Mazzy Star, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Belly, Nirvana, The Crash Test Dummies. Never mind that I was thigh-chafingly fat and had boats for feet, wore surfing shirts hundreds of miles from any kind of ocean, and covered my bedroom in puppy centerfolds cut out from Dog Fancy magazine — I knew the names of cool bands, as if I could just walk up to a kid with a skateboard, whisper “Green Day,” and get invited to his house. 

Then, across the gym, I saw him sitting up high in his wheelchair, his wrists curved down like a praying mantis, his body stiff with cerebral palsy. He was skinny with choppy brown hair, his mouth pinched into a nervous grimace with an occasional smile. Just like my twin.

I’d hoped in the move that Danny and I could finally go to the same school, that I could give him wheelies down the halls, slip him high fives in between classes, use his dimpled smile to attract girls, and listen to him laugh when someone got in trouble. We could ride the bus together and play our call-and-response, where my brother heckled me with his version of my name and I gave it right back: “I-an! Danny! I-an! Danny!” I knew twins sometimes switched places and went to each other’s classes, waiting to see who’d notice the difference. With his severe cerebral palsy and bone-thin frame, no one would ever mistake Danny for me, though it would’ve been fun to try. I at least wanted my twin to be in the same building instead of an absence I always had to explain. But Danny — who in addition to CP had intellectual disabilities, was legally blind, and could only say 12 words — was deemed too disabled to be accommodated at my school, and was bused to a larger special ed program 30 minutes away.

So perhaps, in the gym, I was missing my twin and shocked to see this stranger where I wanted my brother to be. His name was Robbie Baka. I introduced myself and said “hi” to him a few times in the halls. Maybe I didn’t need the bands. Maybe, through my brother, I had found my first friend.

***

Initially, I thought Robbie was like my brother but upgraded. While their bodies shared a similar spastic choreography, Robbie could fully control his head, which he used to nimbly toggle his power chair around corners and down ramps, dodging classmates and desks as he navigated the middle school. While my brother was limited to “eh” for “yes,” “eh-eh” for “no,” and several people’s names, Robbie was fully verbal, and spoke with a squeaky voice grounded in his sinuses. My brother was almost all vowels, but Robbie could fit his mouth around every consonant, every “ch,” “sh,” “f.” My brother revealed his intelligence through the jokes he would laugh at or a well-timed “eh-eh!” but couldn’t, for instance, read a sentence or solve a math problem. Meanwhile, Robbie was in mainstream classes — he needed his aide to write and take notes, but he completed the same book reports and took the same tests as I did.

But I quickly learned Robbie was not cool. In the hallways, he sang Disney songs at the top of his lungs, belting out in his gratingly high voice “A Whole New World” from Aladdin. He lapsed into revelry with The Lion King’s “Hakuna Matata.” If he got started on The Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea,” he would not stop. Then he’d somehow raise that voice an octave higher, and imitate his hero: “Whoo-hoo! Hey guys. It’s me, Mickey Mouse! Whoo-hoo!” If all that wasn’t awful enough, he was also a narc. He told on kids for saying bad words and throwing pencils into the ceiling. In his annoying nasal voice, he’d say, “Mrs. Schoffer, Nate threw a pencil!” Or he’d whisper to his aide, who passed up the intel to the teacher, a game of narc telephone. In the hallways, he drove recklessly, and would run over people’s feet without so much as a “sorry.” In choir, he shout-sang every song, ruining whatever harmony we had. And in history class, he’d derail the lesson to ask stupid questions: “Are there a lot of forests in China?” Sometimes his aide would raise her hand, and he wouldn’t even ask a question, saying, “Oh. Um. I forgot.” Only later did I realize that he was playing the heel, that he knew people like me thought he was annoying, and he wanted to annoy us even more. He wanted to run over our feet.

Robbie was one of the few physically diverse students at our school. In our grade of 130, there was one Egyptian, one Asian, and two Hispanics. Our only Black kid was adopted and swore he was Sicilian. Otherwise, it was an able-bodied white-out. Did I like thinking that the only visibly disabled kid in my school was insufferable? No. I wanted him to be as charming and funny as my brother but with all the words, to be one of the cool and witty crips you see on television nowadays: Speechless’ J.J., Special’s Ryan, or even that wheezy best friend from Malcolm in the Middle. But back then, they were not on television, and every time Robbie opened his mouth, I gritted my teeth.

Part of me hated Robbie for his abilities. What my brother could do with those functioning eyes, that coordinated mouth, that agile head. I rarely wished I had a “normal” brother. What I wanted were more opportunities for my actual brother to express himself: to drive his wheelchair where he wanted, to say, “Hey asshole. Shut up.” If Danny were like Robbie, he would just be more of himself. But what did Robbie do with his abilities? He was a rolling advertisement for Walt Disney. 

And part of me hated Robbie because I was terrified about my own social status. I barely talked that first year. A girl in my class nicknamed me “the silent dude.” If I was his friend, I would have to eat lunch with him and the kid who reeked, the boy who talked to himself and still played with Power Rangers, or the girl who got bit in the face by a horse. He was a dark star of unpopularity, drawing losers into his orbit. Contact with Robbie risked revealing the real me: the Brian with puppy centerfolds.

But no matter how much I hated Robbie, the cool kids hated him even more. Mostly, they ignored him, as if to say, Are you still here? Though sometimes the boys mocked him behind his back, strangling their vocal cords into high-pitched imitations and chopping their hands spastically against their chests. When he was alone on the bus, they bounced erasers and spitballs off his face. They wondered aloud whether, in addition to helping him urinate, his aide also helped him whack off.

At my Catholic grade school, when my friend said “retard,” I told him to stop. I told my mother, who told his mother, and then my friend called me sobbing to apologize. But here, “retard” was everywhere: “Why are you such a retard?” “God, are you retarded?” “You retarded retard.” “You el-retardo.” My generation loved the word “retarded,” using it as a catch-all for anything bad. It was the bottom. It was the worst thing you could be. And it was so fun to say. Maybe we liked how it rolled off the tongue: Curve back and then three quick taps on the roof of your mouth —  re-tar-ded. You could cut it up, remix it: Tarded. Tard. Re-re. Fuck-tard. At my new school, they said it so much that I got tired. I let it happen. I was the silent dude.

But here, “retard” was also Robbie. They made it personal. They said to each other: “You stupid Robbie. You’re such a fucking Baka.” In a twist of the penis game, they’d have competitions to see who could yell “Baka!” the loudest in a crowded room. “Baka! Robbie Baka!!!” In the end, I was relieved my brother wasn’t here. I didn’t want to find out what they’d do with his name. 

