So when I heard about Glee creator Ryan Murphy’s new FX series American Horror Story I dove in without hesitation.  Haunted house?  Kickass intro with veiled brides and industrial music and pickled animal fetuses?  Yuppies forced to confront their sexual neuroses by a sexy ghost maid and the specter of death in a faceless gimp suit?  I’ll take tickets for two consecutive showings, please, and one of those collectable plastic popcorn buckets.

As it turned out, most of the content of the first season of American Horror Story can be sorted into one of three categories:

1. Legitimately goddamn terrifying.
2. Horror mash-up schlock that was usually jaw-droppingly tasteless, utterly devoid of any redeeming moral or aesthetic value, and spectacularly entertaining all at once (heartthrob school shooters, ghost abortions, Dylan McDermott masturbating out a window while uncontrollably sobbing).
3. Stupid bullshit that made no sense.

I was entranced for all thirteen episodes, sometimes for the reasons the creators intended, and I will never watch them again.  And I was prepared to say “thanks but no thanks” for the second season, even when I learned it would be launching an entirely new story instead of continuing from the original’s dopey finale.

But I was intrigued I learned the new season would take place in a mental asylum, a venue I myself have some experience with.  I anticipated another rollercoaster wreck of a season – but would I be insulted and entertained, as I was last time?  Or would the show’s presumably insulting portrayal of the mentally ill leave me offended, with a furious blog post months after the season’s finale my only recourse?

Imagine my surprise when, after shotgunning all 13 episodes over a long weekend, I realized AHS: Asylum was actually pretty good.   Maybe even great.

Mind, that might be tough to wrap your head around if you just read a summary of the season’s narrative, a potent cocktail of horror and exploitation clichés: serial killers, cannibal mutants, necrophilia, demonic possession, mad Nazi scientists, nun rape, Chloe Sevigny, benevolent alien eugenicists, and Jessica Lange gleefully performing “The Name Game” for a crowd of ecstatic spastics and schizoids.  This is television that is unafraid to say: “everyone knows Anne Frank died in Auschwitz.  What my show presupposes is: maybe she didn’t?”

But there’s a certain logic to the show’s mad soufflé of tropes and stock characters.  Monsters and horror stories catch on when they resonate with our collective fears, when they expose us to the things we’d rather forget – and AHS: Asylum deliberately samples from  horror stories that toy with our primal fear of mental illness.

After all: who wouldn’t be frightened if someone they loved suddenly began behaving inexplicably and shouting nonsense?  And what are demonic possession and exorcism, after all, but a cultural attempt to explain and cure that kind of psychosis?  Stories about mutant and cannibals and skin-wearing serial killers fascinate us because they pretend to illuminate evil and insanity while quietly reassuring us, “you’re nothing like that, this could never happen to you or someone you love, guys like this are just crazy.”  And there are times when AHS: Asylum doesn’t even need to draw from fiction, because many of its most chilling moments (briefly: forced sterilization, the treatment of homosexuality as a mental disorder, the reckless deployment of electroshock therapy, the deplorable conditions of many mental hospitals, and all the rest) are taken from the nightmarish history of actual mental institutions.  From this perspective, even the series’ portrayal of Anne Frank becomes defensible – it draws a straight line from the Nazi’s systematic elimination of undesirables to our own shameful history of mistreating the marginalized.

Over the course of the season, the loopy subplots about mutants and devils are either resolved or forgotten, and the series shifts focus to a more grounded portrayal of the plight of people society has no use for.  This climaxes in a harrowing sequence in the final episode, a riff on Geraldo Rivera’s expose on the Willowbrook State School, where one of our heroines (a former inmate, now a successful journalist) returns to the asylum and finds it’s degraded even more than she imagined.  At the end of the series, it isn’t the monsters or the cheesy subplots that stick with you; it’s the creators’ compassion for, and outrage at the mistreatment of, the marginalized and mentally disabled.

Asylum won’t be for everyone – I’ve got a long history with comic books and videogames and pulp fiction, so I’ve got a lot of patience for the crazy plot twists the season deploys early on, but if the premise of angels and aliens coexisting makes you roll your eyes then this might not be the show for you.  And I’ll be the first to admit it isn’t nearly as entertaining or, frankly, even as scary as the first season.  But the first American Horror Story only succeeded when it was trying to be silly or shocking, and it’s dramatic moments missed the mark entirely.  The second season manages to say something coherent and compelling and even poignant about the plight of the mentally ill.

The show is a mess and it won’t be for everyone and I doubt the forthcoming season (subtitled Coven, dealing with witches, apparently lighter in tone) will be anything like it.  But for me, going in with a very particular set of experiences and expectations (I’ve come far closer to to Briarcliff than most people will in their lifetimes), American Horror Story: Asylum worked, and it worked far better than I’d imagined it could.

People never ask me the questions I have good answers to.  For instance, people never ask me: “Fletcher, what is the total nadir of human creativity?  What is the single most vile object to pass through the bowels of  mankind’s collective imagination?”

Because it is not reality television, or YA supernatural erotica or fanfiction thereof, or secretly evangelical horrorcore rap produced by men dressed as clowns.

It is Monk.  Monk is the worst.  And finally, finally, I get to tell you all exactly why.

- There have been a couple of predictable challenges to the game from the Christian right.  Which makes sense, because a cursory glance suggests the game is just messing around with Christianity imagery and iconography to check of another item on its list of hot-button issues.  But a more careful analysis reveals the game is an indictment of unearned spiritually, and a reaffirmation of the power of genuine Christian sacrifice.

At the game’s climax, Booker learns that the corrupt theocrat Comstock is actually Booker’s counterpart from an alternate timeline: a parallel universe where Booker found religion, concluded that with God’s forgiveness he basically had carte blanche to do the Lord’s work as he saw fit, and set about spreading the Gospel via Columbia’s airborne armada.  Comstock’s story is the classic refutation of Martin Luther’s doctrine of “salvation through grace” – actually, Bioshock Infinite argues, grace doesn’t help if you rely on it to justify evil actions.  And I’d argue that’s a necessary statement to make in our political climate, where allegedly Christian activists and legislators quote obscure scripture to justify discrimination, then claim they’re doing God’s work by implementing institutional changes that further disadvantage the poor and underprivileged.

