Being Evil

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 19, 2022

 

Some great writers are terrible editors of their own work—and, at times, terrible custodians of it. Walt Whitman is a famous case of this, defacing Leaves of Grass with later revisions. The franchises built around Silence of the Lambs and The Addams Family each operate at a less rarefied literary level and involve many authors beyond the original creator, but there is a similar dynamic at work in the Netflix series Wednesday, about which I have a few specific observations that are well short of a full review.

 

Trust me—there’s a relevant point beyond television recommendations.

 

Thomas Harris was a kind of pop-fiction one-hit wonder, but his hit was not a particular novel (though The Silence of the Lambs made him a rich man when the film was made) but a particular character, that of Hannibal Lecter. I don’t hold one-hit wonders in low esteem: Most musicians, writers, and artists never even produce one hit, and if “Video Killed the Radio Star” isn’t quite as deeply imprinted on the musical mind as the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, it isn’t all that far behind, either—limited success is scorned most intensely by those who have known no success at all. But Harris ultimately lacked the confidence to take Hannibal Lecter’s best advice: In The Silence of the Lambs, there is a very memorable passage in which Lecter mocks FBI trainee Clarice Starling for attempting to explain away his monstrous crimes in psychotherapeutic terms: “You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism. … You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants”—“dignity pants” are adult diapers, if you are wondering—“nothing is ever anybody’s fault.” He holds in especial contempt the notion that his outrages are the result of some childhood trauma: “Nothing happened to me,” he proclaims in the novel’s most poetic line. “I happened.” 

 

Great pulpy stuff, right up there with the best of Mickey Spillane. But Harris eventually supplied Lecter with precisely the thing his character did not need: a traumatic, cannibalism-explaining backstory, the absence of which had been a big part of what made Lecter such a terrifying and interesting character to begin with. Harris also made considerable efforts to morally rehabilitate Lecter, having him murder, disfigure, and eat characters who—we guiltily concur—kind of deserve it. The presumably innocent Princeton students and census-takers are replaced by a series of monsters, or at least very rude people—the “free-range rude” as Lecter calls them—whose suffering is, in the moral universe of Harris’ novels, excessive but not entirely unmerited. One of the big differences between the novels and the films is that, in the books, Starling ends up running off with Lecter after having finally decided that in a world as ugly and corrupt as ours, Lecter’s way is the right way. 

 

Evil is at its most interesting and most seductive when it is mysterious rather than banal—there is a reason that Catholic baptismal vows demand that the initiate “reject the glamour of evil.” Hannibal is a more interesting character when we get only a glimpse of him than when his internal life is dragged out into the unsparing fluorescent light of psychology. 

 

In a smaller way, the writers of Wednesday make the same mistake. Wednesday Addams is introduced with a pithy observation about her high school: “I’m not sure whose twisted idea it was to put hundreds of adolescents in underfunded schools run by people whose dreams were crushed years ago. But I admire the sadism.” The word “underfunded” there turns out to be an unfortunate portent: Wednesday isn’t full of spontaneous malice—she is a budding social-justice warrior. But she starts off being a lot of fun: When she narrowly avoids being charged with attempted murder after releasing a school of piranhas into the swimming pool as rough justice for the water-polo players who bullied her brother—resulting in a spectacular cloud of blood but no fatalities—her mother asks how such a charge would look on her permanent record. “Terrible,” she replies. “Everybody would know I failed to get the job done.” But, unfortunately, Wednesday gets a traumatic backstory, too—bullies killed her beloved pet scorpion when she took it out for a walk—and, like Hannibal, she is given victims who deserve what’s coming to them. In Wednesday’s case, the victim-villains are literally dead white men and the modern inheritors of their privilege who are attempting to “whitewash” the sordid history of the Hogwarts-style school she attends after being kicked out of public school following that attempted murder. There’s even a bit where she defaces the statue of the school’s founder in a clumsy nod to our imbecilic campus politics. She begins the story as a dangerous loner and eccentric, an aspiring novelist who uses a manual typewriter because she does not want to be a slave to technology. By the end, she is hugging her bestie and texting her boyfriend on the iPhone he gave her. (I assume it’s an iPhone—could be Android, I suppose.) Which is to say, she has been fitted for her moral dignity pants. 