“Stop,” I said. “Don’t.” I defended Robbie from the worst of the bullying, but I would not beat up Jim for a thrown eraser or punch Phil for saying “you fucking Baka” every other sentence. I would not fight for him. Because even I found him annoying. If he were my brother, I reasoned, I would make them stop. If he were my brother, I would kill these kids. But he was not my brother.

***

In seventh grade, I brought a Sunny Delight bottle to lunch half-filled with vodka and finally made some friends. They were into cool bands, were in cool bands. We took guitar lessons together. We shared CDs. We smoked cigarettes. We smoked pot cut with pine needles. We slept over at each other’s houses and skimmed our parents’ hard liquor into foul brown tinctures we sipped from Schweppes bottles. 

If he were my brother, I reasoned, I would make them stop. If he were my brother, I would kill these kids. But he was not my brother.

They did not make fun of Robbie. They just felt bad for him. When they met my brother, I was terrified about what they’d think. Would they concentrate on his crossed eyes, his tight and wispy arms, his bony knees, his pastel dog-paw bib, the cavernous gape of his mouth, the string of drool rappelling down his chin? Would they think: Retard. Re-tar-ded. Or would they wait to discover the person in there who laughed when you burped or said the word “bathroom,” who flirted with their mothers, who heckled me with his version of my name: “I-an!”

They were nervous. “Hi,” they said. “Does he shake hands?” They picked up his stiff fist as if it would break. 

My brother, shy at first, flashed them a smile. They smiled back. “Yeah,” they said, breathy with relief. “What’s up, Danny?”

When we were alone in the basement, they asked me questions: What happened to him? Will he ever get better? Can he not talk at all? How much does he understand? How does he go to the bathroom? Do you have to change his diapers? 

With our pool table and my mother’s apple cake, my house became the preferred sleepover destination, and their curiosity developed into acceptance. I’d carry my brother down into the basement, where he’d lie on the couch and listen to us make fun of each other. When they’d catch him laughing, they’d say, “See, even Danny thinks you’re a little bitch.” 

They’d use him to rib me: “Danny, how can you stand your little brother?” and Danny would respond, “I-an!” like I have no idea.

“Oh shit,” they’d say. “He’s making fun of you.” 

We’d play with his adaptive equipment. We took turns torturing each other in his electric hospital bed, jacking up both head and feet, folding our victims into pretzels. We put each other in his Hoyer lift, the small portable crane my parents used to lift him, which held us six feet aloft in its netting and made us vulnerable to kidney shots from below. We convinced one of our friends that Danny’s Hoyer could understand English and would move up for “yes” and down for “no,” hiding the switch behind our backs. The Hoyer moved up and agreed. It thought our friend was a “fag.” When one of us bragged that he could escape from anything, we duct-taped him to Danny’s wheelchair and parked Houdini screaming in the middle of the road. Through it all, Danny smiled and laughed.

They did not treat him like Robbie. They said, “What’s up, Danny? You player. You pimp. You ladies’ man. Dan, you’re the man. Dan the man.” I felt proud to be his twin brother.


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***

While my friends seemed to accept Danny, my other classmates still called each other “retard” and “Baka.” I pretended it didn’t bother me but I held so much anger inside my body. I started taking kung fu lessons. I replaced the puppy centerfolds with pictures of bald and fierce Shaolin monks crouched with spears. I bought a heavy bag and punched the skin off my knuckles. In kung fu class, my classmates said, “It’s like you want to kill somebody.”

They were right. While training after school in my basement, this was my recurrent fantasy: I am pushing my brother at a high school football game, and we walk where the middle schoolers cluster and gossip below the bleachers. I push my brother past the boys who torment Robbie and they say the usual: “You fucking Baka.” But this time, they say it to my brother. 

Cue the violins. “What did you say?” I drawl, readying my fighting stance, tightening my grip on Danny’s wheelchair handles. I’m a pudgy David Carradine. “Say it again,” I say. “See what happens.” 

They surround us, and they say it: “You retards. You fucking Bakas.”

Techno music. My opening salvo: Launch a flying double-side kick from Danny’s wheelchair handles, followed by tipping his chair back for a “footrest of fury.” Then I step out from behind Danny’s wheelchair to snap-kick their knees, to upper-cut their ribs, to crescent-kick their temples, to dragon strike their faces (palm smashing nose into the brain, fingers raking eyes).

When they’re rolling on the ground, writhing in pain, when they know they’ve lost, the last one standing lunges for my brother, and I stop him with a flying kick to the solar plexus and grind my foot into the back of his neck until I hear his bones click. If they survive, they won’t even be mainstreamed like Robbie. They’ll be bused out with my brother, and somewhere in the back of their brain-damaged minds, they’ll be sorry. 

Then I’d come upstairs covered in sweat and chug a glass of milk, my real brother safe in his wheelchair with no idea how many classmates I’d just murdered for him.

***

In eighth grade, my friends and I started a band, with me as the lead singer. My voice was too high and I got kicked out. No hard feelings. We traded copies of Penthouse and porno tapes, wishing that actual girls would let us touch them. We smoked better pot without pine needles. We got older siblings to buy us beer with fake IDs. We snorted Ritalin in the library. We wore hemp necklaces and cargo shorts. We played hacky sack in the middle of town, where we spat and smoked and slouched. We participated in zero extracurricular activities and declared so many things “gay.” When we grew tired of being cool, we escaped into my basement and pretended to be Jedi knights with pool-stick lightsabers.

When my friends slept over on the weekends, they marveled at Danny’s new augmentative communication device, which looked like a chunky proto-iPad. A small speaker on his headrest whispered phrases into his ear and he chose his option by clicking a switch with his wrist. The computer announced in a scary robot voice: “My bro-ther Bri-an is an id-i-ot.” My friends cheered.

But sometimes at school, my violence would squeak out. Once, in the gym, I watched sixth graders pour through the doorway as Robbie and his aide waited for someone to let them outside for recess. “Excuse us,” the aide said. “Please.” No one would stop. 

“Wait,” I said. “Wait!” And still they streamed through. Finally, I stepped into the doorway and hockey-checked a boy onto the ground. The line halted. He stared up at me with tears welling in his eyes. “Why?” he asked. “Asshole!”

Robbie’s aide shook her head. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

Yes, I did.

One day at lunch, at the beginning of ninth grade, my friends stared across the cafeteria at Robbie eating Mexican pizza. They watched as Robbie’s aide fed him cut-up bites with a fork, Robbie’s mouth clumsily masticating as the pizza fell onto the napkin stuffed into his shirt. They watched Robbie as he coughed, as his face bloomed red and he struggled to breathe, as he took long swigs from his giant water bottle. 

“Ugh,” one of them said. “Can you imagine what it’s like to be Robbie?”

“I know. You can’t even hold your dick to piss.”

“To never whack off?” said another. “Or touch a girl?”

