Fictional Characters, Ranked in Order of How Well They Use Their Stuff
When I was a small child we owned a VHS tape of the animated short “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” a print from a 1963 Disney anthology television episode. I am occasionally tormented by one visual image from that VHS tape, which is of Goofy running around in, and sinking into, a plate of jello from the Giant’s lunch table. This image of Goofy is my Sysyphus. How does he start bouncing like that, and yet he also sticks to the surface? And then after that bouncing, how does he just dive and swim straight through it? Goofy’s exit from the jello is just not credible. Goofy died in that jello.
The catharsis of this moment in the film, however, is the juxtaposition against Mickey, Goofy, and Donald’s tiny impoverished lives in the normal world, against the superabundance of the Giant’s table. Watching this film, I never wanted them to kill the giant. (Why? He’s just some guy. Rick and Morty had a decent take on this.) Before this moment, the gang had been starving - sharing a single bean.
A few takeaways from this:
I liked how conscientiously Mickey carves up the bread and the bean. Seems fair and wise.
Goofy died in that jello.
Killing the Giant and taking his stuff is just unreasonable and wasteful. There was more than enough stuff to go around, including the harp lady. Why didn’t they try diplomacy?
It just really bothered me in 1989 - and continues to bother me today - that they not only don’t eat the food, but they killed that awesome Giant. I would have to peg that moment as the beginning of my approach to narrative art criticism, the moment I understood that I enjoyed a character with the wisdom to conserve resources.
Here’s what’s crazy: the intro segment for that tv episode was literally about this. It was a video showing highlight clips from the Disney anthology series, and over that video played a song from a 1948 Disney movie called So Dear to My Heart, which looks terrible and I’ve never seen it. The song is called “It’s Whatcha Do With Whatcha Got.”
The song is literally about doing as much as you can with what you have. It’s not about killing a fucking giant.
Also apropos: here is why we owned this VHS. About once few years my mom would let us buy something in the grocery store VHS bargain bin if it was less than $1.50. By the time I was four or five years old, we owned this, Mary Martin’s Peter Pan, the 1973 Hanna Barbera animated version of The Three Musketeers, and later on we got the 1996 film version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda and the 1999 Mel Gibson film Payback.
We also rented VHS tapes somewhat frequently - my parents weren’t too cheap to spend $4 a week on entertainment, but they were anti-clutter and anti-waste and so didn’t want to own a million VHS tapes that would end up in the trash or in a cardboard box in the basement long after the demise of VHS itself. And that was the right call. My parents: very resource efficient.
(It runs in the family: My maternal grandparents survived the depression and the war, and wouldn’t throw away paper napkins until they’d been used for at least six meals. My paternal grandmother allowed herself to purchase orange juice once a year, and she was a Jew of a certain age, so we never questioned it.)
Characters in fiction exist on a spectrum of resource efficiency. That’s not to say that art is universally about resources and scarcity and economics. It’s just a way of critiquing a narrative (or being a cheeky spoilsport about it). Characters have personalities and conflicts, and the way any character responds to their surroundings and uses available resources tells you a lot about that character. You might even say that there are college courses about this, generally called “Literary Theory 101” and what I’m describing is a form of “Marxist Literary Theory.” But I’m going to pretend that I invented this shit so I could write a list essay about it.
So without further ado, here are some of my favorite characters, ranked on the spectrum from desperate, brutal efficiency to appalling wastefulness.
10. Tie: Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich / Vladek Spiegelman, Maus
It’s almost cheating: books about survivors of concentration camps are, by self-selection, books about people who are extremely successful conservators and managers of resources. And there are many similarities between the tales of Shukhov, eight years into a “tenner” in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’s Stalin-era gulag, and Vladek’s five-ish-year journey from wealthy textile manufacturer to Dachau resident. Vladek survives for years in basements and other hiding holes, trading on friendships and dwindling material wealth to avoid the camps. But in Dachau, as in the gulag, there is nothing to trade but labor and expertise, and the odd tool or clothing item that can be scrounged from the administration, the camp infrastructure, or the rare and magical care package from the Red Cross, or a family member.