 

This is a subject for a much longer essay—I get into it a little in The Smallest Minority—but my belief is that we live in a world of piddling moralistic conformism because in the greater sense we live in a world of moral chaos. The small-ball moral hysteria, and, in particular, the conflation of morality with etiquette (language-policing, “misgendering,” etc.) is a natural and possibly inevitable reaction to the terror induced by the prospect of living in a society that is essentially amoral and predatory—which is the kind of society we live in. Megan McArdle observes this in the specific context of expectations around sex and courtship. Many young women, she notes, are profoundly unhappy in their romantic lives, for obvious reasons, but they also seem, from McArdle’s point of view, to have some difficulty making distinctions between vicious behavior and merely boorish or clumsy behavior—think of the way Harvey Weinstein and Aziz Ansari ended up in the same barrel. McArdle writes:

 

These women express a feeling of overwhelming powerlessness, even though they are not being threatened, either physically or economically. How has the most empowered generation of women in all of human history come to feel less control over their bodies than their grandmothers did?

 

Let me propose a possible answer to this, suggested by a very smart social scientist of my acquaintance: They feel this way because we no longer have any moral language for talking about sex except consent. So when men do things that these women feel are wrong—such as aggressively pursuing casual sex without caring about the feelings of their female target—we’re left flailing for some way to describe this as nonconsensual, even when she agreed to the sex.

 

The various sexual-liberationist movements of the 1960s and 1970s were, in effect, the marketing department for moral and social chaos, and their sales pitch was, is, and always has been a lie: that this chaos will make people happy. Of course it doesn’t: Declining marriage rates and crashing fertility, incels, abortion wars, puberty blockers, the life and times of Lena Dunham—how much evidence do you need? The sex stuff always commands the best headlines—the newspaper business can be tough, as they know over at the Washington Post—but the chaos is wider and deeper than that. To take one example: Many people in the rich world are profoundly unhappy with economic life, and with working life in particular. There is much to like and to celebrate about having a dynamic and innovative economy with highly mobile labor and capital, but we also long for the richness and connection of a life marked by mutual obligation and cooperation rather than one in which labor law and market forces provide the only mediation between employers and employees. The dissatisfaction is particularly urgent among those who feel that the results produced by our laws and market forces are at odds with their sense of their own proper status, their aspirations, the character of the communities in which they live, etc. But as with McArdle’s observations about sex and courtship, we lack the moral language and the moral cultivation to approach these questions in a useful and sophisticated way; instead, we end up engaged in shrill, hysterical conversations about the top marginal corporate tax rate, as though that were really the fundamental issue.

 

The Christian minister Tim Keller has observed (in his sermon series on wisdom and elsewhere) that while much of our political life is spent fighting over moral questions, what is missing from much of modern life—including modern religious life—is wisdom. It is not that issues such as abortion or homosexual marriage don’t matter—of course they do—but what most perplexes and vexes many of us are questions that are only partly moral in character: Whom should I marry? What kind of work should I do? How should I think about this friendship? Should I move to a new city or stay where I am? Am I approaching my finances the right way? Our sense of wisdom and our sense of morality both are diminished because we live under what Michael Oakeshott called rationalism, the misbegotten belief that an authentic and organic society can be organized and managed by means of abstract formal models and that the complexities of social life can be approached as though they were geometry proofs. Life lived that way is life lived in all things and at all times de novo, life lived in an eternal Year Zero. Culture is a kind of accumulated wealth that lives in our minds and sensibilities, and we have found ourselves through our own actions culturally—intellectually, spiritually—disinherited. It is not as though we have blown through our cultural savings account in some kind of spendthrift spree—more like that we have forgotten where the bank is located. 

 

To get back to where I started, this elective poverty shapes our popular culture as much as it shapes our political discourse. Because we are operating from a position of moral insecurity bordering on moral terror, we demand a very simplistic morality from our entertainment: the white hats triumphing over the black hats, and variations on that theme. We cannot endure the moral discomfort imposed on us by stories in which the protagonists—even Hannibal Lecter and Wednesday Addams—are not entirely on the side of the angels. (Angels as we understand them.) In a similar way, the insistent hysterical conformism of campus life that has spilled over into corporate life and entertainment is, I think, moral insecurity masquerading as moral certitude. The result is a world that is in many ways more sterile—it was inevitable that the liberationists themselves would become the most narrowminded of scolds. You can see it in city life: From Hollywood Boulevard to Provincetown, there are a lot of yoga studios and juice bars in the spaces where people once drank too much and made bad decisions, not because there was some great social victory over vice but because we have replaced goodness with wellness. Even Las Vegas has been scrubbed up and put under corporate discipline. 

 

And there is something in us that rebels against that—something that wants the world to let Wednesday Addams be Wednesday Addams.