The People We've Never Met

Ray Liotta died this week. We had never met, but I felt the blow to my heart when I saw the headline. Dead at 67. A secret illness? A mob hit --- Goodfellas style.  Someone who had confused the gangster roles he had played with reality.

On the way from dropping my dog off at daycare this morning, there was an update on the radio. The morning show host who also was feeling the loss of this actor who neither one of us had met, reported that Ray Liotta had died in his sleep while on location in the Dominican Republic. No foul play was suspected. His fiancee had been with him. He had been working. He had been contemplating the future and his next film.

I don't know what it was about Ray Liotta that I loved. Maybe it was that smile. Maybe it was his jauntiness. Maybe was the emotions that played across his face or the voice that was always recognizable. Whatever it was, I felt his loss. 

There was other losses this week. Nineteen of them were children in a school in Texas. The father of one of them wept as he asked Anderson Cooper or someone from CNN how an 18 year old gunman could look at his little girl -- his beautiful, happy little girl -- and shoot her. Anderson or who ever the reporter was reached out to touch his arm as he wept. And I felt as if I knew that little girl and that father.

I cried again when I read the story of the man "who died of grief" -- his wife of 24 years and the mother of his four children had been one of the teachers who died in that school when an 18 year old boy with a high-powered gun in his hand opened fire. He died of a heart attack -- a "broken heart" -- two days later.

This week has been sad. During our three-day celebration of "the unofficial beginning of summer," I am going to pause and think about Ray Liotta and a weeping father and a man whose heart broke.  And about all the other losses we have had -- losses of people and stability. 

At some point this weekend, I will sit down at my computer, and I will write one of the scenes of the book I am working on. I don't know what I want to say or how I will say it. But I know I need to say something about what it means to be human. I need to say something about how we mourn for and with people we have never met.

The Bad Guy Question

Sorry to have been away. It was end of semester and I lost track of my day to blog while reading student papers and getting my grades in. 

Douglas's Monday post caught my eye. I've thought a bit about The Sopranos and the bad guy question. As I may have mentioned here, I've been working on a book about the factual aspects of gangster films. The publisher asked me to do nine films and include The Sopranos as my tenth entry because of the TV series influence on popular culture.

I hadn't seen all of the episodes of The Sopranos  because I didn't have a subscription to HBO when it was on. I only caught an occasional episode when I was staying at a hotel during a conference. Even so, the show was popular enough that I was able to watch clips and read the commentary by critics and fans. With the book in progress, I decided to watch all six seasons. A daunting undertaking (86 episodes), but fascinating.

Tony Soprano and his crew presented me with a dilemma. It was the same moral dissonance that I experienced with the protagonists in the other gangster movies that I watched or re-watched. As Douglas noted about Tony and Christopher in The Sopranos, the display of humanity by characters who do really bad things can be disorienting. 

Michael Corleone in The Godfather does not intend to become a mobster. He has served in World War II and returned home planning to have a life outside the "family business". But when his father, Don Corleone, becomes the target of a rival crime family, Michael kills two men as they are dining in a restaurant. Sent off to Sicily, he marries and suffers the loss of his innocent young bride when one of his men plants a car bomb. Back home in America, his brother Sonny is ambushed and killed. Michael comes home, seeks out Kay, the woman who told he would never become a mobster, and persuades her to marry him. When Don Corleone dies of a heart attack while playing with his grandson in the garden, Michael steps into a role that his other brother is unable to assume. Michael becomes the head of his crime family.

Although many fans rate The Godfather, Part II as a even better movie than the first, I have to say that I find Michael Corleone unredeemable. He has settled too comfortably into his reign as don. He enjoys power too much. He is a dark character, ruthless, cruel. He is not a tragic hero, and I don't care about his fate. Oddly enough, Tony Soprano does worst things, literally has blood on his hands. But the life he leads give him panic attacks. He needs to see a psychiatrist to cope with his anxiety. I care about whether Tony will live or die, and still feel frustrated by the way the series ended. Was Tony dead or alive when the screen went to black?