I got quiet and still. Another friend shook his head: “Dude, I can’t imagine.”

“Someone has to take you to the bathroom? You can’t even wipe your own ass. I mean, look at her feeding him. Fuck.”

“Yeah, I can’t imagine,” said another friend. They all shook their heads, united in this not imagining. My fist clenched. My stomach knotted. But I was silent.

“If I was like that,” my friend said, “I’d kill myself. I’d blow my fucking brains out.”

They all shook their heads in agreement. It was only now that I slammed my fist on the table. “Stop,” I said. “Shut up.”

I stood. “You say that about him, you say that about my brother.”

“Come on,” they said. “We’re not talking about Danny. Don’t be so dramatic.”

These boys didn’t yell “Robbie” in a crowded room. They were my best friends, kids who’d slept over my house every other weekend, who called my twin “Dan the man” and made him smile by whispering in his ear that his brother was a “pussy.” They stayed for dinner and watched my mother feed my brother the exact same way Robbie’s aide was feeding him now, and when my brother coughed food into their faces, they’d yell, “Dan, you got me!” while my brother laughed. They’d watched with curiosity as I changed his diaper and fed him ground-up pills suspended in a cloud of apple sauce. They’d sat in the soft foam of his wheelchair, tried it out on their own bodies, and competed to see who could do the longest wheelie. I thought these were moments of play, of joy, but now I knew what they were really thinking: If I were like you, I’d kill myself.

Standing there, I wanted to flip over their lunch trays and bash in their heads. I wanted to punch their throats, rake their eyes, break their necks. But most of all, I wanted to run away and cry in the bathroom, to find new friends who wouldn’t say such awful things, who wouldn’t even imagine them.

“You are,” I choked out. “You’re talking about my brother.”

Their faces softened. They looked down into the tortured landscapes of their Mexican pizzas. “Alright,” they said. “Sorry. Now sit down.”

What did I think would happen if I walked away? If I went to sit with Robbie? What kind of adolescent hell did I imagine for myself? It is so difficult at that age to picture yourself cast out from the group. You cling so desperately to that “we” no matter what it costs. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be back in that silent year, that lonely and singular “I” on that dirty gym floor, awkward and alone with my binder of cool bands.

So I sat down. I wasn’t dramatic. We moved on. The next time someone said “retard,” I didn’t even flinch. I said it myself.

You retard. You Robbie. You Baka. You brother. You twin.

***

The rest of high school was both better and worse for Robbie. His bullies grew less cruel or more sophisticated in their cruelty: They mostly just ignored him. But if kids no longer yelled “Baka!” or threw spitballs at his head, he also grew more isolated. His middle school friends matriculated to the more diversified subcultures of high school: the goths, the freaks, the math nerds. His parents stopped throwing him birthday parties after freshman year when only three kids showed up. Sometimes the only person sitting with Robbie at lunch was his aide. And Robbie struggled with the more advanced classes and needed increased accommodations, doing subjects like math entirely in the resource room with the special ed teacher. While no genius myself, I was on the pre-college track. We rarely had a class together.

He still loved to sing, but had trouble with the increased rigor of high school choir. He struggled to learn and pronounce the songs sung in Latin and Italian, though when they started to practice “Candle on the Water” from Disney’s Pete’s Dragon, he already knew every word by heart. The more serious singers resented Robbie for his off-key voice, how he seemed to shout-squawk the lyrics, how in their beautiful wall of sound there was always the crack of his voice. He held them back. When they traveled to state-wide competitions, they were thankful that Robbie stayed home.

They’d sat in the soft foam of his wheelchair, tried it out on their own bodies, and competed to see who could do the longest wheelie. I thought these were moments of play, of joy, but now I knew what they were really thinking: If I were like you, I’d kill myself.

One class I did have with him was 11th-grade drama, where I saw a different side of Robbie. There was a lip-synching assignment, which Robbie refused to fake. He sang “Daydream Believer” by The Monkees, his body exuberant as he spun and writhed around the stage to the beat. For the monologue assignment, he inhabited Hamlet in the famous “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy, which he performed in a low strangled rasp that gave the words a doomed weight: “Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered … .” During improv scenes, he couldn’t stop laughing. He seemed so happy to be performing. On stage, he was comfortable with himself in a way that I envied. Didn’t he know what people might think?

He once told a friend that he loved choir and theater because he liked to express himself; he liked pretending to be someone else for a while. Sure. But I suspect Robbie also liked inviting the audience’s eyes onto his body. When so many people either ignored him or stared at him against his will, up on stage he sanctioned that stare. Elevated and under lights, he was impossible to ignore. He invited us to look and listen, translating the characters into his own choreography. In the able-bodied white-out of our small town, here was his disabled body inhabiting our heroes. Here was the song in his mouth, no matter how much he mangled it, and no, mean girl, he would not shut up.

***

Our senior year, I got my wish. My twin brother finally came to school with me. For the past three years, he’d attended Rosemary Center, a specialized school in Cleveland for severely disabled students, but his teachers worried he wasn’t getting enough opportunities to work on his social skills. So for the first two periods of the day, he’d come to my high school for commons and choir, and then they’d bus him back to Rosemary Center in time for lunch. 

I developed spidey-sense. When he was in the building and I wasn’t with him, I tingled. I was a tuning fork for danger. I wondered: As his aide pushed him through the hallway, would the high schoolers whisper: Retard. Re-tar-ded. Would they imitate his moan? Would they chop their hands against their chests? Would they call each other, “You Danny. You fucking Trapp”? Would they take one look at him and think: If I were like you, I’d kill myself. I knew what my classmates had said about Robbie, and how easily their words could ricochet off his body and onto my brother’s, though I don’t think my brother threatened them the way Robbie did. Robbie was too close to normal — he dared to occupy their same space.

The tingle lessened when Danny was with me in commons, the free period in the cafeteria dedicated to socializing and homework. Robbie was also there but mostly sat in the front of the room, parked with his aide who loved to gossip with other teachers. He would always cheerfully greet my brother: “Hello, Mister Trapp. How are you this morning?” He was so nice and upbeat. He spouted inspirational quotes: “You can do it if you try!” At age 18, he still loved Disney, singing The Lion King songs and imitating Mickey Mouse, if a little less often. He told the kind of jokes found on popsicle sticks. I no longer thought Robbie was annoying. He just seemed immature.

We’d talk for a moment. My brother must have known Robbie was like him; he must’ve heard the spastic warble of his voice, saw with his limited vision the blurry outline of Robbie’s wheelchair. And Danny was the only student in a wheelchair Robbie would see all day. What would’ve happened if I’d let my brother linger? Would Robbie have become his friend? Maybe my brother would’ve liked Robbie’s popsicle stick jokes. Maybe the jokes were just an act, Robbie’s warm-up before he got to the dirtier ones, which Danny would’ve certainly liked. Maybe Danny would’ve called him “Eddie,” the name he gave to all his good male friends.