Ivan Denisovich portrays Shukhov’s survival as a matter of utilitarian (perhaps, we are meant to think, Russian) mastery of will. One does not imagine that Shukhov would die for his dignity; he understands, rather, that sacrificing dignity to scrape the dregs of fellow inmates’ soup bowls risks a beating that will cost more calories than a thousand soup scrapings. Shukhov’s One Day is in fact a pretty good day - he hustles a large amount of extra food, mostly stays warm, and doesn’t get hit - but count among Shukhov’s final sentences of hard-earned reflection the acknowledgment that work gang partner Fetyukov (who begs for scraps, scrapes the soup, and takes the beating) will not survive.
Vladek Spiegelman shares a certain cold-hearted practicality with Shukhov, but the framing story provided by his adult son forty years after the camps strips any aspirational component from the story: in the 1980s, retired and wealthy, Vladek can’t stop counting the stove-lighting matches. His obsessive (perhaps, we are meant to think, Jewish) resource efficiency alienates everyone around him; the book all but explicitly posits that Vladek either survived because of this pathology, or adopted it to survive, or both. (Also, clearly a lot of luck.)
These tales of the far end of the efficiency spectrum are not exactly fun reads, and the key takeaways are more political than personal. But there is joy to be found, and that joy is primarily in the nature of ‘I fixed a guy’s shoe and he gave me a sausage.’ It’s not much, but when it’s all you have, it counts a lot.
9. The Good Guys, Seven Samurai
Seven Samurai is alone on this list in that it’s as much about destruction as resource management. Specifically, it’s about a team of villagers and Samurai who have to kill thirteen bandits. Exactly thirteen.
That’s strange. Think for a minute about how fighting ends in war movies. If the good guys are attacking, sure, they might kill everyone. But when they’re being attacked, for the story to end cleanly, typically you need some kind of magical killing blow (a portal in the sky opens or closes, see Ghostbusters, Avengers; a magical saving army appears, see Lord of the Rings or the Western trope with the literal cavalry arriving). This is because the way that most fights actually end - the loser slinks off to fight another day - is messy and doesn’t convey the finality we expect of epic and action storytelling. It means that either (1) they’re going to fight another day, literally, and so the ending isn’t an ending, or (2) the good-guy winners are about to hop on their horses and chase down and slaughter the retreating losers, which while historically accurate is really not a good look.
Seven Samurai, though - in Seven Samurai, there is a group of thirteen bandits. They attack a village of 40-50 people, defended by seven professional warriors. And they continue to attack for days, until one by one they are all picked off.
Why do they keep attacking? If you’re one of the last three bandits, don’t you say to yourself “I have almost no chance of survival, and even less a chance of successfully banditing anything from these people, so I’m going to go join another bandit crew or maybe do something else with my life”?
But they don’t. And I hate to say that the reason why is “they’re Japanese, and bandits gotta bandit, and villagers gotta village,” but I think (and the critical consensus is) that’s really what it is. It’s a movie about how hard it is for groups of people to see themselves change and take action, even if that action is necessary to save their own lives. The villagers do that work, learn to fight, and win. The bandits can’t change. They just attack because that’s what they do. And the titular samurai - masterless, wandering ronin - the ending makes clear that their role is complete once they help defeat the bandits. In fact, they’ve damaged their own standing and utility - they themselves are more suited to be bandits than villagers, and there’s no clear reason for them to exist in the world after they help kill the bandits. They don’t subscribe to, and/or are not accepted within, the collectivist paradigm embodied by the village. Once the battle is over, they’re off being individuals, which the film suggests is a disappointing and unsatisfying conclusion for them.
