Sunday, September 24, 2023

234 Miles of I-26

Drive drive drive
Three lanes to two lanes 
the corridor of Pines 
Police has pulled one over
everyone over to the left 
drive drive drive 
brake lights all ahead 
jump off at the exit if you can. 
A 30-minute detour is always 
better than being parked for five. 
As you approach The Hot Place 
the road undulates. 
widen back to three 
malfunction junction 
Then the Chapin construction canal. 
White Knuckle for 20 miles. 
Next marker is the split off at Clinton. 
Not too much farther down 
on a clear day 
you can start to see the mountains. 
Pray you breeze through Spartanburg 
you're almost there 
last wee bit of South Carolina has cheap gas 
and then as you cross the border 
the cell phone coverage has gaps 
and your audiobook pauses. 
And then up up up 
past the lumbering big rigs on the right 
and you weave and up and down a bit 
and, boom!, off you go: the exit
and you roll the window down 
and you smell the mountain smell 
Sweet Air 
and up the Steep Chisholm Hill 
around the bend the tire thumps 
as it drops from asphalt to dirt and gravel 
down the driveway 
parked in Incline 
step out and breathe deeply 
and raise your hands 
over your head to stretch

Home

Thursday, March 23, 2023

A SMAWG (Southern Middle-Aged White Guy) Opines upon "All the Pretty Horses" Over 30 Years After Its Publication

 I bought a paperback compilation of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy from The Killarney Bookshop in Killarney, County Kerry in 2002, when I was 22 or 23 and on a brief vacation there from my duty station of Bamberg, Germany. My finger hurt. I had (I thought) jammed the hell out of my ring finger catching a football during PT the morning before I flew. Turned out I had broken it and I took too long on vacation and when I got back to Bamberg, they couldn't fix it and now that finger is fused and, because of that, I'm technically a disabled veteran. So I have that going for me. 

I was deeply and passionately in love with film, with cinema, even, as a young man. I wrote a screenplay in college; filmed 70% of it during spring break. I wanted to make movies. But I knew that career, along with being a writer, is a statistical idiocy of a plan, so off I went being responsible. 

Hell with responsibility. Next life, if I can't be my first choice (independently wealthy), I'm going for poverty and writing or directing. 

My introduction to Cormac McCarthy as a sometimes sophisticated, but normally oblivious, college kid, was Billy Bob Thornton's 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses. I'd not read a lick of McCarthy to that point. But I was getting a degree in Classical Studies and my father is an English Professor. So I viewed the film altogether differently than, apparently, the rest of the movie-going public, who collectively yawned as it quickly left theaters. 

A quick pause...if you're reading this and haven't read a 31-year-old novel nor seen the 23-year-old movie, I'm not going to give you a plot synopsis and I'm not going to spare you from spoilers. Don't be a dodo. Go away and watch the movie and/or read the book.

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So, I loved that movie. It was clear it wasn't a scene by scene adaptation (which is virtually impossible) and so I couldn't be sure the book did what the movie did, but I will tell you my gigantic takeaway of the movie is that it ultimately was clearly about the soul making its journey to judgment after death. The movie repeatedly has characters talk about Heaven. "Not everyone thinks heaven is a ranch in west Texas" is an early line (or thereabouts) that sticks with me all these years later.  In the movie, there didn't seem to be a realistic world where John Grady Cole could have survived the stabbing he took, and so from that point forward seemed like his soul's journey to understand his death. 

He had to deal with the loss of those around him and they speak to him as though funerarily, and at the end of his long and trying journey back to west Texas (Heaven), an old judge with a great white beard listens to his confession and absolves him. Seemed pretty damned obvious to me. Also, anything with year 2000 Penelope Cruz is going to get my utter praise. What a woman.

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Around 2012, my college roommate, gargantuan bibliophile that he is, handed me a copy of Blood Meridian and I took a look at the first sentence and thought to myself, "This son of a bitch just intellectually challenged me." Blood Meridian is Biblical and hellish and sparse yet dense and it is less read than studied or concentrated upon. Within a year, I also read The Road, and what a completely different experience. Flew threw it. Not nearly so difficult. 