I didn’t give them a chance. Instead, I pushed Danny past him, into the senior lounge where we’d hang out with my friends in a carpeted corner with couches. Danny brought his Dynavox, his upgraded augmentative communication device. Like the old one, it scanned pre-programmed options across a plastic screen, but when Danny clicked, instead of the scary robot voice, it was me. Technology had improved so much that I could record his options into his computer, giving him my voice.

We asked, “Where’s the party at?”

We sang blues lyrics: “I want one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer.” 

We said, “Shit.”

My classmates gathered around, astonished at my foul-mouthed voice coming from his machine, my brother smiling from his wheelchair with his wrist cocked and ready to click another. 

From the computer, we said, “What’s up, bitches?” 

We said, “Hey girl, can I get your number?” 

We said, “Hey Thompson, you’re a fuck-face.” 

They howled with laughter. Even Ben Stanley, who had loved yelling “Baka” in a crowded room four years before, smiled at Danny. “That’s so bomb,” he said to my brother, and then to me: “You are such a badass.”

“Me?” I asked. “Why? My brother said it.”

“Right,” he said and winked.

But one day we got too close to Robbie and his aide, and my brother clicked, “Steve Cooper sucks balls.” 

Robbie rocked with laughter and said, “Mister Trapp, did you just say what I think you said?”

His aide shook her head. “Come on,” she said to me. “That’s not appropriate.”

“What?” I said. “Danny said it.”

She smiled at my gambit. “I see what you’re doing there.”

My brother laughed, knowing we were getting away with something. We were in trouble at school together like true twins.

But eventually, Danny’s speech therapist discovered our page, and we were busted. Our mother made us erase the most explicit options. From then on, she would monitor my additions. A year later, they erased me completely.

At 17, I had literally given my brother a voice, imagining what he would want to say. I knew my brother mostly through translation. Read his body language, listen to the tone of his “I-an,” analyze the context, and guess what he was thinking as “eh” or “eh-eh” options: “Do you want a milkshake? Are you mad at me? Are you sick of this song? Eh or eh-eh?” Through his Dynavox, I could finally lay down the tracks of his personality, and all he had to do was click himself into existence. 

And what did I do with this awesome power? I made Danny into a crude, potty-mouthed cartoon of a teenager, a mirror of my own ID. I programmed his computer to say “bitch” and “fag” without thinking about their relationship to the word “retard.” I’m not even sure my brother always knew what he was saying through the machine, though he certainly enjoyed his audience’s reactions. 

I knew what my classmates had said about Robbie, and how easily their words could ricochet off his body and onto my brother’s, though I don’t think my brother threatened them the way Robbie did. Robbie was too close to normal — he dared to occupy their same space.

For years, I’ve regretted that I treated giving my twin brother a voice as just another joke. But now I see what I did as a reaction to Robbie. I wanted Danny to be a counterbalance against Robbie’s cheerful Pollyanna personality, his squeaky-clean Disney songs, and his Mickey Mouse impressions. I wanted Danny to be funny and subversive. I wanted him to shock those who would pity him. I wanted my classmates to hear a disabled person say “fuck” and “shit” and “shut up, asshole.” I wanted him to make fun of them. And no matter what Danny really wanted to say, he obliged me. He clicked my version of himself out into the world.

In the end, we played the twin trick. We traded places and waited for them to notice. But to this day, I’m not quite sure if they mistook me for him or him for me.

And yet, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t keep Robbie and Danny apart. After commons, Danny joined Robbie in choir without me, adding his moans to Robbie’s squawks. Together they sang a duet against that beautiful wall of sound. 

***

After we graduated, I lost track of Robbie. I assumed he’d follow the path of most people at our high school: off to college, someplace like Wright State, an accessible campus with ramps and lifts, elevators and attendants where Ohio funneled its disabled students. I expected him to at least continue down the mainstream, for him to find gainful employment someplace with that agile head and coordinated mouth, where his coworkers would enjoy his cheerful presence but secretly wish he’d cool it with the Mickey Mouse impressions. I expected him to have a very different future than my brother, who aged out of the school system and moved on to a day program for people with disabilities at United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) in downtown Cleveland. 

On Christmas break my senior year of college, I went to UCP to visit my brother. In the workroom, among the line of people in wheelchairs, there was Robbie. He was still skinny but now had a buzz cut and stubble on his chin. “Well, hello there, Mr. Trapp!” His body seized in excitement, his arms clenching down. His voice was still grounded in his sinuses but it seemed a bit lower. He had become a man, just as I had. On a long white table were scraps of wood, plastic boxes with nails, screws, and containers of glue. There was a stack of square boards, each with a hole in the middle. They were packaging boxes for birdhouses. 

My mother had mentioned that Robbie was at UCP with my brother, that they actually rode together on the bus, but it was hard to believe. Wasn’t there something more he could do? They were both part of UCP’s sheltered workshop. They did “piece-work,” an absurd parody of work. Instead of earning a set wage, workers are paid “by the piece,” a salary commensurate with their productivity when compared to a “normal worker.” My brother, for instance, would click a hand switch that activated a paper shredder. At the end of the month, they’d mail him a check for 45 cents — negative 90 cents when you factor in the cost of postage and mileage for driving to the bank to cash the check. My mother asked UCP, “Can’t you just keep it?” They could not. 

Certainly, Robbie could make a better living somewhere in the community. Certainly, he could make minimum wage. He had been in the same classes as I was. What did he learn — why endure all the mocking and isolation — if he was just going to end up in the same place as my brother? Surely our high school had prepared Robbie for a different kind of life.

No, my mother said. Robbie had significant learning disabilities. He had health problems — asthma and gastrological issues — so here he was packaging birdhouses with my brother.

Robbie said he liked it here. “They treat me pretty good. Everyone is super nice.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, Robbie Rob!” someone else said from his wheelchair, and they all laughed.

Robbie squealed and said, “Don’t start!” He turned back to me. “And your brother has become a good friend.”

“That’s great, man,” I said. “I’m glad you’re doing well, Rob.” I shook his hand and went to the next room to visit Danny.

***

That spring, to save money, UCP contracted with a cheaper bus company. The bus was late. The bus broke down on the highway. The new bus driver barely talked to Danny or Robbie. A mouth breather, my mother said. He often called in sick, and then they’d send a substitute driver who breathed even more from his mouth. When the bus got a hole in its roof, they didn’t fix it. Once, when it was raining, my mother opened the door of the bus to find Robbie with a tarp draped over his head like he was a piece of furniture. Robbie was good-natured about it, but my mother complained: “You’ve got to be kidding me. Here’s a kid with health problems and you put a tarp over him?” They fixed the bus but not the drivers.

