Television and role models
Morton, Brian
ometimes I worry that after I die I'll find myself in an office, sitting across from a man who has a printout showing how I spent every minute of my life. He isn't using the information to...
...Can he kill people just for misery...
...You could argue that, in the climate of the mid-1980s, featuring a hero who stalks around New York with a gun, taking care of problems the police can't handle, the show was glorifying the vigilante antics of people like Bernhard Goetz...
...A few years ago I became addicted to nightly reruns of a television show from the eighties, The Equalizer...
...but I'm not sure that the man without heroes is any happier...
...Or maybe that's unfair...
...Maybe I can just die...
...I tried my father, but he couldn't guide me either—not because he'd been gone so long, but because he was never a skilled navigator of emotionally complex situations...
...It's embarrassing to admit that at thirty-nine I'm still an adolescent boy...
...and I knew that, a champion of the power of the will, he would stress the part that my friend could play—would have to play—in her own recovery...
...What if they give me the wrong medication and I flip out...
...The different episodes unfold with an exquisite formal consistency, like the ritual dramas of ancient China...
...But beyond that, he had nothing to say to me...
...Hesitantly, she reaches for the phone .. . I could make a defense of the show's intelligence, I suppose...
...If you asked me who my heroes are, I'd mention Chekhov and Lawrence and Whitman and Henry James and William James...
...I didn't know if I should pretend to be sure they could help her there or admit that I was almost as scared as she was...
...and though she was desperately afraid of going back, she didn't see any other choice...
...One of the things I like about the Equalizer is that he reminds me of my father, who died in 1984...
...Need Help...
...whether to try to talk her into this or let her go home...
...He puts an ad in the paper...
...How do you account for that...
...I encouraged her to make the decision, and after she made it I drove her out there...
...I could intimidate the security man if I just acted the part...
...He said that this other man, during a time of difficult contract negotiations, had come to speak to some of the workers he represented—they were workers in a hospital, now that I think of it—and that management had forced him to leave the building...
...or Pat Riley, the relentless coach of the New York Knicks...
...She took my hand, and both of us held on tight...
...I knew her well enough to be sure they were wrong...
...Yes, surely there are—but I haven't come across them...
...the police can't help...
...I wondered what William James would do in my place...
...What if it makes me worse...
...Now, you claimed to be passionately interested in literature," he says, "and you believed that Tolstoy was the greatest writer who ever lived...
...My friend was in a tiny windowless room, pacing back and forth...
...about a year before his death he told a story about another union leader, a man whom he regarded with scorn...
...I even dressed like McCall that morning, in a three-piece suit...
...Even to put the question this way— "the amount of time I waste" —is to tell a lie...
...But if the Equalizer means something to me largely because he reminds me of my father, the question remains: when I needed to draw on some of the ferocity, the force, that my father possessed in such great supply, why did I use a TV character as an intermediary...
...She told me it would kill her to stay there...
...I did remember the gentleness that sometimes came over him when he was dealing with people in trouble, but the memory didn't take me very far...
...when I asked her if something was wrong with her eye, she said she didn't know...
...Then I thought, Fucking Robert McCall would never let them turn him away...
...Are you sure this'll help me...
...Sometimes the show seems not just dumb, but ugly...
...I didn't know whether to be firm or yielding...
...He has an enormous supply of friends with time on their hands, so he can provide around-the-clock security for an AIDS-infected kindergartner menaced by neighborhood bullies...
...He went meekly," my father said...
...the same crisp, unsentimental style...
...In a time of distress, I called on the Equalizer to tell me what to do...
...But to make it an honest list, I'd also have to name people like Robert McCall...
...I wouldn't know how to answer...
...Unhappy is the man who needs heroes...
...He's just doing some research on the gulf between who we are and who we claim to be...
...So can I claim that I watch dumb shows on television merely to waste time...
...He has the same white hair...
...I've been too busy watching TV...
...The man suddenly seemed a little vague, a little lost...
...The Equalizer's heroics are often rather unlikely...
...And he has the rhetorical skills of a Cicero, so he can finally persuade the bullies to change their ways...
...In the first fifteen minutes we're introduced to the victim of the week—a woman threatened by a vengeful former husband, an impoverished retiree harassed by a slumlord, whatever...
...There's a personal element in all this that I haven't mentioned...
...I realized that there was no excuse for being cowed by authority: I could make myself the authority figure here...
...q 272 • DISSENT...
...Adolescent boys reach toward manhood by imitating athletes and television detectives...
...I thought of how I had made myself equal to the situation a year before by pretending to be Robert McCall...
...he didn't meet my eyes...
...Are you sure it'll help me...
...Can't I just stay here and sleep in the glove compartment...
...the same manner of dress—almost militantly formal...
...She kept pinching her eyelid...
...If I needed a fictional intermediary at all, couldn't I have found a better one...
...I kept driving...
...Call The Equalizer...
...I tried to summon him up again, but he didn't work for me this time: evidently he could guide me only during action scenes...
...Some of the garbage on television means a lot to me...
...I could make a better case for the show's ridiculousness...
...I knew that he'd be full of sympathy for my friend—because he was a sympathetic man, and because he knew what it was to touch bottom...
...The next day, when, along with her family, I talked the people at the hospital into letting her leave, I continued to be Robert McCall...
