Shed No Tears for Douglas Sirk

When a popular artist finally gains critical acclaim it’s tough to decide who to cheer for first: the artist now justly recognized or the critics who have finally smartened up. Such is the case with director Douglas Sirk, whose career is being exhaustively profiled in Cinematheque Ontario’s “Masters of Melodrama”—along with a mini-retrospective of his most enthusiastic disciple, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Sirk was critically derided during the 1950’s as a mere purveyor of lushly mounted “women’s pictures” with paperback-profound titles like Imitation of Life or All That Heaven Allows or Written on the Wind. Over the last couple of decades, though, his oeuvre has been reevaluated by the critical-academic community and is now more highly regarded than that of most of his “serious” Hollywood contemporaries. What’s happened is that they have caught up to a public that was in Sirk’s corner all along: All his films are stupendously watchable; they made money—many were hits—and he was probably able to get more profundity and style on the screen through the side door than somebody like Orson Welles was ever allowed to shovel in up front.

But it’s not hard to see why a serious-minded Eisenhower-era critic raised on a diet of East of Eden and On the Waterfront might find Douglas Sirk a bit difficult to digest. Consider the storyline from Magnificent Obsession: Mr. Irresponsible, millionaire playboy, survives a boating accident with the speedy intervention of an emergency crew equipped with the community’s only resuscitator. On the other side of the lake, a beloved physician-philanthropist dies because the needed resuscitator isn’t there. Mr. Irresponsible, wracked with guilt, decides he must take Dr. Philanthropist’s place as the community’s quiet benefactor. Overplaying his hand, he also tries to take Dr. Philanthropist’s place at home with his wife. Spurning his advances, Mrs. Philanthropist is hit by a car and is struck blind. While recuperating, she develops a friendship with a guy she meets on the beach, unable to see that it’s Guess Who.

Mr. Irresponsible anonymously pays for her to see the finest specialists in Europe. He visits her there, and she falls in love with him. He tells her who he actually is. She breaks off the relationship. The European specialists turn out to be powerless, so Mr. Irresponsible decides to give up this millionaire thing, goes to medical school, and becomes a famous brain surgeon. Not too many years later he learns she’s fallen into a coma. He rushes to the scene, operates, restores her sight, and is there at her bedside when she awakes. A heavenly choir sings, and our serious-minded critic loses his lunch on the way back to his typewriter.

I can sympathize. To one raised outside the melodramatic loop, an encounter with Magnificent Obsession—or any other of his 50’s films—can be pretty disconcerting: The speed with which plot complications pile up against each other is breathtaking (like a video of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead stuck on fast forward); characters just up and say what’s on their minds directly and bluntly; and the search for love and its myriad setbacks is the centre of existence for everyone—maybe even for God as well. It’s philosophically simple and easy to digest—all the crackers are from way down there in the heart of the barrel, where they’ve had a chance to get all warm and fuzzy—and Sirk aims straight for the heart, using strictly below-the-belt techniques.

To spend time in the company of a Sirk film is to be seduced into accepting melodrama as legitimate artifice, and once you’ve bought into the process—for me, it happened about midway through the opening credits to Written on the Wind—it proves an astonishingly flexible genre. Take A Time to Love and a Time to Die, released in 1958 and one of the best (and least-known) American war movies ever made. It is a startling film: In an era of chauvinistic U.S. war movies peopled by caricature Nazis and the clones of Sgt. Rock, Sirk chose to shoot a paraphrase of All Quiet on the Western Front in actual bombed-out German locations, giving us WW2 from the point of view of the losers, both military and civilian.

Not surprisingly, he finds the most important action away from the front, in a romance between a German soldier on leave and a woman he meets while searching for his parents through the rubble of his home town. Their affair is tragic, on-the-run, and portrayed with enough conviction to make you believe that what they are going through—not gunshots exchanged between soldiers—is the real tragedy of war. A Time to Love and a Time to Die is Sam Pekenpah’s Cross of Iron directed as if it were Kings Row—which turns out to be an even better idea than it sounds.

Being even better than it sounds is a trait of Sirk’s work, especially for one unfamiliar with the real sophistication of his apparently weeping universe: Behind every tear is a dig at contemporary society; bubbling up through the soap is a wail of horror at what people will do to remain unhappy.