I wanted my classmates to hear a disabled person say “fuck” and “shit” and “shut up, asshole.” I wanted him to make fun of them. And no matter what Danny really wanted to say, he obliged me. He clicked my version of himself out into the world.

I was three hours away on the other side of the state, in my last term of college. If I felt the twin tingle, if I sensed my brother was in danger that afternoon, I mistook it for an overdose of caffeine.

The bus driver pulled into the UCP parking lot to take my brother and Robbie home. I know almost nothing about this man, just what my mother told me: that he was skinny and quiet and in his forties. I know he was polite to her but wouldn’t talk to my brother. I know he worked for a company that paid him the least it possibly could. 

When I imagine him that day, I see him drive into the UCP parking lot, past the brick columns at the front of the building. He’s wearing the bus company polo shirt, the insignia that his friends make fun of at the bar after his shifts, before his shifts. His life has not gone the way he wanted. Like all of us, he was once a child and briefly beautiful but now finds himself driving this bus, making chicken scratch working for the only company that would hire him, so bored with loading the cripples on-and-off, on-and-off, while their mothers eye him suspiciously from the lawns of their nice houses. Maybe on his good days, he makes the best of it: He has a picture of his favorite niece dangling from the rearview mirror; he blasts Fleetwood Mac from the blown-out speakers and taps out beats on the steering wheel; he sometimes turns to classical and practices deep breathing.

But today is not a good day. How much does he drink before he picks them up? He gets blitzed in the neighborhood on his buddy’s porch, passing a bottle back and forth as the bus idles on the curb. Or he drinks in a corner bar, trading stories and shots of whiskey and cheap tall-boys. Wherever he is, he stands up and is drunker than he meant to get but cannot be late again. Maybe he’s battled addiction his whole life and cannot have just one even though he’d like to be a responsible custodian of these vulnerable people. Or maybe he thinks: I don’t have to be sober for this. Look who I’m driving? If we get in an accident, it would be a mercy. If I was like that, I’d … .

He stops the bus in front of the one in the power chair, who is running his mouth, as usual, talking to the other one, who stares blankly into space. They have that pretty aide behind them. He puts the bus in park. As he makes his way to the back, the aide opens the side door, and he stares at her through the metal grate of the lift platform. He feels like he’s in a cage. The hydraulic motor whirs as the platform lowers down perpendicular to his feet. No more hiding. He steadies himself. She won’t notice. “How you doing, sweet thing?” he asks. He has never called her that before. Too far? Or not far enough? She glares at him and pretends not to hear. “Damn. No offense,” he says and laughs. 

The platform lowers down to the blacktop, its lip curling flat, and the boy with the big head and the powerchair loads first, backing himself onto the platform. Robbie Rob, they call him. The aide buckles the belt, and clicks the switch to raise him to the bus floor. He shoves the chair into its space, fetches the Q-tie-downs, and straps him in. God, he hopes the kid doesn’t start singing those Disney songs. It’s too much for a man to listen to for 35 minutes. The kid continues talking endlessly to the other one, who, as far as the driver has seen, is like talking to a pile of meat. But sometimes when he glances back in the rearview, they look like twins.

The aide eyes him suspiciously like those mothers on their lawns. OK. On his best behavior. He’s not that drunk. He stands up straight. The quiet one with the bitch of a mom who got him in trouble for the tarp is already on the lift, waiting. He walks to the boy and pulls him in. “Come on, buddy,” he says. It’s easier today. It’s easier like this.

After he straps the boy to the floor, he climbs down the front steps to sign the pickup sheet. Maybe it’s here where he stumbles. Maybe his eyes are too heavy, his cheeks too flushed. Or maybe the aide has seen the signs this whole time: the swaying in the doorway, taking too long to strap in her clients, the “sweet thing” come-on and jovial laughing, the tell-tale slur. Before this, she’d worked as a bartender and knows what to look for in a drunk. She knows how to defuse his demands for another, how to call him a cab, but she’s at a loss on what to do when he wants to drive her two disabled clients half an hour into the suburbs. Now that he is ground-level, she gets a good look and is sure. She can smell it. “You’re drunk,” she says.

He laughs. “What’re you talking about?”

“You’re drunk,” she says again. “Wait right there.” She turns and runs inside the building to get help.

It’s easier today. He climbs back in the bus, slides the door shut, and fires up the engine. She comes back out and screams “Stop! Call the police!” He hits the gas and guns it out of the parking lot, the wheels screeching as he lurches right onto 101st Street. But it’s only a block to the stoplight on Euclid where the cars stream past one-way, and in the rear view he sees UCP staff members sprinting down the sidewalk, closing in. He lays on the horn and nudges the bus out into the lane. An SUV swerves and honks, nearly clipping his bumper, but the cars behind it brake and beep as he pulls the bus into the lane. There. Thank God. He drives straight, his hands at ten-and-two. He watches the UCP polo shirts grow tiny. He’s done it. He’s gotten away. Easy.

Except Robbie Rob, the one in the power chair, will not shut up. He’s been screaming since they left the parking lot. “Stop! You heard her! Stop! Pull over!”

“Quiet back there,” he barks.

“I heard her. You’re drunk! You’re drunk and you’re driving us! You’re drunk driving! Pull this bus over right now!”

The kid is thrashing in his chair, his face turning red. And now the other one starts, his teeth gnashing: “Ehhhh-ahhh-ehhhh.”

“Shhhh,” he tells them both. “That’s enough.”

He stops at the next light. He acts like everything is normal. He’s pointed the wrong way, going deeper into the city, at 95th Street, down in numbers, not up. He’ll have to turn around. He’ll drive the cripples home and pretend it was just a misunderstanding. He will nod to their mothers. They’ll have no idea. 

The light turns green and he hits the gas. “I’m taking you home, fellas. Relax. That woman was crazy.” He looks in the rearview mirror. Robbie Rob isn’t buying it.

“You think we’re idiots? Fuck you! Pull this bus over right now!” 

So the Disney kid can curse. He didn’t think he had it in him. He calls back, “You want to go home, don’t you?” He feels bad about the veiled threat, but that shuts the kid right up. He turns down a side street and goes east down Carnegie Road, finally in the right direction. “Don’t worry, gentlemen,” he says. “I got you.” He’s feeling good again. It’s easy. But then he swerves a little too much into the left lane and the cars honk. He needs to concentrate.

“You bastard!” the one in the powerchair yells. “Pull over right now, you bastard! Let us off!” The driver grits his teeth. That voice. How can one kid be so annoying? “Stop! Ahhhh!” the kid yells. He will not shut up. He will not give the driver a break.