It’s disappointing in part because of how much beauty the film suggests in the villagers’ collectivist aesthetic, which really does come down to resource management. In planning the defense of the village, there are only so many resources in play, and these are described in the battle planning phase. There are key geographic elements that lend to defensive construction. The one building outside those geographic boundaries is quickly destroyed. Then there is only so much food to go around (hence the high stakes of food-stealing bandits) and it must be rationed. There are only so many women to go around, so they must be retrieved from bandits and/or protected from class-crossing aristocrats.
For the plan to work, each element of the defense not only must work, but it must kill a certain number of bandits. So a defensive structure that scares off the bandits is unsuccessful; it must lure in several so that at least some may be killed. The villagers are unlikely to survive an assault by all thirteen bandits at the same time (so it’s a good thing the bandits don’t try that!), so they need to lure in and divert individual attacking bandits. And they need to track the bandits’ numbers so they can allocate resources to remaining defensive points.
It’s notable that there are real characters among the villagers, but the arc for each villager character is essentially stoicism in the face of loss. Even the young woman who maybe falls in love with a samurai abandons that subplot because it is not a path for her. The village is the only path; there is only the collective - note how, as demonstrated in this video essay, the village always moves in groups. There just are no individuals. And that’s true even for the samurai, and even for the (pretend? aspiring?) samurai Kikuchiyo, the lone character in the movie who breaks caste. They choose the village, even when it means negating themselves. This is a story about a group of individual Samurai interacting with two collectivist subcultures and choosing sides. You could even argue they choose the wrong side - the side that abandons them after the fight. But the villagers are also the side of creation, joy, and most importantly for this list, long-term planning. How can you say no to that?
8. The Mohicans, Last of the Mohicans
You know what I can’t stand? Any action movie where the hero shoots some people, runs past them without taking their fully loaded automatic weapons, and then later gets jammed up when the single clip of his pistol runs out. Looking at you, early James Bond films.
The contrast I always hold in my mind is the 1992 movie Last of the Mohicans, which takes place during the French and Indian War in the 18th century. What’s the significance of that? Well, everybody’s using single shot muskets that take like 45 seconds to load. So if you really want to jump some dudes, you gotta kill them fast, take their guns, fire those guns into the next dudes, and repeat. Which is what we see Daniel Day Lewis do here.
In my mind, not having seen this movie in 20 years, I really built this scene up as a masterpiece of efficiency. But coming back to it now I see it’s a very short scene and it’s very inefficiently shot, with a lot of camera cuts that distort the physical location and presence of the figures. And firing two rifles at the same time, from the hip? Zero chance that works. This is not up to modern action movie standards. Also, the music is downright mawkish. Honestly, it’s kind of awful. He takes those guns, though, I guess.
7. Jimmy McGill / Saul Goodman, Better Call Saul
Whenever someone makes art about a non-artistic profession, it’s likely to suck for members of that profession. As a trained musician, Whiplash can eat my ass. It reminds me more of my high school basketball team than any musical ensemble I was ever a part of. (Adam Neely is on point about this.)
As a professional lawyer guy, though, Better Call Saul is rarely a disappointment. This has less to do with the technical accuracy of the legal minutiae - that stuff is generally correct, although the characters generally talk about it in a way that’s meant to be slightly accessible to viewers, and thus sounds super basic to lawyers - than with the grinding nature of the work.
Saul is a successful lawyer (in the later seasons) because he is a grifter, and even if you’re not a grifter, one of the secrets to legal work is that you succeed by out-working people. That can mean putting in crazy hours and foregoing sleep, although in my experience that’s less common than portrayed. More often, it means holding ideas in your head, playing with them endlessly, and then presenting a judge, an adversary, or a potential partner with a resolution framework that guides them, maybe without their knowing it, to a workable result - even if it’s not the perfect result you’re hoping for. You exercise as much control over a situation as possible by putting in the effort to construct a dialogue that trends in the direction you want.
(I can’t bring myself to spoil the plot of any consequential element of the show, so instead, here’s another lawyer’s take on Jimmy McGill - mostly regarding an early episode where Jimmy has to make the best of the limited arguments at his disposal in a very difficult case.)
