Armageddon man: a review of The Loom of Ruin, by Sam McPheeters.

I first realized that Sam McPheeters was a great writer when I read his incredible profile of former Crucifucks frontman Doc Dart, an acutely observed and devastating piece of writing that reads like "Frank Sinatra has a Cold" for the punks. At one point not long ago, I remember wondering aloud to a friend when he was going to publish a book.

It's tough to talk about McPheeters without talking about his musical career (much to his chagrin, no doubt). Full disclosure: I am something of a diehard fan. When I was in college, I actually attempted to write a profile of McPheeters for a journalism class when I discovered that he lived in nearby Claremont. While very polite in responding to my inquiries, Sam clearly had no interest whatsoever in being profiled--although I did manage to badger him into answering a handful of questions. (I felt a thrill of vindication when he responded with some enthusiasm to a query about which Presidential Libraries he had visited, as I had long detected a certain fascination with the presidency in his output, which also recurs in The Loom of Ruin.) McPheeters is probably best known as the singer for Born Against, the quintessential political punk band of the '90s--but his greatest work is with Men's Recovery Project, who I rank alongside Devo as premier satirists of the boundless stupidity of modern man. When I heard McPheeters had written a novel about a furious gas station owner who threatens to destroy civilization, I was frankly ecstatic.

I see The Loom of Ruin as a continuation of the aesthetic evinced by Men's Recovery Project, who chronicled the absurdity of the commonplace. MRP scrutinized the barren landscape of modern life, unmasking the surreal, nightmarish qualities of quotidian activities like working in an office and sending email. The emblematic Men's Recovery Project song is "Normal Man", where the banal title proclamation--"that's right, I'm a normal man"--is delivered with the slobbery desperation of someone who recognizes that "normal" is nothing of the sort. It's one of MRP's many thumbnail sketches of the grotesques haunting our dystopian present, figures that include the Sexual Pervert ("The world is his napkin / Sitting quietly on the bus / No one knows it's him"), the Egyptian Assassin ("It's a gross, lonely life"), and the Rude Scientist ("his theories have been rebuked and his articles refused").

Trang Yang, the central figure of The Loom of Ruin, is the most striking grotesque in the McPheeters oeuvre: a violent, pathologically furious Hmong gas station owner, whose limitless rage suggests a combination of Mel Gibson, Virginia Tech gunman Seung Hui-Cho, and Michael Douglas' "D-Fens" character from the film Falling Down. But The Loom of Ruin is a novel about the cosmic cruelty of coincidence, and Yang's rage is explained to be the result of brain damage suffered after being struck with a stray round from an LAPD firefight. Before the shooting, we are told, Yang had plans to build an enormous Hmong community center. Afterwards, he plots the murder of the LA Lakers with a machete.

One of the best qualities of The Loom of Ruin is how expertly McPheeters evokes the setting of Los Angeles, a natural playground for his brand of surrealism if ever there was one. At the same time, McPheeters' depiction of the city evokes the interchangeability of the metropolis, in a world where all interactions are mediated by a vast corporate matrix composed of entities like Chevron, Safeway, Apple, and Time Warner. Through his total rejection of society, Yang represents that most classic of American archetypes: the rogue, operating beyond the bounds of legality and even common sense, inscrutable and indigestible to all observers, serving no master.

But true escape from the web of global capitalism is impossible, both in The Loom of Ruin and in real life; Yang is still, after all, a Chevron franchise owner. Appropriately, nearly every character in the book is depicted as a bundle of private anxieties buffeted by vast, impersonal forces they can't begin to understand. One of the most impressive writerly feats of The Loom of Ruin is how McPheeters juggles the novel's large cast, which features dozens of characters ranging from a pair of dimwitted ironic racists to Barack Obama to Satan, with each one progressing the ominous plot and remaining (mostly) distinctive. That said, one also can't help but wonder if the real reason McPheeters added Satan to the roster is simply in order to work in a Black Sabbath quotation in the novel's final stretch. But the method by which the devil is summoned is an inspired and appropriately prosaic piece of urban mythography: a character accidentally runs an empty microwave for two minutes.

But all of the characters are essentially reduced to props the second Trang Yang enters the scene; he is a figure of such raw, hateful energy that he crashes through the book's brief chapters like a wrecking ball. Yang is more a force of nature than anything else; he is more akin to a mythological demon or a cruel demigod than a human being. He's nothing less than the glowering unconscious of late capitalism, a seething, embodied death wish that wants nothing more than to burn it all down.