What seems little more than a parade of well-off women’s romantic misalliances is more like a cry of dismay at the hellish trappings of contemporary American life: all the men who aren’t Rock Hudson are weak, alcoholic or deceitful; the suburb is a women’s prison; and kids are like pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (When two grown children abandon their mother after destroying her romance in All That Heaven Allows, they buy her a television set. “Turn the dial,” they tell her, “and you have all the company you want.”) Even the titles are heavy with social irony: There is no tomorrow in There’s Always Tomorrow; in All that Heaven Allows, nothing is allowed.

Given this implicit social critique, it has been fashionable of late to dress Sirk up as some sort of a lefty subversive. This does him no favor, since he’s after something potentially more difficult, and that is taking melodrama seriously: Our emotional lives are what is most important to us; social convention does kill the quest for love; the stuff that glues us together as a society does tear us apart as individuals. To him, these axioms obtain no matter who’s on top socially; there is no implication that the poor have it any better. (The rich certainly get no help from their social position: In There’s Always Tomorrow, wealthy toy manufacturer Fred MacMurray feels like a robot in his suburban existence. You can almost see his eyes mist over when he runs into old flame Barbara Stanwyck—no doubt reminiscing about the good ol’ days when life meant something and the two of them plotted to bump off her husband in Double Indemnity.)

Sirk’s films still work forty years on because he reaches us in the way we prefer to reach each other. To accept them on their own terms is to open yourself up to all sorts of unexpected delights—like Rock Hudson in his pre-Doris Days (if he had been hit by a car in 1959 he might well have become the thinking woman’s James Dean); or the magnificent suffering of Jane Wyman and the burnt-out seductiveness of Dorothy Malone (overheated in Written on the Wind and downright overdone in The Tarnished Angels); or an astonishing visual style where characters run an obstacle course through a world of suburban interiors lit as if they were dungeons from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Cumulatively, Sirk’s movies are as close to self-recommending as you are likely to get: Designed for the multitudes, they are finally starting to catch on with the merely smart.

Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997

Night of the living Peanuts

The Toronto Star TV Guide recommendation for Sept. 1, 1989 read: "For every season, there is a Charlie Brown special. From 1969, It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown has Charlie moaning about how the boys never won a game against the girls at summer camp. A great way to prepare the kids for that dreaded first day at school."

As soon as I read it, I felt a surge of nostalgia for those halcyon 1969 times when I took some time from my carefree days of evading the 106 neighborhood bullies in River Heights to watch the show's original broadcast. Peanuts was hot stuff then, being the world's most popular comic strip, and every Charlie Brown TV special was an event.

After I thought about it for a while, though, I realized was that the show's return for the nth time was probably more to prepare we adults for that dreaded day the kids go back to school---Charlie Brown is, after all, our symbol, not our kids'. Snoopy works for Metropolitan Life, now.

A scene drifted into my head: the family has all gathered around the television to watch It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown. Dad tells the kids that he watched exactly the same show when it originally came out in 1969. The program begins, and as the images flash by, the parents positively glow with emotion, secure in the certainty that the kids at this very moment probably feel exactly as they themselves did 20 years ago.

This is now expected to be a point of real contact between generations; a meaningful family moment, rather like taking Dad to see Field of Dreams, and then going home with him to get good and drunk and listen to all of his Benny Goodman records and a scratchy old copy of Tommy by The Who. It made me dewy-eyed just to think about it.

But then, there is also something vaguely sick about the whole idea of a group of otherwise intelligent adults re-experiencing their video childhood in front of the family, and then thinking that this somehow better connects them to their kids. Points of real communion between generations used to revolve around the concrete common experiences of growing up or growing older: A first day of school, or a last day of summer vacation. Childhood humiliations. Falling in love. First hot-wired car. Childhood victories. These are experiences our parents had, we had, and our children have. They are common episodes which jump generational boundaries to connect us.

But, witnessing all of the above second-hand in a Charlie Brown TV special as a point of family communion? Something funny is going on here: The way-back machine has crashed in flames, or at least does something radically different than it used to. Maybe the idea now is just to get in touch with your own childhood, and the guise of communing with the kids is just so much sentimental malarkey. Maybe Gil Scott-Heron was right: We just want to go back as far as we can, even if it's only as far as last week.

