Adventures at Midlife

If there’s a new media or genre or means of expression to be celebrated out there, I’m always late to the party. (I figure I should have created this blog at least four years ago.) So it’s not surprising that I haven’t had much exposure to the emergence of the graphic novel, sort of an extended comic book for grown-ups. I somehow associated it with Japanese anime and other media that haven’t appealed to me and that don’t seem to have the legitimacy of traditional media.

Wrong again. The filmed version of Persepolis really changed my mind. Marjane ‘Marji’ Statrapi’s coming-of-age story set against the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran is beautiful and simple and funny and utterly terrifying. I had the same reaction to it that I’ve had to well-executed puppet theatre or other representational theatre — the non-realistic portrayal somehow makes the themes and issues much clearer and more poignant. “Life couldn’t possibly be worse than it was under the Shah,” the characters believe, and then the mullahs move in and the war with Iraq begins. Even when her parents send her away to escape the horrors of the regime, Marji is still defined by Iran, by what her family has suffered and lost.

She’s a few years older than my oldest son, and while he was spending his childhood and adolescence looking for the next ballgame-party-adventure with his friends, she spent most of hers afraid, for herself and for everyone she loved, several of whom were executed by the various regimes. Sent to Vienna by her frightened parents, she falls in with a bored, alienated crowd of Holden Caulfieldesque students, and eventually lashes out at them for their indifference to what was happening in the world.

I wonder if any generation in the West is ever really aware of what is going on around them? I remember being absolutely astonished by Apocalypse Now, with its violent, nihilistic portrait of Viet Nam. “Was that really what was going on?” I wondered. And I read a book a few years ago called Hungry Ghosts that argued that, while my friends and I were playing hopscotch and discovering boys and going to our first junior high school dances, tens of millions of Chinese peasants were starving to death trying to fulfill Mao’s public relations stunt of exporting grain to other “poorer” nations. (A hungry ghost is the bottom rung of hell in Chinese mythology, doomed to wander, starving, through eternity.) As many as 50 million or more Chinese people may have died, which I suppose could put Stalin and Hitler in second and third place as the 20th century’s bloodiest regimes.