Hearts, brains, and guts

While watching Zombieland the other night, I had a minor revelation on the subject of danger and fear. In the film, Jesse Eisenberg (doing his best version of a poor man's Michael Cera) plays a nerdy college student who claims that his innate obsessive fearfulness is what helps him survive the zombie apocalypse. Since he's always been a Warcraft playing shut-in, he argues in a voiceover dripping with geek pathos, it's easy for him to follow the extremely antisocial, risk-averse lifestyle necessary to avoid becoming a "human Happy Meal" when every human around him has been zombiefied. Yet within the first five minutes, his character is paired with Woody Harrelson (doing his best version of a poor man's Clint Eastwood), who sprays the air with bullets just for fun and generally expends a shocking amount of his energy on putting himself at risk. To hammer home his extravagantly superfluous bravado, the main motivation of his character is not, as for the others, to find a zombie-free zone, but to locate and consume what may soon become the world's last remaining Twinkie. Predictably, though quite delightfully, the rest of the film deals with the navigation of these two poles -- extreme risk aversion and extreme risk predilection -- as they relate to life, love, and zombie survival.

What I realized as I was watching all the silly yet surprisingly smart zombie-killing action go down was that the character played by Eisenberg (and made infinitely more famous in pop culture by Monsieur Cera) has a lot to say about the psychological makeup of my generation in general and me in particular. And not just because he's a Warcraft playing shut-in (substitute Diablo and I'm guilty as charged), but because his major phobias are not the rational fears you'd expect for someone in his situation (violent, cannibalistic hordes of zombified humans), but completely irrational, moderately ridiculous ones (clowns, bathrooms, dirty dish towels). As someone also raised in a world hermetically sealed off from any actual danger, I feel a lot of empathy for this kind of abstracted second-order fear, as well as the impulse to refashion it into some kind of bizarre self-definition-cum-self-affirmation.

Last summer, on a bet, I had to learn how to ride a motorcycle, and while jerkily zipping around a dusty strip-mall parking lot in first gear, I realized that my biggest fear wasn't dying in a fiery crash on the highway, or even experiencing the sensation of skin scraping against the grit, gravel, and broken glass that littered the concrete. My biggest fear was not being very good at riding the damn thing -- not being able to master turns, or leans, or figuring out the rules of the road, and thus letting down the well-intentioned boy I'd made the bet with, as well as his father, who was patiently trying to teach me to shift gears as childish tears of frustration and shame streamed down my face. I kept trying to explain to the confused Texas boys in attendance to my paltry performance that I just didn't like dangerous things, that speed wasn't fun or exhilarating for me. Maybe, I tried to suggest to them, and even more plaintively to myself, maybe I'm just a scared little girl who needs to remain locked in the safety of esoteric anxieties and neuroses. But as soon as I framed it that way, in exactly the same pathos-ridden inner monologue performed by Eisenberg, I balked. Like Eisenberg's character, I had existed in a solitary, essentialist framework for a long time and, like him, I wasn't entirely happy in it -- not the least because it was a framework dominated by a secret obsession with heroicism and machismo (see: every video game and comic book, ever).

Because the thing is, the Eisenberg-Harrelson duality is actually a singularity. No matter where the members of my generation fall on the spectrum, we almost certainly want to be at least a little bit more Harrelson, and I'm certainly no exception. Any time I've dealt with fear and danger in a public setting, I found myself working through the complex performative possibilities and coming up on the Harrelson side. Eighth grade gym class comes to mind, when I was one of the only girls to make it to the top of the climbing rope (the reward was getting to sign your name on the gym ceiling with a Sharpie) but made the mistake of wrapping the rope around my leg when I slid down, sloughing off a third of the skin that covered my left tibia. The school nurse nearly keeled over when I limped into her office dripping with blood, but I was totally stoic about the whole thing, eying the raw, red tissue with clinical interest as she proceeded to scald it with alcohol and swath it in gauze. I'd never broken or sprained anything, and I decided that this moment was going to define my relationship to pain from that day on. Walking through the deserted hallways to get back to class, leg bandaged and bloody gym clothes in hand, I felt absurdly proud, like Indiana Jones returning roughed up but triumphant from yet another legendary quest. Whatever pain I'd dealt with struggling up the rope and then using it as an accidental skin grater seemed completely immaterial in comparison to this euphoric victory march. For the first time in my life, I felt like a genuine certified badass.

The point is that bravery does not exist in a vacuum, just as fear doesn't. It all comes down to the performance of a type, and the reason the Harrelson character in the film isn't the lead and dorky, neurotic Eisenberg is has everything to do with Zombieland's savvy handling of this basic social fact. Harrelson is an archetype, a comic book character, while Eisenberg is the real mirrored representation of the film's audience: a geeky, avid comic book reader, video game player, zombie movie watcher, precisely for the reason that Harrelson is who he secretly wants to be.

The main takeaway from all of this is that there are two options:

1. Be Eisenberg and make risk-taking antithetical to one's perception/presentation of self. Be pretty much safe from failure and pain but remain dominated by secret dreams, yearnings, feelings of inadequacy, etc.

2. Be Eisenberg trying to be Harrelson, possibly fail and/or look ridiculous, almost certainly get eaten in the metaphoric zombie apocalypse that is the modern world, but at least go down in style.

Well, long story short, I may be a scared little girl at heart, but at least I'm a scared little girl with a motorcycle license. And if worse does come to worse, I'm also an organ donor.