That’s really what Saul Goodman (if not Jimmy McGill) does as a lawyer, and the show is very transparent about it. Saul has very limited means: he has a few social/criminal connections, knowledge of a few grifting tricks, and so few personal attachments that he’s able to put in unthinkable amounts of time to frame the problem for his adversary. The word “unthinkable” is the key here: Saul puts in so much effort that his adversaries, in law and otherwise, choose to see the world he wants them to see, because the effort required to see otherwise is too great.
There’s a “Chekhov’s Gun” quality to Better Call Saul, or perhaps a soap opera quality, in that Saul’s tricks and connections are so limited that as each problem arises you can guess which combination of resources he might use to solve the problem. That can feel writer-y in an unpleasant way; I don’t want to just guess my way through the show like it’s a puzzle box. But this feeling is balanced by the fact that as the show builds, Saul not only acquires new tricks and shifty allegiances, he also actively makes bad decisions and burns bridges, wastes opportunities (at least, the opportunities a seemingly sane person would value). Saul is resourceful, and that’s a major pleasure of the show, but he’s no miser, and he’s definitely not a good guy.
6.5. Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
I remember a surprising amount about this book given that I read it almost thirty years ago, when I was a kid, but what I remember most is that the two kids run away from home and live for like a week on fourteen dollars. I’m not sure I can do anything with fourteen dollars, even in 1970s money. Could I buy lunch? I guess, but I’d have to eat it standing up.
I recall they save money by squatting in The Met and sleeping in Marie Antoinette’s bed or something. Cool. Don’t think you’d get away with it.
The Kincaid kids get six-and-a-halfth place because what they actually do (run away from home to live in an art museum) is fundamentally dangerous, and this is the point where characters transition from compelling to distressing, as we shall soon see.
6. Alexander Portnoy, Portnoy’s Complaint
Reading Portnoy’s Complaint as a dysfunctionally horny teenager, my primary takeaway was that I was not alone in the world. That was pretty great. But as a corollary to that, I understood that the book is a tragedy, about a man who receives love and intimacy and throws it away. I was never too callous to see beyond that - Alex’s relationship with “the Monkey” is extremely sexual, but she wants more and is willing to give him more, and he throws her away over, truly, nothing. (At least, the incident that concludes their relationship is nothing.) At the age of fourteen, feeling alone and unattractive, I truly could not fathom throwing away not just sex but a lot of sex, and I guess, love.
My thoughts on that relationship have changed over the years, and in fact they changed even by my late teens, the moment I turned down sex for the first time. I get it, it was not the right fit for him, they would never have been happy together in the long term. So why does Alex lead the Monkey on for so long?
Again, I’ve lived long enough now to understand why Alex leads her on. And why it may have been best to end it when they did. If anything, I now see the novel as requiring the (at-the-time) taboo-breaking masturbation and neurosis passages just to soften the blows and provide context for Alex’s more adult problems. That said, I’m reluctant to give Roth too much credit: there’s a reason this book was written and published at all, there’s a reason he got away with calling her “the Monkey,” and the primary reason for both is that the Monkey was a real person, who died, and so Philip Roth felt free to write about her while framing her entire life as a secondary plotline to white male neurosis.
5. Rebecca Bunch, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Rebecca Bunch makes pretty good use of her assets throughout Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - she uses her brains, body, and credentials to find stable employment and attract a number of romantic and platonic partners, develop her understanding of self, and ultimately, even fulfill her artistic ambitions. Good job. Really neat.
She’s terrible with money.
Spoiler alert: season one of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a music theater rom-com. But slowly, the show reveals that Rebecca is not living in a musical rom com, she’s living in the real world* and she has considerable mental health problems. One of the really big hints is how she spends tens of thousands of dollars doing insane things like renting a party bus and, um, committing felonies. But mostly just spending crazy money on stuff to attract boys, and then fucking it all up and hating herself. (Video at right is, for me, the all time greatest piece of art about self-loathing. I really don’t spend a lot of my time loathing myself lately, but I know I’m always one mistake away from it, and this song is a reminder of exactly what I’d be in for.)
