Review: Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

by Matthew Ryan


Naughty words have an unmistakable demoralizing toll on an uptight culture. But shocking a (comparatively) puritanical society sometimes has another point, such as George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” monologue in 1972. He was trying to say that an irrational fear of naughty words gets in the way of healthy human discourse. To illustrate the point, he used a lot of naughty words. Not everyone got the joke. That monologue was broadcasted over airwaves and lead to a landmark obscenity law case. As a result, the FCC has more control in regulating the messages that come to us over the air.

Chuck Palahniuk’s message also has a way of being taken the wrong way. Consider the (now) wildly popular film adaptation of his book Fight Club. The core of the movie has a character coming to grips with personal responsibility and had suggestive gay imagery. Much of these meaning was lost on young males who only responded to the brawling and angst. The number of Fight Club posters in fraternity houses and the videogame featuring Fred Durst is proof of the misunderstanding.

Palahniuk’s most recent twisted journey, Snuff, could be misunderstood only if there was some substance behind the naughty words to misunderstand. This novel concerns the fate of porn diva Cassie Wright as she embarks on what is to be her final, historic adult odyssey: World Whore Three. It’s a knock-down, drag-out kind of hardcore production, with a gangbang cast of 600 from all walks of life, including a baseball team straight from the Special Olympics. She doesn’t intend to make it out alive, opting instead to use the royalty and insurance money as a final charitable contribution to her unplanned child, conceived in World Whore One, whose identity is unknown at the outset.

But Cassie, who would have made the most interesting character of all, is behind the scenes for the most part. Our vantage point is limited to dudes 72, 137 and 600; a Wright-obsessed high schooler, a desperate and once-famous TV actor and an experienced “woodsman,” respectively. There’s also the ringleader, Sheila, an angsty sort of feminist with an endless supply colloquialisms for male porn actors. While various incarnations of pud-pullers, yogurt-squirters, shank-shuckers and the like might count as edgy for the MTV demographic, it gets old for anyone with sophistication.

As for the dudes, each fit conveniently into classic porn stereotypes, and all seem to suffer from a bad case of snarkyness and a deficiency of real conflict. Dude 72 is youth whose sex drive is subverted by conservative mother who hypocritically indulges her own appetite via erotic cake-making. Dude 137 is trying to revive his career through the historic gangbang and grapples fears that his past performance in gay porn just was an act of retribution for his Oklahoma upbringing. Dude 600 hasn’t cared since his first love left him. These roles haven’t been cutting-edge for a long time.

The plot is stringy and unremarkable. Events move forward slowly, as most of the time is spent bogged down in the history of each pud-puller. Once the story gains critical momentum, the book has just about reached its overblown finale. The only points Palahniuk earns in plot are some decent twists, which are not as exciting as his previous works but keep the reader invested for a little while longer.

Another hallmark of Palahniuk’s work is an abundance of trivial knowledge, and this book does not break from tradition. There’s mention of the Roman Empress Messalina, who moonlighted as a prostitute and a won an epic sex competition against another famous prostitute of the time. There’s also talk of Marilyn Monroe’s double-life as the intellectual Zelda Zonk, and the harmful effects of Kegel exercise balls filled with mercury. These factoids typically unfold as bite sized stories in themselves, and are mostly allegories for the novel’s subtext. Palahniuk studied journalism in college and its shows in his compulsion to use these elements as much as possible, but the effectiveness of each element is based on how relevant it is to the story.

This time around, most tidbits miss the mark. Sheila has an uncommon medical vocabulary and uses it with reckless abandon. Number 137 is a veritable cornucopia of Hollywood trivia, and Number 600 is the same when it comes to the porn industry. These characters are walking, talking encyclopedia Erotica, but it does little more than give the scene some colorful jargon to match the drapes. At its worst, it comes off as pretentious and distracting.

The sum of Snuff’s parts is an attempt to assess the state of the sexual revolution from several points of view. From Sheila’s perspective, there’s the renewed feminist effort to portray women as studs, conquering male after male to establish as sort of balance of power. From 72’s vantage point, there’s a rebellion against hypocritical sexual repression. We get some gay perspective courtesy of 137, and a nihilistic impression of love from 600. But there’s nothing that goes beyond the most superficial critique of American sexuality, and it all gets diluted with large swaths of naughty words. After the last milk monkey standing, this book delivers as advertised: snuff.

Review: Radiohead concert in St. Louis (5.14.08)

by Matthew Ryan




Before it even got off the ground, it was obvious that the show was to be taken seriously. On the left side of the stage were rows of banks of crates, arranged in store-esque aisles. One of these crates bore the spray-stenciled name: RADIOHEAD. An arsenal of 20-ish guitars lined one of the aisles, ready for battle. Wires stuck out of metal crates like a network of nerves from a DaVinci anatomical sketch. From a light platform suspended above the crowd, rope ladders came down. Three stagehands climbed to the top of the platform and sat in customized seats, manning lights, pointing cameras, setting the trajectory of laser beams and whatever alien technology Radiohead was about to throw at the crowd. Yes, they meant business.

When it came time, the musicians, sans Yorke, came on and took positions in short order. The crowd -- a mix of pimply high schoolers, highbrow college nerds, polo shirt-clad frat boys, girls in towering high heels and dangling dresses, folks with mortgages and kids -- examples of every kind of live, breathing people -- started hollering in a way that couldn’t be one-upped, until Yorke finally came on stage, then it reached a new kind of loud.