But that's the thing. Cormac McCarthy is an artist. Yes, he's a writer, but he's an artist first and foremost. An artisan is someone who creates for others to enjoy and, usually if they can do it, for money. An artisan can create something that is monumentally difficult, but that's not the separation between artist and artisan. Michelangelo couldn't do an airbrush painting on a t-shirt. Difficulty is not the mark of an artist.  

What is the mark of an artist? "MUST" is the mark of an artist. Because the art, whatever it is (painting, sculpture, play, manuscript, etc) must be. It simply must. "I must" is the refrain of the artist, not "I want". And the artist goes about releasing it.  Sometimes, the artist can create with intention; though it's my experience that the core comes out as it must and then an artist garnishes/molds/shapes it with flourishes of intention so that the final result is a blend of the core "must" and the artist's desire ("I want"). Failed art is when the "I want" overrides the must.

Michelangelo carved the David. You see it in person and it stands out because the head and hands and feet are too big. It gives the hero the feeling of a puppy that will one day be a ferocious attack dog. Young and not yet what he was to be, but what he must be at the time he needed to be. It's a gigantic thing. In fact, the piece of marble it was carved from had been called "Il gigante". And Michelangelo said David was always inside of Il Gigante, he just freed the statue from the encasing stone.  So an artist is a blend of intent and submission to a greater creative drive that is beyond the artist's control.

I took a terrible opportunity to look at some youtube reviews of All the Pretty Horses after I read it. Tried to read some written reviews. The reviewers are not artists. Most of them are unfortunate simpletons. For them, style and plot are the hallmarks of great writing. And, yes, they can be, of course, but they are not the end all/be all when it comes to a work of art. 

Michael Crichton plots are put together like a swiss watch. You've got your foreshadowing, your twists and turns, your clever double back to upend expectation. Hell of a writer. Before his death, Hollywood used to say he had half a billion dollars of ideas just floating along in his head. But I'm not altogether sure he was an artist. Which is fine. Bob Dylan's not a poet. Bob Dylan is a song-writer. He's great at that. Fantastic. Michael Crichton was a thriller writer and he was amazing at it. But he wasn't an artist.  Cormac McCarthy is not a thriller writer. He's an artist. And he's a Biblical artist, from what I've read so far.

And I say that because I heard one reviewer lament that McCarthy didn't have a set style. Of course he doesn't. He is hyper-talented and bends himself to the must of the work . And I heard/ read others who lamented that All the Pretty Horses has a very basic plot.  Good God, man. The plot is the foundation for the art. These people are used to a crayon set with a red, green, and blue, and can't see the full spectrum. 

So I'm not giving a review, because that's beside the point. Here are thoughts on the novel. Not theses. Thoughts. Do with them what you will. 

1. This book is about mirrors. For example

Names: John Grady Cole (JgC) is a Christ-like figure. Christ descended to Hell for three days; this book takes place over three seasons (starts in late spring, goes through summer, ends in fall just before winter)

 Alejandra is the Spanish version of Alexandra. Alex=defenderAndr--=man (think Android, a manlike robot). At any rate, she's a defender of mankind, like Christ was. She's a mirrored version of JGC.

Jimmy Blevins (John the Baptist): the boy has taken the name of an actual holy man, we discover. But he leads the way to death for JC.

Don Hector: not biblical, but in The Iliad, Hector has the epithet, "Breaker of Horses."  Except, he's not the actual Breaker of Horses, JGC is. See what good that Classical Studies degree did for me?

Lacey Rawlins: Lacey, his "pardner", is who JGC would be without his compassion and greatness. Lacey speaks with truth, and wisdom. He pretty much predicts the negative outcomes that will, and do, come to play out throughout the novel. JGC's compassion will not allow him to step away from situations, even if he "should." Lacey is JGC without the faults/negatives that JGC gets from his compassion, but also without the greatness. He can do things with horses, but he's no master. 

