Author: Christopher Bahn

There is a rock god on stage at the Triple Rock Social Club bestriding the speakers like a colossus, his Loverboy T-shirt sacrificed to a Dionysian frenzy, his tongue out and waggling, his fingers pulsating. With a quick kick and flip, he’s down in the crowd, then up on the back bar, strutting around the beer bottles and whiskeys as he brings the music directly to the people. The fact that he has no instrument is of no consequence; this is rock ’n’ roll.

At the Minneapolis regional of the Air Guitar World Championship a couple of weeks ago, nine contestants took the stage to see whose mimicry of real rock-star moves would be good enough to win a slot at the L.A. nationals. There, one lucky American would be chosen to represent the red, white, and blue at the world tourney of “airaoke” in August.

Though amateurs have practiced the art of air guitar for generations (you only start feeling stupid doing it sometime in your thirties), the formal World Championship first took place in 1996 in the city of Oulo in northern Finland. Though the annual Finnish event has been a reliable source of silly-season news stories since then, only last year did the nation that invented the electric guitar finally send a competitor. Davie “C. Diddy” Jung swept the title just the way the U.S. dominated Olympic basketball after NBA players were allowed to compete. And there are signs that the world’s newest Sport of Kings is headed straight for the Hollywood machinery that builds American Idols.

The championship is set up in that mode, with the contestants playing to both the crowd and a panel of three local judges (rock critic Melissa Maerz, Cities 97’s Brian Oake, and Andy Lindquist of Willie’s American Guitars) who are hamming it up as much as anyone.

In the first round, contestants freeform for sixty seconds to the song of their choice. Things have been heavily stage-managed; all contestants have outlandish costumes and goofy stage names, and it’s impossible to miss the camera crew filming the proceedings for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Project Greenlight.

All contestants were entertaining, though maybe in spite of themselves. One, who used the nom de guerre “Iron Ranger,” had a peculiar floppy style, as though she were trying to get a handle on a twenty-pound trout instead of teasing power chords from a guitar. And the mullet-wigged “Ax Action,” concentrating with furrowed brow on the riff to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” almost fatally misjudged the length of the Triple Rock stage. He told me later, “Falling off the stage is a classic guitar thing. I really should have gone down to the ground, played for a second, then come back from the dead.” So that was on purpose, then? “Oh, sure,” he deadpanned, then burst out laughing.

The best was “Bob the Murderer,” an orange-haired Triple Rock employee who enthralled the crowd with a perfect punk pantomime of Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten and The Young Ones’ Vyvyan. Though he did little in the way of actually mimicking a guitarist, he stomped and glowered and spazzed brilliantly. An added plus: That was not technically a costume, since it’s the way he dresses all the time. Even in air guitar, authenticity adds extra weight.

After the second round, in which all contestants performed “Cat Scratch Fever,” the judges declared a tie, leading to an “air-off” between Jon “Jackicaster” Maki, who performed in a painted-on seventies pornstar ’stache and orange jumpsuit emblazoned “Stroke This,” and the clear crowd favorite, Michael “Mother” Rucker, in the Loverboy T.

“It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” erupted from the speakers. Jack and Mother strutted homoerotically. Jack flashed his nipple ring, but Mother stripped to his Calvins, and the screaming crowd sealed his win.

Of course, there was one little thing: Mother was a ringer, an L.A. actor and story editor who’s worked on (surprise!) the Project Greenlight TV show. But it seems churlish to complain about fakery in an air-guitar contest, especially when there was no real attempt to hide the setup. Minutes after the closing jam, Mother basked in air fame as he answered questions from two journalists and signed a T-shirt for a besotted female fan, who was greatly saddened when his Sharpie pen turned out to be dry.

In the end, air guitar is all about love. Nick “Swami” Swanson, who took third place, told us: “Air guitar comes from you expressing what you wish you could have done yourself. You want to be like the real thing. It lets you forget for a moment.”—Christopher Bahn

At one table, two devils wandered through a postapocalyptic wasteland. At the other end of the room, a boy and girl passionately embraced, but tragically, she turned into a robotic killing machine and chased him all over the city. (Modern love is like that.) Across from them was another pair of lovers whose affair was much more traditionally romantic, if you overlooked the fact that he was a square and she was a triangle.

They were all stories drawn in ink, pencil, and marker by a collective of artists—eight bespectacled, nerdy guys mostly in their twenties. They call themselves the Cartoonists’ Conspiracy, and they were hunkered down at three tables at the downtown Grumpy’s. Each was focused intensely on a sheaf of thick, white Bristol one-hundred-pound paper. They were participating in the Twenty-Four Hour Comics Day, an endurance contest that took place a couple of weeks ago. Each artist had a single day to complete a twenty-four-page comic, with no advance planning or preparation.

The idea was proposed about ten years ago by author and cartoonist Scott McCloud. While our local crew was inking away, five hundred others in sixty similar groups were putting pen to paper as far away as South Korea.

Around eleven p.m., with an hour to go, the mood was calm but determined. It was surprising there weren’t more cups of coffee scattered around, but then, at this point caffeine might cause jitters and splotchy inking. Of the eleven cartoonists who started twenty-three hours ago, three have dropped out. The survivors are mostly making final revisions, cleaning up hastily inked lines, or brainstorming their final panels. Only one clearly was not going to make it: Damian Sheridan, whose double-sized drawings took up an entire table, was still on page eleven—less than half way.

Though his artwork was impressive, he’d had trouble finding a solid storyline to ride through two dozen pages. He inked a mermaid spearfisher and her encephalopod sidekick, but admitted, “before the spearfisher, it was about a kid who dies in a tragic kite accident, and before that two robots who fight each other with accounting jargon.” He was gamely plugging away anyhow, and vowed to finish after a good night’s sleep. According to the official rules, that’s a “noble failure” common enough to have its own name, the “Eastman Variation.”

If the intention of the event was to put on a big show for the public, it was not a great success. While The Rake was there, cartoonists outnumbered audience members two to one. And as a spectator sport, watching people draw is not too dissimilar from watching paint dry. But tonight was also about team-building—hanging out with buddies to lend moral support to each other’s creative drive. In the end, each cartoonist’s biggest battle is with the blank paper in front of him or her. And when midnight chimes, the finished stories are taken to the nearest all-night copy shop and turned into a two-hundred-page book, on sale thereafter at Dreamhaven and Big Brain comic-book stores.

“The goal was to push ourselves,” said Brian Roberts, who goes by the nickname “Doctor Popular.” One of the club’s organizers, Doc supplements cartooning with gigs as an ad salesman, writer, and professional yo-yo player. (Who knew there was money in that?) His twenty-four-hour story, about a Cro-Magnon man named Trog who becomes the world’s first celebrity cave painter, is one of the evening’s most inspired. But true to the spirit of the event, he thought it up on the spur of the moment. “I had an idea I wanted to use, and I can’t even remember what it was now. At midnight, I just started drawing this caveman.” He was only six panels away from finishing, and sketched quickly but confidently in rough pencil, playing with a way to condense that final bit of plot into those half-dozen boxes.—Christopher Bahn

“So you’re telling me,” I ask the Pope of Witches, “that Hubert Humphrey was a vampire?”