Yorke came on, a bit like a nobody and a bit like an alien. He wandered back and forth at first, hands in pockets, occasionally looking at the ground, perhaps waiting for a train at a station. Or maybe he was waiting for the mother ship. He looked a bit tickled as he examined his St. Louis audience, as any average human being looks at another human being doing something odd, or maybe it was the look that an extraterrestrial observer gives when examining the human race.

This was all very strange, yes, but strange for both parties. The crowds didn’t seem to make sense of it either. Here was the band they’ve rocked-out to, toked up to, screwed and had babies to, a band built into a Beowulf-like mythological construct (Did you hear these guys didn’t even charge for the last album? No way! I heard he’s got an actual radio stuck in his head that receives all sorts of interstellar frequencies? Whoa, freaky!). Considering the hype, perhaps it was a band that wasn’t supposed to exist at all. Yet Yorke cometh, and was putzing around on a stage before all. On top of that, you could see his maligned eye from a camera feed as it shone on a display in the back of the stage. And this bassist fellow had an oddly-shaped nose and an eye that looked punched-in. And then there was Jonny Greenwood, with his bony face. What was going on? The crowd went with the flow. Beeps and boops trickled in the background and the evening began with “All I Need.”

Yorke talked after the second song, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” something about smelling donuts??? And how anybody could eat donuts at a time like this??? And now donut sales would dive??? He was talking about the smell of Elephant Ears stands, but it was barely intelligible through his British accent.

In quick succession, Radiohead played song after song from the catalog (but conspicuously nothing from Pablo Honey and only one from The Bends), not wasting any time in-between. Light effects came into full bloom, with LED tubes that hung from the rafters like neon streamers. One song they’d twinkle like ice crystals, flash like lightning and flow like rain, and the next they’d glow purple and otherworldly. Green washed down the length of the tubes like goo flowing from the sky, all very high-end and hypnotic. This was the backdrop that Yorke spazzed out to, head jerking, mouth moaning, arms and hands snaking along like he was embracing a first-time acid trip. The crowd fell in line and clapped to his beat.


Tricks were en masse. For “You and Whose Army,” Yorke made use of a piano rigged with a camera, which made for an extreme close-up blasted on the massive screen at the back of the stage. In Crayola green, the audience witnessed Yorke get closer and closer to the camera, until a massive Yorke eye took up the entire screen. Backing off the camera, his face then became distorted in the screen with a fish-eye effect, before being multiplied over and over.

For “There, There,” he ran around on stage with drumsticks as the crew plopped a small drum set in front of the mike. After sitting down, Yorke said “I wonder what this thing does.”

In his second and final address to the crowd, Yorke told of a song from Amnesiac that was “lost sight of.”

“It seems very pertinent now,” he said, the “P” popping through the sound system, and played “Optimistic.”

A little over an hour of songs rapid-fire and the band rushed off. But the house lights stayed off and stagehands still ran around, preparing for who knows what. It didn’t fool any of the crowd, not for a second, so some went ahead and shouted encouragements while others sat and waited for the inevitable encore, which came in about two minutes. As the band came back, they waved and clapped. Colin Greenwood smiled big, and Yorke looked at the ground and scratched his head. They knew we knew it was all for show. There may have even been a bit of an ashamed blush on Yorke’s cheeks. He thanked the crowd and took up an acoustic, at which point the amphitheater became quiet and attentive, and “Exit Music” flowed through the PA. Little flames began cropping up in the crowd up front, people flicked on lighters. From under the stage covering, the stars couldn’t be seen, but when people in the lawn seats held up lighters, it created an eerie similarity.

When the five-song encore came to an end, Radiohead left as quickly as they did after the first set, but stagehands were still messing around with equipment, so the shenanigans were busted again. It was apparent to the audience that a second encore was inevitable, so with further encouragement, the band came out for another round. Three songs resulted (the double-encore was repeated at other concerts on the same tour), and in one last splurge of energy, going out supernova-style, the band hit the crowd with a green and purple light-strobing, video screen pixilating, uber freakout to “Paranoid Android.”

After that, it was done. Honest.




Setlist:

FIRST SET
------------
All I Need - (In Rainbows)
Jigsaw Falling Into Place - (In Rainbows)
Airbag - (Ok Computer)
15 Step - (In Rainbows)
Nude - (In Rainbows)
Kid A - (Kid A)
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi - (In Rainbows)
The Gloaming - (Hail to the Thief)
You and Whose Army? - (Amnesiac)
Idioteque - (Kid A)
Faust Arp - (In Rainbows)
Videotape - (In Rainbows)
Everything in Its Right Place - (Kid A)
Reckoner - (In Rainbows)
Optimistic - (Kid A)
Bangers + Mash - (In Rainbows)
Bodysnatchers - (In Rainbows)

FIRST ENCORE
-------
Exit Music (for a film) - (OK Computer)
Myxomatosis - (Hail to the Thief)
My Iron Lung - (The Bends)
There There - (Hail to the Thief)
Fake Plastic Trees - (The Bends)

SECOND ENCORE
-------
Pyramid Song - (Amnesiac)
House of Cards - (In Rainbows)
Paranoid Android - (OK Computer)