So how does Booker respond to the revelation of Comstock’s true identity?  Traveling outside of space and time, he returns with his daughter Elizabeth to the moment of the baptism and allows her to drown him, erasing Comstock from existence and saving his daughter and the people of Columbia from his nefarious influence.  Instead of taking the easy path of unearned redemption, Booker makes the greatest sacrifice possible to ensure a better life for his child.  And in a game about Christianity, the significance of that should be pretty obvious.

That’s not to say Booker’s a straightforward Christ figure – both as Booker and as Comstock he’s an undeniable bastard, not a man in a position to offer forgiveness but one who desperately needs it.  Rather, Booker’s a flawed man who finally does good by following Christ’s example.  On a fallen earth (a fallen earth that even the airborne Columbia remains part of) that’s about as good as anyone can do.

 - The portrayal of Daisy Fitzroy is an embarrassment.  Like, I would actually be embarrassed if I were Ken Levine.  I know how it goes.  I’m a white dude.  I’ve written and even shared stuff that I’ve only realized after the fact could be interpreted as racist or sexist; embarrassment, and then an apology and a hasty correction if possible, is the only reasonable response.

Because the tale of Daisy Fitzroy, scullery maid turned freedom fighter and the only significant person of color in Bioshock Infinite, is something to be embarrassed by.  Daisy’s introduced to the player as a hardened but sympathetic revolutionary, fighting on behalf of racial minorities and the underclass against Comstock’s theocracy.  That is, until Booker and Elizabeth travel to another parallel timeline, where Daisy has become a self-righteous tyrant as bad as Comstock.  Tracking Daisy Fitzroy through an alternate Columbia devastated by civil war, Booker and Elizabeth finally catch up with her just as she executes Jeremiah Fink, the robber baron responsible for keeping much of Columbia’s population in indentured wage slavery.  Which, hey, fair enough.

But then she turns around and, with some half-assed justification, prepares to shoot Fink’s son.  Daisy’s only prevented from doing so because Elizabeth crawls through a vent and stabs her in the back.

That’s a big problem.

Bioshock: Infinite takes the only significant, named person of color in its entire cast; railroads her into pointless one-dimensional villainy without an explanation; and then sacrifices her to provide development for one of the (white) heroes.  For a work so interested in criticizing casual racism in American culture, Bioshock Infinite is alarmingly thoughtless about how it treats its own characters.

- And just as bad: Daisy’s implausible leap from rabble-rouser to child-killer, and the descent of her Vox Populi from idealistic revolutionaries to vengeful terrorists, totally neuter whatever political point creator Ken Levine is trying to make.

Bioshock Infinite is remarkably specific when pointing out the sins of the political right, and that’s what makes it effective satire.  Through recordings of Comstock’s sermons and private diaries, through the propaganda he releases to his people, and through the characterization of his alternate self Booker DeWitt, we get a clear look at Comstock’s failure; we see both the beauty of his perfect unfallen America, and the evil he embraces to achieve it.  Were I a conservative, I’d hope that playing Bioshock Infinite would help me understand some of the mistakes my political allies were making; the veneration of the founders and the white-washing of America’s past, the eagerness to inflict violence as deterrent and punishment, the willful ignorance to the systemic injustice inflicted on America’s poor and people of color.

But as a progressive, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take from Bioshock Infinite.  Don’t murder kids for no reason?  Thanks for the insight, Ken.  Don’t let those Occupy rallies get out of hand?  Son, have you seen Occupy Wall Street?  At its pinnacle, back in 2011, Occupy was a bunch of muddy hipsters and wilted flower children wielding pet snakes and bongos.  We couldn’t hold down a few yards of concrete, much less overthrow a damn city.  There are plenty of criticisms to be made of both the Democratic establishment and the progressive movement, but Infinite doesn’t make them, and its platitudes about how all sorts of extremism lead to violence are condescending and simplistic.  As commentary on the decadence of the modern American left, explaining how its flawed ideology will lead to tyranny, Bioshock Infinite is totally useless.

And even if it works as a general indictment of extreme leftism, it doesn’t work in a game explicitly and specifically about America.  The story of power in America, sometimes for the better and more often for the worse, is the story of a handful of big important men making big decisions and everyone else getting dragged along.  Now, that’s obviously an oversimplication, but we’ve certainly never seen anything like the bloody socialist uprising depicted in Bioshock: Infinite.  The game throws in lots of references of Les Miserables and Marxist rhetoric to try to establish historical precedent for the Vox Populi’s reign of terror, but that sleight of hand doesn’t change the fact that the Vox don’t have a parallel in American history.  Showing a fictional underclass revolution as equivalent to the sort of theocrats and oligarchs who have so much power in real-life America, and then declaring both sides to be just as bad, is intellectually dishonest.

Especially when, in order to sell your false equivalency, you have to paint the leader of the insurgency as a child killer. The only thing that convinced me of was how shallow Ken Levine’s “all extremism is bad” argument is.

I want a “Daisy was right” t-shirt.

- And finally, for everyone who missed it over on Tumblr, a piece of fan art: Compost for Comstock!

- One of the defining gameplay features of the original Bioshock were the plasmids – superpowered genetic modifications that could be used alongside your arsenal.  They were also a critical part of the game’s narrative, as Rapture’s social breakdown was hastened by widespread and unregulated genetic modification.  I’ve heard criticism that the vigors don’t make sense as part of Infinite’s universe the way plasmids did in the original – it makes little sense that a society as reactionary and fixated on tradition as Columbia is would be so blasé about widespread gene-splicing.  If the anti-vaccination movement has taught us anything, it’s that paranoid types (both liberal and conservative) are extremely hostile towards science and medicine they don’t understand.

But I see the vigors as more of a missed opportunity for additional social commentary.  Infinite’s Columbia is fixated on racial purity and conformity – seeing the populace abuse genetic modification to better embody Farther Comstock’s ideals could have been creepy and appropriate to the setting.  It could have led to some compelling moral problems for the characters: workers investing in genetic modification for their children to give them a better shot at climbing the social ladder, for instance, or Booker having to splice himself to go incognito among the populace. Imagine a Grand Theft Auto-style scenario where the cops are pursuing you and you can literally modify your genetic makeup to evade detection.

But while summoning waves of angry crows to fend off Colombia’s fuzz isn’t as creepy or as thematically resonant as spawning swarms of bees from your pores was in the first game, I’ll be damned if it isn’t more satisfying.  I’ve cut back both on drinking and on spending money on useless nerd merch since college, but I’d be sorely tempted to buy a “Murder of Crows” vigor flask.

