Interview with D. Harlan Wilson by Esteban Silvani

Your latest book, Peckinpah An Ultraviolent Romance, is unlike any novel I’ve ever read in that it messes with the blurred line between violence on the screen and the violent tendencies we humans carry within. Tell us about what was going on in your mind leading up to and when writing this book.

I’ve been interested in violence for a long time, as a creative and critical writer, and personally, too. I didn’t have a violent childhood or anything. My interest stems primarily from screen violence. Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, Tom & Jerry, etc. when I was a kid, and as I grew up, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, that sort of thing. Movies for kids, or kidlike sensibilities, but loaded with all kinds of hardboiled trauma and shitkicking, although not gory. As I got older, I grappled onto what was out there. I’m a product of the 1980s so slasher flics were big on my radar. And then Tarantino came along, etc. I’m drawn more to ultraviolence—i.e., cartoon violence—than “real” violence. Ultraviolence speaks more to the human psyche, to the dynamism of our desires and fears and especially creativity, whereas “real” violence is, while horrible, utterly ordinary, something I can pick up on any news station. That’s a big reason why I write what I write. I hate the ordinary, violent or otherwise.

Anyway, Peckinpah’s oeuvre falls somewhere between “real” violence and ultraviolence. In his films, some scenes are wackily over-the-top whereas others are accurate representations of the real. I liked that recipe, and he was a master stylist as well, and in both cinema and literature, I revere style.

I didn’t know much about Peckinpah until recently. I had seen The Wild Bunch a long time ago but didn’t remember it. My brother-in-law, David Smith, reintroduced me to his work. He had a copy of The Wild Bunch sitting on his coffee table one summer, 2006 I think. We watched it, and I was entranced. David had seen a lot of Peckinpah’s films and told me about them, and that was it. I started renting films and reading biographies and criticism. I knew I wanted to do a book about him. Not criticism, but not quite fiction—something in between. But I wasn’t sure what.

In 2008, I was approached at Context Convention by Tim Deal, the editor of Shroud Books, who I had sold a story to for his magazine, and he asked me if I wanted to do a book for their Signature Novella Series, which was still in its infancy. I said of course, and things just fell into place. The next week I started writing Peckinpah. The result is what might be called a “critifiction.” In it, I extrapolate a (decidedly absurd) Peckinpahesque narrative that’s perforated with bits of commentary on his films and violence in general. It’s generally met with pretty good reviews so far. Some folks don’t know what to make of it.

When researching the life and works of Sam Peckinpah, what impressed, disappointed and surprised you the most?

Peckinpah was a wildman. A drunk, a drug addict, a brawler. But smart. And he took chances artistically, despite certain ostracization and alienation from the film industry. I’m more or less a mild-mannered and straight-laced guy, nowadays at least, and I probably would have been rubbed the wrong way by Peckinpah in private life, but I respect the sort of ethic and drive he seemed to have. In theory, I think we were very similar. Which is why I wouldn’t have liked him – two birds of the same stone don’t get along. But maybe that’s because I’m afraid that Peckinpah is what I have the potential to become. As a person, I mean. I will ever be as financially and critically successful. But he died in obscurity, on a shitty note, a “failure,” as a man and a professional. Then again, all I know about Peckinpah comes from his art, biographies and documentaries. You can’t know a person unless you know them in real life. And then you still can’t know them, right? Every human being is a walking mystery, deep down, to themselves and others. The flows of desire and fantasy render us obscure, even if we think we’re not.

When watching Peckinpah’s films before writing this book, what was it about the films that prompted you to write Peckinpah and what films in particular influenced you the most?

I’ve studied all of Peckinpah’s movies, but the ones that had the most resonance are the ones that have lived longest in the collective/critical consciousness: The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. These are actually the last three films he wrote. I found myself weirdly compelled by the last film he directed, The Osterman Weekend, but that’s because I saw it for the first time long ago, as a kid, during a formative period in my life. Convoy also made an impact because critics overwhelmingly slammed it (and continue to slam it) and I’m interested in things that incite mass antipathy, especially when they’re produced by top chefs, so to speak. But for the most part it was those first three films I mentioned.

As with most films, or any narrative form, it was Peckinpah’s style that attracted me. Those films are raw and ragged but at the same time superstylized. And there’s a subtle irreal quality to them. Not so subtle in Alfredo Garcia – the film was panned as a quasi-surreal mess when it came out and more or less ruined Peckinpah’s career. He had to scrap to make his last three films, and before he died, he was reduced to making music videos. The last thing he directed was Julian Lennon’s Too Late for Goodbyes. So his legacy is this kind of gutter/genius filmmaker. And that’s generally what I try to write. I’m no genius, mind you. But I try to bridge the “literary” with low/pop culture, and many of my narratives are cinematically oriented, i.e., I adopt the machinic techniques of filmmaking in order to represent the socius as a mediatized/pathologized body.