“Yes, he actually was. Hubert was a very interesting person.”

So says Carl Llewellyn Weschcke. We are sitting in his spacious office at the St. Paul headquarters of Llewellyn Worldwide, the largest independent occult publishing house in America. At age seventy-two, he’s a sage and grandfatherly figure, like a well-groomed Father Christmas or Albus Dumbledore. He has been president of Llewellyn for forty-three years. The ascendance of his company has both mirrored and fueled the rise of New Age from an obscure fringe phenomenon to the remarkably mainstream movement it is today. And because of his influence, the Twin Cities is one of the nation’s major pagan population centers. Just across town, in fact, the hugely popular Edge Fest conference kicks off later this month. Weschcke can take some small measure of credit—or blame, depending on your point of view.

The Weschcke family has for four generations combined business with an uncommon interest in unusual religions. Carl’s grandfather Charles was a successful pharmacist, patent-medicine inventor, and prominent theosophist who passed his views on to his son and grandson. As a young man, Carl felt his life’s work went somewhat beyond his grandpa’s herbal laxative, and in January 1960 he spent forty thousand dollars on a small mail-order astrology publisher, Llewellyn, and moved it from Los Angeles to St. Paul.

Unless he’s clairvoyant, Carl couldn’t have known how successful this would be. He tells me that if he’d only wanted to make money, he’d have done something else. But he was passionate about the occult, and he identified with the company so strongly that he literally took its name as his own. And his timing was perfect: Llewellyn may have been decidedly fringe in the Eisenhower era, but few people in the fifties guessed that the next decade would be…the sixties. Vision-questing hippies found their needs met in a steady stream of books with the distinctive crescent-moon logo on the spine.

In the late sixties and seventies, Carl Weschcke flourished as a sort of public emissary for Wicca, the ancient religion of witches and warlocks. Crowded gatherings at his bookstore, a former mortuary he dubbed “Gnostica,” snowballed into the first openly pagan public events in America, now remembered as the legendary “Gnosticons.” These were sort of Star Trek conventions for druids, psychics, witches, and astrologers, who flocked here from all over the world. He picked up that tongue-in-cheek papal moniker for his founding role in the Council of American Witches, a short-lived but influential cadre of occultists. Their main accomplishment—creating a thirteen-point statement defining Wiccan belief—was no small feat for a brand of faith with no central authority, and no moral precept other than “If it harm none, do what thou wilt.”

“That was the first time in this country that witches got together to try to hammer out something saying ‘This is the way we should act toward one another,’” says Magenta, a cofounder of the New Alexandrian Pagan Library in South Minneapolis. It was a vital statement of self-identity for New Age religion in the face of a mainstream that often equated nature worship with Satanism.

Still, Weschcke was willing, if not eager, to play the role of the eerie wizard around the press, who relished such an interesting character. Newspaper photos of him back in those days are often candlelit and spooky, his eyes owlishly peering out like a Midwestern Vincent Price. Articles describe secret initiation rituals into his coven at the notorious mansion on Summit Avenue, supposedly the state’s most haunted building, that was Weschcke’s home and corporate headquarters.

After his son, Gabe, was born, Carl decided to settle down a bit. He sold the mansion and discontinued the festivals. These days, he is relieved to have it all behind him. “I never enjoyed being in the limelight,” he insists. “But I did it because I felt I had to do it. I was a very shy person as a young boy, and basically reclusive. I did a lot of lecturing on behalf of Wicca, and some I felt very good about. I was on the Phil Donahue show once. And no, I didn’t enjoy it.”

Magenta credits Weschcke’s open lifestyle with helping to break down barriers not unlike those faced by gays and lesbians. “In the seventies and eighties, a lot of us weren’t willing to be out of the broom closet,” she says. “People were worried about losing jobs, losing houses, losing kids. But Carl was publishing the books, so he kind of had to be.”

The last decade has seen an enormous increase in the New Age audience. Llewellyn has thrived, especially in the burgeoning teen market, with books like Silver Ravenwolf’s The Solitary Witch. But the tarot cards are growing more insistent. Not today, but soon,Weschcke must face the inevitable: retirement. “I’ve got 10,000 books I haven’t read,” he said. “I’ve got books I’d like to write.”

Maybe one will be a Wiccan biography of HHH. Humphrey wasn’t a blood-drinking fiend, explains Carl, but more of an energy vampire. (This is a relief.) “I remember one time he was giving a speech in downtown St. Paul,” Weschke says. “There was the most drained man. He was pasty white. He’d been at it all day. And then he started talking. And you could see him absorbing vitality from the people. The more he talked, his cheeks got rosy, he got this vibrant energy, bouncing up and down. That’s a form of vampirism. It happens.”—Christopher Bahn

Jim Stowell will literally go halfway around the world just to get a good story. A prominent force in the local theater community for thirty-five years, the actor and playwright has developed a specialty in the last decade and a half as a master monologuist. His deeply personal tales—funny, angry, politically aware, and wry—draw from his experiences in places like Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Amazon. His current project, Family Values, was originally produced at Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater in 1999. (You may also have seen him that year in the Jungle’s Macbeth.) Family Values depicts Stowell’s experiences growing up in a small Texas town on the Mexican border, and his late-nineties trip to war-torn Northern Ireland. The play explores why people hate each other, and why anger in the blood so often leads to the spilling of blood. Like many of us, Stowell found his perspective on that subject irrevocably altered in September 2001, and he decided to completely overhaul the play in light of the way we live and feel now.

The RAKE: The original version of Family Values was, to some extent, about the Cold War. You begin with boys throwing rocks at each other, and end with Americans and Soviets threatening to shoot rockets at each other.

STOWELL: That was the original concept, that direction. Guys in jets doing exactly the same thing as those boys. But we got to talking about that ending, and Richard Cook, the director, said, “Because of the changes in the world, I’m already way ahead of that business with the atomic stuff. We’ve just zoooomed past all those things.” And I agreed with him. We’ve completely redone the ending.

So where does the play go now?

What we’re looking at now is the connection between what I learned in Belfast and how that connects to 9/11, and us. There’s a story in the play about a woman named Maggie who’s caught on the bus in Belfast with a bomb strapped to her. That story was told to me in Belfast, but it was never explained that she was going to the airport and putting the bomb there and then getting in a car and driving away. It was assumed that I knew that. When I told the story in 1999, I never had to explain.

And after September 11th?