- Speaking of which: it’s striking how often crows appear and reappear through the game.  I suspect it’s economic use of existing graphic assets but the birds also remind the player of Booker’s role as an invader/scavenger in this self-contained world.

- On the same subject as the vigors, I thought the original Bioshock was extremely clever in that it explained the freely available firearms and ubiquitous ammo dispensaries of most FPS games not as a concession to genre requirements but as the ultimate consequences of a totally deregulated libertarian dystopia: in a world where there’s no government to control the distribution of weapons, the bad guys all use guns and then everyone has to take arms to defend themselves.  (Sadly, this element of Bioshock has recently proved prophetic, as lax gun laws have encouraged random shootings, and conservative lawmakers insist the solution to this is more armed citizens.)

That kind of reasoning doesn’t really work in Columbia, but I think the ubiquitous firearms could still have been part of the game’s satire.  As Comstock’s Hall of Heroes and Soldier’s Field demonstrate, his nationalism and religious fundamentalism also include militarism; why doesn’t that extend to the populace as well?  Give everyone a gun.  It’d lend additional unease to the carnival scenes, as you gradually realize the cheery revelers are all packing heat, and could lead to some cool emergent gameplay as untrained civilians get involved in shootouts.  It could also add some poignancy to Infinite’s commentary on racism if armed civilians reacted with greater hostility to minorities, and the player had to decide whether to risk breaking cover to intervene or allow an innocent to be shot.

We’ll conclude the discussion on Friday: I’ll talk about two big controversies surrounding the game, its use of Christianity and its depiction of the Vox Populi worker’s uprising.  Bring popcorn (or dig some out of a garbage bin, if that’s more your style).

- I’ve seen a lot of complaining about the violence in Bioshock Infinite and I’m faintly baffled by it.  The purpose the violence serves is obvious and, as far as I’m concerned, totally justified.  You’re strolling through Columbia, enraptured by the lush scenery and scientific marvels, totally seduced by this impossible wonderland of turn-of-the-century Americana.  And then BAM!  You’re invited to participate in the lynching of an interracial couple and then BAM!  You’re driving a grappling hook/chainsaw into a policeman’s cranium.  It’s a one-two punch that shatters Columbia’s eerie tranquility and establishes the atmosphere of juxtaposed wonder and horror that will permeate the rest of the game.

Now, I’ve heard arguments that the ultraviolence will scare off queasy players who might otherwise give the game a fair shake, and awaken to the creative potential of video games.  My response is that Ken Levine isn’t obligated to advance the medium.  He’s obligated to follow his muse, and produce the art he wants to make.  When artists deliberately set out to create conventionally “great art” we usually end up with boring nonsense: Oscar-bait with massive production values and a soaring orchestral soundtrack but no unique or interesting qualities.  I’d take an interesting, repulsive, messy contraption like Bioshock Infinite over a dozen works like that, no question.

- The plagiarized period covers of modern pop songs broadcast through time are neat, and I suspect there’s some intended commentary on intellectual property and the entertainment industry.  Maybe something about how the media exploits artists by hacking up their work to make it suitable for mass consumption, then reaping the profits?

- I’ve seen very little writing on the Comstock House asylum seen towards the end of the game – obviously, the treatment of the mentally ill is an interest of mine, and if I try to produce an actual essay on the game it will probably tackle this stage.

But briefly: the House is pretty clearly based on the Bentham panopticon, and Foucault’s critique of it.  The Boys of Silence are especially interesting as living instruments of the panopticon, surrogate eyes for the central intelligent, beings that can observe but cannot act.  And the patients we see are an effective representation of how society stigmatizes and ostracizes the mentally ill; ghostly and intangible, suspended between parallel universes, they are literally outside our reality.

- I know a lot of people haven’t been sure what to make of the Handymen, Columbia’s cyborg enforcers, constructed by permanently fusing the aged and infirm into massive exoskeletons  – I figured they were a commentary on end-of-life care, “death panels,” and our obsession with extending the quantity of life at the expense of quality.  And even if that wasn’t what the creators were trying to say, I’m declaring DotA and saying it’s true anyway, because it’s too good to pass up.

- So how about Elizabeth, eh?

Little Anna DeWitt.  Grew up.  Filled out.

There’s something a little queasy about Elizabeth’s sexualized depiction, and how it colors her interactions with her parents (all three, across dimensions).  Thankfully, the designers modified the pandering design that appeared in the game’s 2011 trailer (breasts or eyes, I couldn’t tell you which were bigger, but the overall effect was uncomfortably evocative of the combination of sexualization and infantalization of animated women that the otaku kids call moé).  But there’s still some male-gaze stuff going on in the version that appears in the final product.

It’s especially queasy in light of twists of the game’s ending: Comstock and Booker are the same man across universes, Elizabeth is Booker’s daughter.  So there’s some really creepy subtext when Elizabeth changes from her original outfit, now torn and bloodied, into the form-fitting, cleavage-emphasizing gown of her mother, Lady Comstock; we now have the daughter playing dress-up as the mother so dad can get an eyeful.  And this is before the Lady herself is resurrected as a shrieking, undead harpy (well, Siren, technically) that Elizabeth and Booker must rebury.

What makes this seem deliberate and thematic instead of just Freudian is that this part is immediately followed an alternate-future scenario in which an elderly Elizabeth adopts the mantle of her father, the Prophet Comstock, raining fire-and-brimstone sermons (as well as literal fire and brimstone) over the world below.  So we have two sequences in which the child play-acts as each of her parents, before forging her own path at the end of the game.

And having Elizabeth act out the roles of both of her parents, and showing that neither of these options is healthy or appropriate, goes a long way to turn the creepiness of her Lady Comstock cosplay into an asset.  I’m not sure this totally excuses the way the designers sexualize her, but at least it gives a solid thematic reason for why the game encourages the player to oogle the daughter figure through the eyes of her father.  It’s supposed to be wrong and uncomfortable and it’s something the narrative explicitly rejects.

(Well, at least that’s my DotA explanation for it.  We all know the real reason is that the creators were probing the middle space in the Venn diagram between “Sexy” and “Tasteful” and that they misjudged the final design just a bit.)