So, at some point Rebecca burns through everything she’d saved up as an elite NYC attorney and she’s broke. Frankly I enjoyed that plot point, because characters wasting money with no long-term consequences infuriates me.** Unlike others on this list, she has a pretty good excuse, and ultimately receives the help she needs, so the show casts her frivolity in an appropriate light, as the symptom of a very serious disorder. But it’s still frustrating to watch her throw away all her money.
*Sort of. As a lawyer, I really can’t stand some of the lawyer/law firm elements of the show, like how a massive class action lawsuit will resolve itself within a single episode, seemingly over the course of days. Better Call Saul also features a massive class action lawsuit, which Jimmy initiates in season one, and as of season five (timeline unclear, but at least a couple of years later), that lawsuit is in discovery. As in, still years away from trial. That is an accurate timeline. Also, Rebecca commits felonies. Like, actual fraud, theft, bribery. I get that she’s white and privileged, but I don’t think in “the real world” much of it would be forgiven by your best friends, much less the law. There’s also this song, which I think is a bit unfair, although (a) it stars my brother-in-law’s former roommate, and (b) is correct in that most of the do-gooder lawyer vocations like immigration law are immensely depressing and don’t pay well.
**See, e.g., The Simpsons, or any other tv show in which characters’ finances more or less reset from week to week. I also get very frustrated with 19th century Russian novels in which aristocrats don’t pay their debts (because they need super cool country houses and city houses), but that’s a bit different: historically, over the 19th century the Russian aristocracy really did face a massive debt problem, and rather than reform the economy and/or their own behavior, they sold off landholdings, refused to free the serfs, and lost a bunch of wars to distract themselves. And who can argue with success?
4. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye
Holden Caulfield is a loser.
When I read Catcher in the Rye in my freshman year of high school, I was appalled at how certain of my classmates received this book as a holy bible. In retrospect, they were having their “you are not alone” moments, much as I reacted to Portnoy’s Complaint. And that’s pretty telling.
These days I have more compassion for people’s Catcher in the Rye fandom. I think Catcher in the Rye is about an awkward, confused, probably clinically depressed teenager just having a really horrible time, and that probably fits the description of more than a few people I knew back then, even if I was never afflicted in quite the same way. But I’m sympathetic to people struggling through their teen years.
What has always bothered me is the “revelation” some people have in relation to Holden’s accusations that so many adults are “phonies.” On the one hand, yes all of us are phonies in the sense that we possess both high-minded ideals and occasionally slavish allegiance to unjust power structures (more on that below). On the other hand, that contradiction doesn’t make people phony, it’s just the beautiful complexity of human life, buddy.
Holden Caulfield is higher on this list than some others, because he really does look at himself and try to do better. But damn, does he fuck up pretty bad. It’s high school, buddy! You have privilege and intellect. Those are great resources - maybe the best America can offer you - so don’t waste them! They will absolutely pay off for you as long as you don’t freak out and ruin yourself. So you take your beatings, you let the handsome athlete dude fuck that girl you like, you get good grades, you go to college, marry rich, work at a desk, and then some time in your 40s or 50s you do the things you want to do. This is America. Get with the program.
3. Hector, The Iliad / Everyone, Dazed and Confused
I wonder what Homer wanted me to think, reading The Iliad. Or watching the 2004 film Troy, which is not exactly the same as The Iliad, but does accentuate some of the points I discuss here, and also has some pretty great action scenes. (Also, did you know the ‘Trojan Horse’ is not in The Iliad? The Iliad takes place during one year toward the end of the war, all the stuff about how the war started and ended comes from other works. Crazy.)
I suspect that Homer understood that his audience would have a complicated reaction, as it’s a complicated story. However, I doubt he foresaw that an audience nearly three thousand years after his death would see the characters in the tale for what they are, which is a bunch of suicidal lunatics.