Ray Liotta's portrayal of real-life mob soldier, Henry Hill, in Goodfellas is another riveting depiction of an incredibly violent man. But Liotta's voiceover narration is engaging. Liotta's Hill is unrepentant and jaunty. He normalizes the violence that he and the other mobsters engage in. He draws us into the subculture, makes us complicit as we root for him because he seems less vicious than other members of his crime family. 

Thinking about these two gangsters and the others in the films and the television series I've watched has been useful as I plotted my 1939 historical thriller. I have a character who is a bad guy. He cheats, he lies, he kills. But the deeper I go into his motivation, the more I understand his "why." The more I try to step into his shoes, the better I am able to understand why he is who he is. This makes my feelings about him more ambivalent. I want to be on the side of my protagonist, but I find my bad guy more complex. I need to restore balance between the two.

At any rate, Douglas's post has given me more to think about as I work on my bad guy's back story. I'll ponder the matter after I've enjoyed my Christmas dinner with friends. Speaking of food, that reminds me of the Liotta's detailed description of the meal he was preparing in between the errands he had to do to prepare his female drug courier for a flight she was scheduled to make. . . .

Happy Holidays, everyone!  I'll check in with you again in the new year. Wishing us all less stress and more joy.

Inhabiting Characters' Minds

I realized something a couple of nights ago when I was reading before lights out. By the time I get to bed these days, I really need to escape from all of the depressing and scary thoughts that would otherwise follow me into sleep. I've found that any book works, as long as it holds my attention for that half hour.

For the past week, I've been reading Naomi Hirahara's Mas Arai novel, Hiroshima Boy. If you haven't encountered him, Mas is in his 80's, a member of the Japanese American community in Los Angeles, and a retired gardener. In this book, he travels back to Hiroshima to bring half of  his dead friend's ashes to the man's sister. On the ferry to Ino, where the woman lives in an assisted living facility, he notices a teenage boy in a red San Francisco T-shirt. Later, he finds the boy's body. Then the ashes he has brought with him disappear, apparently taken by the woman who wandered into his room.

What I realized about this book is that my brain shifts gears when I'm reading it. I am seeing the world through Mas's eyes. I am inhabiting his mind, and the way he thinks is almost like meditation. I'm not good at meditation. It makes me impatient. I want to get it over with and check it off my list and move on. I almost put this book back on my TBR pile. But then I clicked on a news website (in my endless surfing from one website to another looking for good news). There was an article about the 75th anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima. Obviously, this was the right time to read this book. So I went back to it -- back into Mas's head. I'm slowing down and letting him take me along at his pace. Having surrendered, I really love this character. Bonus: the plot is intriguing and I'm getting a history lesson from the perspective of a survivor. 

Oddly enough, this has reminded me of Goodfellas. I have watched this movie multiple times. Several times recently because it's among the films I'm discussing in a book about gangster movies. If you haven't seen the movie, it's based on the life of real-life mobster, Henry Hill, who became a government informer. I thought of this movie while reading Hiroshima Boy because watching Goodfellas requires being in Henry Hill's head. Hill is played by Ray Liotta, who provides the exuberant voiceover. We follow Henry from boyhood, when he becomes fascinated with the mobsters who hang out across the street, through his life as an adult criminal, and then his downfall when he is forced to go into the federal witness protection program. What stands out about Henry is his enjoyment of what he does. He "normalizes" the world in which he lives. But the sudden, explosive acts of violence that he and his colleagues engage in are an aspect of this world. These men are criminals and killers. And in the scene that leads up to his arrest, being in Henry Hill's head is like being deranged. He (Liotta) tells us about his crazy day, as he is preparing an elaborate meal, picking up his brother, getting the woman who is transporting his drugs ready for her trip, and worrying about the plane overhead that seems to have him under surveillance. He is high on his own drugs and so tightly wound that a doctor insists on examining him. Being in Henry's head toward the end of the movie is knowing you're in a bad place and -- if you didn't know how his story ends -- you would wonder if he (you) are going to make it out alive.