- Tomorrow, I’ll talk a little about the game’s implementation of weapons and “vigors” (genetic superpowers) and how it might have been done better.

I’ve been thinking a lot about videogames and narrative, and I was reminded of the videogame theory class I took back at Swat and one paper I wrote in particular: a take on The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for Nintendo 64.  I was a die-hard Zelda fan growing up, and although I’ve cooled on the series with  recent installments, for better or for worse Majora’s Mask was one of my defining gaming experiences as a teenager.  The weirdness of the thing, how it took gameplay conventions and NPCs I was familiar with and pushed them into uncomfortable (uncanny?) places, got inside my head.  It’s one of the games I’ve replayed the most, and the one that I’m most frightened to replay again, because I’m confident the combination of time and circumstance and adolescent psychology that made it so potent ten years ago can’t be recreated.

I wrote this paper my senior year of college: it’s a little clunky, and it gets a little academic at points (I still love the Tarot symbolism of the moon and tower but some of you might roll your eyes).  Anyway I thought it was worth sharing.

Til We Have Faces: The Identity of the Hero in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to create for videogame players a “miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer”[1].  This was the genesis of the Legend of Zelda franchise, as series that includes some of the most-loved and best-selling titles of all time.  True to Miyamoto’s ambition, the Zelda series has excelled in presenting players with a complex world to explore and challenge.  Yet the series includes one entry that, bizarrely, subverts the ludological and narrative principles of the rest of the series.  The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was released in 2000 for the Nintendo 64 game console, as a direct sequel to the best-selling and groundbreaking The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  Yet to the disappointment of many the title was radically different from its predecessor.  Few of the major characters from the previous game returned, and the series’ beloved kingdom of Hyrule was replaced by a surreal alternate universe.  Majora’s Mask was a profoundly unusual game, one that bent backwards to subvert the heroic fantasy so crucial to the success of previous Zelda titles.  In the context of the extremely popular Zelda franchise, Majora’s Mask daringly undermined the series narrative premise by offering an adventure based, not on violence, but on compassion and transformation.

In his essay “Game Design as Narrative Archtiecture” scholar Henry Jenkins argues that “[g]ame designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces”.[2]  This principle of spatial exploration is thus central to the Zelda series, and especially to Ocarina.  When the player begins a new quest, they may pause the game and look at a blank map of the fantasy kingdom of Hyrule, with the implicit promise the player will chart the world.  Through Ocarina Link explores forests, rivers, mountains, a frozen cave and an active volcano, Egyptian ruins, the stomach of an enormous sea monster.  Jenkins locates adventure games like Ocarina “within a much older tradition of spatial stories, which have often taken the form of hero’s odysseys, quest myths, or travel narratives.”^[3]  Jenkins argues that spatially oriented fictions often draw upon archetypal characters and stories, using the audience’s preexisting knowledge of generic tropes to reinforce the reality of the fantasy world.[4]  Link’s journey in Ocarina may be mapped to the Joseph Campbell’s archetypal “hero’s quest”; the hero “ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”[5]  In Ocarina Link leaves his village, learns of the wizard Ganondorf’s conspiracy of world domination, conquers dungeons, and eventually takes hold of the sacred Master Sword.  Yet as Campbell describes “instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold [he] is swallowed into the unknown”.[6] Link reawakens, seven years later, as a powerful adult.  In this form he assembles his weapons and allies and confronts Ganondorf, ultimately emerging victorious.  Through the time-traveling powers of the titular Ocarina of Time, returns to the unspoiled world of his childhood, presumably enriched by his experiences.

The game’s narrative is archetypal, even simplistic.  But Jenkins argues that adventure titles such as Ocarina, are not “badly constructed” in their narratives but rather privilege “spatial exploration rather than development” of plot and character.^[7]  It makes sense that, as Jenkins puts it, “the characters – our guides through these richly-developed worlds – are stripped down to bear-bones”.[8]  To burden such characters with greater complexity would inevitably distract the player from their own agency within the game.  So Ganondorf is the “magician, [the] negative father-figure”[9] identified by Carl Jung, an older male antagonist who becomes a literal  “tyrant-monster”[10] at the end of the game as he transforms into the demonic Ganon. The Princess Zelda is the “Queen Goddess of the World”, the “the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero’s earthly and unearthly quest.”[11] Link himself, the central figure of the Zelda series, and is paradoxically and yet necessarily the least developed character in the series.  In his work The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim observes that, in the fairy-tale, “[t]he more simple and straightforward a good character, the easier it is for a child to identify with it and to reject the bad other.”^[12]  Accordingly, Link’s identity is so vague as to be nonexistent.  His countenance and hairstyle are androgynous, his green tunic visually undistinguished.  He is usually viewed from a behind-the-back camera, so that his face is often not even visible to the player.  Link may cry out when wounded or shout as his blade strikes a foe, but he never actually speaks. He can kill monsters, collect artifacts, cast magic spells, but he cannot chose to greet a friend or ask a stranger for the time of day.  Link saves the world without really ever living in it.  He is a narrative void, a gaping hole in the center of the game’s plot to be filled by the player.  Bettelheim observes that in fairy stories, “the child imagines that he suffers with the hero his trials and tribulations, and triumphs with him as virtue is victorious.”^[13]  Link is a window through which we may experience the game world, and according to his function he is designed to be as transparent as possible.

In his essay “Genre Trouble” critic Espen Aareth deduces from the “totally prescripted” actions of videogame heroes like Link that “the simulation, as a primary phenomenon, must form the basis of any combination” of narrative and gameplay.[14]  Yet as Henry Jenkins argues, it is possible to reconcile player agency with the constraints of the game narrative.  Jenkins compares the performance of the videogame player to that of a masked actor in a traditional commedia del arte:

The masks set limits on the action… The actors have mastered the possible moves or lassi associated with each character, much as a game player has mastered the combination of buttons that must be pushed to enable certain character actions… the shape of the story emerges from this basic vocabulary of possible actions.[15]

Jenkins’ mask analogy is a fortuitous one.  The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was released in 2000 for the Nintendo 64.  The title was created using a modified version of the Ocarina game engine, as is readily apparent upon starting the game.  Majora’s graphics and third-person camera, baring a handful of subtle refinements, are virtually indistinguishable from Ocarina’s, and many character and enemy models are carbon-copied from the series’ previous installment.  Yet while Majora offers no significant mechanical changes from its predecessor, its narrative architecture is radically altered.

