The Perils of Supernatural Evil

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 31 March 2015.

Pan Twardowski and the Devil by Michał Elwiro Andriolli

Thanks, Art! That solves a lot for me. A few things come to mind. One is that the story is much darker than I thought. I've focused on Arthur's torment in the face of a mankind who has eradicated any context for appreciating a mystic from contemporary life, and I've ignored the perils of supernatural evil, other than to think about Stan in hell and several characters slouching toward it through bad choices.

Secondly, in thinking of Farthington as a scientist, I've imagined him more and more as an eccentric figure from Victorian or Edwardian science fiction, but I suppose he should be more like a Frankenstein, Faustus, or Von Doom--someone who couples his scientific pursuits with an interest in the arcane and occult--he's an alchemist as much as a scientist.

Finally, I don't think we've imagined an Arthur whose soul has become more wholly spiritual well enough yet. We know patients and staff at the hospital turn to him. We know he gets up on pillars. If Will's ex-girlfriend Linda is still in the story, we know she is a nun because of Arthur. We know Will will eventually repent the American Dream and become a monk or something because of Arthur. We know the restaged concert for Iceland has something to do with Arthur's transformation. We know Arthur has a vision of an apocalypse that requires Farthington, a submarine, and a hippie maiden throwing a guitar into a volcano in Iceland. And I think on some level, we know the story doesn't end, but it's also important to our quest to make Catholic art that the beauty and glory of God working through Arthur is cohesive enough to evangelize the audience.

The History of Arthur White: Felix Culpa

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 2 January 2013.

Will sees the brass ring of Arthur's rockstardom right as Arthur sees the brass ring of sainthood.

Unfortunately, Arthur has no interest in being a rockstar and Will has no interest in Arthur's being a saint. Arthur can't even appreciate the huge gravity of Will's selling the family business to Anthony in order to fund the second recording and deal with further lawsuits (the record company refused an advance after the first Brand New Life masters disappeared). Brand New Life starts to unravel as Fr. Bernie is given a new placement and most of the group feels too uncomfortable about dealing with Arthur's mysticism and Will's tyranny toward Arthur.

Present-day Will trying really hard

Only Joe Lazarus stays with Arthur, plotting with him to sneak away to his friend's place in Colorado where they can make the album Arthur is called to make without Will's interference. Unfortunately, Will, who senses that desperate measures are needed to get his brother back on track, commits Arthur and has a series of electroshock treatments administered to him. Joe doesn't understand why Arthur doesn't show up at the rendezvous point, and he drifts away, brokenhearted, feeling like his divine purpose was taken away from him, and dies after years of touring in various groups, a failed marriage that produced a child, and stints in rehab until his death in a drunk driving accident.

The ECT has a few unexpected effects.

One is that Arthur is fried so badly that he can't make music for years.Will wanted control over Arthur, and what he got was total control: dependency from a helpless brother. Will dealt with that by institutionalizing Arthur, but after a while, he couldn't afford to anymore, and his girlfriend Linda convinced him to move Arthur to their home in Lansing. Even then, Will just let Linda, a nurse, care for Arthur and spent as little time as he could with him. He just couldn't deal with the anger or the guilt. As Linda spent time healing Arthur, though, she had a mystical experience through him and left Will to become a missionary sister, which meant Will had to take care of Arthur.

He now blames Arthur for driving away Linda.

After years of taking care of Arthur, Will's feelings have mellowed, and some days, Will even wonders about the goals he chased, the damage he did to his brother, and the emptiness of what he thought was the American Dream.

Other days, he convinces himself that he was right.

He's defensive about feeling like a failure, especially as far as his vow to his mother is concerned.  He tries to hide his own aging, paradoxically, by dressing like his heroes from the sixties. His main sense of dignity, these days, comes from the fact that he has always taken care of his brother.

Arthur, on the other hand, has healed far more than Will knows, although he will never fully recover. Will never got the mystical side of Arthur. The ECT severed Arthur's ability to discern the difference between mystical reality and reality as most people perceive it, chronological time and Kairos, memory and history, etc. The result was an overwhelming flood of truth and beauty through the Sweet World that Arthur has slowly been sorting out through daily mass, mortification, and obsessive prayer (especially the rosary, which helps him know he's talking to Mary).