2. Speaking of this mirrored idea: Texas and Mexico are mirrored versions of each other. Texas is heaven for him; the mexican hacienda/estate is a paradise.  Also, JGC and Alejandra's families are amazingly similar, just JGC is farther along the time line. For people who don't know such things, if you read the book, the opulence and size of the mexican hacienda would leave you to think that JGC is a poor shmuck and Alejandra is nobility. Not so. The JGC ranch that he should have been heir to, had his mother not chosen to sell it, was 18000 acres. The hacienda is 11000 hectares. 11000 hectares is 27000 acres. Larger, yes, but not at any size that would be a real class divide. 

3.  Alejandra's mother, like JGC's mother wants nothing to do with the land. But the land is in Alejandra's father's family and in JGC's mother's family. If JGC's father were the inheritor of the ranch, JGC and Alejandra would be on equal footing, but JGC never would have been driven out to find her.

4.  JGC's family had the turmoil and death and success, but they stayed true to the land, until JGC's mother. Alfonsa's family may have gone down the same route had Alejandra's great aunt, Alfonsa, inherited the land instead of her brother. She was cosmopolitan and had those big ideas and was not tethered to the land, per se, though her injury resigned her to it, it appears.

5.  One of the reviewers, being very self-congratulatory and white, lamented how Alejandra was yet another cliche of the enigmatic latin lust object as white male authors write latin women. Alejandra has blue eyes, for one (not what one typically associates with "hispanic"); the great landowners were of Hidalgo stock and would have been racially and class horrified to be considered too much like the people; they would have considered themselves European before common Mexican. 

Regardless of that, the idiot reviewer didn't consider JGC from Alejandra's perspective. He's equally as enigmatic from her perspective. Here's a younger man, clearly of a different stock than the others, even his also-white friend; he didn't fawn. He didn't overly pursue. He was laconic. Compared to how others treated her, he must have been a bolt of lightning. 

6.  The book allows the reader to run with their own prejudices. JGC is a bumpkin from Texas. He's at a Mexican estate and he's out of his social element and shouldn't dare go beyond his station. Except he's not, as I've said. Alphonsa can tell there's something innate in him, but never discovers what he really is. But she tests him. She's been educated in the greatest schools in Europe. He beats her in the first game of chess. Of course, he gets that talent from his father; not the one with the American landowning heritage, so that's a bit of a dig at the pretentiousness of chess. Still, she's been playing for four to five times longer than he's been alive and he beat her. And because of her arrogance, she never thought to discover who he really was. She takes clear pride in her education; she insists on speaking English to show how intelligent she is, but she takes no note that he speaks fluent spanish and he's a master with horses and he is fluent in compassion above all. His compassion is the source of his humility and his mastery.

7.  He can win (and usually does) when allowed to compete. He is defeated when he is not given an opportunity. Don Hector chooses pool for their competition and beats JGC  without the boy having a turn (if memory serves). Alfonsa's last game is her diatribe telling him it's over with Alejandra. He laments that she won't let him speak. If she had, if she had listened, she might have been won over.  Alejandra won't really let him have a chance. She goes to him at the end; they have their Indian Summer, as it were, but she will not entertain being with him. She doesn't know what kind of man he is, she says. Sweetheart, you probably ditched the best man you'll ever know. That said, I do believe THAT would have been hard for JGC to express because of his humility. 

8.  The locomotive in the beginning of the novel bores out of the east, emitting light that mars and disrupts. The novel ends with JGC on horse going into the reddening west.  Instead of emitting, he accepts light that matches him to the rest of nature; the proof he is there is his shadow. Anna Karenina ends with the train of modernity destroying the old ways. All the Pretty Horses starts with that train and ends with the main character embracing the old ways despite modernity.  Also, the alternate title for Blood Meridian is "The Evening Redness in the West" and JGC rides past unconcerned indians on his way to that redness. Not sure what any of that means, but it's a nice throughline on the location.