I sent the script off to some people, and they asked about the “suicide bomber.” The unspoken assumption had changed: not “bomber”; “suicide bomber.” Willing to live versus willing to die. A life and death difference. The world’s fundamental assumptions have changed. In the play, I say to an Irish woman, “You’re taking a bomb out to the airport, you’re going to blow up all these people like me. I’m an innocent civilian. What the hell is that? What’s the strategic value in killing somebody like me?” When I was in Belfast, I saw myself as an innocent bystander. Everywhere I went in the world, I saw myself as an innocent bystander. And that’s just not true now. None of it necessarily was true even then.

What is true now?

The world is not Belfast anymore. The world is Tel Aviv. It used to be Belfast, where the bombers try to make a getaway. Now they don’t even try to. And that fundamental change in consciousness we’re now bringing to the script.

You’re also changing the structure of the story around, breaking up the narrative from the original three solid chapters.

In the past, I’ve always written things integrated like a movie. There will be flashbacks. I’ll go back to Texas, and then come back up to the present. For this play, initially, I thought, “Gee, I’d like to do something different. I’ve been doing this for a long time.” And I got to thinking about it, and I realized that everyone who’s going to come see this play, ninety-nine percent of them have never seen any of my other work. 1998 was my last big show. Five, six years, that’s a generation of theatergoers. So I changed it back to the way I like to be doing it.

You’ve been doing monologues like Family Values since the eighties. How did you become interested in the form?

This was at the end of fourteen years as a playwright, so I was ready to evolve to the next step. I had a great working relationship with Patty Lynch of the Brass Tacks Theater; we did three or four monologues together. The first one we did, we didn’t know what we were doing—nobody had ever done it! We didn’t know what the hell to do. We showed up at rehearsals at night and said, “Jeez, what are we doing tonight?” We put our heads together and figured stuff out.

This was before Spaulding Gray?

This is what happened: Spaulding Gray came to the Illusion and filled their house twice. Two or three nights in a row. So the producer looks at that and says, “Ah, hm… Full houses. One person. No set. This really looks good.” Then she brings Kevin Kling and I, we do a show, and there are so many people every night they had to move the set back to put in more seats. The producer didn’t have to be a genius to go, “Oh, big hit, no expenses. Good idea, let’s do this again.”

It’s hard to strip it down any more than that.

It is. That’s just about as far as you can go with one person. Almost no set, and no costumes, and almost no music.

If only we could get rid of the actor, we’d really have something.

Yeah! They’re a pain anyway.

Jim Stowell’s Family Values
October 30-November 16
Park Square Theatre
20 W. Seventh Pl., St. Paul
(651) 291-7005
www.parksquaretheatre.org

Independent cinema is a bigger growth industry than you might think. A decade ago, there were maybe a hundred film festivals worldwide showcasing foreign films, documentaries, and low-budget fare. Now that number’s about a thousand. Here in Minnesota, the reigning king is the U Film Society’s international festival, one of the largest yearly draws of any arts event in the state. But there’s apparently plenty of room for growth here, too. Two of the newest film fests, Sound Unseen and Central Standard, screen this month, and they ought to be on the radar of any self-respecting fan of indie cinema.

Central Standard, after a modest start last year, has an ambitious slate of thirty-plus feature-length films and dozens of shorts. The focus here is regional: Nearly all the films were shot somewhere other than New York or L.A., including eight Minnesota-made features. The festival opens with the excellent, quirky cop drama Evenhand and a performance by ex-Soul Coughing singer Mike Doughty, who wrote Evenhand’s soundtrack. Other good prospects include local writer/director Patrick Coyle’s moody Detective Fiction, and Speedo, a documentary about demolition-derby king Ed Jager, whose life is as beat-down as one of his post-race cars.

Sound Unseen, now in its fourth year, focuses on movies about music, gathering a wealth of documentaries, concert films, and video collections. Highlights this year include a biography of recording engineer Tom Dowd, who went from the Manhattan Project to become Atlantic Records’ secret weapon; You See Me Laughin’, which profiles gutbucket bluesmen R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, maybe the last authentic Delta blues musicians around; Let Me Be Your Band, about the wacky world of one-man bands; and the long-lost uncut version of Sun Ra’s 1974 sci-fi musical Space Is the Place, a true time capsule of free-jazz fabulousness.

Both festivals are local eruptions of a larger national uprising in independent film. In recent years, festival-circuit giants like Sundance and Cannes have been reduced to a business-driven need to find the next big Hollywood breakout hit. The high-profile festivals, once proudly independent, have become Hollywood’s happy hunting ground, and festival organizers have responded in the most pimp-like fashion: They draw movie-hungry studios and their cash by requiring exclusive premiere rights to the movies they screen. In exchange, of course, indies get their best shot at discovery by the majors. To be sure, the effect on America’s film culture at large is probably positive—this is where movies like Memento, Reservoir Dogs, and Usual Suspects first got noticed and pushed toward a wider public.

The problem is that the odds of any particular movie getting picked up are at least as grim as a minor-league ballplayer’s chance of getting drafted by the Yankees. And the system favors potential blockbusters, so documentaries and offbeat features tend to get shafted. There are only so many slots, and reel after reel of worthy work simply gets lost somewhere between one cocktail party and another. And so the only apparent path to success for hopeful directors was one that strikes an outside observer as insane: Submit your movie to only one festival, and then never show it again anywhere else, even after the premiere, lest the all-important buzz wear off and scare away prospective distributors. “They want the buzz to themselves,” says Sound Unseen programmer Peter Lucas. “But that’s if they pick these films up. Too many filmmakers were doing this and then the films were never seen or heard from again.” Sundance or die.

But there was clearly a niche for the films left behind by the gold rush. What happened was the film world’s version of a fringe festival: the growth of a whole bunch of upstart film events across the country, at places like Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center and San Francisco’s Other Minds. Their primary interest is connecting with local audiences, not with Hollywood dealmakers. Since they’re not obsessed with nabbing national premieres, it also means more sharing between fest-runners in different cities. “If we see something great, we don’t necessarily hoard it,” says Lucas. “We call other programmers and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to show this.’” This has the pleasant effect of creating an ad hoc distribution network, helping solve one of the chief headaches for independent filmmakers. As they ought to have been all along, film festivals become an audience-reaching end in themselves.

“I think it’s become unhealthy for the independents to hold out for Sundance,” agrees Central Standard’s programmer, Todd Hansen. Technical advances and the rise of DVD distribution make the economics of low-budget filmmaking actually work in favor of artists for a change. These days, small filmmakers can turn out high-quality product on an incredibly low budget. Shooting and editing on digital video can be cheaper than buying a used car, and going direct-to-DVD is a genuine alternative to spending five million dollars to break out an indie film via the L.A. pipeline of celluloid. It may not be very high profile, but the alternative before was total obscurity. “No one’s going to have a house in Malibu,” notes Hansen, but a frugal, marketing-savvy filmmaker can build an honest-to-gosh career without ever being noticed by the majors. For instance, Vermont filmmaker John O’Brien, whose comedy Nosey Parker is playing at Central Standard, has made not just one but three films while maintaining another career—as a sheep farmer. (Now there’s a day job that beats waiting tables.)