The game begins with the same incarnation of Link that appeared in Ocarina, restored to youth and traveling through the woods on his horse Epona.  The Link that appears here is visibly older than the child seen in the beginning of Ocarina, yet has not yet reached adulthood; this is an awkward, adolescent version of the hero, living between the two time periods established by the game’s predecessor.   Link is searching for Navi, the guardian spirit from Ocarina equivalent to Campbell’s “protective figure… who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass”.^[16]  Without warning, Link is ambushed by the Skull Kid (a minor enemy from Ocarina) wearing the titular mask, who steals his horse and Ocarina.  When Link gives chase, the Skull Kid drags Link into a strange alternate world and uses the power of the mask to transform Link into a tiny, powerless Deku Scrub.  The Deku Scrub was another minor enemy from Ocarina, a plantlike nuisance that spat nuts at Link.  In a game that featured shrieking zombies and fire-breathing dragons, the Deku Scrub was decidedly near the bottom of the enemy hierarchy. Link escapes the tunnels and finds himself in Clock Town, the epicenter of Majora’s alternate world of Termina, and as he explores, he is ignored by and condescended to by the townspeople.  There are no real enemies, thankfully, because instead of a sword the Deku has only a twirling pirouette attack, and a bite from a tiny stray dog is enough to send it flying.

This is hardly the empowering “Hero’s Quest.”  The player has barely had time to find their bearings, and already Link has undergone a devastating symbolic castration.  He has lost his horse, his Ocarina and his human form.  He is without his guardian Navi, and his only aid comes from Tatl, a bratty fairy with a grudge against the Skull Kid who joins Link in an alliance of convenience and berates him as she offers advice.  The world of Termina is a parallel universe to Hyrule, filled with familiar characters in altered circumstances.  The kindly farmer Talon runs a bar selling spiked milk; the regal King Zora manages a cheesy pop band; the quiet woman who raised chickens is now searching for her lost fiancé. To make matters worse, there sits at the bottom of the screen an omnipresent ticking clock, running a three-day countdown, and an ominous grinning moon hangs low in the sky.  Each day it grows a little bigger.  At the end of the third day it will fall, and end everything.

This is the opening of Majora’s Mask, heavy with unease and with dread.

Link eventually regains the Ocarina of Time, and with it the power to return, any time he likes, to the moment of his arrival in Termina.   Thus Link is forced to relive the three-day cycle again and again, the inhabitants of Termina ignorant of his struggle, until he can determine how to prevent the coming cataclysm (Jung notes that the duration of three days is a “stereotyped expression” for a period of mystical trial, undergone by disparate figures including Jesus Christ and Hiawatha).^[17]  Here Majora’s Mask establishes itself as a radically different game from Ocarina of Time.   Jenkins observes that games like Ocarina “center around the struggle to explore, map and master contested spaces.” ^[18]  Majora’s Termina is much smaller than Ocarina’s Hyrule, both physically (most of Termina’s inhabitants live in Clock Town, and may be encountered on the first three-day cycle) and temporally (the game takes place over three days instead of seven years).  If Ocarina features an implicitly masculine narrative of exploration and conquest, then Majora is more feminine, focused on redeeming others or mastering social relationships rather than overcoming foes. Through the game Link protects a caravan from bandits, reunites separated lovers, listens to the confession of a tormented circus performer, delivers a letter from a young man to his mother on the eve of the moon’s fall.  Instead of his usual armory Link collects masks, usually given as gifts or rewards by the townspeople, which have little relevance to dungeon exploration.  Instead of taking health power-ups from defeated bosses Link receives them from grateful allies or finds them hidden in obscure corners of the game’s environment.  In Majora, the Ocarina of Time is used not only as a time-travel device but as a curative device; the most commonly used melody in the game is the “Song of Healing,” which Link uses to remove magical curses and put unquiet spirits to rest.

Even the game’s dungeons and combat scenarios are placed in an explicitly redemptive context.  Whenever Link conquers a dungeon he removes some blight from the surrounding terrain (clearing the poison from a swamp, bringing spring to a frozen mountain village).  Each dungeon also features an optional challenge by which Link can collect the scattered fragments of a broken Great Fairy, eventually earning a boon from the reconstructed goddess.  In some cases villainous characters from Ocarina are sympathetic in Majora, as with Kuome and Kotake, two witches who fought Link in the previous game but who now run a magic shop and help Link to navigate the dangerous swamp.  Some enemies such as the mummified Gibdos and skeletal Stalchildren can be pacified if Link wears a particular mask.  Other times, enemies are transformed into allies once they are defeated.  Several dungeons feature “Gekkos”, fierce amphibians that reveal themselves to be innocent frogs once defeated.   Indeed, the dungeon bosses are actually benevolent Giants, transformed into monsters through by cursed masks. Once Link defeats them these masks are removed, and the Giants pledge to help Link.  Even the Skull Kid himself is revealed to be a naïve tool of Majora’s machinations.  Ocarina’s narrative of colonial conquest and spatial mastery is replaced by mechanics of purification and redemption.

Along with healing, a major theme of Majora’s Mask is transformation.  Link does not grow and progress, as he does in Ocarina, but rather undergoes a series of bizarre, lateral transformations between different forms and identities.  Using different masks allows Link to transgress boundaries of class (using a special hat to gain entrance to an exclusive club), species (some masks allow Link to control or communicate with animals) and even gender (the Great Fairy’s Mask allows Link to attract the stray fairy fragments in dungeons, and grants him a garish feminine visage that is horrifying on his little body).  Of particular significance are the three transformation masks, which allow Link to assume different physical forms.  Throughout the game, Link is must use his Song of Healing to bring peace to three restless spirits, each time earning a new mask that allows him to assume their earthly form.  Link first uses the Song to escape from his plantlike Deku Scrub body, and later uses it to ease the spirits of (and borrow the identities of) the powerful ape-like Goron hero Darmani and the piscine Zora musician Mikau.   Each of these forms incorporates different gameplay mechanics; the Deku can spin and parachute through the air using oversize flowers, the Goron can curl up and roll about quickly as a powerful (if unwieldy) spiked ball, and the Zora can generate bioelectric shocks and swim gracefully underwater.  The transformation masks also neatly solve the narrative problem of Link’s lack of identity by allowing Link to enter the narratives of other characters.  The Goron is revered by his tribe’s elder and the elder’s young son; the Zora is a member of a rock band, and is implied to have fathered the children of the band’s singer.  Because of his function as the player’s avatar, Link cannot have his own story.  Yet by allowing Link to enact the roles of these other characters Majora integrates its hero more convincingly into its narrative world.  There are moments when the game uses the player’s awareness of this performance to great effect, as when the Goron hero Darmani’s surrogate family is overjoyed to see him returned while the player knows that this Darmnai is merely an imposter, only Link wearing a mask.  The nature of Link’s deception is never commented upon within the game, but it contributes to Majora’s sense of uneasiness.  The overall narrative effect is not unlike Carl Jung’s description of metempsychosis, of “one’s life [being] prolonged in time by passing through different bodily existences; or, from another point of view… a life-sequence interrupted by different reincarnations.”^[19]  Experiencing Majora’s world as a composite, viewed from the perspective of four characters who are really one, creates a strange cumulative effect.  Everything is multiply significant; a pool of water that would drown the bulky Goron form can be easily traversed by the sprightly Deku, which can skip across lillypads, while the aquatic Zora can swim to the bottom to explore.