He has made very slow progress, but, over the course of thirty years, he has come to remember his calling to make the last album and to deliver it to Joe Lazarus. Over the past year, he has been making music again and Will has come to enjoy it; he even has a little drumset set up by the organ just in case Arthur stumbles on something worthwhile. What Will doesn't know is that Arthur is recording songs to send to Joe Lazarus. Arthur doesn't know Joe is dead, but Joe Jr. will get them in the mail and begin his quest to understand his father, shoot his student film, and resuscitate the career of Arthur White.

And ultimately, we have the story of a felix culpa: Arthur makes the album he was called to make, Joe finds peace and meaning through a return to the Church, and Will repents and finds God.

Plus, the audience is transformed through the story, told through a decade of amazing music, and through their own roles in bringing the story to life.

This Creepy Nihilistic Thing

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 29 May 2014.

Plot-wise, I feel like the Farthington stuff is really coming together.

Thief starring James Caan and Tuesday Weld

The problem I'm seeing is that it has in some ways crowded out the stories of Joe Lazarus, Arthur White's Brand New Life, and Will Witkowski. I don't want to undo any of the Farthington stuff; it's really good. I just want to figure out how to revise and reinsert a few things it has eclipsed.

Originally (and I think we disagreed on this one a bit), I really loved the idea that at some point, Arthur came really close to making the sort of music he was born to make. I saw Brand New Life being the first step in that process and an escape with Joe Lazarus being the closest he came to fulfilling it. Before Farthington, Will was the nemesis who crushed Arthur right when he was about to become the artist he was supposed to become.

The Farthington plot eclipses all that in a lot of ways, so we've got to figure out how to give its impact back. I really don't want to lose the idea that, at some point, Arthur almost became the artist he could have been. He won't stand up as a protagonist if we never feel that he could have been great. At the same time, that feeling we develop is something to make suspect, as the bit of heaven Arthur can show people on earth is only a faint glimmer of what heaven has in store for us. We should be torn between the idea of loving the bit of heaven we see through Arthur and the lesser thing rooted in the American Dream, lamenting that Arthur could have "made it."

So, I don't want to touch the Farthington plotline.

I just want to make room for an Arthur who almost made it and wasn't just a victim; a Joe Lazarus who almost saved Arthur and was dashed by failure; a Will who is the flawed but protective brother who tries to save Arthur from Carlton Farthington; and a Brand New Life that for a period sets Arthur on a positive path.

Reasserting these ideas may complicate the story a bit, but if we're thinking of five TV seasons, we need several ups and downs and some squirminess in terms of how the audience reads the characters.

I don't yet have a clear picture of how to reintegrate these pieces, but my hunch is that after Will rescues Arthur from Farthington and gets him his first treatment, Joe Lazarus helps bring Arthur back to his true form; Will then works with Joe to put Brand New Life together; Will sees the initial success and starts doing a bunch of dumb commercial stuff in his eagerness to make Arthur a star; and the tension that creates between Will and Joe drives Arthur back into the predatory hands of Farthington, who validates Arthur's vision and lures him into the heroic quest to save Iceland.

Maybe after Will kills Farthington, we think he's a good guy looking out for his brother. But then he has Arthur committed until the money runs out, at which points he dumps him on Linda. So maybe what looks like Will's heroic quest actually ends up being this creepy nihilistic thing...more like the end of Thief starring James Caan and Tuesday Weld.

The Comeback

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 22 December 2012.

The ending of Arthur White only works if it's comic, but there should be two tragic phases.

The first is Arthur succumbing to hubris, worshipping himself, and losing everything. The second is Will, through his best intentions, destroying Arthur.

I think we almost need to invent a new type of tragedy here...not tragedy of fate or tragedy of will but tragedy of culture...the culture of the American Dream. Of course, you've already pointed out Arthur Miller here. Just as a Willy Loman spared the American Dream would have been a talented and happy carpenter, an Arthur White spared the American Dream would have been a Therese of Lisieux.

Instead, he'll have to take the low road as a tortured, disfigured version of what he was made to be. I see the first round of tragedy as the anarchic individualism of the American Dream coming out of the sixties. I see the second round as the homogenizing effects of the American Dream of the mid-seventies and eighties.