9.  JGC is his grandfather reborn, which is why it starts at grandfather's death.  There should have been a chain of grandfather to father to JGC, but the father was not the direct link.

10.  Don Hector and the brother of the blevins-slain man (the charro) are cowards, unable to act despite their desire. Don Hector was a supreme coward in his failure to confront jgc on any level that is fair. Jgc confronts all equally, on their ground (even the horses) the whole book. His refusal to kill the captain was a mercy and not a cowardice and the potential burden of having to be responsible for the captain's death was something the land relieved him from. JGC will not act with aggression until he is forced to do so.

11. Dude, it's different in the book, but he gets absolution from an old judge. C'mon. 

12.  JGC has three significant deaths occur for him (even beyond Blevins and the assassin): his grandfather, his father, and the grandmother (abuela).  She was not his blood, but by everything you unpack throughout the novel, she was more involved in his life than his blood parents were. He waited to leave until after his Grandfather's funeral at the start of the novel and waited to head into the redness until after Abuela's funeral after the end.

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If the plot and run-on sentences are what you're taking away from All the Pretty Horses, go enjoy your airbrushed t-shirt.





Thursday, June 30, 2022

Lara Kennedy Lawson May 11, 1982- June 25, 2022

Brilliance, mischief, mayhem, and fun. The older I get, the more I believe that there are people you simply like and then you fill in the reasons after the fact.  You don't need a reason. You like them. That's enough.

When we first met, Kennedy and I could not be more different, excepting for the fact that we both are loud. 

She: Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, liberal, atheist, small.

Me: None of those things.

And yet, I came to absolutely adore her. And she me. We played extremely well together. Minds dancing and sparring in equal measure. Our great commonality our sheer ludicrousness and ferocity. 

Aside from that, we deeply trusted and confided in one another. We loved each other, sans romance, which irritates me to qualify, as if it were a lesser form, but, for those who didn't know us, I wish to stanch lascivious assumption. 

A decade ago, there was a break. Though not a vicious or malicious one. Things could not be as they had been. We reached out to each other casually in these intervening years but never returning to the depth that we had been before. Despite the distance, I thought of her fondly and wrongly assumed there would be a time for more. 

I remain. She does not.

I love you, Kennedy.





Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Cooking and the Perpetual Bachelor

I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty of it, but I don't cook. I just don't see the point in wasting that much time. Why, when I can make a terrible turkey sandwich in 32 seconds and pop a multivitamin?

But I'm trapped at my place during this COVID-19 nonsense, and I have a kitchen, so sure. Why not?

I wanted Indian food. It's not a terrible turkey sandwich, but I like it fine. I'll make it.

The point of this is not whether I ended up making it. Spoiler alert: I made it. It was fine. Nothing to talk about there.

However, I have some thoughts on the experience of making it.

1.  WHY DO SPICES COST SO MUCH! 

What in the living hell is Cardamom and why does a thimble-full of it cost the GDP of a sub-saharan banana republic?  Da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to find a way to get spices cheaper. Columbus accidentally found a new world on his journey to find a way to get spices cheaper. Indian food is eaten by, um, Indians, who on a per-capita basis are some of the poorest people on earth, and yet just the spices to make a dish that's a part of every cheap Indian restaurant buffet on six continents requires that I take out a home-refi loan. I have a job, a good one, so I buy the damn spices, but I'll be eating this damned Chicken Tikka Masala until at least the autumnal equinox just to make sure I get my money's worth. If I ever get extra money again, I'm investing in spices. This is ludicrous.

2.  Knifework

If someone breaks into my house or an animal comes at me in the woods, I know what to do with a knife. Pointy end goes into problem. Repeat until no more problem. Easy peasy.  But finely chop onions or mince fresh garlic and ginger? Oh my dear God. I feel like I'm eight and back learning how to painstakingly write in cursive. How am I this slow at this?