If Ocarina was about progressing Link from helpless child to confident adult, then Majora’s Mask is a game about adolescence, about the transitional time between innocence and maturity.  Many of the games supporting characters engage with these themes of age and adolescence.   The farm girl Malon, from Ocarina, has two equivalents in the world of Termina, representing her childhood and adult selves; the impatient groom Kafei is transformed into a child shortly before his wedding, and when he is eventually reunited with his beloved he is still trapped in this form (“…Tee-hee!” giggles Tatl.  “They’re lovers, but they look just like a mother and child.”  The game inadvertently engages adolescent Oedipal anxieties).[20]  The tension between childhood and adulthood is expressed most articulately by Tingle, a 35-year-old man clothed in a green tunic similar to Link’s.  Tingle is short, with a large red nose and a noticeable paunch, and is given to shouting out nonsense magic words.  He recognizes Link as a forest fairy-child, and professes his desire to be like him.  “My father tells me to grow up and act my age, but why?” he asks.  “I tell you…Tingle is the very reincarnation of a fairy!”[21]  The character is a cruel parody of Link, resisting maturity, addled by dreams of magic and grandeur that will never be fulfilled.   Even the impending apocalypse itself is symbolically loaded with adolescent concerns.   If Link fails, the moon will strike the clock tower in the very center of Clock Town.   The Moon is traditionally associated with the feminine, with illusion and imagination; Jung writes that “man’s unconscious is the lunar world, for it is the night world, and this is characterized by the moon, and Luna is a female designation, because the unconscious is feminine.”[22]  The tower, in contrast, is a physical, masculine, phallic symbol, “a man-made structure; it is tall, rigid, enduring and impervious to the elements.”[23]  In the Tarot it is associated with destruction.  The fall of the moon is a convergence of masculine and feminine symbols, an implicitly sexual apocalyptic event.   The world of Majora’s Mask is suffused with such thematic references to growth and change.  In Ocarina Link was able to transition, instantaneously, from child to adult.  Majora forces the player to experience the messy, difficult process in between the two.

It is at the game’s climax that these themes of transformation and redemption find their purest expression.  Standing on the Clock Tower, more moments before the moon falls, Link summons the Four Giants he freed.  The Giants struggle to hold back the moon, and a glowing beam of light emerges from its gaping mouth.  Link enters into it and is drawn up to the moon.  Yet he is greeted not by a lunar wasteland but by an idyllic field, where five children in white scamper and play.  Four of them wear the masks of the bosses Link has bested, and the last wears Majora’s Mask itself.  Each of the first four children wishes to play with Link and once he has completed each challenge the child demands some quantity of masks from him.  Each of Link’s masks is unique, most of them received as gifts in exchange for his kindness; Link trades each of them away, and the children express their thanks in stilted, halting voices.   “I wonder…” one asks,  “The face under the mask… Is that…your true face?”[24]  Majora flirts with existentialism here, asking the player to consider not only Link’s performance within the game but also their own performance as Link.  But the game gives the player no time to ponder such philosophical dilemmas.  The player has given away all of Link’s masks, and the other children are gone.  Majora is waiting.

The child wearing Majora’s Mask sits alone, hunched under a tree.  If Link agrees to play with him he is transported to an arena where he will face Majora but not before Link is granted one final gift; if he has collected and bartered away every one of the game’s masks, than the Majora child gives him the Fierce Deity’s Mask.  Then the fight with Majora begins and the game once again engages its themes of maturation and transformation; Majora progresses from a levitating mask to “Majora’s Incarnation” an awkward, bug-eyed, childlike form that dances around and flings torrents of energy at Link, and then to “Majora’s Wrath” a lithe and muscular humanoid figure with enormous tendrils for arms.   The fight with Majora is a lengthy and difficult one, yet the power of the Fierce Deity Mask can end the battle almost instantly.   Wearing it Link undergoes one final transformation into an alternate version of his adult self from Ocarina of Time, clad in black-and-white armor with a golden moon emblazoned on the chest and wielding an enormous helix-bladed sword. The Fierce Deity form is the final embodiment of Link’s labors; by helping Termina’s inhabitants and earning masks he has gained the power to transition into a adult form.  Link defeats Majora, the apocalypse is averted, and a new dawn rises with all of the Mask’s evil undone.  Link, for his part, returns to his own world, satisfied that he can go on without Navi’s guidance; an almost invisible moment of character development for a previously transparent figure.  Thus the world is saved, although perhaps the means of its salvation are perhaps unconventional.

Majora’s Mask represented an odd diversion for the Legend of Zelda series.   Ocarina of Time was a benchmark game, selling millions of copies and influencing the development of three-dimensional games, and while Majora was successful it did not have the same impact.  Indeed, subsequent entries have religiously followed Ocarina’s template, offering a vast heroic quest set over a vast fantasy world, and titles such as The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess have treated Ocarina’s characters and events with utter reverence.  Majora’s Mask, despite all that it accomplishes, is consigned to be nothing more than a footnote in the development of the videogame.  Yet in an industry ruled by sequels and remakes, and narratively constrained by heroic fantasy quests, Majora made subtle refinements to its predecessor’s gameplay while attempting a fundamental reconstruction of the heroic quest.  It demonstrates a profound understanding of the workings of its narrative and ludological heritage, and attempts to creatively expand upon it, all within the context of one of videogames most revered franchises.  In a series constrained by narrative continuity and heroic convention, defined by some of the most popular titles of all time, Majora tried to move adventure gaming beyond simple hero fantasies.  It is difficult to imagine Nintendo taking the risk of producing another franchise title as experimental as Majora.   But the game suggested a growing awareness of modern videogame conventions, and made a movement to break them.  In a genre defined by conquest and violent empowerment it shows a rare compassion for its characters, for their tragedies and their strangeness, and suggests that it may only be aggression but compassion and mercy that eventually save the world.