I may be making too much of this, but look at the commitment to a kind of diseased, second-order, bad-media nostalgia in recent offerings from the marketplace: ancient, adolescent-fodder comic books like Superman and Batman are now live-action movies, with live-action renderings of The Flintstones, Dick Tracy, and Boris and Natasha (from the 60's TV cartoon show Rocky and his Friends) on their way.

George Lucas remakes the garbage sci-fi serials of his youth as Star Wars I-III. Steven Spielberg remakes the garbage serials of his youth as Indiana Jones I-III. (Didn't these guys experience anything real when they were growing up?) Both make literally billions, as an entire generation resonates in harmony. In a weird variation, the old literally become young again in Freaky Friday, Like Father, Like Son, 18 Again, Vice Versa, Cocoon I & II, and Peggy Sue Got Married.

On TV, a seemingly endless parade of haggard reruns of Danger Man, Leave it to Beaver, Perry Mason, I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, The Honeymooners, Andy Griffith, and a truckload of others, wanders across the late-night TV screens of a host of sentimental yuppies, who are all coked up and trying to re-experience a childhood when those shows were the highlight of their existence. Hell, I'd love to rent a couple of episodes of The Outer Limits and wander back to the days when I was about nine, and had to sneak into the TV room to watch it. But that's a thoroughgoing bit of self-indulgence I would never inflict on someone a generation younger than I.

Star Trek movies. Remakes of Mission Impossible. Contemporary 60's radio. The Big Chill. Sequels. Gomer Pyle, USMC on video. The glorious moment when Team Canada's Paul Henderson scored the Only Winning Goal That Ever Really Mattered---that moment which brought history to a close, now available to be relived again and again. Millions mainline video reruns of their childhood while their children shave their heads and rerun the childhood of Nazi Germany in the streets of Anyville, Canada....

Aw, c'mon now. Meaningful contact between people who don't really know each other often takes the form of an exchange of artifacts; offerings left at the edge of the Other's village in the dark of night.

But this? This is crazy: When we awake it seems that the only artifact that the first TV generation has to offer the second is Watching.

-Published in Between the Lines, 1989

While You Were Dead

The major reason you are supposed to be interested in Kiss of Death is that this is meant to be the big Breakout Film for David Caruso, whom you may remember as Mr. Intensity on the TV series NYPD Blue. The reason I’ve been waiting for Kiss of Death has been to see Nicolas Cage as a psychotic badman with a goatee. As it turns out, neither was really worth waiting for, but for me, the Cage letdown is the tougher cross to bear.

Kiss of Death is a good-souled-ex-petty-criminal-caught-up-in-forces-he-can’t-control movie, and it’s chief problem is that it has nothing to really distinguish it from all the other older and largely better good-souled-ex-petty-criminal-caught-up-in-forces-he-can’t-control movies. It is based on the screenplay of a 1947 movie of the same name, although the director of the current version swears on a stack of Leonard Maltin Movie Guides that there’s nothing of the original left. This is too bad—I seem to remember a scene from the original where giggling psychopath Richard Widmark shoves a little old lady in a wheelchair down a set of stairs, and something like that might just have saved Kiss of Death, or at least given us something to look forward to.

There is a choice at the center of Kiss of Death that nobody at the studio had either the guts or the good sense to make. Do you want to make a good, conventional decent-man-on-the-run piece? Okay, then ditch the director and maybe bring in somebody like Sidney Lumet, who has done this kind of stuff in his sleep; and lose Nicolas Cage, or at least the nut-case mannerisms that make him a bad joke in a conventional context. We’ll keep David Caruso—let’s pretend that he’s on parole from TV, and see if he can carry a film by himself.

On the other hand, if you want to make this a great whacked-out over-the-top thriller, well, then let Cage drool a lot more, expand his part, ditch Caruso, bring in Quinten Tarrantino as a script doctor, hire David Lynch or maybe Lars von Trier to direct, wind ‘em up and let ‘em go. You’d have the movie of the decade, or at least movie of the week, which is about 4 1/2 days better than you’ve got right now.

