10. Everything reminds me of everything

I wanted to have been targeted by Mr. New Yorker Writer simply because I’d wandered into his line of sight and not because of anything particular having to do with me.

I realized, the other day, that for years I’ve been kidding myself about why for a period in the mid-1990s I read a lot of books about serial killers, Ted Bundy in particular. And that got me thinking about why I never understood David Mamet’s approach to acting.

I thought I was interested in serial killers because I likened them to sexual harassers in a couple of ways—ways that Bundy, more than anyone else, epitomized. Famously, he had the gift of camouflage and could function in society with complete plausibility. He dabbled in politics as a Young Republican and, during the period when he was killing women he had abducted, mostly from college campuses in Washington and Oregon, he worked as an administrator for the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Committee, which was where he met Ann Rule who went on to write the definitive Bundy tome, The Stranger Beside Me, which I must have read two or three times. During this period, Bundy wrote a brief monograph on the subject of rape prevention, and later on he joined in the search for the missing girls under the auspices of the Department of Emergency Services.

All this seemed to me to rhyme with the sort of sexual harasser exemplified by Angelo in Measure for Measure, who shows one face to the world and another to his targets. That seemed terribly significant to me from 1993 to around 1997.

Another aspect of the Bundy story that I seem to have cherished was his tendency to target women simply because they crossed his path. I think I very much wanted to see the target of a sexual harassment campaign as similarly random. I wanted to have been targeted by Mr. New Yorker Writer simply because I’d wandered into his line of sight and not because of anything particular having to do with me.

I read about serial killers because there was no literature about sexual harassment at the time. And in my family, you always researched and read about anything that had happened. Particularly if it happened to you or someone you were close to. My father was a shrink—an actual card-carrying, couch-mongering old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalyst, with an office on Central Park West and everything. Reading about stuff, especially what was personal to you, was part of a Freudian ethos I was raised on that saw trauma as something to be mastered, and this you did by revisiting or confronting it. But there was nothing written about sexual harassment in 1990, no books or articles or essays, no way of confronting or researching it on the page. So, I read about Ted Bundy. That was what I thought, anyway.

That background is probably why I’ve never understood the concept of “trigger warnings.” Reared in a metaphorical mindset that sees nearly everything as a stand-in for something else—I learned to analyze my dreams almost before I could walk—I can’t imagine any experience or aspect of life-as-it’s-lived that you could not be reminded of by something coming out of left field. So, the idea of trying to avoid things likely to remind you of a particular incident or event seems laughable to me. Everything reminds me of everything, and nothing isn’t reminiscent of something.

It occurred to me the other day that it was not Bundy himself but his victims I was fixated on. I knew all their names and pseudonyms, the principle ones—Lynda Ann Healy, Donna Gail Manson, Susan Rancourt, Roberta Parks, Georgeann Hawkins, Denise Naslund, Janice Ott, Debby Kent, Caryn Campbell—and the circumstances under which each had disappeared. I knew that Lynda had been in bed in her basement room and Donna on her way to a jazz concert on campus. I knew Susan had been on the way back to her dorm after a meeting for students who were thinking of becoming RA’s and that Roberta had headed out to the student center to meet friends for coffee. I knew that Georgeann had vanished between her boyfriend’s dorm and her sorority house, mere feet away down a “well-lighted” alley, and that Janice and Denise had both disappeared from the same crowded park in broad daylight, one of them while picnicking with friends. I knew that Debby had left to pick up her brother after attending a high school play and that Caryn had disappeared between the second-floor elevators and Room 210 at the Wildwood Inn in Aspen, where she was vacationing with her fiancé and his two children.

The point about these women, it seemed to me—what both haunted me and soothed me—was that they had all been where they belonged, someplace safe: asleep in their beds or with friends or steps away from a loved one. And yet Bundy had got to them anyway. They were “good girls” in that sense in which we’re taught to judge ourselves: they’d none of them been engaging in high-risk behavior. In fact, they were instances of that “perfect victim” we now know and admonish ourselves doesn’t exist.

Thinking of all this, I was suddenly overcome with sadness and a strange affection for my younger self—with her lack of written resources and her metaphorical mindset—to whom all this had been so important.

That metaphorical mindset is why I could never understand the approach to scene analysis that Mamet and his students espoused. Or no, strike that. I understood it, but I couldn’t do it myself.

There were three steps, and the first two went like this: you were supposed to determine what the character was literally doing in the scene—that was the first step. Then you were supposed to characterize that in a more general way, or as Mamet put it, decide what the “essence” of that was. That gave you the “action” or objective. Some of Mamet’s students added an extra sub-step where you determined what the character wanted. It didn’t matter—it was the first step I couldn’t get past. I could never see things in literal terms. Whatever the character was doing, I always found myself expressing it metaphorically, at least one remove from reality.

Actually, there was another aspect to Mamet’s analysis that made it difficult for me to do. Your action had to be expressed in terms of getting the other actor in the scene to do something or getting something from them. Again, I understood the reason for that. It was the most brilliant thing about this approach, because it created an agon and located the drama not in a character’s feelings or internal struggles but in the desire to do something. The problem for me was the manipulative way in which actions had to be couched. I simply couldn’t think in those terms—wanting to get something from someone or wanting to get someone to do something.

Abstract, intellectual influence I could get behind. I could see getting all up in someone’s business for the purpose of changing their opinion about something, a play, for instance, or some other work of art or literature. I could see wanting to get someone else to appreciate how a particular bit of dialogue was bogus or how some piece of scenery or literary device was ingenious and what its effect was. But I come from a long line of master manipulators, and while I can detect manipulation, I’ve never had a taste for it myself. The idea of trying to control others or affect their lives or actions: that’s always been anathema to me. To me it reads as underhanded.

And thinking about all this, I found myself wondering whether my own scruples—priggishness, if you like—about influencing other people had made me a puppet in someone else’s manipulations.