Playing Pretend

I encountered Eminem's "Stan" yesterday. (Although, to be sure, I don't make a career of living under rocks.) I'm not really into hip-hop and rap, and have always tended to pass on artists who built reputations as being intentionally transgressive, so I'd never really paid any attention to Mr. Mathers' work or the controversies he sparked. But when listening to "Stan," I found it really interesting, and so set out to learn more about it. And from there I learned that the video for it was pretty heavily... redacted for general consumption.

But the Internet being the Internet, it wasn't hard to find what I'm given to understand is an original release version, and watch it. And, as I'm sure you've guessed, I'm not really sure what all the fuss is about. Okay, I'm old enough to understand that one person's cautionary tale is often viewed as another's how-to video. When I worked with children, back in my twenties, one of the more senior staffers once told me that the problem with telling kids "don't do drugs" was that all they would hear was "do drugs." And it's a legitimate concern, to be honest. After all, there are people who use the word "stan" to proudly self-define themselves as superfans of something, despite the fact that Stanley Mitchell is clearly not intended to be a role-model for anyone.

But for all that the story of "Stan" is that of a obsessive fan whose anger at perceiving themselves to be ignored by a celebrity who they feel owes them something culminates in a tragic murder-suicide, the eight-minute video is more poignant than over-the-top. There are Lifetime movies that are more disturbing.

Watching Stan's disintegration over the course of the video (which is a really excellent exercise in short-form storytelling, both visually and lyrically), I started to wonder if a general sense that the rough edges of society must never see the light of day leads to people feeling alone in what are really common situations. While I'm sure that people driving themselves from bridges with their pregnant girlfriend locked in the trunk is far from an everyday occurrence, abusiveness that escalates to fatal violence isn't. And a general attitude that children need to be kept within a world that pretends that this doesn't exist renders them unprepared for the eventuality.

It was an debate that simmered constantly when I worked with children. While policy was to limit their exposure to things that adults deemed too distressing or unpleasant, for the population that we were working with, many of them had already experienced abuse of some form or another, and were likely to experience it again once they aged out into the world around them. And it's hard to prepare someone for something while maintaining that its entire existence is fictional.

There is something about American society, I think, that prevents it from looking itself in the mirror on a regular basis. I don't claim to be above being put out when the person who looks back at me in the mirror is the person who I am, rather than some person I might wish to be, but I understand that if I am to have any hope of reconciling the two, I have to know my starting point. This is simply how it works. I think. But maybe I'm incorrect about that. After all, humanity has made it this far and the pretense shows no sign of going away.