As it is, Kiss of Death is a real Todd Stottlemyer of a movie: 11-and-10 won-loss record, ERA in the high 4’s or low 5’s, takes up space in the rotation and pitches lots of innings, but not much more than that. Like Steven Brunt says, it’s those .500 movies that’ll kill you every time.


While You Were Sleeping—which might also be called Two Engagements, a Wedding, and a Coma—is about beautiful lonely people, and is based on what is—along with mistaken identity—the most popular of old comic chestnuts: the lie that grew and grew. It was made by a Disney subsidiary, and has five and a half Disney Moments scattered throughout, which is skating perilously close to the edge, but it never falls off.

This is because it has three big things in its favor. First, it’s very, very funny. Second, it has this incredible supporting cast of people like Peter Boyle and Glynis Johns and Peter Galleger and they do a lot of great ensemble work. But most important, it stars Sandra Bullock—who with this movie will easily step ahead of Meg Ryan as Hollywood’s most beautiful and convincing funny-girl-next-door. The camera loves her and she was making people swoon in the aisles.

Still, what fascinated me the most about While You Were Sleeping was it’s major conceit—in fack, the conceit of a whole genre of films—that we can be made to like and even believe in the notion of the beautiful lonely person. Think of it. I don’t know of any people like this—gorgeous, charismatic, sane people who cry in their solitary eggnog at Christmas. All the good-looking, intelligent funny people I know are all married to one another and having one hell of a good time. Yet we will accept the existence of people like this in a movie. Why?

Well, maybe it’s that seeing a beautiful person in our own emotional situation legitimizes the feeling for us. If those society lionizes above all—and those are the beautiful—if they’re lonely and screwed up and unhappy, well, it must be all right for the rest of us to be that way, too. I dunno, maybe I’m gonna have to reread my Aristotle—I’m sure he’s got something about this somewhere. All I know is that it didn’t make my feelings feel legitimate at all.

Nice movie though, and it’s gonna be a monster hit.

-Broadcast on Definitely Not the Opera, 1995

Return of the Pod Producers

Well, unlike the movie I’m going to talk about, I’ll get down to the important stuff right away---The Matrix: Revolutions was the most unpleasant, time-wasting cinemagoing experience I’ve had since Armageddon. It’s bone-crunchingly noisy, it hasn’t got a brain in its head or whiff of poetry in its mythology; its love story is dead on the slab; the acting is ponderous; there are plot holes that will make you gasp; it feels longer than Ben-Hur; you have to work really hard just to watch it and you have to work even harder to care about anything you see. And for the cost of admission for two you can get you and your date a really nice bottle of wine---I know my choice.

Worse, it doesn’t even deliver the goods as an action movie. The Matrix Reloaded, even if it took forever to get moving and was cluttered with marble-mouthed pontificating, at least had a few action set-pieces that pinned you to the back of your seat and made you grin. Revolutions lacks even that.

Virtually no screen time is spent in that wonderful black-vinyl and ray-ban- world of the Matrix; we are for the most part trapped in that dim and grubby world of Zion, where the producers make the same mistake George Lucas made in his second series of Star Wars: and that is, no matter how flashy you make them and how cutting-edge the technology you use to animate them, machines fighting other machines is just not compelling. People we could not give a damn about---and in fact have to rack our brains to even remember from part 2---fight a big meaningless battle against machines that are as anonymous as so many flying can-openers. Actually, the people climb into machines themselves and together with the enemy cutlery, they all dig a hole in the center of this movie that sucks in every whiff of personality it ever had.

For me, it all came to a symbolic head close to the end, when Neo and Trinity have one final squeeze before parting ways. “You have to save Zion” she says. And I thought, Zion is the least interesting place I’ve ever seen in a movie! I thought Neo was supposed to be saving the human race! But no, in this movie, Neo’s working for the producers, not for us. Now, he’s there to save a set.

One of the most intriguing propositions made by the original Matrix was that our world has become a bunch of human bodies kept in pods while all the life and energy is sucked out of them to feed a race of machines. It’s become pretty obvious that the Hollywood that gives us The Matrix: Revolutions is one of those machines. And like Neo, we’re now faced with a choice. Take the blue pill and you’ll keep thinking you’re seeing real movies. Or you can take the red pill, get your ass out of the theatre, and tell the machine to get stuffed. The choice is yours.

