In defense of screamers

Brooks Salzwedel, Nest High


Pretty in Pink

Scene:
Andie walks up to Blane in the hallway to confront him about reneging on their prom date. Previously, Blane succumbed to the pressure of the wickedly delectable villain, Steff, played by James Spader, to stop slumming it with Andie. Andie has no intention of letting Blane cut and run. Nope. She wants him to admit he's ashamed to take her out. Up to this point, Blane has been avoiding her so that he won't have to actually tell her he won't be ringing her doorbell, corsage in hand, on prom night. Sweet.

ANDIE
"What about prom, Blane?" (calmly)

BLANE
"Oh Andie, I'm having a bad day. Can we talk later?" (eyes shifting)

ANDIE
"No. What about Prom?"

BLANE
"C'mon. Why don't we just meet after school." (smarmy)

ANDIE
"No! What about prom?" (shouting)

BLANE
"Andie, C'mon." (cowering)

ANDIE
"Just say it." (sternly)

BLANE
"What?" (pushing back)

ANDIE
"Just say it. I want to hear you say it." (crescendoing)

BLANE
"Andie, please. Alright?" (just above a whisper)

ANDIE
"I want to hear you say it." (sternly)

BLANE
"A month ago I asked somebody else and forgot." (voice quivering slightly)

ANDIE
"You're a liar! You're a filthy, fucking no-good liar! You didn't have the guts to tell me the truth! Just say it!" (Andie pushes Blane back against the lockers, then hits him on the left shoulder, gritting her teeth, and screaming at him.)

BLANE
"I am not lying." (resolute)

ANDIE
"Tell me! Just say it! Tell me!" (screaming)

BLANE
"What do you want to hear?" (accusatory, raised voice)

ANDIE
"Just tell me!" (screaming)

BLANE
"What?" (raised voice)

ANDIE
"You're ashamed to be seen with me!" (screaming)

BLANE
"No I'm not." (shaking his head)

ANDIE
"You're ashamed to go out with me!" (screaming)

BLANE
"No I'm not."

ANDIE
"You're afraid! You're terrified that your Goddamn rich friends won't approve! Just say it! Just tell me the truth!" (screaming, hitting Blane on the chest)

BLANE
"You don't understand, and it has nothing at all to do with you." (calmly)

Andie abruptly turns and hurries down the hall. Blane calls out to her with tears in his eyes.

* * *

Whew, heavy. People tend to say "I'm not lying" precisely at the moment when they are lying. When you're backed into a corner it becomes a battle. Fight-or-flight instincts kick in. The right thing to do doesn't play into it at that moment because moral questions require forethought and afterthought. Someone calling your bluff leaves no time, and the only thing that matters is winning, or not letting the other person get your goat. Could it be the act of aggression coming from the perpetrator that leads a person to stick to his or her guns at all costs? No you did not get all up in my face with your so-called virtue. Or, does it have more to do with control? After all, this brazen individual has just crossed over an invisible line of demarcation and is treading on your super-ego. You get to decide. At least you get to decide first before anyone else is allowed in with their rights and wrongs, yeses and nos.

Being able to predict the outcome is vital in many situations, profitable even. It comes in handy if you play fantasy football. It comes in handy if you own beachfront property in Galveston and a hurricane forms in The Gulf. It also comes in handy when trying to decide if a new love interest is worth your trust.

In chaos theory, "dynamic systems . . . are highly sensitive to initial conditions. . . .Small differences . . . yield widely diverging outcomes . . . rendering long-term prediction impossible (Wikipedia). To exemplify how a small difference can yield a widely diverging outcome, scientist Edward Lorenz came up with the butterfly effect: "The flapping of a single butterfly's wings today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does" (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos). Even though chaos theory is most often applied to science and mathematics, each of us has the ability to detect slight variations in human interactions that deviate from the norm, variations as subtle as the flutter of a butterfly's wings. We can sense that a widely diverging outcome may be around the corner and are compelled to know it ahead of time. Typically, we will either turn away and stop listening, or we will confront.

In the case of Andie and Blane, Andie chooses to confront. To Andie, the screamer, two things are reprehensible: the betrayal and the lie. The betrayal happened the minute Blane submitted to Steff. He became complicit in the act of stripping Andie of her identity and turning her into a faceless, nameless "other" for the purposes of silly high school social dominance. Really, Blane? Andie knew something was up when Blane altered his predictable pattern of behavior and didn't return her calls. Non-response is like a flashing yellow sign on the highway that reads, "Proceed at your own risk. Not liable for damages or injuries." For Blane, avoiding Andie's phone calls seemed like the thing to do. He'd sold his soul to Steff and abandoned his lady love--if he just topped off that pot of depravity with a nice, tight lid, maybe he could get away with it. And here's where the lie comes in with a trio of tactics: 1) Avoid: "Can we talk later? Why don't we just meet after school?" 2) Deny: "I am not lying." 3) Turn the tables: "What do you want to hear?" This one especially stings because he's edging to sully her credibility by implying there's no merit to her claims, basically saying she's a raving banshee.

Seemingly, the easiest part of the dark side is that getting away with it is dependent upon being right, and we will wrestle tenaciously to claim it like a prize. I'm right! I did what I did because I was right and therefore I don't have to face the consequences because there are no consequences because I'm right! Screamers have something to say about this. They aim to snatch that prize right out of the weasel's hand and take him down with a knee pick.

Andie's looking for a couple of things, here, the satisfaction of hearing him say it to her face. The lie rips through everything the two of them know about each other--the information they have gathered, absorbed, memorized, coded into language, and then has come back out in their movement and breath, glances and speech, gestures and affection. This way the two of them know, the way you know when you look into someone's eyes. The eyes tell you everything, don't they? She is able to walk away the minute he admits it, when he says, "You don't understand. It has nothing at all to do with you." That's what she wants most, a return to their internal language rather than the denial of it, him pretending as if it were never there at all.

Andie and Blane turned out alright. Blane told off Steff and apologized to Andie. They made out like crazy, illuminated by the headlights of Blane's BMW. A happy ending, the two of them are likely stronger for the trial because they got to see one another's mettle in the face of social pressure and moral questions. But what about the rest of us, hobbling without the benefit of a Hollywood screenwriter?

According to author James Gleick, "An essential property of chaotic behavior is that nearby states will eventually diverge no matter how small the initial differences are" (Chaos, The Making of New Science). In relationships that are troubled, are we pre-destined to split apart in wider chasm each time we return? I'm hedging the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. Getting back to that butterfly, the flutter of its wings caused a change in the atmosphere that had a domino effect. One thing led to another, resulting in a tornado, or not. It makes me think of the familiar time machine plot line where travelers alter some tiny feature of the past and then return to a present barely recognizable. Time travelers are supposed to follow the laws of the land, to leave no trace. Our environments are not sterile; they are ever-changing. New and different facets enter the fray, redirect, and affect the evolution of our relationships every day. When I am feeling anxious, you step out of the office in the cold to call me from a park bench. For the first time, we sleep all the way through the night without reaching out. Missing my elastic band when I wash my face before bed, you hold my hair. I don't answer when you call. At times we are as open and true as Don Quixote on a quest. At others we cloak and shift with guile.

Our relationships are deterministic systems, ones in which "every action . . . produces a reaction . . . and every reaction, in turn, becomes the cause of subsequent reactions" (Wikipedia). In effect, our relationships are the sum of "cascading events," each one changing the outcome again and again. It stands to reason, then, that the possibilities for outcomes are almost infinite, even though we don't always move at such a pace.