The kid is yelling so loud that the driver doesn’t notice the sirens. But as Robbie pauses to take a breath, the driver hears the whoop whoop, sees the red and blue flashing in his rear view. “Fuck,” he says. It’s hospital security, the Cleveland Clinic police. They’re not real cops, right? He needs time to think. He could run the lights and speed through the intersections. He could barrel down side streets and ditch the bus in an empty parking lot. He could disappear into the city. And yes, there is a chance he could wreck the bus, that he could smash into another car and end up dead or maimed, not to mention what could happen to his passengers strapped to the floor. Their wheelchairs would not do well with the g-force, their skulls rattling against their headrests. If he overturned the bus, they’d hang from the ceiling like bats.

It could also be so easy. All he needs is to concentrate. All he needs is a little silence. If it was just the other one, the quiet one, he could do it. He could get away.

But the loud one will not shut up. The siren seems to make him worse and he’s thrashing more than ever, practically foaming at the mouth, and now the other one is moaning and for Christ’s sake they will not shut up. That Robbie Rob seizes with rage as he screams: “You bastard! My dad is gonna sue your ass, you bastard!”

And suddenly the driver wakes up to his own life: He is running from the cops in a short bus. He’s very drunk, and he’s kidnapped two disabled men in wheelchairs. And Robbie Rob, so annoying with that nasal voice, is right: He is a bastard. This is what a bastard does, and he is not a bastard. So he slows the bus and pulls off into a side street. He puts the bus in park, raises his hands, and waits.

When the cop opens the door, Robbie is still screaming: “You bastard! You fucking bastard!”

My whole life, I dreamed of protecting my brother. I would be there to put my body in between. I would be there to fight for Danny, to save him. But when my twin brother’s life was truly threatened, when a drunk man was speeding a bus down a Cleveland street with my brother in the back, it was Robbie, not me, who protected him. I cringe to think what would’ve happened if it had been just my moaning brother in the back, with the driver unable to interpret his sounds: What’s happening? Please stop. I’m scared. But there was Robbie being so annoying, yelling in that grating voice grounded in his sinuses, refusing to shut up. It was Robbie who fought for him. It was Robbie who may have saved my twin’s life.

***

When Robbie died five years later, I was away again, this time at grad school. My mother and brother went to his funeral. He’d passed away in his sleep. It felt incomprehensible that Robbie would die before Danny. With those functioning eyes, that coordinated mouth, that agile head, he seemed set up for one long life. But there he was, ashes in an urn. My brother was having his own health problems and my mother felt like she was attending a dress rehearsal for the death of her own son. She was right: My brother would last two more years, until the age of 28, one more year than Robbie’s 27. Now they’re both gone, twins in death, riding that bus together into the unknown.

I wonder, on those long rides home from Cleveland, if my brother ever called him “Eddie,” if he used it to heckle him when Robbie would light into his fourth Disney song that trip, or gush about their cute coworker with the long red hair, or for the second time that week ask him, “How can you tell a vampire has a cold? He starts coffin.” Maybe when I wasn’t watching, Danny learned to fit his mouth around the “r” and the “b” and added another word into his repertoire. I wonder if they passed each other’s names back and forth: Rob-bie. Danny. Rob-bie. Danny.

***

When giving directions, I have heard that instead of saying “hang a right,” the boys who tormented Robbie, now almost middle-aged men, sometimes say, “hang a Robbie,” a cruel artifact from their childhoods, an almost affectionate tribute to their tormentee, who by that time had been dead for almost a decade. After 25 years, his name was still a thrill to say out loud, to map the world with, to drive in its direction.

As I work on this essay, I write Danny’s name. I write Robbie’s too. As I approach the end, I feel terrified, like I’m that lonely and singular “I” again on the dirty gym floor, but instead of my binder of cool bands, I have this essay with their names. I want to retreat into silence again. I wonder what audience I’m writing for, if I’m still holding onto that “we” no matter what it costs. When you read their names, do you pity them? Do you secretly think: Retard. Re-tar-ded. Do you laugh along with my scenes of joy, of play, but really think: “If I was like that, I’d … .” Or can you imagine? Do you have a brother like mine? Do you look like my brother?

You Robbie. You Baka. You Brother. You Twin.

***
Brian Trapp is a fiction and creative nonfiction writer who has published work in the Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Narrative, Brevity, and Ninth Letter, among other places. He teaches at the University of Oregon, and will be a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.

Editor: Carolyn Wells 

Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

Sensitivity reader: Ian Markauskas

Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

Illustration by Carolyn Wells

Jeanna Kadlec| Longreads | April 2021 | 2,936 words (11 minutes)

Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, critical observations about characters like Scar (The Lion King) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks. A quick Google search of “gay Disney villains” will turn up dozens of articles, all repeating the same litany of facts: That The Little Mermaid’s Ursula is based on the iconic drag queen Divine, that Hollywood often uses British accents and effeminate mannerisms in men like Robin Hood’s King John to signal moral decrepitude.

But those are observations without analysis, which is to say: pointing out the obvious without asking why or how. The subtext of these clickbait articles and listicles is often: Disney codes villains as queer because Disney thinks being gay is bad. Which is one way to read it.

However, simply saying “Disney is bigoted” has never sat entirely well with me for one reason: In spite of what the Supreme Court of the United States may rule, Disney is not a person. Disney is a corporation that wields the power of a nation-state, and, consequently, has one central obsession — the preservation and expansion of that power, a theme that is prevalent and evident in every story they allow their employees and contractors to tell. 

If queerness is consistently coded a certain way, it has something to do with how Disney wants power to function — who can wield it, and how. 

***

Millennials are the generation whose childhoods were shaped by the stories of the Disney Renaissance, a period generally considered to have begun with 1989’s The Little Mermaid and concluded with 1999’s Tarzan. It includes favorites like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Mulan — which, incidentally, are at the heart of the corporation’s “live-action” remake strategy, intended to further monetize a now-grown generation’s nostalgia for the stories that formed us, stories we can share with our own children (or group texts). 

The Disney Renaissance was birthed after a decade of HIV/AIDS ravaging queer communities; its height marked by political milestones such as President Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) and the institution of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for LGBTQ+ members of the military. Divergent, non-normative sexuality was purportedly a threat to society, and Disney, ever the quiet institutional soldier, answered by providing a veritable stable of queer-coded villains who were ill-suited to lead or assume power. 

Indeed, there were so many queer-coded villains in this period that it’s hard to remember them all — let alone the different lessons they taught us. To wit, you probably remember Scar, Jafar, and Ursula, but you have probably forgotten Governor Ratcliffe from 1995’s Pocahontas: the fashion-conscious, social-climbing, crown-appointed governor in charge of the colonizing “mission” to the “New World.”