-Broadcast on CBC Radio's DNTO, 7 November 2003

John Ford: The Last Roundup

John Ford directed something like 100 films of all varieties over a 50-year career, but he is best known for his westerns: movies like Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine set the Western archetype for a couple of generations of filmmakers and filmgoers alike. Yet as the Cinematheque Ontario retrospective that starts tonight makes clear, Ford’s time as a vital force in the art of cinema has long passed. Cinematheque should call this series “The Last Roundup”—it’ll be difficult to see the need for anyone doing another Ford tribute any time soon.

Unlike, say, Orson Welles, whose still-inspiring career was on display in the Cinematheque series immediately preceding this one, the work of John Ford has become largely irrelevant to contemporary cinema. All the usual film-society suspects—Welles, Renoir, Ray (Nicholas and Satyajit), Fuller, Antonioni... even Robert Bresson—all have their disciples. But nobody wants to make movies like John Ford any more.

This should not come as too much of a surprise: we are even farther in years from 1956’s The Searchers —the film generally acclaimed as Ford’s greatest—than The Searchers was from the invention of the feature film. Ford was lionized by the French critics in the 50’s, the majority of the academic debate over him took place 35 years ago, and his critical reputation peaked about the time of his death in 1973. Cinema has evolved in the meantime: Nobody has written a serious theoretical piece on Ford in 20 years. The man is now a subject for the biographers, not the theorists; and his movies are now museum pieces from the days when dinosaurs ruled the west.

Some of the artifacts have held up better than others. When Ford had a good script, he made a good movie. The Searchers, The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath (both 1940); Wagon Master (1950)... these are all good films; capable of being enjoyably absorbed as the heirlooms they are. They are movies that display the virtues for which he has been justly praised: a great cinematic eye and an invisible, self-effacing visual style.

The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers especially stand out: Grapes for a sense of conscience largely absent from the rest of Ford’s work; The Searchers because it actually is the way your fond childhood memories of the other Ford westerns feel. Both are for the most part also blessedly free of the self-indulgence and sentimental gas about cavalry and frontier life that mars so many of the rest of his movies—they offer us Ford without embarrassment.

Time has unfortunately made embarrassment the dominant response to far to too much of what remains. The man who could make Henry Fonda look beautiful just walking up a street in My Darling Clementine could rarely make John Wayne sound comfortable speaking English. His sentimentalism in Young Mr. Lincoln is almost alarming—the movie feels something like a Frank Capra life of Christ, and is so full of icons that the editors of Cahiers du Cinema were able to invent structuralist analysis on the basis of that movie alone.

In his westerns he was prone to repeat himself shamelessly: Watch too many in a row and you begin to believe that there is a lost tribe of actors wandering in circles around Monument Valley. His racism hardly seems an issue any more: what sticks in your craw now is the absurd way he always has his Indians fall off their horses when they get shot. The relationships between his leading men and women (for example, Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine, or John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in just about anything) make Popeye and Olive Oyl look like Tracy and Hepburn.

When Ford was coasting, which was often, the blarney-and-bullshit can become almost insufferable. (A hint: if you see Andy Devine’s or Victor McLaglen’s name in the credits, you’re likely in for trouble.) Rio Grande—the third in Ford’s “cavalry trilogy” has its first moment of real drama about 80 minutes in. Until then, it’s cavalry life as a bunch of yuks between good ol’ boys, interrupted by the occasional visit from a woman nobody knows how to react to. If Rio Grande is anything to go by, Ford’s view of the history of the west is one long, awkward look back at his own adolescence.

All of this reaches some kind of zenith in 1952’s The Quiet Man, in which John Wayne plays a boxer who returns to Ireland, ultimately to do battle with Victor McLaglen (drunk, yet again) for the hand of Maureen O’ Hara. The Quiet Man is all faith-and-begoria and calcified blarney; surely the most outrageous movie ever to win its maker an Oscar for Best Director. (Ford won four of them in all.)

The lingering image from an extended encounter with the work of John Ford is a feeling of a real, natural talent done in by indiscipline and questionable taste. When directing the right script he was capable of what felt like an elegant, plainspoken honesty which admirers like Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray were able to bring even more effectively to their own films.

