The Joy of Behaving Badly

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

- William Carlos Williams

There is often a certain pure, transcendent joy that accompanies misbehavior. This is evident at an early age – just watch the face of the demonic younger brother in the viral video “Charlie bit my finger.” Somehow, as we get older this tendency becomes less apparent in our day to day lives, but, at least from what we see in “God of Carnage,” that does not mean the gleefulness no longer exists.

My theory is that it’s merely hidden under layers of pretense. Something in our restless psyches is pushing to escape from stifling regulation, and this can manifest itself in interesting ways. There is a wonderful release that comes with, say, escaping at age eight to live as a “hobo” for several hours in the woods surrounding one’s house or wandering with one’s friends out of a school dance to stargaze unchaperoned on the wet grass of the football field. This is just hypothetically speaking of course, as I would never do these sorts of things. And neither would you, right?

Michael, Veronica, Annette, and Alan certainly would not, as we see so clearly from the insistent strength of their initial assertions. And yet there remains that mysterious allure drawing all four towards…what? Towards destruction? That sounds too harsh, and perhaps it is. The Jungians among us would say that it’s beneficial to be in touch with one’s “shadow side,” that primal god of carnage that batters against the walls of convention. Not to mention satisfying.

“I want to show myself in a horrible light,” Michael says, late in the play, because there really is something sort of cathartic to the experience. What makes it so satisfying, where should the line be drawn, and what is to be done when the dangerous catharsis leaves wreckage and disarray? You can hear those questions addressed soon in my interview with director Andrew Grenier.

The Value of Uncertainty

Most of us want things to line up.

We want our lives to follow a scheme, with a measured beat. This is present in the metrical composition of our poetry and literature and even simply in our physical makeup. A friend told me recently about a professor who said that Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter mimicked the beating of the human heart. What that reveals to me is that this need for rhythm and structure extends way past basic motion. The desire for that constant pulse existed centuries ago, long before modern times. Long before Chaplin parodied the industrial revolution’s mechanical heartbeat, humans were creating their own and amplifying it for all to hear. The action is somehow essential, that much is clear.

What becomes trickier to define is the moment at which this desire for rhythm becomes excessive and unnatural, crossing the line into artifice. We all want to feel that collective pulse, but a crudely manufactured one is obvious and grating.

In God of Carnage the characters drift in and out of the realm of social conventions, searching for connection but often stumbling. The passage of time is central to that search, says director Andrew Grenier, because as time marches on alliances are constantly shifting, moving towards something ominous and undefined.

Yet what is remarkable is how, even when all hell breaks loose, these people still feel the urge to clearly define their surroundings. They seek to outline the root of the conflict, their relation to each other, and, near the end of the play, the very nature of humanity. Of course the more sweeping these statements become, the more warped their worldviews appear, often because this means quantifying the unquantifiable.

So how does one decide what is quantifiable, what merits intentional structuring? That’s a question that I, and I’m sure many others, struggle with continually. There is that persistent Aristotelian idea that rest is our natural state, that motion and uncertainty are all fine and good but yet exist only as intermediaries to a final place of resolution. And that’s what I think this play challenges most of all: that knee-jerk impulse to resolve all conflict, both internal and external. Our true capacity, as objects, to spiral ceaselessly is almost frightening to ponder, but for that very reason it is vital to consider these sorts of issues.

In the weeks to come, I’ll be examining this along with other questions surrounding the play.