The Blacklist Is A Docudrama About America
James Spader’s Raymond Reddington — is he a sociopath, a hero, or some of both — like a Reddington-esque man that once I loved and who once loved me?
We’ve been binge watching NBC’s The Blacklist. I started watching the show when it was first aired, but quit because it jumped the shark really fast.
Or so it seemed at the time. The absurdities on the show that then seemed to be jumping the shark now look more like a funhouse mirror of actual reality. At times, maybe just a “regular mirror.”
External evidence would seem to indicate that there most certainly could be —is— a “Cabal” of criminals in high places in the U.S. government. The show regularly features bioterror threats and while to date, we haven’t seen any viruses that cause death within moments, we have experienced a terrible pandemic. Drugs do travel freely across the U.S. border in large quantities as do people (and unlike many upper middle-class people, I know why and the answers are ‘human trafficking’ and ‘low-to-no-cost labor’). Many public organizations present that they are charitable, but they really are fronts for criminal activity behind the scenes.
Everybody’s out for #1. And there are still only a small number of people who realize what a dangerous, risky, evil, and crude world it really is.
Just like The Blacklist’s Raymond Reddington as portrayed by James Spader.
I’ve always liked James Spader.
He has lent his peculiarly masculine, morally ambiguous, erudite presence to Raymond (“possibly”) Reddington, a character that reflects the vices and virtues of the 20th American century man. Reddington knows that anything but a better world is the one we live in. Spader is firmly in “Generation Jones,” like me, like Barack Obama, and like a man he reportedly attended Andover with, John F. Kennedy, Jr.
We are none of us who came up in these times, anything like full-on Boomers.
Reddington is more than a little bit like my second fiancé, John Starr. Here is Mr. Starr. He has been gone a while now. I do miss him, and always will.
Our little-recognized Jones generation straddles the Boomer world of the 50s and 60s, and bridges to the younger generations, who grew up with media and cultural influences like computer gaming and mobile phones and processed autotune music and images that don’t reflect reality. Things, I don’t think, that we would have accepted because we are more grounded in the real, physical world by nature of our upbringing: playing outside, playing with each other, riding bikes, pretending to be heroes and villains with tree branches and rock forts.
We grew up with books. We grew up listening to Gore Vidal debate William F. Buckley. If we saw some sexy girl in Playboy, those were usually her breasts and she had a real body.
We grew up with classic, traditional stories of American history. We read great poets: Whitman and Baudelaire. We listened to Springsteen. I listened to The Who.
We’re not “hippies.” Most of us grew up hating hippies.
But whether we were rich Billionaire Boys Club preppies or people whose parents played with Frank Zappa, we didn’t grow up thinking other nations were somehow less than the U.S. We were not overtly prejudiced against other ethnicities and races and to express such views was shameful in our circles; we wanted to live equally. We respected other cultures. We were interested in them. We wanted to travel, to see fine things. We aspired … We did have hope.
It’s like Raymond Reddington. His global “reach” and seemingly endless supply of cool friends from around the world would have been one of my highest aspirations back in the 80s.
One night Mr. Starr dialed me and growled, “Sterling, I’m going to desegregate Kansas City. Everyone is going to have an opportunity.”
Mr. Starr named his children Jack, Bobby, and Elizabeth.
He died of alcohol-related liver disease alone in a Kansas City hospital room.
I still talk with his chauffeur, Zubin. Zubin is now involved in stock trading. Zubin was Mr. Starr’s Dembe.
It’s Mr. Starr who got me on the cover of the Kansas City Star in 2002 when I was an actual nominee for the Nebula Award. The people who voted for that award had no real sense of who I was and am, then or now, nor did they really understand Mr. Starr nor did they have any context to understand him.
They think Raymond Reddington is wildly fictional and cartoonishly-exaggerated, like a Batman villain.
Reddington is an aspiration of a certain class of American man and has always been.
These sci fi insiders were nearly to a person, upper-middle-class liberals or their opposing set, well-off managerial-class Heinlein enthusiasts. They did not know who the fuck I was even when I served six years as their Treasurer.
Yes: I know that you need to pull a “Red” to get anywhere in this godforsaken world.