As a reader/viewer I appreciate the depth of these characters. As a writer, I'm analyzing how I'm brought  so fully into their worlds. I'm also thinking about why I find it impossible to do more than skim American Psycho, and why I still haven't been able to make it through the much less graphic movie. I suspect it's because there is nothing about the protagonist that I can comprehend. There is too much darkness there.

At any rate, it's something to consider as I work on my historical thriller. Do I want to have readers enter my villain's head and understand how he sees the world? Do I want to give him that opportunity to reveal himself? The thing is it could completely change my book. For the reader to go there, I have to go there first. The last time I did that with a character in another book I was working on, I saw the world through his eyes and realized he was not capable of what I wanted him to do. If that happened with my thriller, it would completely screw up my book.

Thinking. . .

Just a Little Tummy Ache

Thank you, Aline, for your post on Monday. You've given me another destination if I actually do take a vacation in late May (meeting up with friends who want to do a bus tour of Scotland). You also made me happy that I'm working on a historical novel set during an era when one could still hope to get away with accidentally seasoning the stew with a poisonous flower.

I long to have an herb garden. Since our growing season here is short, I thought of doing a window box. My only problem is that I have a cat who snacks on anything green. I've taken to the internet to Google the various lists available on plants that are dangerous for four-legged family members. I've even noted the green plants that my cat's vet has in her office waiting room. But I'm still wary that somehow I will manage to purchase the wrong plant at the garden store and do my cat in. And, yes, I have asked the staff in several stores. They always seem reluctant to assure me of the safety of their lovely plants. I suspect they're concerned about a lawsuit if my cat decides to have a snack and gets more than a stomachache. 

One of the workshops that I'm scheduled to do at Sleuthfest in March is titled "Food, Crime, and Justice." Since I'm not an expert on poisons, I'm leaving that discussion to the presenter who is. But I do plan to discuss the theories in criminology about killers who use poison. For example, the male criminologist who in the mid-20th century wrote a book in which he argued that poison was the preferred murder weapon of female killers. This preference, he argued, was for both practical reasons and because women were secretive and devious. 

I'm going to encourage my workshop participants to think about everyday interactions that involve food and drink. I've thought about this because whenever I go back to revise my own books and short stories I notice how often my characters eat and drink. I don't think I'm capable of writing a high-octane thriller in which no one ever stops for a meal or a bathroom break. Not that I want to. My characters stop off in their favorite cafe or restaurant. They make trips to the supermarket. They talk as they are cooking and sitting down to dinner. Their favorite foods and how they consume them reveal something about them.

I always notice how characters prepare and consume food in crime films. It's one of the topics I'm discussing in my book about gangster films. For example, two of my favorite scenes in Goodfellas involve food preparation -- the gangsters cooking their own elaborate meal in the prison kitchen, and, later, Ray Liotta (as Henry Hill) back in the kitchen preparing a meal as his character's world is about to come crashing down.  

In everyday life, we do tend to pigeonhole people by what they consume -- vegans versus meat eaters. Hard-working, drive-thru black coffee drinkers versus the espresso latte elitists who lounge in cafes. We have stereotypes of who these people are -- work, friends, beliefs. In fact, these perceptions have become so much a part of American culture that politicians can alienate voters by fumbles when they try to shop in a supermarket, order a hamburger, or eat a slice of pizza. Note to politicians:  Do not eat your pizza with a fork in New York City. 

My fascination with food is one of the reasons that I'm writing a book set in 1939. My characters  travel in a Pullman coach, attend the New York World's Fair, and appreciate having enough to eat because they have survived the worst years of the Great Depression. 

Time for lunch. I missed breakfast, and I will be grateful for the meal I am about to consume.