The Diviners (56 page)

The filmmaker almost pounces on the shot as she dives in next to her younger brother and reaches her hand all the way down the line until she manages to get her arm around three of them, around her younger brother, her older brother, and her mother. Behold the family. What does the camera know? The camera knows that the American family consists of at least one adulterer, that the American family consists of a mother with depressive symptoms undiscussed with the other protagonists in frame; and the American family consists of at least two races; and the American family consists of at least one young man with a serious mental illness; and the American family consists of at least one young woman who has had sex with her own gender on a number of occasions and who thought it was kind of hot; and the American family consists of at least one screenplay writer and one master of divinity; and the American family consists of one teenager who is a total outcast at his school. Behold the family, sought after by the police of large metropolises, compulsive about sexuality and psychiatric medication, uncertain as to its political beliefs, argumentative, dismissive, except when loving, brilliant, broken, sad, and about to do one thing all together, as one. And that one thing is
not
to sit and discuss their many problems in a sober and loving way. No, the American family, as soon as the digital camera is shut off, is going to perform its one regular activity. It’s going to watch television.

And what are they going to watch?

The Werewolves of Fairfield County
! Because it’s a Sunday at
8:00
PM
. And this is the Thanksgiving episode, as broadcast on the UBC network, the network of the American family. UBC has been heavily promoting the Thanksgiving episode of
The Werewolves of Fairfield County.
Because the network knows a hit when it sees a hit. Everybody, for some reason, is now watching
The Werewolves of Fairfield County.
The cast was on the cover of a major newsweekly a fortnight ago. The Halloween episode is normally the big episode in the fall season, but the creator, Christine Katz, has spoken in recent interviews of the need, in this the fourth season, to come up with new creative challenges for herself and her staff of writers. This year it is the much-ballyhooed Thanksgiving episode.

A synopsis of the general themes of
The Werewolves of Fairfield County
is in order, for those who have somehow missed the previous three seasons. Of course, it’s important to note that the lycanthropes of the program are not afflicted with an illness, some disease, some contagion, caused by the bite of another werewolf. No, this is not the lycanthropy of your Lon Chaney Jr. films, from the high period of horror films. Nor is it dependent on
I Was a Teenage Werewolf,
the nineteen-fifties articulation of this condition. No, the lycanthropy of
The Werewolves of Fairfield County,
which is the lycanthropy of the new millennium, is genetic, part of a spontaneous evolutionary mutation. In Fairfield County, stronghold of the affluent and powerful here in the northeastern megalopolis, the human species has spontaneously come to express a genetic crisis. In Fairfield County, the human species has mutated, such that the tennis stars and swashbuckling fiscal experts of the county number among them those who grow hair on their knuckles and howl for blood at every full moon.

The werewolves have formed themselves into a pack. Season two, in particular, was organized around this principle. The pack protects the individuals from being pruned by the police or by the unscrupulous hunters of the area. The pack keeps its members from needlessly taking human life. And so, in season two, the werewolves began to exhibit a certain crude moral rectitude. For example, during the second episode, the werewolves happened upon the mayor of Waterbury, who had embezzled funds from his education budget, and they tore him limb from limb in a sequence that was considered too violent for the hour at which it was broadcast.

The older wolves look after the younger wolves. The Caucasian wolves of Fairfield County, who outnumber the others, protect the Asian and African American wolves, though there is no discerning the racial origins of the werewolves when they are under the sway of the full moon. The rich wolves, of whom there are many, protect the poor wolves. The strong protect the weak. It’s true, the social conditions of the pack would seem an improvement on the relationships that are formed by “human civilization.” This was driven home, e.g., in the third season, whose theme was the mixed blessing of wealth. Ezra Montgomery Scott, one of the alpha dogs, was being tried by an overzealous state prosecutor for insider trading, while at the same time he was caring for a teenager at his home, a new member of the pack. The young man, of course, was frightened by and unprepared for the manifestation of his mutation. He was a caddy at the Round Hill Club and he was an orphan, and Ezra Scott, while playing a late round of golf with his lawyers, thought he recognized something in the boy. He took him home to give him a talking-to.

The moon was nearly full. Scott locked himself and the boy in the basement, as was his habit for the entirety of the three days, and when the two of them weren’t baying lonesomely, in a way that drove Scott’s pair of greyhounds wild, he tried to persuade the boy that though his new identity was a cross to bear, there were things that were salubrious about being a werewolf. For example, there was a sense that you belonged. There was the certainty that there were always others who had compassion for you, even when things were at their hardest. This Ezra Scott explained to the young inductee, though in doing so Scott missed meetings and hearings relevant to his court case. When the boy manifested suicidal ideation, Scott cared for him, and when the boy tried to attack Scott at night, Scott managed to keep him from getting injured. All while Scott was meant to be rehearsing talking points with his defense team. For the price of his kindness, Ezra Scott was convicted of stock fraud and sent to the penitentiary, from which he escaped at the next full moon.

