Quel ennui!

Some favorite bores from film, literature, and our own Thanksgiving dinner

Booooooring: “Phaedra,” Alexandre Cabanel, 1880

Kingsley Amis is one of those British authors whose wit, style, and verbal facility will seduce you into serious misanthropy if you’re not careful. Especially if you too struggle with nice, decent, productive, hard-working, and earnest boring people.

The extreme case is probably in Jake’s Thing, whose 59-year-old protagonist decides against treatment for his erectile dysfunction after the following deliberation:

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them.

Yes, all women. Jake deems half of humanity boring.

Is Jake a misogynist? I think this question misses the point. Since Amis’s subsequent novel, The Devils, celebrates love and sex among the aged, infirm, obese, and drunk, it’s obviously a mistake to conflate the author with his one proto-incel protagonist. And while it is regrettably gendered in Jake’s Thing, that book’s anatomization of bores tracks perfectly well with drips, dullards, and drags of all gender presentations in our current era: “their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances,” their need “to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong,” and “their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion.”

Kingsley Amis once named boredom as his biggest “vice,” and his author son, Martin Amis, wrote that Kingsley’s father had “persecuted” his son with boredom, thereby creating the master of comic literature who raged at boredom “with a crusading passion.”

It’s obvious this apple didn’t fall far from the tree if, like me, you suspect that Martin Amis’s own righteous “war against cliche” wasn’t so much a principled stand against second-hand feelings and dead ideas, but a war against the people who use cliches, people who are, for this reason, boring.

He definitely shares his dad’s gift for getting the experience of a bore down onto the page. In my favorite passage in London Fields, the American narrator describes his long-winded housecleaner as a Marquis de Sade of tedium:

She has been giving me a particularly terrible time about the stolen ashtray and lighter. And I’m often too beat to get out of her way. Endlessly, deracinatingly reiterated, her drift is this. Some objects have face value. Other objects have sentimental value. Sometimes the face value is relatively small, but the sentimental value is high. In the case of the missing ashtray and lighter, the face value is relatively small… but the sentimental value is high…. Being of high sentimental value, these objects are irreplaceable, despite their relatively low face value. Because it’s not just the money…

Aaarrrgh!

Who can resist a guy takes “half a day to recover from one of these drubbings,” but is still erudite enough to immediately align his own petty crankiness with the struggles of Cervantes’ hero, “after Sancho has spent about fifteen pages saying nothing but look before you leap and waste not want not and a stitch in time saves nine, and Quixote bursts out… Enough of thine adages! For an hour thou hast been coining them, and each one hath been like a dagger through my very soul.”

I too know the sting of that dagger. In fact, I’d join the Amises’ crusade against bores in a heartbeat if I weren’t so afraid of it turning against me — if I were either more convinced of my own fascinating-ness or didn’t suspect that boredom with one’s fellows only reveals a lack of the patience, generosity, creativity, or empathy that makes other people interesting. That maybe boring people are bored with people.

It’s true that many volumes have been written on the subject of boredom and many of these are boring or, actually, terrifying.

I decided a while ago that I’d never read David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, since, from I understand, it pursues the subject of boredom quite directly, turning a bunch of IRS employees from Peoria into knights tilting at the towering boredom of tax returns for nearly 600 pages. Call me a philistine, but such glosses on this book, plus the author’s suicide before finishing it, don’t make me want to join his headlong rush unto the breech.

True, some smart writers, like Siobhan McKeown, explain that The Pale King “isn’t simply a book about boredom.” Rather, it’s “a book in which boredom is enacted upon the reader in a meaningful way, such that the very experience of boredom itself is changed.”

So I assume that the spell it casts is similar to the one Karl Ove Knausgård works in My Struggle, whose first book I did manage to sink into during the pandemic, though not the others (because, you know, TLDR: too boring). But to his credit, I don’t recall Knausgård offering bromides like the revelation that McKeown approvingly quotes from The Pale King, that sometimes “what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works for your entertainment.” Which anyone who spends an afternoon with their two-year-old manages to work out for themselves, but I guess it’s nice to be reminded.

Still, I can’t imagine that any serious, prolonged stare into the abyss, any attempt to wrestle boredom down like Jacob wrestling the angel, can be as satisfying as comic treatments of boredom’s wages, of its villains and its victims.

Here, I need only cite my favorite scene in the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, where a rustic trapper character delivers one of the funniest, most mesmerizing performances of a “tedious man” in recent cinema history.

This comes in the film’s final huis-clos segment, “The Mortal Remains,” in which the 83-year-old character actor Chelcie Ross delivers a monologue that turns the familiar archetype of the common windbag into something out of The Importance of Being Earnest with shades of Olivier’s dental interrogation scene in Marathon Man.

