Rick Moody - The Diviners

Even as she looks at his face in the monitor of the camera, she can see something else happening, slowly at first, the hand of her older brother, reaching toward the free hand of his mother, the black fingers of her brother’s hand walking across the couch toward his mother’s white hand, and the filmmaker is observing a rigorous cinematic detachment while this little thing happens, the black fingers of the son interlacing themselves with the white fingers of the mother. Nothing is said; it’s just a moment worth studying. Her brother’s face never changes, and her mother’s face never changes, and the camera pauses, and then it continues its journey.

The younger brother is wearing whatever it is that he thinks he has to be wearing these days, because he’s still in this moment when he has to be wearing something that indicates dissent. Some protest is always being implied. He has on the baggy jeans, and he has on his so-called wife-beater, and he has donned the jewelry, the jewelry that will have the maximum impact in the right-to-left movement of the camera across the text of the Duffys. Her younger brother. He has so quickly assumed the mantle of the Duffy who has to call the revolutionary police down on the rest of them, her younger brother with his pierced face and his multiple tattoos. Her brother who won’t even talk about the sinister group of teenagers he was associating with, and who won’t say anything about whether they were involved with the arson at that franchise restaurant in Concord. Nevertheless, here he is flush against his older brother, though there’s another three feet remaining on the couch, crushed up against his older brother as if it’s his older brother who’s going to solve the problems of the world. The younger brother looks as if he’s about to lean his head on his brother’s shoulder, and now the camera retreats to a wider angle, until they are all in the frame, and then the filmmaker herself jogs past the coffee table and past the stack of art books, past the decorative fern on the side table. There’s the sound, from off screen, of the dishwasher in the kitchen changing cycles.

The filmmaker almost pounces on the shot as she dives in next to her younger brother and reaches her hand all the way down the line until she manages to get her arm around three of them, around her younger brother, her older brother, and her mother. Behold the family. What does the camera know? The camera knows that the American family consists of at least one adulterer, that the American family consists of a mother with depressive symptoms undiscussed with the other protagonists in frame; and the American family consists of at least two races; and the American family consists of at least one young man with a serious mental illness; and the American family consists of at least one young woman who has had sex with her own gender on a number of occasions and who thought it was kind of hot; and the American family consists of at least one screenplay writer and one master of divinity; and the American family consists of one teenager who is a total outcast at his school. Behold the family, sought after by the police of large metropolises, compulsive about sexuality and psychiatric medication, uncertain as to its political beliefs, argumentative, dismissive, except when loving, brilliant, broken, sad, and about to do one thing all together, as one. And that one thing is not to sit and discuss their many problems in a sober and loving way. No, the American family, as soon as the digital camera is shut off, is going to perform its one regular activity. It’s going to watch television.

And what are they going to watch?

The Werewolves of Fairfield County ! Because it’s a Sunday at 8:00PM. And this is the Thanksgiving episode, as broadcast on the UBC network, the network of the American family. UBC has been heavily promoting the Thanksgiving episode of The Werewolves of Fairfield County. Because the network knows a hit when it sees a hit. Everybody, for some reason, is now watching The Werewolves of Fairfield County. The cast was on the cover of a major newsweekly a fortnight ago. The Halloween episode is normally the big episode in the fall season, but the creator, Christine Katz, has spoken in recent interviews of the need, in this the fourth season, to come up with new creative challenges for herself and her staff of writers. This year it is the much-ballyhooed Thanksgiving episode.

A synopsis of the general themes of The Werewolves of Fairfield County is in order, for those who have somehow missed the previous three seasons. Of course, it’s important to note that the lycanthropes of the program are not afflicted with an illness, some disease, some contagion, caused by the bite of another werewolf. No, this is not the lycanthropy of your Lon Chaney Jr. films, from the high period of horror films. Nor is it dependent on I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the nineteen-fifties articulation of this condition. No, the lycanthropy of The Werewolves of Fairfield County, which is the lycanthropy of the new millennium, is genetic, part of a spontaneous evolutionary mutation. In Fairfield County, stronghold of the affluent and powerful here in the northeastern megalopolis, the human species has spontaneously come to express a genetic crisis. In Fairfield County, the human species has mutated, such that the tennis stars and swashbuckling fiscal experts of the county number among them those who grow hair on their knuckles and howl for blood at every full moon.

The werewolves have formed themselves into a pack. Season two, in particular, was organized around this principle. The pack protects the individuals from being pruned by the police or by the unscrupulous hunters of the area. The pack keeps its members from needlessly taking human life. And so, in season two, the werewolves began to exhibit a certain crude moral rectitude. For example, during the second episode, the werewolves happened upon the mayor of Waterbury, who had embezzled funds from his education budget, and they tore him limb from limb in a sequence that was considered too violent for the hour at which it was broadcast.

The older wolves look after the younger wolves. The Caucasian wolves of Fairfield County, who outnumber the others, protect the Asian and African American wolves, though there is no discerning the racial origins of the werewolves when they are under the sway of the full moon. The rich wolves, of whom there are many, protect the poor wolves. The strong protect the weak. It’s true, the social conditions of the pack would seem an improvement on the relationships that are formed by “human civilization.” This was driven home, e.g., in the third season, whose theme was the mixed blessing of wealth. Ezra Montgomery Scott, one of the alpha dogs, was being tried by an overzealous state prosecutor for insider trading, while at the same time he was caring for a teenager at his home, a new member of the pack. The young man, of course, was frightened by and unprepared for the manifestation of his mutation. He was a caddy at the Round Hill Club and he was an orphan, and Ezra Scott, while playing a late round of golf with his lawyers, thought he recognized something in the boy. He took him home to give him a talking-to.

The moon was nearly full. Scott locked himself and the boy in the basement, as was his habit for the entirety of the three days, and when the two of them weren’t baying lonesomely, in a way that drove Scott’s pair of greyhounds wild, he tried to persuade the boy that though his new identity was a cross to bear, there were things that were salubrious about being a werewolf. For example, there was a sense that you belonged. There was the certainty that there were always others who had compassion for you, even when things were at their hardest. This Ezra Scott explained to the young inductee, though in doing so Scott missed meetings and hearings relevant to his court case. When the boy manifested suicidal ideation, Scott cared for him, and when the boy tried to attack Scott at night, Scott managed to keep him from getting injured. All while Scott was meant to be rehearsing talking points with his defense team. For the price of his kindness, Ezra Scott was convicted of stock fraud and sent to the penitentiary, from which he escaped at the next full moon.