When Mr. Starr and I were in an elevator in “Don Hall’s place” (Don Hall being Mr. Starr’s friend, the owner of Hallmark), a well-known editor joined us. Oh hell.
It was Jim Frenkel.
Frenkel immediately took the immaculately-dressed, tall, slender Starr to be the nominee and started chatting him up. And though John and I hadn’t seen each other in person for years, we immediately fell into an easy routine of I was his date (“escort”) and he was the nominee. Mr. Starr began to spout off sci fi concepts and ideas as if he was an old hand instead of the truth: the only sci fi he’d ever read was mine. He practically made a book deal right there in the elevator.
Bruce and I do something similar today. We have several alternate personas, including “Roger and Rikki,” a pair of real estate investors. On our first date, Bruce made dinner reservations for us as “Klaus and Sunny Von Bulow.”
Mr. Starr and I had a long-running gig where I’d say, “You’re a very strange man,” and he’d reply, “You have no idea,” as seen in the 1985 movie Reversal of Fortune starring Jeremy Irons as Klaus Von Bulow. This movie is based on a book written by Alan Dershowitz, who defended Von Bulow against charges he intentionally injected his wife Sunny with too much insulin leading to an irreversable coma. Now look where good old Dershowitz is. Reversal of Fortune presented him as a much more moral individual than Von Bulow . . . (yes of course Alan Dershowitz, you kept your underwear on — you hounded your first wife to suicide — hyenas have more integrity than you!).
“I want to read your work, Sterling” John said one night. Not “read” as in buy the books; he’d done that. He meant he wanted to be the voice actor. He knew his voice was a gift, a tool. He used it to sell things and to mesmerize people. I’m sitting here thinking about what had hurt him, why he drank … oh my God, if only I were Reddington and could put them on the Blacklist …
I based the mad, bad, yet oddly idealistic billionaire who wanted to create the “Perfect Town” in my first novel Imago on Mr. Starr.
I did, later, have the amazing fortune to have my work read by a voice actor with a voice not unlike the deep, masculine growls of James Spader as Raymond Reddington or the natural speaking voice of his real-world sometime counterpart John Starr: Keith Szarabajka. I do recommend the audio version of Female Science Fiction Writer: on it, Keith reads three stories. Beautifully, perfectly, especially “Shakespeare in Hell.” Mr. B.L. Zebub? Beelzebub? Chef’s kiss: perfect.
Who are these men? Who am I?
Fucking Americans. Fucking terrorists. Fucking heroes. Fucking sinners. Fucking saints.
I started out writing about how the plots on The Blacklist seem so absurd on the surface, but are really only slightly twisted versions of real-world events, people, crimes, terrorism, and government agency policies and actions.
I realized I was writing about my generation, about the love between us, about our hopes and dreams.
I think my generation aspired to be the best. Yet this idealistic perfection can never be achieved.
Who and what is Raymond Reddington? A traitor? A spy? A hero? The “Concierge of Crime”?
Who was Mr. Starr? An oil heir? An insurance salesman? A mover-and-shaker in Kansas City? A world-traveling raconteur?
Bruce just told me half of his old neighborhood friend group that got lost on the way to Woodstock has become Protestant ministers. The other half are deceased as a result of a variety of criminal mishaps. So given the types of chaps they were, it would seem that now they are … how shall we say it … ministering to their flocks?
Bruce, unlike me, really is a Boomer. We have things in common all the same, inside.
I think, in our generation: me, Mr. Starr, Barack Obama, the late, much-lamented John F. Kennedy Jr. with his George Magazine and his ideals —
We wanted something better. But along the way we got lost. Drugs, drink, sex, distraction, the almighty dollar.
Discovering that our ideals were based on lies. Lie after lie after lie. Lies like the endless turtles forming the foundations of the world. Without the lies perhaps we would not even have a world.
And now we are older and perhaps some of us may even have had to become mass murderers just to get by. Maybe making and selling drugs like OxyContin. Maybe silencing people who had flames coming out of their kitchen taps from fracking. Maybe going to work for a weapons manufacturer and making weapons that can kill thousands. Even millions.
Doing things we know are wrong with great courage and conviction.
Like the man on The Blacklist who has taken the identity of Raymond Reddington.