You might not think that “wanton destruction” or “a state of violent disorder or riotous confusion” would have any place in a clergyman’s home. Think again, dear reader. It’s after Easter now, in a college town known for plenty of partying, and I’m reporting in to say that a little madness in the spring– mayhem, even — has crept into our normally quiet abode.
Recently my husband found some post-Holy Week relaxation in watching, on YouTube of course, those new ads for Allstate Insurance with Mayhem as the main character. If you are misfortunate enough not to have seen them yet, you’re in for a treat. I won’t ruin it for you (although the ads are all about ruin) if I just say that the guy takes on a variety of identities to illustrate a range of accidents, mostly bad car crashes with all of the ear-splitting sound effects, that are just waiting to happen in our lives. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZXM_g3mqew Although his face shows us that he is not exactly unscathed by the damage that he has caused, he nonetheless walks away from the wreck each time, in the same suit. The lesson? If we don’t have Allstate insurance, we’ll be sorry.
Now why would a guy who has spent over twenty years in the ordained ministry helping people through very real periods of suffering and calamity –- why would this same guy find it entertaining to watch Mayhem wreak his havoc?
The ads provide a kind of comic relief, that’s why. Although there is indeed plenty of damage done in these quick clips, it’s damage done to things; the people are a little banged up and stunned, but clearly they will survive, though probably with less attachment to their material belongings. Nobody loses a limb, let alone a life. This puts the whole thing in sharp contrast to the all-too-real suffering that he experiences alongside his parishioners at certain times in their lives. From some things, there is no easy brushing oneself off and walking away. There is recovery, yes, but it often takes a long time in the going through.
And, besides coming off more like a despicable frat boy than a force of pure evil, the character of Mayhem is intriguing in his ability to be both an integral part of the disaster and detached from it at the same time. In fact, my husband even went so far as to say that the guy actually reminds him of Jesus – I’m not kidding – as depicted in a famous fresco by the Italian master Peiro della Francesca, entitled “Resurrection”. He’s not exactly smirking, but there is a kind of “See what I got myself out of” expression and pose there. Triumph over death, indeed.
The thing is, we all know that disasters come in a whole spectrum. While we’re pretty clear about which ones we would have no inclination to laugh about (the real ones that truly hurt people), it can’t be wrong to give ourselves a little room to be amused by portrayals of catastrophes we recognize but don’t have to experience for real, this time anyway.
Which leads, of course, to the 100th anniversary of the Titanic. This week’s New Yorker includes an article by Daniel Mendelsohn entitled “Unsinkable.” It gives a kind of retrospective on all the books and movies and songs that have come out, and keep coming out, about the mighty ship going down. It’s little wonder, he says, that we find the story so endlessly fascinating: “…it uncannily replicates the structure and the themes of our most fundamental myths and oldest tragedies.”
Our daughter just spent four hours in the movie theatre watching the new 3-D version of Titanic, and she said that the ladies room was full of bawling teenagers afterwards. The central love story — with the accompanying issues of class barriers ultimately determining who got saved and who didn’t — never ceases to pull them in. As beautifully wrought as the film is, though, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine how completely different our feelings would be if we had actually been aboard the ship at the time. As our daughter put it, “We would’ve completely freaked out.”
I’d like to think I would have been serene and brave enough to be among those musicians who decided to keep on playing for their doomed shipmates right up until the end, but I doubt it. I often wonder – don’t you? – how all of the knowledge I’ve gained through the years about what’s important in life would, or would not, come to bear in crucial moments when disaster strikes for real. What would I really be made of? One thing seems clear: most of our moments, mercifully, are not heavy laden with the weight of tragedy….and we still better hold on to what keeps us afloat, keeps us buoyant. In a way, it’s all practice; in another way, it may be all that really matters.
So I don’t begrudge my husband his right to watch the new Allstate guy, over and over if he wants. With depictions of a teenage girl texting before she crashes, a deer caught in the headlights, a financier driving with his espresso, a raccoon chewing through everything in somebody’s attic – all of it virtual and completely the opposite of virtuous – it’s pretty creative stuff. Not only that, Mayhem makes his other favorite YouTube features – songs of the gravelly voice Tom Waits – seem positively beautiful by comparison.