Pocahontas has one of the top-five highest-grossing Disney soundtracks of all time, but that’s generally where any lingering nostalgia dies. To say that the film itself is problematic is an understatement. While the screenshot of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas’ father, saying “these white men are dangerous” has found a rich afterlife on social media, the film’s historical inaccuracy and deliberate whitewashing of colonization and its aftermath have cycled it out of many a millennial’s “comfort film” rotation, something that has generally gone unaddressed by the corporation. (The fact that Mel Gibson voiced John Smith hasn’t helped, either.) 

Pocahontas may seem like a strange vehicle for discussing queer villainy. But that’s the thing: Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities, and what better way to do that than to displace the heart of the film’s conflict onto contemporary cultural anxiety: queerness and its incumbent specter, masculinity. 

Divergent, non-normative sexuality was purportedly a threat to society, and Disney, ever the quiet institutional soldier, answered by providing a veritable stable of queer-coded villains who were ill-suited to lead or assume power.

Disney’s attitudes toward colonization and queer coding are, it turns out, inextricably linked. By using a queer-coded villain, the corporation entirely elides white responsibility in retelling a historical tragedy, letting the cowboy-type colonizers off the hook for any wrongdoing and, instead, reframing them as the heroes of the story. In Pocahontas, Disney pulls off the magic trick of telling a story about colonization and genocide where the only thing that’s actually punished is the “wrong” kind of masculinity. 

***

Governor Ratcliffe is not set up as the villain because he is a colonizer, or even because he is in charge of the mission to invade the Powhatan nation — or, as Disney has framed it, dig for gold. To criticize him for these positions would implicate and damage the purported “heroism” of every other white character on screen. 

Something else, then, must indicate his villainy, and Ratcliffe violates Disney’s favorite American norms — individualism, hard work, modesty — immediately. He wears bows in his hair and a literal feather in his cap. His twinky manservant, Wiggins, helps dress him, and is even in charge of bathing his dog … and let’s take a moment to discuss the dog. Unless fighting, Ratcliffe is rarely seen not carrying his white pug, Percy, who is always adorned in a collar that is fancier than anything the crew are wearing. Disney villains’ animal familiars tell us something about their personality, and Percy’s taste for luxury speaks volumes about Ratcliffe’s lifestyle. 

Ratcliffe prefers to delegate rather than do physical labor himself, a standard managerial practice, but not something heroes do. He belittles his workers when things don’t go well, seeing his crew as a means to an end and insulting them as “witless peasants” behind closed doors.

The narrative works to align the audience’s viewpoint with that of the other colonizers: in the words of one of the laborers, “Look at us! No gold, no food, while Ratcliffe sits in his tent all day, happy as a clam.” The audience is clearly meant to sympathize with the worker instead of Ratcliffe, the villainous manager, even if that worker is also occupying stolen land and explicitly fantasizing about killing Indigenous people. (What “audience,” exactly, is this for? You already know the answer.) 


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However, it isn’t just that Ratcliffe is a bullying, well-dressed boss in an environment where no one is impressed by designer wares. He’s deeply insecure and concerned about what other people think, as opposed to the naturally popular, carefree everyman that is the Captain of the ship (and Pocahontas’ eventual love interest) John Smith. In fact, we learn that this mission is something of a last-ditch effort to salvage Ratcliffe’s reputation with the king. For him, success means falling in line, trying to do right by the crown, to reap the reward. When he says “it’s not that I’m bitter,” we understand that he is, in fact, deeply bitter.

Ratcliffe’s real fantasy is power — bringing his enemies at court to heel, being so celebrated that “My dear friend King Jimmy will probably build me a shrine” — precisely because he feels so ironically powerless.

This is not the kind of chaotic, burn-it-all-down villain who has been canonized by drag shows. 

***

A casual Google search reveals that Ratcliffe does not even show up on most “Gay Disney Villain” lists. Something about him elides memory and decisive categorization as other, encouraging a certain slippage. 

He isn’t as easy to pin down as the Queer Villains of Excess: the Scars and Ursulas who you can spot by their muchness, their refusal to conform to rigid social structures, their wild desire to usurp the throne. Excess is the singular quality that usually drives queer-coded villains to crave power at all costs, their appetites monstrous and unnatural. 

Ironically, even the most chaotic queer-coded villains are rarely bent on creating their own power structures — they only ever desire the kingdom and, seemingly, the lives of their straight-coded, heroic counterparts. Jafar wants to be sultan, but has no conception of what to do with that power once obtained, to the point he cannot strategize enough to realize that the genie is beholden to others. Scar believes himself to be the rightful ruler of the Pride Lands, only to drive the kingdom into a barren wasteland: The queer failure of reproduction, on which society so purportedly rests, made manifest. “Fuck the social order and the child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized,” queer theorist Lee Edelman writes in No Future — the anthem of Disney villains everywhere. 

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities, and what better way to do that than to displace the heart of the film’s conflict onto contemporary cultural anxiety: queerness and its incumbent specter, masculinity.

The opposite of excess is moderation, and restraining oneself to fit into the boxes society has prescribed — well, this is assimilation. 

Assimilation is when a group of people assumes the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group — when something core and essential to one’s culture and sense of self and identity is lost in the interest of resembling the social majority. In the U.S., this has had many iterations around the suppression of non-English languages, the forced Christianization of Indigenous peoples, and more. For the LGBTQ+ community, it looks like our communities having been largely underground until the last 50 or so years, because social legibility meant imprisonment, exile, or death 

In many ways, for many people, various forms of assimilation are pure survival in a white, heteronormative, and otherwise profoundly difficult world. But assimilation used against one’s own community, assimilation used to turn the target off your own back and toward communities with less cultural power than yours, becomes an alliance with the oppressor. 

Ratcliffe is a queer-coded villain whose trademark is assimilation, not excess. This is why he slips and slides through millennial memory — hard to remember, hard to pin down. He isn’t an outsider, an icon to queer children everywhere, an individualist who has chosen himself at all costs, someone who we grew up both terrified of and wanting to become. No. He is trying desperately to fit in, to use the white supremacist system to his own benefit. But working for the system always comes with a price. 

***

There is a queer anxiety to Ratcliffe, because he knows his attempts to fit in are pretense. This is, as he says himself, “my last chance for glory.” Does he exile himself from the crew of colonizers because he thinks he’s better than them, or because he thinks they’ll see through him? Or both? Captain John Smith can have a beer with the guys. Ratcliffe, not so much.

Holding the title of “governor” in a servile bureaucracy doesn’t guarantee respect. Rugged masculinity and physicality — the kind Smith has — does. On a certain level, Ratcliffe both understands and resents this: “The men like Smith, don’t they?” he asks his manservant Wiggins. Even their voices tell the story: Ratcliffe is the villainous bureaucrat, complete with an English accent. Smith is the heroic adventurer — with Mel Gibson’s American accent intact and unfettered. 