But to take best advantage of this unheard-of concept of DIY moviemaking, you’ve got to get some screen time in regional theaters, and Hansen hopes that Central Standard will eventually function as a portal for locally made movies to get bookings in out-state towns like Sauk Centre. He’s also taking his case to the airwaves starting October 6, when he’ll host Channel 45’s new indie-film showcase, FilmFinds.

Of course, especially in the present economy, finding sources of funding for nonprofits is no easy job. The audience for indie fare seems to be growing everywhere, but can it be enough to support these proliferating festivals and ensure their survival? “They’re all still happening, so I think that question sort of answers itself,” says Hansen. “There’s a flawed distribution system right now, and there’s a craving for material that’s not reaching people through the heavy overhead and high expense of Hollywood. There’s a huge missed market out there. And Minneapolis is incredible for having supported Iranian-subtitled films for twenty-one years. Not many people have that. It’s a great testament to this town and the savvy of its filmgoers.”

For more information:

Central Standard Film Festival, Sept. 17-21; (612) 338-0871.

Sound Unseen Film Festival, Sept. 26-Oct. 2; (612) 333-4995.

Tom Hazelmyer may not be the first guy you’d think of as an art gallery owner. An ex-Marine and gun collector, his greatest claim to notoriety is Amphetamine Reptile Records, the Minneapolis-based punk-rock label he founded that defined the angriest and most abrasive wing of the hardcore movement of the 80s and 90s. AmRep built its reputation on furious, working-class acts like Helmet, the Melvins, and the Cows.

Hazelmyer lived and breathed the DIY ethic, not just running the label but designing most of the artwork. And one of his marketing brainstorms—putting the AmRep logo on a Zippo lighter—grew into a full-fledged side business: FlameRite, which distributes Zippos that have been embossed with designs chosen by Hazelmyer from a who’s who of underground artists including Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.

As age, boredom, and the death throes of grunge made AmRep a chore, Hazelmyer scaled back to a nearly 100-percent back-catalog operation. Instead he concentrated on raising his three kids and the family business—the three Grumpy’s bars in Minneapolis and Coon Rapids. FlameRite continued as much for fun as anything else. But with his instinct for spotting a cultural trend, he soon realized he was onto something bigger—the ground floor of the burgeoning “low-brow” art movement, a pop-culture melange of collectible toys, retro commercial art, motorcycle decals, underground comics, graffiti, and Japanese anime. Many of the names most often checked—Shepard Fairey, Frank Kozic, Kaz—also grace FlameRites.

It’s art, to be sure, but from artists who drink Budweiser because they like to, not because they’re trying to be ironic. Putting their work on a lighter wasn’t just a sales trick, but part of the whole point. “Merchandising in any art was, for god knows how long, just verboten,” said Hazelmyer when we looked in on him the other day.

This style of art wasn’t getting much play in local galleries. But Hazelmyer’s always been good at punk rock’s Andy Hardy routine: If your favorite work isn’t getting seen, put on the show yourself. “Like Kozic. For years he was doing shows across the entire world—Europe, Japan, Los Angeles, New York. Totally accessible guy, and no one ever bothered to bring him to Minneapolis,” Hazelmyer grumbled. “He’s a friend of mine, and I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. We’ve got the bar downtown, we’ve got the side room.’ I just started doing it.” And in March, he moved the art showings to Ox-Op, a tidy red-and-white gallery converted from garages in Grumpy’s back-lot in downtown Minneapolis. (“The rent is right,” he notes dryly.) He’s also recently collected the FlameRite designs in the trim and groovy book Scorched Art.

Hazelmyer has gleeful sarcasm for the mainstream gallery world’s tendency to enshrine “a piece of string with a rock on the end of it” as a major work. But graphic design has always been a big part of his life, and of course punk’s look is nearly as important as the music itself. In that sense, the move from punk pioneer to gallery owner is a completely natural progression, with the Zippos as the bridge.

“The two have gone hand in hand, doing the art gallery and the lighters,” said Haze, running a finger down the gallery’s upcoming schedule. Most are artists with whom he’s created lighters. “They trust me, they know I’ll pay. I say, ‘You want to come to town and do an art show?’ They go, ‘Shit, no problem.’ Versus just calling somebody up in L.A., they have no idea who you are, and you’re trying to talk them into coming to Minnesota in January. Not an easy task. I always promise them lots of liquor and we’ll go shooting.”—Christopher Bahn

New Mexican mystery novelist Tony Hillerman has been the unofficial cultural ambassador of the Navajo Nation for more than 30 years. His Indian detectives, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, have introduced thousands of white readers to the rich culture of the tribes of the American Southwest in bestsellers like A Thief of Time and Skinwalkers. Hillerman turns 78 this month, just in time for the release of his 16th Leaphorn & Chee novel, The Sinister Pig, which revolves around an evil billionaire, a murdered CIA agent and the oil pipelines on the U.S.-Mexico border. He’s hard at work on the 17th, with no plans to retire anytime soon.

THE RAKE: So, just what the heck is a sinister pig?

HILLERMAN: You’re giving away my plot. (laughs) In the world of pipelines a pig is a device that is used to clean out pipelines. They’re hollow, and they used to look like a torpedo and they covered them with pigskin, with the bristles out, in the old days. Now they’re very modern and they have computer chips in them and they do all sorts of things. But one thing they could do is smuggle cocaine or diamonds or money you want laundered or whatever, across state lines or national lines. Another sinister pig is the boss pig in a sty full of pigs who doesn’t want any other pig to share in the food. … You’re always looking for a title, and the book kind of reflects my attitude. I think it was Enron and all these major, important companies going bankrupt and screwing their employees out of their retirement and their perks and everything while the CEOs sail off to their summer homes in the Antibes or whatever. That inspired me to get rough on ’em. Apparently nobody else is.

THE RAKE: How did you become a writer?

HILLERMAN: I was raised daydreaming, and my mother always said she wanted to be a poet but didn’t spell well. I don’t spell very well either.

THE RAKE: Do you think of yourself more as a mystery writer, or a writer about Indian culture?

HILLERMAN: I just consider myself a writer. You know how the youngest son—the big brother does the fixing and important stuff, and you go get the hammer and the screwdriver and all that. I grew up in a family that had an older brother and a younger brother, and so you go out into the world and there’s not many things you’re very good at except running after the hammer. I found out very early on that the only thing I could be happy doing was writing. So I just think of myself as a writer. But the problem is if you don’t develop other hobbies you can’t quit.

THE RAKE: You’ve had other careers before becoming a novelist, though.