When left to his own whims, Ford inevitably leaned on the cliché—cliché’s which have been deemed excusable by his admirers because he invented them. But critic David Thomson has put this notion of inventing the cliché in it’s proper perspective: “Sheer longevity made Ford a major director.”

The elevation of Ford to the pantheon of cinema’s master directors has been a historical peccadillo that did neither him nor his audiences any favors. Perhaps it’s now time we relieved Ford of the responsibility that comes with being called a great filmmaker, and took what the man said about himself more seriously. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ford claimed that “...the only thing I always had was an eye for composition. But I never thought about what I was doing in terms of art or anything like that. To me it was always a job of work—which I enjoyed immensely—and that's it.”

In a 1973 tribute to Ford, Indian filmmaking legend Satyajit Ray tells the story of the 1958 meeting between Ford and the much younger British director Lindsay Anderson. Anderson was showing Ford a copy of Every Day Except Christmas, his documentary mood-piece on the behind-the-scenes action at the Covent Garden Market. After watching silently for half an hour, Ford finally turned to Anderson and said, “when are we going to see those Goddamn vegetables?”

It’s a phrase that makes a good epitaph. It cuts through the academic double-talk and sums up the real virtues of the filmmaker: John Ford was the guy who gave us the vegetables.

Published in the Globe and Mail, 2000

They Text Among Us

To the single person, the institution of online dating should be one of the most opportune uses of technology ever designed: matchmaking without the bullshit or bar-hopping; a perfect meeting of technological opportunity and a human need. Indeed, for single baby-boomers, online dating’s popularity is now second only to classic matchmaking by mutual friends. But there are some ominous clouds on the digital horizon.

Glitches are appearing in the machinery: A recent class-action lawsuit against online dating site Match.com claims that 60% of the user profiles are fraudulent. And the problem this highlights is not simply that people tend to fib about their weight when there’s no way to catch them out; it’s that the system by which we tell each other about ourselves online is fatally flawed. The very structure and technology of online dating makes it a perfect home to the pathologically amoral predator—the sociopath.

According to the best estimates of social scientists in the field, the prevalence in society of the pathologically amoral—people of no conscience who chronically lie and exploit others for their own ends—amounts to about one person in 100. When you factor out Parliament, this means that there are about 350,000 Canadian sociopaths lurking around out there.

And the anonymity of the online dating site is a perfect medium for sociopaths on the prowl: They have no reputation to precede them; the only story you read is the one they themselves tell. The now-old joke is that on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog; but on a dating site—especially a free service relying exclusively on user-generated content—nobody knows that you’re a mad dog either

What’s the lonely online single to do? Sociopaths are usually quite attractive, charismatic people, so identifying the liar and the opportunist behind the mask is a subtle, lengthy process—typically, only their long-term victims know that anything is not as it seems. Within a business, a police force, an armed service, or a male-dominated religion, sociopathic behavior is often accepted as normal—or in that context is at least a lot harder to distinguish.

Worse, romance is the very home of self-delusion and compromise, where we willingly suspend disbelief, and where by design, hope triumphs over reality and self-knowledge. So, how do we unmask the sociopath online, before we’ve become subject to Stockholm Syndrome?

On the theory that you should always reach for the most industrial-strength tool you can get your hands on to do the job, let us consider Canadian Psychologist  Dr. Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist—Revised. Developed over several decades, the PCL-R has become the classic, go-to tool of the corrections industry to distinguish the mere criminal from the sociopath. Using something like the PCL-R to screen your online dates may feel like overkill—like taking morphine for a headache. On the other hand, it’s probably better to have the Club of Hercules and not need it, than to need the Club of Hercules and not have it.

According to the PCL-R, the visible identifying characteristics of the sociopath are that they are: emotionally shallow; glib but superficial; deceitful and manipulative; egocentric with a grandiose self-image; promiscuous; impulsive excitement seekers unable to show restraint or take responsibility; and people who above all show a lack of empathy bordering on solipsism. They are strangers to fellow-sentiment; people for whom solidarity is a matter of phonetics, not feeling.