In the end, that's what The Loom of Ruin is: it's a jet black comedy about man's ruin. We love our apocalypses, but our favorites tend to be those where we can imagine ourselves surviving and even flourishing; dramatic reversals of fortune that give meaning to the meaningless and deliver us from the grueling monotony of an existence defined by mindless consumption. (The reigning example, is of course, a world overrun by zombies--where we can literally rise above the drudgery of our everyday lives.) But the annihilation wrought in The Loom of Ruin is of a very different kind: haphazard, undignified, inscrutable. It's a kind of kitchen sink apocalypse, where rather than being transformed into rugged survivalists, we watch humanity blown to pieces at the absolute nadir of its dignity, fighting over an Applebee's gift card. In The Loom of Ruin's ultimate flourish, man is laid low not by his Promethean hubris but by his sheer laziness, auto-corrected into oblivion.

The Saw movies and the failure of capitalism, or why you should watch Saw V and VI.

In case you somehow don't know, the Saw series began in 2004 with a piece of low-budget guignol where the guy from The Princess Bride is trapped in a broken-down bathroom of death with a cynical hipster photographer, at the whim of a deranged cancer patient. It's arguably the key movie that popularized the much-maligned "torture porn" subgenre, but the truth is it's a lot less bloody than memory and notoriety may lead you to believe. It's also phase one of a seven film series, in a relentless culture-industry cash-in that somehow also manages to smuggle in a surprising critique of free market capitalism.

Ironically, it is in Saw V, long after most viewers stopped paying attention, that things began to get really interesting. The central game in Saw V accords more closely to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma (see Fig. 1 below) than any in the series: five players are told they must cooperate to survive, but quickly turn on each other in a frenzied struggle to survive. By the time only two are left--having escaped physical trauma at the expense of the others--they realize that cooperating would've meant only a manageable amount of bodily harm for each player. But since everyone else died in a frenzy of all-or-nothing competition, the final test (which requires a minimum amount of blood from each player) has to be shared among two, and is likely to prove fatal to both.



Not shown on chart: severed limbs.

And when was this bloody parable released? October 2008, the month of the bailout, when Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld (the real-life equivalent of the film's asshole journalist disintegrated by a nailbomb) appeared before Congress and stated that his decisions were "prudent and appropriate" given the information available at the time.

What also makes Saw V interesting is the identity of the players: each was a participant in a callous real estate scam that left several innocent bystanders dead, from the developer who set the plot in motion to the arsonist who burned down the building (who are actually the film's Final Girls, although one is a dude). Jigsaw's earlier games always had a fundamentally conservative cast, focusing on placing junkies and derelicts into life-threatening situations in order to motivate them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. By pitting them against each other in a life-and-death struggle for diminishing returns, the movies provide a brutal dramatization of the cauldron that forged modern horror movies: Reaganism.



Hello, taxpayer. I want to play a game.

This is how the Saw series represents a long, savage reenactment of how free market capitalism conquered the world: rewarding players who would do whatever was necessary to survive, and brutally punishing those who hesitate when asked to take drastic action that may fatally imperil others. The poor, sick, and weak are asked to make drastic sacrifices or die. The trickle-down logic of Jigsaw's traps is explained by the fourth movie, which is also the nadir of the series. In this outing, Jigsaw's wife, a well-meaning liberal, opens an urban free clinic only to be rewarded by a junkie-induced miscarriage; the film thus combines the failure of rehabilitation, socialized medicine, and the death of the unborn into one incredible sledgehammer blow! But just a movie later, the brutal logic of Jigsaw's vengeance turns on those who had previously escaped its wrath. (It is also conceivable that Jigsaw saw people like the unscrupulous developer as competition, since his plans required a ready supply of crumbling, abandoned buildings.)

Saw VI takes the progressive turn of the fifth film and runs with it, providing what may be the best entry in the series aside from the original film. In a crowd-pleasing flourish, the victims of the sixth film's gamesmanship are greedy insurance agents--who, it is revealed, refused to pay for Jigsaw's experimental treatment in the first place! The sixth movie also features another heavily modified prisoner's dilemma, altered to better reflect real world circumstances: here the negative outcome (to wit, being forcibly injected with industrial-strength horror movie acid) is not meted out to the players, but onto the claims adjuster himself, providing a grisly revenge fantasy for those victimized by a financial industry that eliminated risk by socializing it.

It's easy for mainstream commentators to dismiss horror movies, especially those with sequels approaching/surpassing double digits, but they've always carried a societal critique that's often nowhere to be found at the Oscars. And torture porn, so widely-reviled as a filmic mode, has a lot more meat on its bones (pun intended) than it's given credit for. George Romero himself has argued that they're "lacking metaphor"--are you kidding me? Saw is all metaphor.