HILLERMAN: No, I started out as a police reporter in a little town in Texas. Then I worked on four major newspapers in various roles. In the interim I worked for United Press. So I spent about 20 years as a—is the term ink-stained wretch still used? It applies to guys that want to do something interesting and aren’t all that tied into making a lot of money. Which we sure as hell didn’t. I don’t think pay scales have increased too much since then, but you really had to sort of take a vow of poverty to be a journalist in the old days.

THE RAKE: How important is it for a writer to have had other occupations in order to have the experience to write about?

HILLERMAN: I really think working at a newspaper as a reporter has two huge advantages for writers. One, you’re writing every day. You learn how to use the language, you learn how to get a paragraph to make sense if you’re doing it every day. And also it puts you where the action is, where you’re seeing the guy sitting in the defendant’s box sweating out the jury. You’re at the scene of the crime, you’re at the scene of the train wreck, you’re dealing with people that are under tension, and I just think you can get a whole head full of memories of people and things. I wonder sometimes how normal people come up with their good books.

THE RAKE: You’ve said before that you don’t usually have trouble coming up with ideas because you’ve seen so many things in real life.

HILLERMAN: Yeah. You’re trying to come up with a character, and you suddenly remember a fellow that was kind of like what you want. Or a situation that caused a guy to be the way he is. I rely on that, but I think a lot of writers do. They have a whole head full of stuff that would go well in a book or in a plot, and they can’t remember what they did with their glasses but they remember those things. Accumulate ’em.

THE RAKE: What do you want people to take from your novels?

HILLERMAN: Above all I would like them to be aware that the cultures of the people I like to write about, the Navajos and Hopis and so forth, are extremely complicated and extremely interesting—and in the case of the Navajos especially, are extremely valuable. You can learn a heck of a lot from Hopi and Navajo ways of life. For example, the negative value they put on greed, of having more than you need. In their mythology, that’s how you identify a witch, the ultimate of evil. They have more than one kind of what we call a witch, they don’t use that word. And the fellow who’s got money and stuff, and kinfolks who are hungry, it’s an almost certain sign the guy’s evil. We’ve sort of left that behind us. We think the homeless person is probably a crook, or dangerous.

THE RAKE: Although you’re not an Indian yourself, your affinity for Indian culture goes all the way back to your childhood.

HILLERMAN: I grew up in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma—population, oh, about 40. It was right in the middle of the allotment given to the Citizen Band Potawatomi tribe. In addition to the Potawatomi, we were surrounded by Seminoles and other Indian tribes. It was a really grungy part of Oklahoma. In fact they’re having a literary festival right now down there in my part of the world, and they call it the Red Dirt Festival. Anyway, to answer your question, growing up my friends were mostly Potawatomi Indians, and I went to an Indian school. When I went to high school, we were kind of scared of Seminoles, us Potawatomis. They had a warlike reputation. They were more athletic than we were. Our best football players were Potawatomis. And so you grow up, you know they’re just people like everybody else. The good ones and the bad ones, the ones you really like and the ones you cross the street when you see them coming. Then, when I got out to New Mexico—the Potawatomis and the Seminoles were pretty well assimilated. They’d been moved around so much that most of the kids I knew didn’t know their language anymore, or much about their culture. I got to New Mexico and I saw the Navajos and the Pueblo tribes, and these were cultures that were alive and well and vigorous. I was interested, and the more I saw the better I liked what I was seeing.

THE RAKE: What’s your writing process like?

HILLERMAN: I gave up outlining books in the middle of the third one [Listening Woman]. It dawned on me that it was a horrible waste of time. And it screws up the process for me. In Sinister Pig, there’s a very minor character in it, a guy named Budge, who’s a chauffeur and pilot for this mogul.

THE RAKE: And who also does his dirty work.

HILLERMAN: Yeah. And so as I was writing the book, early on I was thinking more and more about him and how did he get that way. And gradually he took over a big chunk of the book. I had no intention of that, but I think it made a better book. … A lot of things about this book I like. I kind of wondered if my editor was going to let me get away with that runaway Budge, coming from nowhere and becoming such a major character. But I liked it, and I sometimes thought I would start the book all over again and make it all about him.

THE RAKE: What kind of research do you do for the books?

HILLERMAN: Sinister Pig was a monster for research. I grew up near the oil patch and I knew something about pipelining, and people who worked on pipelines and everything, but I didn’t know nearly as much about them as I needed to know, an
d then I moved my Navajo policeman down into the Border Patrol, and I had to accumulate a mountain of stuff about the Border Patrol, their rules and regulations. And then I didn’t know that landscape as well. It’s right down on the border of Sonora. And I’ve been down there a time or two, but I couldn’t close my eyes and reconstruct which mountains you see from where. And that was a lot of work. Luckily my wife is one of these ladies who made Phi Beta Kappa and have straight A grades in college, and her field was actually bacteriology, but she’s very much into botany, so she joins me on what botany I’m involved with. But it was a lot of work and I think I’m an idiot to do it. … I don’t know if you get this way, You start a column, and it’s gonna be a dandy. And then you’re finished, and you’re glad you’re done but it didn’t come out as good as you’d wanted it and you feel bad about it, sort of. I’m that way about every book I’ve ever written.

THE RAKE: Have you ever had a plot become so complicated,
or require so many pages to get through, that you had trouble finishing it?

HILLERMAN: Most of my books I’ve had trouble finishing them. Making all the threads come together and making it all seem sensible. It’s not uncommon for me to have trouble finishing them. I also have trouble in the middle of them.

THE RAKE: Do you have a favorite among your novels?

HILLERMAN: Yeah, I’ve got two. The one I think people would expect me to prefer is A Thief of Time.

THE RAKE: Because that was your big breakout book.

HILLERMAN: Yeah. And the one that my publisher was dismayed that I insisted on writing is my real favorite, when I look on myself as a writer, and that is Finding Moon. It concerns a guy who’s just gotten a dishonorable discharge from the Army for drunk driving, and looks on himself as kind of a loser. … What I’d intended to do, years ago when I was working for United Press, and everything was going to hell in the Congo basin—Stanleyville, the Paris of Africa, was in flames, and about five different tribes were fighting over the gold mines and the diamond mines and the oil fields. I thought this would be an absolutely lawless situation, I would want to put a guy like [the main character], a kind of fella who settled down to be an accountant or something and his company transfers him over there—sort of a Pilgrim’s Progress takeoff, self-discovery, right? Anyway, that’s what I wanted to do with it, but by the time I got serious about doing it everyone had forgotten about the Belgian Congo. It didn’t even exist anymore and nobody wanted me to write it, so I didn’t I started a time or two. Then I watched the news coverage of the evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon and I thought, hell, here’s the thing, going on right in front of your eyes. So I gave this guy a mother who was going to the Philippines and arranged to have her more promising son, who’d been an officer in a helicopter repair company and had been killed in an accident, to have the younger guy go over and bring back the older brother’s child with a Cambodian woman, going to get him in all this chaos. That’s what I wrote, and by golly I like what I got. Which isn’t always the case.