The Iliad is a book about a bunch of dudes who have a million opportunities not to kill themselves, and won’t do it. Homer sort of excuses this as being manipulated by the gods, and ok fine, but the characters are presented as having freedom of choice - literally every step of the way, someone is like “if we do this, we shall die, but it shall be glorious,” and the heroes are like “yes, proceed.” That’s the whole story. No character embodies this more than the Trojan prince Hector, the acknowledged second greatest warrior in the world. He could give up his brother Paris to Menelaus, rather than I don’t know, having his country invaded over a woman. (I’d be more sympathetic to this if Helen were treated as something more than property, but that’s not what’s going on.) He could just not leave the city walls, and not duel with Achilles. But his approach at all times is just “I am a warrior man, I will spill the blood of my enemies, please raise my son to do the same.” Ok, guy. You realize you could, instead, spend a very long life being super rich and banging your gorgeous wife and, like, not dying? It is very frustrating.
But I guess we’re still talking about Hector three thousand years later, and that’s the tradeoff he made. (I have more respect for Achilles, who more overtly makes the same tradeoff; Hector comes across, until shortly before his death, as being far less intentional about his choice to live-fast-die-young.)
You know who we’re not talking about? The characters in Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused, about a bunch of Texas high schoolers (mostly) hanging out after the last day of school, hazing each other and preparing for the awesomeness of next year’s football season and prom and so forth. Dazed and Confused is about a few different things, and people have different reactions to it, but to me it’s about a bunch of idiots from a shitty small town who unknowingly assume they’re living in The Iliad. (There are characters within the film that intuitively understand this, but it’s never fully interrogated.) Even while they’re all partying and goofing off, there’s a deadly seriousness both to the hazing and to the imposed social hierarchy. And my entire reaction to the movie has always been oh my God whyyyyyy. Just, what a waste of people’s lives, such pointless assholery. Almost none of these people are going to go anywhere or do anything with their lives. They’re just throwing up pointless roadblocks to their own happiness. It’s a film about people who should be having a great time, and are pretending to have a great time, but by failing to interrogate the structures governing the use of their time, end up unhappily wasting their time.
Time on earth is one of the few things we indisputably have, and it seems like a terrible thing to waste. To accuse someone of wasting time, you have to have a strong sense of what life is for, so that you can say what time alive is well spent. And I’m not 100% sure I know what life is for, but mostly I think we all make our own decisions to create meaning in our lives. And so what truly does seem like a waste is when people fail to appreciate that, and go through lives never questioning the implications of their actions, including most importantly their acquiescence to the political and philosophical structures governing their material existence, and spend their time alive being manipulated into unhappiness on the basis of those unquestioned actions and structures. That sort of life does not seem meaningful, because it is not chosen. And while it could lead you to become super famous like Hector, you’re far more likely to wind up in someone else’s army and die nameless in the Middle East, like the many people Hector killed and whose deaths he was otherwise responsible for, and also like many an idiot American high schooler of my generation.
I wasn’t particularly popular in high school.
2. Mildred Pierce, Mildred Pierce / Wang Lung, The Good Earth / Alexander Hamilton, Hamilton
Kurt Vonnegut had a theory that there are only a handful of different basic story shapes. It’s a theory he used as his masters thesis in English literature, and returned to in lectures and books throughout his life. Like any “literary theory,” there’s really no dispute about this; it’s just a way of looking at different types of narratives and classifying them.
One story shape is “rise and fall.” A rise and fall narrative is pretty simple: a character starts with nothing, builds something great, then loses it. Usually they “fall” due to the same character trait that fuels a meteoric rise. In other words, the main character just wastes it all.
I have a hard time with rise and fall stories. I really like the first half. Who doesn’t love a plucky adventurer? But once I understand where the rest of the story is headed, I just can’t stand to watch the slow-motion train wreck.