Here’s the letter I wrote for the IOCDF, explaining how the disorder has affected my family, and how the organization helps sufferers:

“OCD is the pathological intolerance of risk, however minute, and the surrender to protective ritual, however unbearable…As an OCD sufferer, I did any number of asinine, irrational things not because they would protect me, but because I thought they might,and I’d be darned if the one night I failed to properly pray the lord my soul to keep was the night I died before I woke….” 

Not a lot of people get this about OCD.  People associate repetitive behaviors such as hand-washing and counting with the disorder. In reality, most of the action is actually happening inside the sufferer’s head – the physical (or mental) rituals are a way to ward off the ceaseless, cyclical thoughts that torture the sufferer.

I’ve suffered from OCD for as long as I can remember, but wasn’t diagnosed until I was twenty.  My particular variant of the disorder involves uncontrollable, intimately disturbing intrusive thoughts, with no visible compulsions.  OCD severely impacted my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.  It wasn’t until I was properly diagnosed and received appropriate treatment at the McLean Hospital OCDI and The Anxiety & OCD Treatment Center of Philadelphia that I found myself on a path of learning to manage this insidious disorder.

The OCD Foundation is doing critical work on the frontlines of the battle against OCD using the most powerful weapon we have: education, both to raise public awareness and to instruct treatment providers in diagnosis and care.  Sadly, there are still many areas of this country where no one is trained in the appropriate treatment modalities for addressing OCD; there are many areas of this world where clinicians have little familiarity with its diagnostic definition.  I’ve met friends in treatment who battled undiagnosed OCD, not just through college like I did, but for most of their adult lives.  The IOCDF is working to change that, and I’m walking to help them out.

Please consider making even a small donation – the website is simple to use, fast, and totally secure.  If you’d like to create your own page and join my team, Team Triggered, I’d be happy to have you.  Also, if it isn’t too much trouble, please post this on Facebook and pass it along to anyone who you think might want to donate.

Thanks for your support. I really appreciate it.

Best,

Fletch

• I have a new column up today at Psychology Today about things high school students with mental disabilities should  look for in a college.  Not quite as jokey as some other stuff I’ve done recently, but I know I’ve spoken to a number of young people about the difficulty of balancing mental illness and college life, so hopefully some of you will find it useful.

• Titling the scale from “serious,”  zipping past “funny” and careening headfirst into “horrifying”:  I published another article with Cracked.com recently, this time about the 5 most soul-destroying attempts at videogame marketing I’ve ever seen.  Not safe for work, unless your workplace condones mutilated body parts, breastfeeding zombies, and crudely illustrated bits male anatomy.
• I’ve been very busy over with odds and ends at my new Tumblr account.  Over the past few weeks I’ve covered rejected Republican convention performers, Andrew WK’s sex body spray, a hypothetical fandom RTS game, and most recently a rap battle between NBC comedy titans Ron Swanson and Abed Nadir.  Tumblr’s a fun outlet for ideas not quite worth expanding into a full essay, so I suspect I’ll be busy there for quite some time.
• For anyone following my annotations for Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck, I started a second Tumblr dedicated exclusively to the project.  I’ve put up some excerpts from the annotations, as well as a few attempts at fan art.  I’ll be putting up my (mammoth) annotations for Act 5 Act 2 of Homestuck sometime over the next week – probably after the hubbub over the rumored 4/13 update dies down – so keep an eye out for those as well.
• Finally, I’m going to be a keynote speaker at the Parent/Professional Advocacy League‘s upcoming Conference and Celebration at the end of May!   They’re a great organization, and I’m thrilled to be working with them.  The conference will be in Marlborough, MA, so check out the links and think about swinging by if you’re in the neighborhood.

Surely Huber didn’t mean for himself or his interview subjects to sound racist?  I’m sure that, if only he had the opportunity to clarify his points, we’d realize this was all a big misunderstanding.  Well – as a fellow Philadelphia resident, white person, writer, and also not a racist, I’ve taken the opportunity to make that opportunity happen for Robert Huber!

What I’ve done is applied literary “close reading” critical techniques to Being White in Philly to extrapolate Robert Huber’s personality, beliefs, and “voice” (his “character”, as we call it in the writing biz).  After that, I’ve used my ”creative” writing skills to expand on Huber’s original essay, and extrapolate how Hubert might clarify his not-racist argument.  I assure you, reader, that I have executed this process with scientific rigor; it is totally infallible, in no way legally actionable, and above all NOT RACIST.

Quotes from the article will be presented in quote boxes; Hubert’s hypothetical clarifications will be given after the quotes.

Later, driving up Broad Street as I head home to Mount Airy, I stop at a light just north of Lycoming and look over at some rowhouses. One has a padlocked front door. A torn sheet covering the window in that door looks like it might be stained with sewage. I imagine not a crackhouse, but a child, maybe several children, living on the other side of that stained sheet. Plenty of children in Philadelphia live in places like that. Plenty live on Diamond, where my son rents, where there always seem to be a lot of men milling around doing absolutely nothing, where it’s clearly not a safe place to be.

RH: “I can’t emphasize enough: I did not at any point imagine a crackhouse while scrutinizing that sketchy ghetto domicile.  At no point did it even cross my mind that crackheads (of indeterminate ethnicity) might be shooting or smoking crack inside, their forearms bulging, their crazed eyes veined with red.  I only imagined innocent little brown babies, tragic victims of America’s racial injustice, pooping hard enough to stain that meager sheet with sewage.  Just babies poopin’ everywhere.

“Also: note that I did not specify the race of the ‘men milling around doing absolutely nothing.’  There were just a whole lot of suspicious men, of indeterminate ethnicity, loitering. You know how it is.  Grown men, drifting.  Guys acting all lackadaisy.  Bros getting their lollygag on.  Fellas skipping with a spring in their step, whistling a merry tune, footloose and fancy free.