3. Timing

I've tried to cook before. In my twenties. That also went fine. But I knew that I was bad at timing. I recall that I'd end up eating whatever I cooked in stages. As in, oh crap, I finished the protein but haven't started the vegetables, so I guess I'll eat the pork chop as I make the squash casserole. Piecemeal eating would take hours. Now that I think of it, I bet that's where the word "piecemeal" came from in the first place.  Part of me picking Chicken Tikka Masala is because it's effectively one dish. But I hadn't counted on how slow I am with that damned knife. I allotted an hour for prep time. It took closer to two. And then I was so focused on the chicken and sauce that I forgot to start the rice steamer. So I ended up eating three hours later than I intended.

4. Portions

This recipe says it feeds 3-5 people. Bullshit.  Just this batch will last me two weeks if I eat five meals of it a day. I barely have enough tupperware to freeze the gallons this damned recipe created.  But now I have iceberg-sized ice-blocks of Tikka Masala taking up my freezer. And, let's not forget that I have two billion dollars in spices left on my shelf to use up.

5. Smell

I love Indian food. Really. I do. And I like going to Indian restaurants. But I've never walked out of an Indian restaurant wondering if I'd ever smell anything but cumin and coriander and turmeric ever again. It's the next day and the smell from the clothes I was wearing as I was cooking last night has permeated through the laundry basket and swallowed my bedroom. My hair smells like spices. My blanket smells like spices. My kitchen, of course, smells like spices. I can only imagine that as I heat up the next 136 days of this meal, this smell will continue.


Sometime in September, I'm going back to terrible turkey sandwiches and multivitamins.



Monday, April 22, 2019

Arya and Gendry: Real Talk

Arya (creepy stare): You make that weapon I designed yet?

Blacksmith (apprentice): Yes.

Arya (creepy question): How many women you you knock dem boots with?

Blacksmith Apprentice (remembering she's phenomenal with weapons and he just handed her a huge one): Gee, how does one remember such things?

Arya (mega creepy): you know...tell me

Blacksmith Apprentice (calculating the number that will not get his throat slit if he says the wrong one): Three? Yeah. Three. I have all of my (straight) teeth in medieval times. I'm not covered in rickets and rampant malnutrition. I have a job and I grew up and live in Whore Central.  I'm played by an attractive person who waxes his chest, so definitely...three.

Arya: Great. I've thought you could get it since I met you.

Blacksmith Apprentice: Since back when you could successfully pass as a boy and were still processing watching your pop's head get cut off?

Arya: I kill people all the time; have I mentioned that again in the past 30 seconds?

Blacksmith Apprentice: Um, I too have always wanted you since the moment I laid eyes on you when you were just a crossdressing preteen riddled with PTSD.

Arya: So,  I kill people all the time; have I mentioned that? But I ain't been 'bout that sex yet, and we gon' die so I wanna know what it feels like.

Blacksmith Apprentice (quickly, under his breath):  It's probably going to feel like VD transmission and unplanned pregnancy.

Arya: What was that?

Blacksmith Apprentice: I said that I would love to enact the sex at the psycho munchkin rich girl, who I'm easily four points ahead of on a ten point scale, in a foundry where I've been wearing leather pants (and no underwear) next to a blazing forge. We have zero chemistry, but, you know, I'm into that.

Arya:  Check this out. Not only am I super pale, I'm covered in grisly, massive, purple scars.

Blacksmith Apprentice:  Thank God. There's no way I could perform if you were not.

Arya:  Have I mentioned that I cut people's faces off and wear them?

Blacksmith Apprentice:  Your words are like verbal viagra. Truly.

Arya:  And remember, we can't make this last forever because we have an army of undead descending on us to cut us into little pieces and the pieces that aren't cut up will reanimate to go kill other people, so you're gonna need to be quick about it.

Blacksmith Apprentice: So you want me to speed through pseudo forcible sex at an awkward virgin on itchy-ass hay?

Arya: Yes. That.

Blacksmith Apprentice: I'd love to make this last hours, but I'll figure out how to get this over with as quickly as possible.