THE RAKE: I liked that one too.

HILLERMAN: Nobody’s ever read it. (laughs) I took for granted that you hadn’t read it or I wouldn’t be giving you all the plot. … I was pretty happy with The Wailing Wind too. I’d have to add it to the list of my favorites.

THE RAKE: How is your health these days?

HILLERMAN: Well, I think it’s pretty good. I get things wrong with me but they’re always pretty trivial stuff. I get horrible-sounding stuff, I’ve had two heart attacks, neither of which was any particular note, no damage done. And then I’ve had two bouts of cancer, long in the past, I should be clean too. One of them, I was getting my hair cut, and the barber I like—I’ve got a nine-dollar-a-haircut barber I like real well. He had a new employee just out of the Navy, and he was looking a the back of my head and said “what’s this thing back here?” I said I don’t know, I’ve had it for years. “Well, it looks bad to me. Why don’t you go and ask your doctor about that?” So I went and asked my doctor about it. He sent me to a skin man. Skin man said, oh, that looks bad, and he sent me to another guy who sliced off a sample of it, and he told me I had a tumor in a sweat gland. Doesn’t that sound exciting? So I had to go in and have that taken out, and when I got there they found that the guy who sliced off the sample had sliced off the tumor. There wasn’t any nefarious stuff left for them to work on. Anyway, that’s not what you consider a life-threatening problem. But I’m in good health, I think. I’ve got arthritis, which makes me hesitate to get into an airplane.

THE RAKE: You’ve stated before that you have no plans to retire from writing, that you can’t imagine what you’d do with your time. Is that still the case?

HILLERMAN: Yeah, it sure is. When I finish a book and don’t have all that stuff going on, I’m bored out of my skull. One of my characters, Joe Leaphorn, someone once asked him if he was playing golf, and he said “I got the ball I all nine holes and I can’t see why you’d do it again.” Well, that’s exactly what I did/. I went out and played nine holes of golf and said “What the hell am I doing?” And I’m too crippled up and clumsy to do the kind of fishing I always like to do. Trudging up and down these streams, hunting the fish. I never did like to fish out of a boat. Now I’m so awkward and everything that I just don’t do it much anymore. So I’m going to keep writing as long as I can.

THE RAKE: Would you want another writer to take over the Chee and Leaphorn books after you’re no longer doing them?

HILLERMAN: Boy, I never even thought of that. I can’t imagine a writer who’s very good wanting to do that. I’d think they’d want to do their own stuff.

David Cronenberg is infamous for his unique style of horror filmmaking. His films–among them The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers–gaze with icy formalism on worlds where biology has gone mad. They’re a catalogue of physical breakdowns, sexual dysfunctions, florid mutations and hallucinations. His latest, Spider, based on Patrick McGrath’s novel, stars Ralph Fiennes as a muttering, schizophrenic Londoner who obsessively scribbles notes in an invented alphabet, struggling to make sense out of his fractured relationship with his mother (Miranda Richardson, terrific in a triple role). Quieter and largely grue-free, it’s still a clearly Cronenbergian film, and his best in years. The Rake crashed into the director recently for a Q&A.

RAKE: Last time I was here at Nicollet Island Inn it was for a romantic evening with my wife. Now I’m back, on Valentine’s Day, with the director of "Crash," "Rabid" and "Videodrome." Is that a bad sign about the future direction of my love life?

DC: I had a very lonely experience last night. I was alone in my room. But it is rather romantic. I think you’re safe. I think you’re OK.

RAKE: What attracts you to the subjects you choose to make films about?

DC: It’s hard to say… For me, filmmaking is a philosophical endeavor. I’m talking to myself and trying to explain things. Trying to explain the human condition and existentially what I am and what society is and what culture is and what art is and all those things. And I understand too that the first fact of human existence is the human body. And that’s something people try to avoid accepting, because if you accept the body as the totality of your existence as an individual then you accept mortality, you accept death. That’s a very hard thing to do even as an exercise.

RAKE: You’ve said that your intention with Spider was less a realistic portrayal of schizophrenia than a story with wider resonance to the human condition. What do everyday people have in common with someone as eccentric as Spider?

DC: Imagine taking away from yourself those things that Spider doesn’t have. He doesn’t have a wife, a family, a job. He doesn’t seem to have a religion, doesn’t seem to have politics. If you take all those things away from most people, I think you’ll end up with someone potentially very close to Spider. That is to say, feeling very disconnected from the flow of life around him, confused about himself and who he is. Knowing he can’t deal with people. And then struggling with his memories. He’s trying to figure out who he is based on these constantly shifting memories. I relate to that. I can feel that in myself. And I know how fragile identity is, and how much creative effort we have to put into maintaining an identity.

RAKE: Given that, it’s ironic that Patrick McGrath changed Spider’s character so much when he wrote the screenplay from his book.

DC: Yes. In the first draft of the script Spider was writing in English and there was voiceover. In the novel, Spider writes the novel, that’s his job. And that means he’s very good with language and very literary. But hearing that spoken over the face of our Spider, who is very inarticulate, was unbelievable. I still wanted him to write in the journal, because I still wanted to give him something physical to do that would show that he was obsessively trying to remember things; basically he’s taking evidence of a crime for some future use. But I didn’t want us to be able to read what he was writing, so I had Ralph develop the hieroglyphics that he did. As soon as I made the decision to keep the journal, I was setting him up to be an archetypal … maybe a failed artist, whose writings are unfortunately in a language that nobody can understand.

RAKE: Although you do eventually reveal the central mystery of Spider’s past, it’s obvious you’re careful not to explain too much.

DC: There are some things that if you just say it right out, they actually lose their meaning. Some things cannot be expressed without destroying them. So it’s a matter of balance. You be evocative, you give the audience clues, but they have to come up with it themselves for it to have that sense of revelation.

RAKE: Are you making the kind of films that you want to make? Is it too difficult to sell, for instance, a David Cronenberg slapstick comedy?

DC: Well, I’ve never tried that. But I do think my films are generally quite funny, even Spider. But no, I haven’t had trouble that way. I’ve been offered all kinds of films that I haven’t done just because I didn’t want to do them. But I was always happy that people recognize I could do other things, that I had the technique to do things I’m not necessarily known for. I haven’t found that to be a hindrance.

RAKE: Has it become more difficult for you to make movies as an independent filmmaker?

DC: It’s pretty tough right now, just because [moviemaking] is a business and the economy of the world is very shaky. Given the impending war with Iraq, I’d say it isn’t going to get any easier.

RAKE: And you’re not likely to make the next Sergeant York.

DC: Definitely not. Although I did like that movie.

RAKE: On most of the movies you direct, you write the screenplay as well, even when it’s based on a novel like Naked Lunch or Crash. Spider’s a rare exception. What attracted you to this story above shooting one of your own scripts?