...But I see here that you spent a total of 260 hours in the company of Tolstoy —300 hours if we count the time you spent reading biographies and criticism— whereas you spent more than a thousand hours in the company of someone named David Letterman...
...In one show, for example, he travels to Latin America to rescue an investigative journalist who's being tortured by a brutal right-wing regime—a regime that McCall himself helped bring to power in a military coup years earlier...
...Since he's always resorting to violence, the last moments of many episodes show him in a state of despair, convinced that he hasn't changed at all—convinced that he's merely found a new outlet for his own diseased need to use force...
...she has nowhere to turn...
...She begged me not to make her go...
...I searched for someone else to call on...
...Kevorkian...
...More than this: when I was writing about the incident in the hospital, I realized it had a direct precedent in something I once heard my father say...
...but there it is...
...She said she couldn't go through with it...
...it would be better to die...
...I don't know why it had to be a man, but apparently it had to be: it never even occurred to me to think of a woman...
...foreign policy...
...Last week, a year after her first stay in the hospital, my friend decided to check herself back in...
...Her panic made me panic...
...My friend sat beside me, shivering, with her knees drawn up under her chin...
...McCall himself is an interestingly ambiguous character...
...What if they decide I'm suicidal and never let me out...
...In the middle of the Reagan era, the show often took a scathing view of U.S...
...I didn't know who to be...
...In another he tangles with an Oliver North type, a fanatic who makes common cause with terrorists and druglords in the name of the war against communism...
...He outruns twenty-fiveyearold thugs and tosses them around at will...
...Nevertheless, I watched it every night, and if they were still showing the reruns I would watch them all over again...
...She wasn't eating, she wasn't sleeping, she'd lost her job...
...When we came within a few miles of the hospital she began to panic...
...Her depression had lifted for a few months, and then returned...
...I walked back and told him, briskly and matter-offactly —I tried to find the tone of a man who's never contradicted—that I needed to see my 270 • DISSENT Notebook friend, that I had a flight to catch in less than two hours, and that I had no time to argue about it...
...In almost every show, while doing the Lord's work in this way, he has to kill a few people...
...and the same unhesitating sense of right and wrong...
...Then she notices the ad in the paper: "Odds Against You...
...I wished that she could choose to stay: I thought they might be able to do more for her there than she'd been doing for herself on the outside...
...I had no idea what to say...
...What if some crazy person rapes me in there...
...My father was the head of a labor union in New York City...
...An aging secret agent, Robert Notebook SPRING • 1995 • 269 Notebook McCall, sick at heart because of all the terrible things he's done, quits the CIA and, hoping to wash some of the blood off his hands, sets himself up as a freelance do-gooder in New York...
...And since my customary heroes were of so little use to me in that moment, I thought, Well, I guess I'll have to be...
...She—let's say it's a she—is desperate...
...I didn't know what might happen to her in the hospital...
...How can I account for the amount of time I waste staring vacantly at the garbage on TV...
...it would be better to hide in SPRING • 1995 • 271 Notebook bed...
...He drives his Jaguar into Harlem to confront a street gang, delivers blistering lectures to hostile, heavily armed young men, and somehow both this sixtyish, paunchy hero and his luxury car emerge untouched...
...it would be better to go back home...
...Probably the most intelligent thing about the show is the acting of Edward Woodward, the Englishman who plays the lead role...
...She said that if she was half crazy now, she'd go all the way crazy if they kept her locked up...
...weeping with remorse, they embrace the child, and all is well...
...If it was me I would have told them, 'You want me to leave, you'll have to carry me out.' " Though he was sixty-six years old when he said this, I have no doubt that he would have told them exactly that...
...Let's call Dr...
...I sputtered out a few weak words of protest and turned away, cowed, resigned to going home...
...and without another word about the hospital rules, he let me in...
...about a year ago, a friend of mine who was enduring a prolonged depression was confined to a psychiatric hospital against her will...
...Maybe I should try reading one of his books all the way through sometime, instead of skimming...
...He isn't using the information to decide my fate...
...Finally I thought, Can't you just be yourself, without heroes...
...The fucking Equalizer would find some way to get in there...
...I talked to two of the psychologists on the floor, who said they intended to prevent her from leaving: they thought she was a danger to herself...
...Best known for his portrayal of the title character in Bruce Beresford's Breaker Morant, a film about the last days of the Boer War, Woodward brings to the role of Robert McCall a passion and a subtlety that go far beyond anything provided by the script...
...or Jean-Luc Picard, the tragic, noble, stoical, bald-headed captain on Star Trek: The Next Generation...
...people in trouble seek him out...
...Many of the episodes deal with McCall's past and the horrors he perpetrated when he worked for the government...
...I went to see her, and a bored-looking little man at the security desk told me that visitors weren't permitted in her ward...
...You get the impression that if there are two thousand murders a year in New York, half of them are committed by the Equalizer...
...But since she was so sure that she wanted to get out—it was the first thing she'd been sure about in months—I felt I had to try to help her get out...
...Surely, in the vast record of world literature, there are richer, more complex figures who share some of my father's traits...
...maybe the problem was simply that he was too unlike me for me to draw on him now...
...and he helps them, usually for free...
...She hadn't lost the sense of humor that is one of the many things I love about her, but she was terribly afraid...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