Mildred Pierce is a novel from the 1940s, which became a movie and then a 2011 HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet. The basic plot is that the titular character, a single mother during the Great Depression, is inspired by her hateful daughter to open a restaurant and build a restaurant dynasty. That part - really cool. I could watch Kate Winslet dissect the restaurant industry and make chicken all day. And that part is so compelling that you sort of gloss over the daughter part, until you realize that you have two hours of miniseries left and it’s just about Mildred Pierce embezzling from her business and driving it into the ground to buy her daughter’s love, which she’ll never get. Woof. It’s extremely melodramatic, with a whole weird plot about operatic soprano music (apparently a really big thing in the 1940s?), but the feeling it inspired in me was fury, at her just throwing away this beautiful restaurant business she’d built.
Wang Lung in the 1931 novel The Good Earth is a Chinese farmer with barely enough land to live on, a useless old father to take care of, and seemingly no prospects. But he works extremely hard, and he obtains a wife who works even harder, and through a combination of tragedies and luck, they’re able to capitalize on the downfall of the local old-money dynasty to expand their land holdings. By the middle of the book, Wang Lung is a major landowner and raking in cash. But of course, he has no idea what to do with the money and has never tasted luxury before, so he goes quite a bit nuts drinking tea and buying a concubine and eating weird foods. He buys his sons an education, but doesn’t himself learn to read, which of course ensures that they plan to sell the land behind his back and abandon everything he holds dear. It’s not an immediate financial “fall” but more of a moral one - the hard-working, easy-to-root-for young farmer just becomes the same dissolute old asshole he hated in the beginning (the one he bought his first wife from, and later his land), and it’s implied that his wealth will not survive him. You want Wang Lung to stay with his first wife O-Lan to whom he owed so much, and build something permanent. Together they possess a ferocious will to become something greater, but the latter half of the book sees Wang Lung allow that will to dissolve into nothing.
Alexander Hamilton was of course a real person. And real people don’t often fit easily into story arcs - but let’s make an exception, based on the character as portrayed in Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography and the musical Hamilton.
In both fact and fiction, Hamilton was a poor orphan in the Caribbean who was so good at writing that, after he published an essay in a newspaper about how scary a recent hurricane had been, everyone on the island got together and gave him a college scholarship and a trust fund. Like, he didn’t win an essay contest, there was no essay contest - the people of the island just said “holy shit, this kid is too good to live here, send him to New York.” And he repaid that favor by going to school for a short while, then joining the American Revolution essentially as a leader of a vigilante brigade, immediately attracting the attention of every single American general, becoming George Washington’s right-hand man, leading the most important attack in the biggest victory of the entire war, becoming the most successful lawyer in New York state, helping ratify the US Constitution, becoming the first Secretary of the Treasury, saving the United States from numerous existential threats and building the financial framework of the country that enabled it to grow for 200 years into the most powerful country in the history of the world.
Then Alexander Hamilton destroyed his political career by writing a detailed open letter about his own sex scandal, and destroyed his entire political movement by publicly humiliating President John Adams with yet another open letter. Then he wrote a letter (or several) to his old frenemy Aaron Burr.
Let me tell you: the first 700 pages of Chernow’s Hamilton, a real joy to read. The next 700, like the latter halves of Mildred Pierce and The Good Earth, a bit of a downer.
1. Louie, Louie
When I began planning this post, I really just wanted to write about Louis CK. Specifically, I wanted to write about a two-second clip from the opening credits of Louie, in which Louie (the character) throws away a half-eaten piece of pizza.
This clip has always bothered me, and I still think about it. In fact, I pitched an essay on this subject to New York Magazine’s “I Think About This A Lot” features section, the first time I’d pitched a piece of commercial writing in over 10 years. (No dice!)
Here’s why it has always bothered me: he is throwing away a half of a piece of fucking pizza. (See video at 0:32, but really if you haven’t seen it, watch the whole thing.)
I mean, there’s some subtext here. I’m going to get to that. But I want to focus on the pizza element first.