How might you tease out this profile in a dating situation or conversation? After all, it’s one thing for a prison psychiatrist to be doing a Q&A with a tattooed somebody on the other side of a wire mesh; quite another when you’re sharing a carafe of pinot noir with your date in the local wine-bar. So consider the following questionnaire as more of a PCL-R Home Edition.

Did your date give you groundless generic complements—as if from a checklist, but having little to do with real knowledge of you?

1)      No (0 points)

2)      A couple (1 point)

3)      Frequently (3 points)

4)      He started with “you have nice eyes” and went on ad nausium from there (5 points)

You ask “have you ever been married? S/he replies

1)      No. (Or once.) (0 points)

2)      “Once or twice” (2 points)

3)      4 or 5 times (3 points)

4)      “My last wife left me because she just couldn’t take a punch.” (5 points)

At any point in the conversation, did it ever seem your date was opportunistically taking multiple and contradictory points of view?

1)      No, all the talk seemed to come from a unified personality (0 points)

2)      There were a couple of inconsistent positions I noticed (1 point)

3)      S/he seemed to be able to switch ideological loyalties like turning on a dime (3 points)

4)      I felt like a facilitator at an Ayn Rand / Hells Angels convention (5 points)

You tell a story about a minor personal tragedy. Your date responds by

1)      Turning pale and gulping out “...but that’s awful!” (0 points)

2)      Giving advice (1 point)

3)      Telling you what s/he would have done to prevail in that situation (3 points)

4)      Looking past you with glazed-over eyes, shrugging and saying “life’s a struggle” (5 points)

Did you get the odd, fleeting feeling that you were being probed for weaknesses?

1)      No, s/he confessed to far more personal faults than I did (0 points)

2)      I noticed that s/he let me do most of the personal talking (1 point)

3)      There were a couple of times I thought “why’d s/he want to know that?” (3 points)

4)      There were long stretches when I felt like a replicant being interviewed in Blade Runner (5 points)

Did any of his/her personal claims strain credibility or seem to have been created ad hoc?

1)      No, all the diverse bits of biography seemed to hang together reasonably (0 points)

2)      There were times when it felt like the story was being made up as it went along (2 points)

3)      Every time s/he flirted with self-contradiction s/he changed the subject (3 points)

4)      This person’s self-description felt like a copy of the Weekly World News that had been torn up and taped back together all wrong (5 points)

For a while, the conversation turns to employment. Your date

1)      Seems pretty happy and secure with his/her job (0 points)

2)      Seems to have had a lot of jobs (1 points)

3)      Seems to have left a lot of jobs without giving notice (3 points)

4)      Seems to have left so many jobs for dubious-sounding reasons that chronically being fired is the only way to make sense of any of it (5 points)

You ask: “Do you have a personal code?”

1)      “No more than the usual—the golden rule, ‘don’t be evil’, that kind of stuff.” (0 points)

2)      “You have to look out for yourself, because nobody else is going to.” (2 points)

3)      “I follow my own laws—after all, the Übermensch makes his own tools.” (3 points)

4)      “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of me.” (5 points)

You ask: “How was your childhood? How was school for you?”

1)      “Show me the man who enjoyed his schooldays and I’ll show you a bully and a bore.” (0 points)

2)      “It was okay, I guess—I don’t remember too much of it.” (1 point)

3)      “I was a rebel—it got me into trouble, but the people running things were real morons.” (3 points)

4)      “Reform school was the happiest 14 years of my life.” (5 points)

You ask: “Where do you see yourself in a few years?”

1)      “I really enjoy what I’m doing right now” (0 points)

2)      “Oh, I don’t know—I try not to think about that too much” (1 point)

3)      “I’ve got big plans. In five years I’m going to be light-years from here” (3 points)

4)      “I’ve already copyrighted the title of my autobiography” (5 points)

Score

0—10              Moral and sane; maybe even slightly prosaic

11—20            Largely normal; not without character faults, but faults likely not clinical

21—30            Borderline risky; even if not pathological likely to be a pain in the ass

31—40            Many warning bells should be going off in your head by the time date is finished; likely best to change email addresses when you get home

41—50            By now, you should already have excused yourself to go to the washroom, sneaked out the restaurant’s back door, and run home to upgrade the locks on your doors

Published in Zoomer, 2012