I see Brand New Life as having two phases: a very happy, promising early phase, and then a convoluted mess phase...kind of like Love.

There have been something like 70 members of Love. There is the "real" Love from the first three albums (mediocre musicians who made great music), the second Love (outstanding musicians who made lame music), and then whomever Arthur Lee could find until he died. The last decent version was a group called Baby Lemonade who just did perfect covers of the original group's recordings.

I think Arthur White wants the right things out of life but finds little guidance until the early days of Brand New Life, which is full of fallen people on a path to redemption, like Joe Lazarus Sr.

Will thinks he wants the right things in life but doesn't. Still he pursues them like a faithful, disciplined soldier. Joe Jr. has no confidence in any sort of reality, and like Pilate asks, "What is Truth?" Agniesczka is a lioness who protects her kids first, then her husband; she is probably materialistic partly because she wants to protect her kids and partly because she's a little vain. Will isn't all that different: he likes to be known as his little brother's protector.

I see late-seventies Arthur being destroyed for doing the right things musically, and Will being a tragic figure for destroying something beautiful and holy out of a misguided faith in the American Dream.

The story of the last thirty years is that Arthur has pace been healing at a snail's pace, and, over the past year or so, has gotten to the point that he can play music again, recording it on cassette tapes in hopes of getting it to Joe Lazarus Sr.

It's a really sad, pathetic-seeming plan, but Arthur is responding to God's voice telling him to get this last album out to the public. He thinks Joe is the only one who will understand. Unfortunately, Joe is dead, which is even more pathetic. But God gets the tapes to Joe Jr., which can bring him healing and shape a new destiny for him.

For the past thirty years, Will has had to cope with Arthur.

At first, he had him committed so he wouldn't have to deal with him. Then he couldn't afford the bills, so his girlfriend, a nurse, said they could care for him at home. Will stuck her with him, and, as she cared for him, she was converted and left Will to join a convent. Will resented Arthur for that, but has seen the empty place his dream has led him to.  He's just about at that point where he is ready to admit his failures and repent. He just doesn't know how...

That's where the comeback comes in.

A Higher Order of Creation (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 May 2014.

It seems like we also have a few women who have to deal with families and faith in the face of spacey, absentee dads.

We can stretch those issues of women who deal with abandonment problems further if we think of Linda and Will, since Linda, instead of getting kids and a family with Will, gets an alcoholic who won't marry her and saddles her with caring for Arthur. We also might have Steffi, who has to tend to all of Farthington's "children," becoming him in that process.

I don't have the words for this yet, but maybe the thematic issue we're running into here is a sort of fallen vision of heaven, that somehow in the male mindset there is a failure to be present in grace.

Maybe men see their visions of their personal heavens as being utopian escapes...freedoms from work for which a man must work really hard. The resulting patterns are obsession and abandonment, where the female characters live in the moment more and engage with people as they are. Heaven isn't a far-off destination with an entrance fee of hard work and the reward of irresponsibility; it's an eternal moment, eternal presence, eternal relationship. We're in it now in the sense that an unborn child is in the world.

A few other thoughts. There are few female tragic heroes. I think that's because hubris is more of a male thing. The order of creation grows from simple to complex, not that either word can do justice to God's creation.

The most like God comes last, and that is the woman.

The only person born without sin after the fall who isn't Jesus is a woman. I really do believe women are a higher order of creation than men are. Look at the way Jesus treats men compared to women.

There are no female "whitewashed tombs" (Mt. 23:27).

I don't think there is a single encounter in the gospels when the few harsh words he has for a woman don't end with a sweet, loving relationship and conversion on the woman's part.  Few of the encounters with men end that way.  The men want to fight to protect Jesus, to kill him, to discredit him, to learn his tricks, to run away. Men generally want to know what to do where women want to know what to be in the gospels.

I love St. Dismas, the good thief, because he sees himself and Christ clearly while the other thief is ticked at his own and Jesus' inability to change reality. He wants an escape plan, both literally and existentially. It's that typical male pattern of obsession and abandonment: work hard to escape. He wants to do, where St. Dismas wants to be, and he consequently enters Heaven before the apostles, if "before" can be spoken of in Heaven.