Arya: Also, we gotta do this sober

Blacksmith Apprentice: FFS. FML.

Arya: What was that?

Blacksmith Apprentice: YOLO?

Thursday, November 8, 2018

The Observer Effect (originally published in The Charleston Mercury; July 2018)

The observer effect

By Ajax Carpenter


Come one, come all! Come on down, y’all!

Welcome to the Holy City™.

We have restaurants and ghost tours. How about one of those carriage rides; you want one? Oh, and don’t you worry; we have bars galore.

We’ve got everything this famous town is known for. Of course, there are the palmetto trees, sweetgrass basket-weavers, museums, and churches. 

Welcome to this sleepy little place, off in a crook of this vast expanse of a country, down where time doesn’t pass. Look at Rainbow Row! Look at the Calhoun Mansion! Ain’t everything grand?! Ain’t everything just so historic!?!

Thank God for the Board of Architectural Review, the mayor and Charleston City Council, who, lo these many years, have protected our skyline and the character of the city. Thank God monstrous hotels and condos and the ever present cranes aren’t blighting our postcards and pictures and just general quality of life. Just focus down low, down where the restrictions on doing any work on any building whatsoever make it so cost-prohibitive that all but the ludicrously wealthy got fed up long ago and said “It might be nice to live out on John’s Island; maybe Wadmalaw, even.”

Don’t mind the three-hundred-dollars-per-thirty-seconds* parking meters that are monitored twenty-five-hours-a-day*, or the potholes, flooding and legendarily bad drivers. Bring your car. Join the fray. Come to get away from it all, but, if you get homesick for back where you’re from, where it’s not so sleepy and time moves so fast, jump in your car and get that slice of Up North or From Off. We have all the traffic you can handle.

If that doesn’t remind you of home, just wait; you’re gonna love the prices. We’re trying to get them up to Manhattan levels for you. It embarrasses us that you’re not able to pay $17* for a bland margarita.

Do you like our districts? We learned a thing or two from the Florida theme parks. Disney’s Magic Kingdom has TomorrowLand, AdventureLand and Main Street USA; we have South of Broad, the French Quarter, and Wraggborough. Think of the horse-drawn carriages like they’re our monorail.

Spill off the sidewalks. Walk in the streets.  The cars aren’t really supposed to be there any way. They’ll stop. They’ll wait.

Ask the questions. You know you want to. All of y’all do. Titter as you say aloud: What’s a Huguenot? (Ha!) What is a grit? (Hilarious!)

We want you! You’re hardy folk. Way back when we only had 847 million visitors a year* (instead of the current annual count of 74 Trillion*), they’d peter out and leave us be for the real hot of summer. But not you! 143 °* and 138%* humidity for July and August, and still y’all pour in here. Charleston can count on death, taxes, roaches the size of compact cars and this relentless parade of “treasured guests.” If you're sweltering, might I suggest a refreshing bland margarita?

Rarer than a ghost, you might just see a local. They’ll be one of the slightly befuddled older folks (always older; ever older), polite if you ask them a question, helpful, of course; but often with a consternated look as though they’re still trying to figure out what happened.

Downtown used to be full of locals. Children played in the streets. The houses had lights on at night because folks actually lived in them (they weren’t just trophy vacation homes back then). They worked and shopped there and played bridge and had book clubs and threw cocktail parties and actually attended all these churches.

Look at all the contractors. There are more of those than locals. That’s for sure.

But enough about them. That’s not why you’re here. You’re here for the nightlife and the beaches. Get a sunburn and then get to Upper King. Mill about. Spend your money. We’d prefer it if you wouldn’t drink and drive, or shout and fight, but you be you.

Try not to notice the homeless folk that have materialized in the past couple of years, sitting heads down, arms outstretched. But, if you do, don’t they add a little extra flavor?

That guy complaining that everything has changed? Don't mind him. He’s not a local even though he insists he is. That's Gary. He moved here from Dayton three years ago. Don't know which of the guys complaining is Gary? Don't worry. They're all Gary.

