pulp fiction

The Flacci Conspiracy

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

The Flacci Conspiracy

I’m not going to lie. I’m getting frustrated trying to find an agent for my novel Too Much Trouble. I’ve visited dozens of literary agency websites. They might consider a manuscript involving serial-killer Cub Scout den mothers, dragon-riding interior decorators, sexually repressed werewolves, psychosocially damaged hydro-therapists, or emotionally available Navy SEALs; however, none of them are interested in a coming-of-age novel featuring three college-freshman navigating first love, family, friendship, and loss during one unforgettable Christmas week in 1972.[1]

So the hell with it. Farewell, Too Much Trouble. Hail, The Flacci Conspiracy.  

Here’s a brief synopsis of The Flacci Conspiracy.

Following the aftermath of a world-wide pandemic and four years of godless communistic rule from a doddering old fool who blinks his eyes a lot, voters without college degrees flock to the polls and elect an evangelist-backed charismatic felon[1] obsessed with spicing up Washington DC’s stodgy neo-classical architecture with some Rococo glitter. His grand vision includes a White House ballroom, a Triumphal arch, and a restored Reflection Pool.[2]

However, the former leader of NIAID[3], Antonio Flacci, is hell-bent on sabotaging the President’s beautification projects. He decides to start small by ruining the Reflection Pool restoration. There’s a problem, however. The pool is monitored by a half dozen mobile security stations and at least nine camera sets. 

Working around the clock, the evil scientists at NIAID come up with a diabolical formula resulting in a potion that when ingested turns people invisible for four hours. 

Armed with box-cutters and packets of fertilizer, four invisible Antifa ninjas slit the Reflection Pool’s lining and seed its pristine Bessy Ross blue water with fertilizer, resulting in a virulent outbreak of alga and widespread negative media attention.

I’ll admit I haven’t quite figured out how truth justice, and the American way will be restored, but it will come to me as I’m writing. As my late friend Starkey Flythe, Jr. used to say, “The pen leads the mind.”

Anyway, the very thought of this has restored my will to live.

[1] Picture a combination of the wrestler Gorgeous George and Liberace.

[2] What do you get when you subtract the letters i-h-a-l from Triumphal?

[3] the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

[1]Too Much Trouble does feature a serial killer, but the murders take place “off-stage,” and John Henry Wade dies of natural causes (i.e., a case of the flu) before the police can capture after in a high-speed chase through Dorchester County.

True Detective Revisited: The Fall of American Culture

/ wlm3 / 2 Comments

Let’s talk about Pulp fiction — not the movie — but its namesake, those lurid narratives printed on cheap paper that, to cop the cliché of their heyday, explored the “seamy underside” of American culture, publications like True Detective, which enjoyed a 71-year existence from 1924-1995.

oRAxXq56vZyUSjcwrvanqDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9

The HBO television series of the same name follows the magazine’s tradition of exposing lurid depravity, though it does so on a much higher artistic plane with shades of David Lynch and Flannery O’Connor, and the depravity depicted in the television series is like to 10th power of the seemingly quaint pistol whippings and murders of the magazine’s beginnings. Furthermore, the series seems to me to be an indictment of American culture, its spiritual poverty embodied in the corrupt Christianity of Southern Protestantism and in the rapacious capitalism of multinational corporations.

The director, Cary Joji Fukunaga, constantly underscores these two themes with the visual motifs of crosses and industrial wastelands, which bring to  mind landscapes depicted in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosh.

Check out the opening credits, for example:

Obviously David Lynch’s influence is profound here, not only in the arid, dispassionate images but also in the soundtrack, and this landscape is populated by characters right out of Flannery O’Connor — shiftless Southern scumbags, depraved criminals, corrupt preachers. The twin protagonists Marty and Rust offer an interesting contrast with Marty embodying the hollow hypocritical Protestantism that O’Connor despised and Rust the nihilism that O’Connor, though a devout Catholic, preferred to the mealy-mouthed ignorant insincerity of many of her nominally Christian characters, as we can see in her treatment of the Grandmother and the Misfit in “A Good Man’s Hard to Find.” In fact, in the sixth episode, a grown up child whore whom Marty tried to rescue from a trailer park brothel years ago calls him “a good man” in a restaurant, echoing the Grandmother’s comment to Red Sammy Butts in a restaurant in the O’Connor story. Of course, neither are good men, as Marty clearly demonstrates when he engages in extramarital sex with the woman.

(Here’s an earlier post dealing with Marty and Rust).

goodmanhardtofindThe complex characterization in the context of the cinematic images that create surreal beauty from ugliness makes the series both intellectually and aesthetically interesting, and there’s also a subplot dealing with public education money being funneled into Christian schools to overcome what one character calls “secular, global education.”  These Christian schools lie at the center of the ritualistic Satanic murders the two detectives have spent the better part of two decades trying to unravel.

Certainly, an anthropologist studying the magazine True Detective and the series would conclude that American culture, despite great inroads in civil rights, has declined precipitously since the decades the magazine flourished, and I can’t help but wonder if the creator Pizzolatto is himself a moralist, perhaps even a Catholic in the tradition of both Bosch and O’Connor.

At any rate, the same cultural anthropologist would also have to agree that television has gotten a whole hell of a lot better in the last fifty years.