Hirsute, unkempt, and gamy in a racoon cap and animal-skin coat, the old trapper gets jerked awake by a bump in the stagecoach’s path and begins to address his fellow travelers at a nodding pace and awe-inspiring length:

“No, I have not been to Fort Morgan,” begins a monologue that should be in any male actor’s audition repertoire, alongside Glumov’s in Diary of a Scoundrel, or King Lear’s “I am a man, more sinn’d against that sinning.” Mostly for its uncanny pacing and anti-dramatic beats. For the way it comes on like a slow gas leak to soon hold everyone in its thrall, the following 70-odd words possibly delivered in a single breath:

“In town, I would talk to them was interested, saloon mostly, until they asked me to take my business elsewhere, what kind of sense that make? There was only the one saloon, keeper called me ‘tedious,’ tedious! Me! If tidings from the greater world are tedious, I would descend from the mountains, not having talked for many months, with much to tell, much to tell, having stored considerable…”

As you can see from the clip above, conventional punctuation won’t capture the pacing and rhythm here, the way the speaker keeps nearly fading out and, like a trapeze artist dropped by his partner, somehow comes swinging back up into view to keep on droning, as the ashen faces of the other passengers register the unease of people subjected to “enhanced interrogation.”

As the monologue heaves towards the ending with its first allusion to the speaker’s chief victim, “a stout woman of the Hunkpapa Sioux,” the actor’s voice becomes like the meandering cellos that Wagner uses to evoke the unruly currents of the Rhine, only much slower, far more turgid. And it ends with the speaker’s admission that, though neither he nor his partner could understand a single word the other said, he did get the distinct impression that “she was often vexed with me. I seldom knew why.”

End…scene!

To me, this is genius: a comic aria of the musings, mutterings, pauses, digressions of a bore that ends up fascinating and hilarious: deftly slaying the beast of boredom. Buster Scruggs (2018) was the Coen brothers’ last film together and while I’ve read that they collaborate on every line of dialogue, I still have a hard time crediting the brilliance of the “tedious man” monologue— its nodding beats, prolix formulations, and stilted modes of discourse — to both siblings equally.

But I can’t develop much of a working theory from either Joel’s spotty treatment of peerless material in The Tragedy of Macbeth, in 2021, or Ethan and his wife Tricia Cooke’s recent forays in lesbian noir with Drive Away Dolls and Honey Don’t.

I like to think that scenes like the one above were produced through an imaginative engagement with the kind of scenes we’ve all experienced, and which many of us are likely to experience in the near future as we approach the season of family gatherings, captive audiences, and endless monologues by beloved tipsy elders who may not be all there.

I wrote this piece partially to explore the ways we might all face such scenes with equanimity and grace. And I’ve found some reassurance thinking back to my own family’s history of self-documentation, in the more revelatory media that preceded selfies and smartphones: VHS camcorders.

These videos produced a form that was entirely different from Super-8 home movies, where your flickering family members come out, greet the camera, and either wave it away or cavort about for the 50 seconds before the reel ends.. No, in home videos where the director is whoever set the camcorder onto a tripod, pushed “record,” and forgot it, the story never begins, or ends. Yet months after your own limited organic memory of the event fades, you’d often find a piece of Dogme 95 verité that reveals found comedy and family drama you never noticed. You’ll see different characters move into the foreground, unnoticed plots begin to form.

I think of one home video of my own family’s Thanksgiving dinner, taken when I was a teenager, in which two people who I’d have considered relatively minor characters back then, my soft-spoken grandfather and grandmother, come off, decades later, like Vladimir and Estragon.

As I recall it, the key scene begins after a frantic blur and brutal cut, when taping resumes with a medium-shot of a ravaged table with empty wine bottles, as the sound of my bourbon-drinking Mick grandfather’s voice droning over slow pan across the table — from my mom, to me, to my sister, and back — as the in-media-res monologue continues: “So this one fella, it turns out, is holding an altimeter…”

And on the soliloquy goes, over a long static shot of the whole table, its relevance getting no clearer, its end no closer in sight. But it soon picks up a strange, semi-rhythmic accompaniment, a soft plink, plink, plink coming from somewhere in the room.

Then the slow pan resumes across the table — from my mom, to me, to my sister, to my grandfather, still talking — and finally to the source of the mysterious sound, my grandmother.

Seated silent beside her husband, she’s the picture of saintly devotion, her eyes fixed on the teaspoon she’s slowly tapping against a saucer — plink, plink, plink — as if tapping out some desultory morse code for a rescue at sea.

At the time, I was too bored to notice how boring it was. But 30 years later, as I watched the video with my sister, long after all our grandparents had passed, the moment acquired a certain poignancy. And when it came to the part where spoon plinks against saucer and the noisemaker is then revealed, neither of us could say a word for a good 30 seconds because we were both laughing way too hard.

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