Sure, this place isn't what it used to be. It’s not a place very many real people live anymore. Any old place can be that. It’s better! It’s CharlestonWORLD:  the Premier Adult Museum, Shopping and Restaurant Park.

Don’t you like this?! Isn’t it enchanting?! Spend and enjoy! Tell your friends and family! Bring them! Bring them ALL!

Why leave? You never have to leave. We can just make more Charleston, expand it up and out. Absorb the other townships and islands. Stack and build. Stack and build.

Come and see.

Come and see.

Come and see.

Come and see!

*Numbers are estimates, only, but you never can tell when satire will morph into reality.


Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Achilles and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

This whole thing is spoilers and won't make a lick of sense if you haven't seen the movie, so go away if that's the case.

What's The Iliad  about? 


The Trojan War, right? 

No. Achilles? 

No, not really. 

It's about rage. About doomed and ruinous anger.  It's an anger of Achilles, but he does not control it. It controls him and controls the work as a whole.  It is directly because of his rage that his beloved friend is killed.  It is because of his rage that foes and friends alike die.  

Watching Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, I was struck by the explosive rage of the two characters, Mildred Hayes and Jason Dixon, both of whom use later excuses to justify giving into their pre-existing fury.

Mildred is a single mother in a dead end job.  Her husband was abusive and then left her for a girl barely older than their daughter.  That's a life of justifiable rage.  Then her daughter is raped and murdered.

Mildred's rage was there prior to her daughter's death.  It was evident in her scream of "I hope you do get raped!" the last time she saw Angela.  

Mildred harms the innocent.  She wounds the pastor who comes to talk to her with her words.  She drills a hole in the dentists thumb(nail) (though it seemed as though he were trying to harm her with the drill, she could simply have left).  She kicks teenagers in the groin without knowing if they were the ones who threw a drink at her car.  She harms her friend and boss by allowing her rage to get her friend/boss thrown into jail and held without bail.

Of course, the main person she harms in the movie is Sheriff Willoughby.  She wounds him on a level of honor, for not catching her daughter's killer. He was not the killer and there was nothing more he could do. He's an innocent. Not only is he an innocent, he's dying.  Her anger does not care.  She must rage, and so, even after his death, the billboard that was burned down goes back up with his name on it.

Chief Willoughby is her contrast. He too has reasons to be furious, first and foremost being his terminal cancer despite having a young wife and small children.  He has every reason to be angry that Mildred has attacked him as he's dying, knowing there's nothing he can do.  After he has his episode and coughs blood on her face and has to be taken away by ambulance, his last official words as a sheriff are "let her go."  Unlike Mildred, he chooses to let go.  Not only does he choose to stop fighting her, he helps her, by paying for the billboard for another month (which is also, as he says, a chess move, but I do believe he sincerely hoped his gesture would help allay her rage).  Unlike Dylan Thomas' exhortation to Rage against the dying of the light, he makes his peace with what rightly could have made him angry and moves past it.

Mildred, of course, didn't learn from or accept his magnanimity; she can't.  After he died, she gives in to her unadulterated rage and tries to burn down his office.   At that point, she's beyond thought. There is no positive aspect to her torching the station; in fact, were it not for Jason Dixon's action, her daughter's file would have been destroyed (perhaps including the DNA evidence they did have of the killer).  Getting justice is not her goal. Raging is all she has.
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Jason Dixon is a fool and a racist and a bully.  He's also a closeted gay man who lives with a domineering mother.  He has a life of rage that, while not justifiable, is understandable.  Then the man who believed in him died.

Chief Willoughby says at one point, "If you got rid of every cop with vaguely racist leanings then you’d have three cops left and all o’ them are gonna hate the fags so what are ya gonna do, y’know?"  A way to look at that is that in the rankings for who's lower in society, the closeted gay man must assert himself above the "persons of color", which he has apparently done off screen in an incident referred to as torture. He might be gay, but at least he's better than the blacks, he might justify to himself.  (Obviously pointing out what he's doing is not condoning the behavior.)