What upcoming projects are in store for you?

Right now I’m doing the final edits on Codename Prague, the second installment in my scikungfi trilogy, which is being published in January 2011 by Raw Dog Screaming Press. RDSP published the first novel, Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia, in 2007. Last month I finished the first draft of the third and final installment, The Kyoto Man, but that needs work and won’t be out until 2012 or 2013. I’m also in the beginning stages of writing a book of criticism and theory for UK publisher Wallflower Press’s cultographies series on John Carpenter’s They Live. That’s slated to be published in 2012.

Tell us about the They Live project.

I’m really excited about this project and get more excited as it unfolds, although recently I had to take about a month off because my second daughter was born and I’m teaching an overload of courses this term, so life is hectic. But I just returned to They Live last week and am pecking away at it.

The cultographies series started a few years ago. It’s distributed by Columbia University Press in the U.S., which is cool. There are only a handful of books so far. The films studied include The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Bad Taste, Donnie Darko, This Is Spinal Tap, and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Upcoming this year are cultographies on three of my favorite films: Blade Runner, The Evil Dead, and … wait for it … Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Can’t wait for those.

Each cultography is about 20,000 words and asks authors to work with the same basic template: a discussion of personal involvement with the film, an account of the film’s production and reception, a critical analysis (the bulk of the cultography), and a deduction of why the film is important. I really like this venue. I have an intimate relationship with They Live. The subject matter, but also its star, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, who I followed closely during his wrestling career when I was a teenager. These books are unique in that they’re written by learned critics but they also beckon those critics to be autobiographical to some degree. I do this in my fiction, so I was happy to land such a gig.

Right now I’m writing a section on the 1980s and revisiting my perceptions of the Cold War and Reaganism and the fears they invoked. I had forgotten a lot of that stuff. Projects like this are one of the reasons I write: to explore history, personally and culturally.

In a general sense, do you feel that most of today’s ultraviolent movies many of which employ techniques pioneered by Peckinpah himself, serve to excite man’s appetite for blood, or do they mark the sub-conscience with warnings against caving in to animal instincts?

Both. The best ultraviolent films, in my view, stir the core of our aggressions (latent or unbound) and produce a sense of jouissance. But this jouissance functions as a critique of our aggressions. We witness violence, we empathize and/or sympathize with it – and then we’re like, fuck, that shit ain’t right. But I think ultraviolence, more than being a medium for action, is an outlet. Beyond that, it’s a stylistic tool. For me, ultraviolence is a vehicle for playing with and sculpting language. We’re all subject to language – language defines us, contextualizes us, makes us who we are. Without it there’s nothing. And the description of violent acts, more than anything, even more than porn, imagistically and in words, strikes a chord with us. A terminal chord. Violence is the insignia of death. Death is what worries us most. And we’re fascinated by our anxieties. Fascinated, and traumatized.

Since so much of your work has existential themes – what has influenced your interest in this in the world of literature?

Existentialism was my first real interest in literature. I was doing my B.A. at Wittenberg University in the early 1990s. I belonged to a fraternity and mostly partied as an undergrad, but I majored in English and had always been an avid reader. I took all the survey courses and studied a ton of Shakespeare and medieval literature. That was fine. But it wasn’t until I started reading Camus, Kafka, Sartre, Gogol, Dostoevsky, etc. that I knew I had found a kind of home, or at least a specific direction. Existentialist fiction is distinguished, among other things, by dark absurdities, ideological rifts, and narrative risk-taking. It was right up my alley – as much back then, when I was a teenager, as it is now, twenty years later.

How long ago did your writings begin to be published and how have you seen the market for your brand of fiction change since then and where do you see it heading?

My first story was published in a now defunct online zine called Liquid Ficiton in 1999. I had been submitting stories for a few years before that while living in Liverpool and Boston, but the Liquid Fiction story was my first hit. No payment – only recognition. I sold my second published story, though, “The Fire Drill,” for a whopping $25 to a magazine called Akkadian. Which is also dead. From that point onwards, things began to accelerate; the columns of rejections in my submissions log were interrupted more frequently by acceptances in both print and online venues. Sometimes these venues paid, sometimes they didn’t. But I wasn’t writing to make a living – I still don’t. If I wanted to I’d have to significantly alter the content and coherence of my narratives. I had always planned on making my primary income as an English professor, even though it was a long road, ten or so years in graduate school.