The last thought: I am a big fan of T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," especially that second to last stanza in which all sorts of images from the story of Jesus' life are scattered randomly in the background of the magi's quest, decontextualized and just part of the existential fabric of a life's mission.  A similar thing is happening with The Odyssey in Mad Men: characters are floating in and out of the story. It's not so much a retelling or recontextualizing of The Odyssey as it is a concept that life is The Odyssey and we're all living different and even conflicting aspects of it all the time.

Eliot's "

So these two texts are really informing my approach to archetype and keep me from worrying too much about stereotype and cliche.

A Higher Order of Creation (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 May 2014.

Circe Invidiosa by Waterhouse

I see your point.  I like the Steffi idea, especially since it's a twist and TV needs twist, but archetypically, she could easily default to a Scylla/Circe figure.  Not that I mind that.

I see a lot of promise in Agnieczka as a character...we just haven't talked about her much because of her loose connection to an ex of yours and partially because of the awkwardness that happens if you play Arthur White and have to have a relationship with an actress. The problem goes away if we pursue the TV show option and don't play the parts ourselves.

Linda is a heroic figure, but she's kind of saved by Arthur, which lends her to a few stereotypes...the redeemed fallen woman Mary Magdalene type, which again, is not a huge problem for me since the men are fairly archetypical, too.  I'm not on a quest to eliminate archetype...I don't think any of us are.  I think we just want to sharpen the archetypes.  Archetypes are really useful for helping people process truth...they just fail when they are presented in a hackneyed manner, unless the point is farce.

Arthur's parents are interesting contrasts. There's probably that problem of the Victorian thing where the wife is the moral head of the household and the dad is the economic head, but I do like the idea in which Arthur's mother's ambitions toward heaven rival and even outstrip his father's economic ambitions.

The big female character you left out is the Virgin Mary. In my eyes, the whole story is about Arthur's relationship with Mary...she's the central figure of his mystical connection to heaven.

In so many ways, Arthur lives in a feminine world, and there's a little bit of a feminist undertone I see in the way that Will and Farthington's aggressive masculinity screws so much up, and if the world could accept Arthur on his own terms instead of trying to butch him up and measure his music in terms of money, it would be a much better place. It's not that Arthur is effeminate...it's that the world can only recognize his gifts--creativity, intuition, love, a profound appreciation of beauty, a life-giving disposition--in feminine terms. Really, though, they are divine.

The idea of Steffi adds an interesting spin on maleness.

One other crazy idea: Joe Lazarus, Jr.  could be Josie Lazarus. Sorry, Joe! But really, there's your female on a heroic quest if we just change his gender.

3-D White Guys

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 May 2014. 

"native and indued unto that element"

You know, as I'm looking at our pictures, I'm realizing that we don't have many well-developed women written into this story.  There's The Woman in the Sweet World; Lena, Will and Arthur's mom; Agnieszka, Arthur's wife; Linda, Will's girlfriend in the later years...

This concern comes out of my AP English class where I noticed that most of our tragedies consist of a 3-D white guy suffering against the 2-D backdrop of non-white and non-male characters. I wonder if it would make sense to develop a convincing Virginia Wolff- or Simone de Beauvoir-type character, who, maybe just by her presence, satirizes the seriousness of what is going on with these self-important men. I'm having a real hard time imagining who it could be, but I think that shows just shows my narrow-mindedness.

The same narrow-mindedness that had the original (female) teacher of the class choose all books that are by white men, about white men.

The "stage" is already crowded with men angling to be the tragic hero. One thought is that current-day Carlton is Oberlin student/cult member Steffi Humboldt. In that case, Carlton Farthington did die and only appears in public dressed as the mascot. Steffi is the one who has taken over all of his material, including the material that he appropriated from Arthur White and Will. Maybe Steffi has some connection to Arthur that she would want to appropriate him, taking him into herself as it were, and bringing forth new life (okay that's problematic, but I'm trying here!).

But it does make sense to me that she or some other woman could be the sea devil. It might be interesting if we were able to write an entire story for her, where our story becomes just one small part of her universe. Unfortunately, my mind can only envision her having an Ophelia/Edna Pontellier/Virginia Wolff-type demise: she walks back into that element to which she is "native and indued." I suck.

Have a great day!