DC: Laziness. Like most writers, I’ll do anything to avoid writing. It’s really hard. To do an adaptation is easier. To have someone give you a good script is easiest. Although I was very arrogant about that as a young filmmaker, I felt that you weren’t really a filmmaker if you didn’t write your own script. I’ve come to realize you can have some very interesting experiences fusing your own sensibility with someone else’s, to do things you never would have come up with yourself. In the case of Spider, it’s almost not like an adaptation, because it was the script I read first, and the script was the basis of my decision to do Spider. So you pray that a great script comes to you — and particularly if it has financing already done, that would be great. But if not, then my fallback is to write my own script. A lot of directors don’t have that fallback, because there’s no necessary connection between directing and screenwriting. It ‘s only an accident that you can do both. There have been of course multiple directors that couldn’t write.

RAKE: What effect do actors have on the evolution of your stories? Ralph Fiennes did a lot to refine his character, like adding Spider’s constant incomprehensible mumbling, which is really effective in showing how he occupies his own mental space separate from the rest of us.

DC: He came up with the idea, but I had to say yes to it. That’s how it works. In a collaboration everybody comes up with suggestions, not just the actors. The costume people, the production designers, they all come up with possibilities and options. But the director has to say yes or no to them because the director is the only one who has the big picture. He’s the only one who’s there for every scene and every moment, and will be responsible for putting together the editing. But you don’t want your actors to just be puppets. That’s not acting. You want an actor to have a lot
of input. That’s why actors like to work with me.

RAKE: Spider drinks his tea with about four heaping spoons of sugar. Was that a reference to Jeff Goldblum’s coffee habits in The Fly?

DC: I try very hard not to worry about connections that people might make amongst my films. I’m not a self-referential filmmaker. But I didn’t take it out for that very same reason–to ignore the existence of this other movie I made and go with what I think his character would do. I thought it was an accurate observation that Patrick made about the way a lonely man like that might be, the way he drinks the tea. It was in Patrick’s novel that Spider keeps eating all that sugar. And certainly Patrick was not thinking of The Fly. There it had a different meaning, which was that [Goldblum’s] metabolism was changing [as he turned into the Fly]. In this case it’s just what lonely people often do, just this comfort thing. It’s an entirely different meaning.

RAKE: If you couldn’t be a filmmaker, what would you choose to do?

DC: I always thought I’d be a novelist. And I was kind of surprised to find myself in filmmaking. Often I much prefer to read a book than see a movie…. I don’t actually watch my own movies. There are too many associations. Maybe when I get senile and can’t remember that I made those movies, I might be able to judge them objectively.

The Rake goes inside the criminally overshadowed AV Club.

If The Onion is the nation’s class clown, the AV Club—the newspaper’s unheralded entertainment section—is its thoughtful little wallflower of a brother. Originally a wacky complement to the newspaper’s celebrated satire, the section grew into its current format under editor Stephen Thompson, who fought for a more serious critical focus when he took over in 1993. The specialty of the house quickly became long, free-flowing Q&As with notable celebrities, both up-and-coming and down-and-going. There are legions whose presence in an irreverent Gen-X publication like The Onion is nearly mandated by law—Penn & Teller, Henry Rollins, the creators of Mr. Show. But the AV Club is distinct for its focus on completely forgotten B-listers. Long before Behind the Music and Fear Factor, they let the Vanilla Ices of the world steal a little overtime in their 15 minutes of fame.

The AV Club’s new book The Tenacity of the Cockroach collects 68 interviews with such diverse figures as Joan Jett, animator Chuck Jones, film director Russ Meyer, and novelty-music king Dr. Demento. These folks have little in common, other than their scars from years of showbiz struggle, and their hard-won place in popular culture—even if that place is far out on its fringes. Tenacity explores that theme through the widest possible cast of characters, moving from embittered cranks and recluses to focused pros to those grateful just to be here. The Rake recently turned the glare of the Q&A spotlight back on AV Club editor Thompson.

The Rake: What valuable life lessons can we learn from celebrities?

THOMPSON: Obviously I don’t think Rachael Leigh Cook has a lot to teach us, or Ashton Kutcher, God bless him. But if you select wisely, and talk to celebrities that have an interesting perspective on their work and how it fits into the culture, there is potential. We probably share a certain skepticism about the tendency to make a celebrity’s story universal, like we can all learn about what it’s like to have a baby because Celine Dion had a baby. If you remember when Celine Dion had her baby, it was like this triumph of the human spirit because Celine Dion had managed to breed, and her baby was of course a kind of miracle baby. (Laughs) How ridiculous is that? I mean, obviously, Celine Dion had difficulty conceiving and I’m glad she was able to have a baby. But it was this ridiculously overblown thing where we were supposed to take this great uplifting life lesson because a pop singer went through this.

The comedy section of The Onion gets far more attention than the AV Club. Do you sometimes feel like you’re the redheaded stepchild?

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me a little bit, over the years, but I’d never in a million years expect to be acclaimed the way the comedy section has been. That’s perfectly understandable. We’re not doing groundbreaking comedy. I think we’re doing a very good entertainment section, but there are so many entertainment sections. At the same time, it bothers me when long articles appear about The Onion and don’t mention that there is an entertainment section.

How did the AV Club evolve, relative to the rest of The Onion?

We launched the entertainment section in 1993. In 1995 we renamed it the AV Club. Originally everything was written by me and the comedy writers, and eventually I brought in my own entertainment staff as I found people. It was trial and error. And there were certainly conflicts. It was originally going to be just a wacky entertainment section. And that idea I didn’t think had ever been particularly well executed. Over time the idea became, why don’t we just do a really smart, interesting entertainment section that has The Onion’s directness and economy of phrasing, has the spirit of The Onion, but is a real entertainment section that would be taken seriously and would enhance the value and the voice of the paper. It took years to figure that out and a ton of fights. My feeling was, why bother having an entertainment section if the jokes you’re putting in aren’t particularly on target? We can be cutting and clever and still provide people with some sort of service. A consistent set of opinions and a clitoral — I mean critical — perspective.

You’d probably get a lot more press with the other one.

(Laughs.) Yes, we’d be faring better today.

There’s a school of thought that a clever interviewer can draw out something universal in just about anybody.

Everyone has a story to tell and everybody’s unique, but finding people who can articulate what makes themselves interesting is a little bit trickier. We try to make sure that our interviews don’t dwell on just a current project, but to do general career overviews because that’s what we’re more interested in to begin with. It helps that our favorite sort of interviewees tend to be a little older, to have a large body of work. And in a lot of cases, they’re people whose work we grew up admiring. We have jokes about interviewing bitter, jilted cranks and geriatric comedy legends. We all have our niches. So the fact that everybody has the tenacity of the cockroach, that they have survived in entertainment, that’s the product of the mentality we’ve always taken into the interviews. We seek out people whose work we’ve enjoyed for a long time.