Dixon most probably tortured an innocent black man. He routinely attempts to bully or attempts to intimidate others, though a point that isn't noted by many is that his intimidation and bullying don't actually work.  The billboard painter mouths off to him and spits at him at the beginning of the film. Red stands up to him at the bar and in his office (prior to the great exception, of course) and Mildred bursts in and calls him a fuckhead and he just takes it.  He's a stupid little man who reads comic books and whose mother puts any real thoughts in his head and everyone there knows it. And he knows they know it.  He's impotent, that we see, but it's clear that he's furious about his impotence.

And then Willoughby dies and Dixon uses that to justify finally acting. And so he grotesquely assaults Red and Red's assistant.  But his rage only works against the weak and he's not actually changed.  Minutes later he's shamed and fired and he's back to his impotence.

Dixon's counter is Red, as we see at the hospital.  Red is a frail, weak, stupid man, but, unlike Dixon (ordinarily), he stands up for himself and will not allow himself to be badgered or disrespected. The chief and desk sergeant try to get him to back down and he refuses.  Dixon drunkenly bullies him at the bar and he insults Dixon right back.  After what Dixon does to him, Red had every right to be furious and, since this is a film about explosive rage masquerading as revenge or justice, he could have harmed Dixon right back in the hospital. Instead, like Chief Willoughby, he lets it go and chooses not to be defined by his anger.
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I have seen reviews that claim that Jason Dixon and Mildred Hayes get redemption by the end of the film.  No. They are not redeemed. They are still just as flawed and awful at the end of the movie as they were at the beginning.  I did not see a movement away from rage at the end of the movie, a requirement for any talk of redemption.  What I saw was that the two furious characters were incapable of stopping their anger, so they end the movie contemplating pointing it in a direction where it might serve some function, where it will harm the person or persons who "deserve" it rather than be responsible for harming the innocent.

Near the end of the movie, Mildred torches the "midget" and never fixes it. It is important to understanding her character that she does not fix things with him.  She could not fix things with him even as, moments later, she stood up for her ex's ditzy girlfriend. And I believe that was because she could use her rage to protect the ditz. Her ex-husband was trembling when she approached them.  Her rage could not fix what she did to the "midget."  As for Jason, he was going to kill himself (raging against himself) and it was only when he considered going with her, so he could focus his rage externally and, perhaps, positively, that he gave up on shooting himself.


Obviously murder or killing vigilantism is a large step for either Jason or Mildred. Mildred is the angrier of the two, but Jason appeared willing to kill himself, so who's to say what he'd be willing to do once he'd reached that point.  For her it's a level higher than she's gone yet, but that does not lead me to believe she won't. Particularly knowing that she's going to recognize the stranger and remember him threatening her.  Why was he several states away in the middle of nowhere Missouri when he's from Idaho?  When he was telling the story to his compatriot at the bar, he says there were two others with him. Perhaps one of them has the elusive DNA?  Are his accomplices his perfect alibi since the authorities don't know they're looking for three men and not one?  The stranger confronts her after Willoughby's death, but the incident at the bar happens at least weeks if not months later (Dixon's wounds have scarred by then). Why was he back in Ebbing, Missouri? Killers coming back to the scene is a known trope.  I do not think it a great stretch to think that Mildred would do the stranger great harm and that Jason, bolstered by her, wouldn't do the same.
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Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri is not The Iliad. In The Iliad, the scene of Priam, a  grieving father, coming to his greatest enemy, Achilles, and asking for the corpse of his slain son Hector is such a touching human moment that it breaks Achilles' anger and the work can end once we see the final result of that ruinous anger in the funeral of Hector.  If Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri were similar, if Mildred Hayes and Jason Dixon were to be redeemed, it would have ended at Willoughby's funeral, after Mildred and Jason got his final messages.  

But it didn't end that way, because their continuing rage wouldn't allow it.