John Smith has swagger — and a reputation that precedes him. “You can’t fight Indians without John Smith!” one of the colonizers declares in his introductory scene, as Smith literally rides a cannon onto the ship. Depicted as a natural leader, he’s respected by his men for his physical prowess and bravery that borders on stupidity. Smith has a martyr-like willingness to put himself in harm’s way for his men that, while not explicitly labeled as Christian, is certainly coded as such. “You’d do the same for me,” Smith says jokingly to his companions, after leaping into the ocean during a storm to save a man who fell overboard. He is, in essence, exactly the kind of leading man that Mel Gibson, the actor who voices him, spent a career playing — the mythic American cowboy and ideal leading man of Hollywood cinema. (Complete with the domestic abuse and antisemitism bona fides.) 

Queer-coded Ratcliffe is trying to earn a place in the system by being its most traditional guardian, but he also represents a kind of masculinity that has long since gone indoors to the Royal Court, concerned with accumulation through relationship and intellect. Americans recognize this as the masculinity of the educated, high-born (or aspirational) cultural aesthete, anxieties about which would soon manifest in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s under the term “metrosexual.” John Smith, conversely, represents the rugged, individualist masculinity that defines itself not by social status but by a cowboy mentality, by connection with God, family, and the land.  

In many ways, Pocahontas is structured like a Western, and John Smith may as well be John Wayne. John Smith saves the man who fell overboard; Ratcliffe is the government lackey in a suit who hunkers down in his cabin and only emerges once the danger has passed, clutching his pug while his manservant shields him with an umbrella. Government intervention is often a primary conflict in Westerns, resented by white colonizers played by actors like Wayne, who have gone west and figured out a way to live (with varying levels of hostility to the local Indigenous community) outside of federal oversight. The men in suits have effeminate mannerisms, a lot of education, and virtually no physical strength (coded as natural, God-given virility), with very little idea on how to practically connect to the world around them. Set aside for a moment the well-documented historical phenomenon of white, Black, and Latino gay cowboys throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and apply the genre of American Westerns and their ideology of masculinity, expansion, and, consequently, who gets to have what in Pocahontas

What do the colonizers want, respectively, in Pocahontas? (Obvious question, but stay with me.) In Ratcliffe’s villain anthem, “Mine, Mine, Mine” — which is, and I cannot stress this enough, a duet with John Smith — Ratcliffe is singing about the gold allowing him to accumulate wealth and reputation and status, delegating the digging to the crew. Smith is the one actually singing about the land while climbing trees and waterfalls, activities which seem unnecessarily strenuous. But don’t they want the same thing: to take whatever land they land on in the interest of colonial expansion? Haven’t Smith and Ratcliffe already been shown to be very much on the same page about the murder and displacement of Indigenous peoples? But Disney’s edit would have you think otherwise. 

John Smith has swagger — and a reputation that precedes him. “You can’t fight Indians without John Smith!” one of the colonizers declares in his introductory scene, as Smith literally rides a cannon onto the ship.

Beneath the surface, anxieties about all-too-contemporary masculinity and what constitutes manhood are relocated to the center of the driving conflict of Pocahontas — one that allows a corporation to elide reckoning with the violent historical subject matter of the actual plot. 

And therein is the issue: Ratcliffe becomes the villain because Smith, his fellow colonizer, cannot be. 

***

In the end, Ratcliffe’s men turn on him. At first glance, it might seem like they are doing so out of sympathy for Pocahontas and her people, as Ratcliffe had been trying to assassinate her father, Chief Powhatan. But this is not it — the other white men don’t try to stop him when he first aims his gun, not until he accidentally shoots John Smith, who is shown taking a bullet for the chief (which is, please note, a fictional event that did not happen). 

“You shot him!” one accuses. “Smith was right all along!” another cries hypocritically, as all of them had been worked up in a racist war song (“Savages”), fantasizing about genocide only the night before. The white colonizers mutiny in favor of the preferred masculine archetype: The Cowboy. Ratcliffe is tied up, gagged, and set to be tried upon return to England. 

It is deeply satisfying to see the avowedly racist Ratcliffe in chains. But is the colonizing and racist rhetoric what he’s being punished for? No. The other colonizers are still walking free, many of them staying behind to continue to build up their Jamestown settlement. 

Colonizing isn’t worthy of punishment in this film, nor is racism, otherwise every white character — John Smith included — would be in chains. The reality is that Ratcliffe is punished for failing to assimilate within the crew successfully, for not embodying the right kind of masculinity, for not reading the room, and attacking the much-respected cowboy-esque leader who the men ultimately mutiny for. This is his crime: not trying to assassinate Chief Powhatan, but wounding one of his own. Meanwhile, Thomas, a colonizer who explicitly murders an Indigenous warrior, Kocoum, is given … a redemption arc, complete with Pocahontas’ forgiveness. 

How tenuous the conditions of acceptance for white gays doing the bidding of white supremacy. 

***

Ratcliffe is, simply put, a Corporate Gay, a Log Cabin Republican, a Cyrus Bean, the Disney equivalent of (allegedly) that one senator from South Carolina. Ratcliffe has bought into the idea that serving the system will benefit him, and that if only he does its bidding, things will ultimately work out. But queerness renders you automatically suspect within any system of power, even white supremacy. What Ratcliffe, and other white gays like him, fail to realize is that assimilation is not acceptance; it is merely borrowed time. 

There is a savvy to the Queer Villains of Excess like Scar and Ursula, who understand that there is no utility in trying to fit in, who know that there is no box possibly small enough to cram your queer ass into. But, truth be told, even these villains have boundaries they won’t cross, only ever wanting to kill the king and usurp his throne — but never outright abolish abusive systems of power. 

There is no queer revolution amongst Disney villains, see. There is no abolition, no truly radical liberation within the fairy tales that ultimately serve to codify what “happily ever after” means, and for who. In Disney, queerness is only ever an imitation of the hetero original, never a full expression of itself. Gay villains are depicted as the dog who caught the car: Once they get it, what do they even do?

* * *

Jeanna Kadlec is a culture writer living in NYC. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, O the Oprah Magazine, LitHub, NYLON, Allure, and more.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

May 31, 1977 —Cambridge, MA — Photographs of American slaves, possibly the oldest known in the country, have been discovered in the basement of a Harvard University museum. Among the previously unpublished daguerreotypes discovered are these (L-R): a Congo slave named Renty, who lived on B.F. Taylor's plantation, "Edgehill"; Jack, a slave from the Guinea Coast (ritual scars decorate his cheek); and an unidentified man.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lise Olsen, Jaya Saxena, and Emma Carmichael.

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Emma Carmichael | GQ | February 9, 2021 | 21 minutes (5,324 words)

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