When the show came out I was in my early post-college period. I was in music school and hustling to make a living with several different jobs. My now-spouse and I were very poor in the way that two people can live in a major city on $30k a year when they know they have a family money safety net. Which is to say, we actually lived on $30k a year, even though you could argue we didn’t have to, but it was the smart thing to do because we were both in academia and we didn’t know if we’d ever earn much more than that, and so if an inheritance did come from somewhere, it would have to be used for college tuition or medical emergencies or a down payment on a house. Also, my spouse and I have both struggled with nutrition and weight for much of our lives. And so we ate way less pizza than a person should in their early 20s. Certainly more than 97% less pizza than I wanted. We ate a lot of pasta with canned tuna. Real cheap.
Guys, pizza is fucking great. It’s just a fucking great food to eat. It’s delicious. I’ve lived in Italy. I know what good pizza tastes like, and I know how to find it where I live. It’s not even that expensive.
I know what that greasy New York jumbo slice pizza tastes like, and it’s great too. That’s what Louis CK eats in the intro clip to his show. He goes in and buys a little pizza snack before he hits the stage for his standup set, and maybe he’s not hungry or maybe he’s in a rush, but he doesn’t finish the slice and he throws it in the goddamn trash can.
For years, we were the biggest Louis CK fans, and fans of the show Louie in particular. It was a groundbreaking show - it spawned seemingly endless variations on the standup comedian/auteur half hour arts fartsy dramedy theme (here’s Vulture ranking the top 15 of them). (The early 2010s were just a fantastic time to be watching tv, with the bonanza of post-Sopranos prestige shows as well, and all the networks and services trying to figure out streaming and giving it all to you for free. And we were able, for a few years, to pirate our internet connection too—we literally paid for none of this. I don’t do it anymore, but not sorry.)
Louie was a show about a guy growing as a person. It had masturbation jokes, but also real characters, and you always got the sense that the characters were struggling with real problems. And with that, and with his standup, Louis CK built the idea for us that, if he’s so insightful about these problems, it can’t be that he’s facing those same problems unsuccessfully. Like, obviously if you do so much comedy about being a shitty human being, you must have sufficient introspective power to not be a totally shitty human being. And Louis CK would do all the right things (like giving huge bonuses to his production crew, and producing specials for other comics) and say all the right things, and you just knew he was a great guy. My spouse and I saw Louis CK live at the Boston Symphony Hall. We went to comedy shows at the places Louis CK used to do standup, and I even did standup a few times, because of Louis CK. I loved Louis CK.
Every new episode of Louie was a big deal. An event. So we’d watch a new Louie and I’d be so excited, and then a few minutes in, my spouse and I would look at each other and back at the screen and say “god damn it, there’s that pizza. I want that pizza.” Then we’d forget about it and watch the episode.
So we were Louis CK fans for a good 7 or 8 years. And then we very suddenly were not.
What kind of monster throws away pizza? See video for example.
And here is another: real-life human being Louis CK.
I’m not going to analogize pizza-abandonment too closely to what it is that Louis CK did. But let’s talk about what Louis CK did:
He masturbated in front of people that didn’t consent.
When those people started sharing their story, he allowed his entourage and management and his industry clout to silence them and damage their careers.
He lied about all of it for a long time.
When he finally had to admit to the lie, he apologized very poorly, repeatedly saying he had power over people because they “admired” him. Perhaps, but he also had power over them because he was a valuable asset to many people in the comedy community, who were more than willing to throw women under the bus to preserve his, and thus their, earning power. With his poor apology, Louis CK protected his entourage and failed to acknowledge the problem.
He promised to keep silent and listen, and then returned to standup a few months later with, again, no real apology or acknowledgment of the problem.
For a fan of Louis CK, there’s no going back. And it’s not because you can’t forgive; I can. It’s because all of Louis CK’s old art is about thinly veiled versions of himself, with creepy masturbation habits, who assault women and face no real consequences for it. I mean, wow. It’s not funny because it’s true. It was funny because we thought it wasn’t true, and now it can’t be funny because we know it was.
Louis CK tossed away both my love and his entire oeuvre.
Also, the guy threw pizza in the fucking garbage can. Fuck him.