Over the years, I’ve seen a distinct change in perceptions of weird fiction. Not experimentalism – like “literary” fiction in general, experimentalism becomes less and less popular as readers become more and more incapable of negotiating language (and the use and application of language) on the printed page and screen. But markets have opened somewhat for practitioners of categories like “New Weird,” “Interstitial,” “Bizarro,” etc. Granted, they are predominantly small press markets, and there’s still little money to be made. But the publishing industry is changing. POD technologies, for instance, have revolutionized the way books are produced, distributed, consumed. Small presses can now put out books that look as good as (and in some cases better) than books published by the Big Dogs. It’s also allowed for the publication of books that otherwise may not have seen the light of day. The problem is many small presses still publish a bunch of shit that looks like shit. Big presses do likewise, just not as often. Anyway, I’m curious to see how the publishing industry will continue to unfold. Right now I think it’s still trying to figure itself out. The result could be bad. In the end, one monstrous company may own all the books. Or everybody will become self-publishers. Both results would be bad.

If Peckinpah were to be turned into a motion picture – who would you think best fit to direct?

I’d like to see an experimental filmmaker of some kind do it.  Only with a big budget.  And a European filmmaker, preferably French or German (Americans generally don’t get my writing).  Who was the director of Run Lola Run?  That guy.  I love that movie – it’s fast, surreal, stylish, colorful, dark, gritty, cartoonish, violent, stressful – everything I aspire for in my fiction . . . Tom Tykwer, that’s the director.  Him.  But he’s probably out of my league.  Right now he’s directing the film adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and before that he directed The International, with Clive Owen and Naomi Watts.

Which of your short stories are your fondest of and why?

I don’t know if I have a favorite.  I end up disliking most of the stories I write and publish; the older they get, the more flaws I detect, and the more boring and juvenile they seem. I like most of the stories that will appear in my upcoming collection They Had Goat Heads.  But, again, they’re relatively fresh and it’ll be a little while before I start hating them.

If I had a gun to my head, I’d choose my story “Gunplay,” which originally appeared in issue 9 of Bust Down the Door & Eat All the Chickens and will be in Goat Heads.  It’s about people putting guns to their heads, among other things.

How come you are so obsessed with mustaches in your stories and yet you don’t seem to carry one?

The thing is, I really want to grow a mustache. But they’re too goofy-looking. I’d only grow one to make fun of them. And they’re purely decorative. Mustaches lack use-value, unless you have a hairlip, like Stacy Keach, and you’re trying to conceal it. Same with sideburns and those underlip tuft things. Full beards, which I grow on occasion, are different. I grow them because I can only shave once a week anyway – I have pseudofolliculitis barbae and bleed from every pore if I shave every day or even every odd day. Other people grow them because they’re lazy, or ugly, or zit-faced, or whatever. Mustaches are . . . I don’t know . . . deliberate.  Ostentatious.  Bold . . . Technically there’s nothing wrong with mustaches. They’re just articles of fashion.  Like ties, right? We’re all subject to fashion statements. Nothing wrong with that . . . And yet part of me senses something profoundly wrong with the mustache.

Are you making any appearances at any conventions/readings this year?

Yes. This weekend, I’ll be at Mo*Con in Indianapolis, IN. Then every month or so I’ll be at a convention either in the midwest or out east.  Most of them are in Columbus, OH, which is only a few hours from where I live in Fort Wayne, IN.  MARCON (Columbus) in May.  ALA (Washington, DC) in June.  Context (Columbus) in August.  Fall for the Book (Fairfax, VA) in September.  World Fantasy Convention (Columbus) in October.

 Any book recommendations? What are you currently reading?

I wish I was reading more new stuff. Right now I’m mostly re-reading books for the courses I’m teaching. One of them is a science fiction course, though, so I’ve been able to revisit texts that I haven’t read in awhile and that I really love: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Octavia Bulter’s Kindred, Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s A Short, Sharp Shock. But I always have other books going, if only a few pages at a time. I just finished The Inflatable Volunteer by Steve Aylett, probably my favorite contemporary author. Spectacular. Ongoing, at the moment, are Brian Clegg’s Before the Big Bang: A Prehistory of Our Universe, Hal Jaffe’s Anti-Twitter, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, and Slavoj Zizek’s Violence. All good writing.

What do you love most about life?

My girls. My wife Christine, who’s an English professor and writer, too. My daughter Madeleine Sue (3 years old). And my daughter Renee Elizabeth (1 month old). It’s busy, and I don’t get much sleep nowadays. But I’m a part-time insomniac so it’s par for the course.