How does your style differ from journalists doing similar long-form interviews, like Charlie Rose or Terry Gross?

I think they do fine work. Because we’re in print, it’s definitely a different art. Terry Gross and Charlie Rose have to talk much more articulately than we do. You can edit an audio interview, but in print you can really polish it up into almost essay-like clarity.

How did you come to the long-form Q&A interview as the AV Club ideal?

That’s the standard block of space between ads in our Madison, Wisconsin, edition, which is a silly thing to base interview lengths on, but we just found it was right. Too much longer, your eyes would glaze over. A lot shorter, the interview barely registers. So we like to do a nice long big meaty feature length interview, but for that to work it has to be interesting. You can’t disguise a boring interview if you’re doing Q&A. Not that we’ve never done boring interviews.

I personally find Q&A more readable. When we started doing interviews, they were essays, which can read kind of flat. The subject gets de-emphasized, and the writer does all this paraphrasing. When I read an interview, I want to read what the subject has to say.

After the Coke bottle, the most enduring icon of the 20th century might be the mushroom cloud. Unlocking the secrets of the atom is science’s crowning achievement, equating matter with energy, and discovering a cheap and limitless source of power. On the other hand, it represents the all-too-possible destruction of life as we know it on Planet Earth. Needless to say, there are some issues to be worked out here. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, artists have been hard at work trying to make sense of the paradox. And as we all know, the end of the Cold War certainly didn’t moot the process. If anything, the specter of “rogue states” developing nuclear capabilities is much scarier than anything during the Soviet era—at least if you believe the rhetoric these days. Two events this month look at different sides of the nuclear question: Park Square Theater’s staging of the play Copenhagen, opening January 8, and Oak Street Cinema’s film and lecture series “Radioactive Reels,” running Tuesdays through January.

Copenhagen, Michael Frayn’s Tony-winning drama about the earliest days of the nuclear age, is a cerebral snapshot of a real-life meeting in October 1941 between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor Niels Bohr.

It was the height of the Nazi regime, and the two men were politically opposed, though still friendly. Whatever Heisenberg came to discuss shattered that friendship, and may even have kept the Nazis from winning World War Two. (Heisenberg’s miscalculation of how much uranium was needed is cited as a major reason the Nazis didn’t develop such a weapon.) What really happened? The simplest explanation is that Heisenberg merely wanted scientific advice, and that Bohr, a Jew, broke off their relationship when he realized his former student wanted to give Hitler nuclear weapons. But there are other possibilities, many suggested by Heisenberg himself after the war.

In the play, Heisenberg claims he wanted to know whether the Americans were trying to build a bomb, so he’d know whether Germany should put the enormous resources required into its own effort. In real life, Heisenberg went even further, claiming in 1956 that his intention was to get Bohr to work with him in actively suppressing A-bomb projects by either side. That statement prompted Bohr to write an angry letter with the accusation that “under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons.” It was never sent, and only released by the Bohr family after Copenhagen’s success.

Heisenberg stuck to his claims, but historians discounted them until the 1993 publication of the so-called “Farm Hall transcripts,” which prompted the writing of Copenhagen. British spies secretly recorded Heisenberg’s conversations with other German scientists while they were prisoners of war. In the transcripts, Heisenberg seems to suggest that he deliberately delayed the German bomb project. Was that a moral choice, or a convenient revision of his past to better fit the post-Nazi world? Or even a white lie to salvage his pride at failing where the Americans had succeeded?

It’s a murky historical question befitting the man most famous for formulating the Uncertainty Principle. Frayn makes the most of that metaphor, framing the moral questions of the play in terms of quantum physics. You don’t need a complete grasp of the science to understand the ethical issues, but Frayn takes admirable care to explain as much as he can in layman’s terms. Just as Heisenberg showed that the act of observing an object is inevitably obscured by the act of observation itself, Copenhagen suggests that truth is never completely knowable because of the lies we tell, both to ourselves and others.

The place of nuclear power in popular culture has also been, in its way, constantly shifting, and governed by our growing understanding of its dangers, our willingness (or lack of it) to face the issue, and our vacillating confidence in the powers that be.

In the years immediately after Hiroshima, nuclear energy was treated as a miracle of science, with an almost charming naiveté—we were supposed to take the futurists seriously when they predicted atom-powered toasters. Still, the destructive potential of atom-splitting was never too far off in the wings, psychologically speaking. In the fantastic plots of pulp fiction, nuclear power took over as the primary device to explain an otherwise outlandish plot, just as electricity had animated Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s 1816 novel. In popular films of the 50s, the horrible effects of radiation were exaggerated, spawning gigantic monsters in movies like Them! and Godzilla—simultaneously acknowledging our fears and putting them in a form ludicrous enough to handle. (These days, radioactivity’s mantle as a great source of monstrous mutation has been commandeered by genetics-meddling, as the most recent incarnation of Spider-Man will tell you.)

Soon enough, and thanks to the increasingly frigid Cold War, nukes were depicted almost entirely in nightmare terms. In addition to the monster movies, the early 60s spawned a number of earnest Cold War thrillers like Henry Fonda’s Fail-Safe, a nightmare scenario in which the U.S. accidentally nukes Moscow, prompting the president to deliberately sacrifice New York to prevent full-scale nuclear war. The reigning champion of Armageddon satire, 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, had the same artistic aim despite the addition of a brilliant sense of humor.

But then even the satirical impulse dried up. Some writers have claimed that the Cuban Missile Crisis was so unsettling that the American public would no longer accept stories overtly depicting nuclear destruction, and there may be some truth to that—for 15 years after Strangelove, the most high-profile nuclear-themed films were the mostly ridiculous Planet of the Apes movies.

Realism in nuke movies didn’t make a comeback until the socially conscious 1970s, most strikingly with 1979’s The China Syndrome, a harrowing thriller about a catastrophic near-meltdown at a nuclear power plant. By some cosmic coincidence, it debuted just a few days before the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, the catastrophic near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The ensuing psychic jolt stuck in the national consciousness for a long time. The number of nuclear-themed novels and movies rose steadily through the 1980s, probably influenced by Reagan-era nuclear proliferation and Chernobyl in 1986. More importantly, there was a noticeable shift in tone. The children of China Syndrome—The Day After, Testament, Threads—dared to depict the post-Apocalyptic nuclear winter with terrifying realism. And, mirroring the growth of the punk movement, science fiction became much more nihilistic. The mutant monster of the 50s always had its vulnerabilities, a scourge that could be permanently defeated. But by the time of The Terminator, WarGames, and Silkwood, even the popcorn thrillers acknowledged that nuclear war meant total destruction. The only mystery that remained—as it has always remained—was just how we were going to figure our way out of this dilemma. Having split the atom once, are we ever going to be sure the chain reaction has stopped?