January 6-12, 2005

slant

Comedy and Terror

by Duane Swierczynski

This is the space where I occasionally make a big fuss about the cover story. However, since I wrote the cover story this week, that might seem a bit awkward.

Besides — knowing me, I'd probably make fun of my own story.

Nice transition, doughboy.

But a subtheme of the story — horror — has been on my mind recently, and for obvious reasons. For almost two weeks, the news has contained more horror than usual.

I've always had two ways of dealing with real-life terrors. One method is to use humor to stun the scary stuff into submission. The best example I can think of happened on Sept. 11, 2001. A good friend of mine, a book editor who works in Manhattan, was watching the towers of the World Trade Center fall from his office window. He was terrified out of his mind; I was busy trying to call his relatives to reassure them that he was safe. Later that morning, he shot me a brief e-mail, and when I read it, I knew he was going to be OK.

"Eh," my friend wrote. "I never liked the towers anyway."

That's gallows humor, folks. It's not for everybody, but for some, it's a way of life.

The other way to deal with horror is to fully embrace it: revel in it, glorify it, own it. Kids in the 1950s coped with atomic-age nightmares by idolizing Hollywood monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster. Jim Warren, our cover subject (p. 18), tapped into that early on and built it into a wildly successful empire of terror. But it was safe terror. A terror you could wrap your mind around.

I was always the kind of kid who almost passed out when I cut my finger but actually paid good money to see Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. The buckets of Hollywood gore helped me deal with the real thing.

But, I must confess. Lately, these defense mechanisms have failed me completely.

There is no gallows humor in Iraq.

There is no way of embracing the horrors of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia.

My mind doesn't quite know what to do with it.

When I think about Southeast Asia, I'm frozen at every level: professionally and personally. I want to tell stories, but what kinds of stories can you tell, other than West-centric tales about Americans who miraculously survived the disaster? Or frame the disaster in terms of a Bruckheimer movie: What if it happened here?

I don't have an answer, but a thought did occur to me as I sat down to type this.

Maybe I shouldn't be so concerned with how we deal with the horror.

Because honestly, it's not about us at all.