“I find that… suspicious.”

Another story: Dennis, 26, teaches math in a Kensington school. His first year there, fresh out of college, one of his students, an unruly eighth grader, got into a fight with a girl. Dennis told him to stop, he got into Dennis’s face, and in the heat of the moment Dennis called the student, an African-American, “boy”…

Dennis apologized, knowing how loaded the term “boy” was and regretting that he’d used it, though he was thinking, Why would I be teaching in an inner-city school if I’m a racist? The stepfather calmed down, and that would have been the end of it, except for one thing: The student’s behavior got worse. Because now he knew that no one at the school could do anything, no matter how badly he behaved.

RH: “It’s disgusting how these ruffians abuse the Racial Slur Victim Disciplinary Immunity Act of 1995.  Sadly, once these rapscallions are subjected to even a single instance of racially questionable language, they receive total exemption from detention, wrist-slappings and spankings.  It’s a disgrace.”

Yet there’s a dance I do when I go to the Wawa on Germantown Avenue. I find myself being overly polite. Each time I hold the door a little too long for a person of color, I laugh at myself, both for being so self-consciously courteous and for knowing that I’m measuring the thank-you’s.

RH: “No, I don’t consider myself a hero.  Why do you ask?”

Everyone does have a race story, it turns out, and every story is utterly unique.

RH: “But none of them are racist.  (Also: when I said ‘everyone’ I meant ‘every white person’.  It’s an easy mistake to make!)”

I buttonhole a woman I’ll call Anna, a tall, slim, dark-haired beauty from Moscow getting out of her BMW on an alley just south of Girard College. Anna goes to a local law school, works downtown at a law firm, and proceeds to let me have it when we start talking about race in her neighborhood.

“I’ve been here for two years, I’m almost done,” she says. “Blacks use skin color as an excuse. Discrimination is an excuse, instead of moving forward. … It’s a shame—you pay taxes, they’re not doing anything except sitting on porches smoking pot … Why do you support them when they won’t work, just make babies and smoking pot? I walk to work in Center City, black guys make compliments, ‘Hey beautiful. Hey sweetie.’ White people look but don’t make comments. … ”

RH: “First: I cannot overstate how sexy this racist was.  On the universal scale of hot racists she was like, maybe not a Prussian Blue, but at least a Dr. Laura.  I’d ‘buttonhole’ her any day, a-wink-wink.

“Second: at first I assumed she was exaggerating - I figured this little Moscow mama had a little too much vodka under her ushanka - but as I spent the afternoon following her silently to observe her from a distance (looking, but never making comments!) I was stunned.  Every single time she passed an African-American man, the fellow produced a joint as if from nowhere, made a beeline for the nearest porch, plopped his ass down and proceeded to complement her.  Every single time.  Black businessmen, cops, priests, everyone.  It was surreal.”

I motion Claire down 26th a few doors, out of earshot of a black guy standing at the corner…

“No,” she says. “There’s no need to be careful if you treat people as human beings.” A black woman comes out of the rowhouse behind us, and Claire adds, certainly loud enough for the woman to hear, and probably the guy on the corner, too, “As long as you don’t have a gun in your hand, I’m okay with you.”

RH: “No, Claire doesn’t consider herself a hero, why do you ask?”

Jen took a look at Bache-Martin, the public school four blocks from her house and 74 percent black: Teachers engaged. Kids well-behaved. Small classes. Plus a gym and an auditorium and a cafeteria, a garden, a computer lab. She enrolled her kids there.

Jen was not in the majority. Other mothers told her, “There is a lot of Greenfield pressure.” That pressure is from fellow Fairmounters: pressure to send their kids, collectively, to the right school. Greenfield test scores are a bit higher. It’s also not nearly so black.

Another mother told Jen: “I didn’t want to be the first”—in other words, the first to make the leap to Bache-Martin. “It takes a special person to be first.” Another told her: “Not everybody is as confident as you.”

RH: “Jen, on the other hand, totally considers herself a hero.  And rightly so.”

Most Fairmounters, of course, aren’t trying to push up into Brewerytown, and their concerns are a little more pedestrian.

RH: “So there’s a neighborhood in Philly called ‘Brewerytown’ and get this, it’s a black neighborhood.  I know, right?  You hear that name and you figure it’s all beer gardens with tattooed waitresses serving you vegan burgers.”

Brewerytown residents tend to stay above Girard, they tell me. “At Halloween,” Eileen says, “that’s the only time we see them. Lot of little kids from the other side of the tracks—African-American kids. People still give them candy.”

“People get upset,” Bruce says. “We used to have a parade on Sunday afternoon, kids would get nicely dressed up, and kids from up there”—he points north—“would come barely dressed up.”

Eileen says, “People say—”

“At least dress up,” Bruce says. “Unless they’re working here, most of them don’t come in this direction. They seem happy to stay in their little lot, as it were.”

RH: “So when I say white people on Fairmount have ‘more pedestrian’ concerns I mean stuff like this: little black kids on Halloween and their unbelievably shitty Halloween costumes.  It’s disgraceful.  Eileen told me she had two or three kids show up pulling that ‘sheet with eye holes’ ghost shit.  Seriously, in this day and age you can get a Batman costume at CVS for like 25.99, who dresses up as a ghost?  She didn’t give them candy and good for her.”

…like many people, I yearn for much more: that I could feel the freedom to speak to my African-American neighbors about, say, not only my concerns for my son’s safety living around Temple, but how the inner city needs to get its act together.

RH: “I can’t emphasize this enough.  This is the real problem.  This is the root (or maybe “the Roots” – I love those guys on Jimmy Fallon!) of all of Philadelphia’s racial strife.  The inner city needs to get its act together.  It’s so obvious!  Why can’t the inner city just get its damn act together?!”

Given the monumental changes he’s seen and his declining health, John no longer risks venturing alone beyond his block. There is a monumental spread, too, in his thinking, when he considers the range of black people who have entered his neighborhood.

He tells me about the time, a Saturday afternoon more than 10 years ago, when he came downstairs to his living room to find a stranger had come in through his front door—“It was a nigger boy, a big tall kid. He wanted money.”

RH: “…

“…yeah, that one guy was a little racist.”