New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018. 240 pages. $25.95.
Ever since 1991, when Kurt Cobain screamed “A denial” over and over again from our stereo speakers, many of a certain generation have sensed that something is intrinsically wrong with the way we live. Few would argue things have gotten better in the interim. How to see and deal with this denial is one of the overarching concerns of Heather Havrilesky’s What if This Were Enough?, a collection of essays that offers a new perspective on how we internalize messages from the world and turn them into insatiable need. Whether it be Little House in the Big Woods or Mad Men, a recent family trip to Disneyland or her deceased father’s driver’s licenses, Havrilesky is expert at associating the feelings derived from these elements and showing how they feed her—and our—quest for things that don’t fulfill. Her book offers a reminder of just how deep our denial goes, and it suggests that the common ways we receive our messages today preclude our best chances at seeing through it.
Harvilesky’s ideas ring with the most insight when examining our society’s current fixation, the internet. Her dissection of BuzzFeed—which has managed to morph the sharp edges and nuanced associations of entire eras into something easily digestible and discarded in seconds—is particularly cogent: “The past is reduced to a slideshow. The future is a YouTube video that won’t load. And the present is a number of jaunty yellow buttons blurting ‘omg’ and ‘awww’ and ‘tl;dr.’ What else can we do but click through?” The author elucidates the way modern online life sets us up for certain experiences and, thereby, certain outcomes. The goalposts of devalued concepts such as love and memory—which used to be bigger than those on an NFL field—have been reduced in the digital realm to the size of those found on an electronic football game. Is it worth competing, scoring, winning if this is what victory has to offer? Why would we bother or care that anyone else does? For Havrilesky, digital grapes are far worse than sour. They have little flavor at all.
A prominent symptom of our contemporary denial, as pointed out by Havrilesky, centers on our passive acceptance of everything we might be titillated by but nonetheless ought to avoid. The author offers many such concerns, especially when she explores the unsavory protagonists of contemporary TV shows. She reserves some of her most pointed criticism for our willingness to entertain empathy for fictional murderers such as Tony Soprano:
Viewers forgave Tony. They embraced Tony and Carmela and Christopher as if they were members of their own family. In forums and comments sections, the year the show wrapped, fans worried loudly about the fate of these beloved characters: They not only wanted Tony to evade prison and survive, they wanted him to live happily ever after. They posted romantic videos of Tony and Carm’s best moments—as if he’d never hit her, as if she’d never called him a cheating bastard, as if they were the sweet married couple that lived next door.
Clearly, there is some value in letting characters act out their worst moments for us. They do the things we can sometimes imagine doing but know are reprehensible, and this allows us a visible, visceral partner in our humanness. To accept their faults too readily, however—repeatedly, season after season—turns an occasional moment of commiseration into something else: a prepossession, an itch that needs to be scratched that causes an itch. There are a thousand media sources out there that will tell you explicitly or otherwise to just scratch away. Havrilesky offers us something else: she’s telling us, This is wrong. You get that, right? It would seem that, if it were wrong, we would feel differently about it somehow. We wouldn’t love these characters so much. I probably don’t have to mention at this point that we currently have a morally reprehensible television star as the president of our country. How can these two things not be related?
Personally, I was never much of a Sopranos fan, but I relate deeply to Havrilesky’s analysis in light of my own willingness to look the other way with another of her targets, Don Draper. The writers of these shows have the perhaps impossible tasks of hooking viewers deeply with their characters’ bad behaviors, then convincing the audience of the wrongness of the characters’ paths. Most of us choose to ignore this moral complexity, just follow along on the high of seduction, letting the scumbag take us where he may. Case in point, Havrilesky notes the deep fan frustration with the final Sopranos episode, in which the writers refuse to render whether Tony lives or dies. Tony just fades away “without redemption and without fanfare, as deeply corrupt and irreparably broken as America itself.” We hope for the best for a character with whom we have bonded deeply—especially when he’s acted out feelings we’re afraid to acknowledge to ourselves. To want justice for his misdeeds can feel like turning on him. Yet, when we take a final lesson from his story, we need something besides his complete vindication. Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello all go down in the end, not because Shakespeare didn’t relate to their flaws, but because anything else would’ve been a denial of those flaws. Havrilesky expertly reveals the crux the writers of the Sopranos found themselves in. They could be true to the fans, or true to the story, but not both. Their choice to cut the film before the audience finds out what happens to Tony serves as its own kind of final analysis, but one that cleverly requires no one to deal with anything. The writers have their angst and eat it, too.
So, where do we go from here? Plenty of us would like to know how to un-open this Pandora’s box of complicity with wherever pop culture wants to feed us. Like Cobain, Havrilesky doesn’t posit many solutions. Her final essay, however, “The Miracle of the Mundane,” offers some hope. The author suggests advocating for a life that leads to works as good as those by luminaries such as Dickinson, Mozart, and Stegner, “the kind of blazing majesty that burns through the confusion and bewilderment, that feels intimate and personal, that lights up each moment with endless possibility.” How to tell a shining beacon from a bright, shiny thing seems to be our biggest challenge. In this book, Havrilesky is, at heart, an aesthete and for her, the shining beacon of Art is where denial gets swept away.