Even among fans, the first season was noteworthy for clichés of the horror genre. The first season was mainly about teenagers. If the program had considerable insight into middle-class teenagers and their fashionable obsessions with copyright infringement and low-riding jeans, it was right in step with most fare on the UBC network. But when the second season introduced the grizzled railroad employee from Stamford, Mike Woodwell, it was clear that something new was happening on network television. Ratings began to creep up. A lineman on the swing shift for Metro-North, Woodwell lost his wife early in the second season to lupus. Never did the howl of a werewolf on a windswept city street sound more heartrending or more appropriate. Woodwell’s subsequent courtship of a black barmaid from Port Chester, Felicia Adams, and his affection for her two sons, one of whom is disabled, was one of the most graceful introductions of an interracial romance in television history. As the critics remarked, there was chemistry between the two. It was about this time that Deborah Weller, PhD, Annabel Duffy’s mom, began to fall for the charm of the show. She got her daughter hooked the next spring when the DVDs of the first season, with extra commentary, became available.

The Thanksgiving episode of the fourth season, according to teasers, also concerns Felicia Adams. Adams has long since broken up with Woodwell, who nonetheless pines from afar. (He seems destined to be one of those television characters who can never work out how to live.) Felicia is now in love with a strong, charismatic African American character, Edwin Watson, who works at the Life Savers plant in Port Chester but who is currently in danger of having his murky past as a low-level drug dealer revealed by a woman who wants to have an affair with him. In fact, at the end of episode nine, Edwin quits the job at Life Savers, without telling Felicia, though he continues to bring back a roll of candy for the two Adams boys each day.

Felicia is not a perfect mother, nor a perfect barmaid, since she tends to go missing several days a month. Occasionally she’s had jobs that were offered her by other members of the pack, but even so she’s between positions at present, except for fill-in shifts at an Irish bar at Thanksgiving. Where is the holiday turkey going to come from? And the stuffing and the cranberry sauce and the pies? Who’s going to bake the pies? The predicament is made even worse because her elder son, Bennett, a scholarship student at the elite Fairfield Academy, intends to go to a big party tonight at the home of the Burns family. You know, the Burns family. The twin brothers of astonishing good looks, and the sister who’s already tearing up the Seventh Avenue fashion shows as a model. Of course, Bennett is aware of the ironies of eating Hamburger Helper and then going to a party with the high-fashion-model daughter of the Burns family, who he’s pretty sure has a crush on him, just as he does on her.

Naturally, each episode has its narrative crisis that can only be faced by the pack as a whole. In the Thanksgiving episode, this crisis has to do with the fact that the ubiquitous deer of Fairfield County are beginning to suffer with a strange, inexplicable wasting disease, and the governor of the state, an independent in the tradition of Lowell Weicker, has declared open season, with high limits, for the deer hunters of the Nutmeg State. No one is meant to
eat
any of the venison until state regulators are certain that the danger is passed. But it’s okay to shoot at deer. The wolf pack, which will be gathering this weekend for the full moon, is in grave danger not only of being pruned in the indiscriminate blasting away at bucks and does but also liable to be famished, too desperate to go without deer, notwithstanding the wasting disease.

This is where the episode begins. In a state park near Bedford, where, at dusk, a pair of bow hunters is sharing a flask and trying not to make a lot of noise. Suddenly, a commotion in the woods. A buck sweeps by, followed close behind by a pack of wild dogs. What a moment of great beauty. Must be an eight-point buck, his rack a beautiful thing to encounter. The crossbow hunters raise their medieval weapons—which have carbon arrow shafting and vibration dampers and pendulum sighting systems and cat whisker string silencers—with intent to take out this white-tailed specimen. They have fantasies of venison steaks in their freezers all winter long. But suddenly there are these dogs and they are, uh, they are extremely large dogs, dogs such as these hunters have never seen before. The pack of wild dogs seems to swell and grow in ways that begin to frighten the men. There must be thirty or more of them! The men shrink back under the canopy of a pine, which gives comfort for a moment, until the pack takes note of them. A group of fifteen or so of the younger pups, eager to kill and flush with their own mad energy, turns and heads for the bow hunters.

Now the credit sequence with the moonrise over Darien and New Canaan. Moonrise over the soccer practice at Wilton High. Then the short takes of the cast changing into wolves while there is mournful slide guitar and harmonica wailing in the background.
The Werewolves of Fairfield County,
brought to you by the United Broadcasting Company. In Newton, Massachusetts, Annabel Duffy notices during the commercial break that instead of watching the program, her brother Tyrone has a book in his lap. And in his hand there is a black felt-tip marker. It can mean only one thing! Her brother is making art! Defaced books! Her mother brings in popcorn from the kitchen and sets it on the table, and the Reverend Duffy takes the popcorn, forgetting to thank his wife, and fills his mouth with it.

In Santa Monica, Jeffrey Maiser is by himself, in an enormous family room that has no family in it. On three walls there are books, the vast majority unread. He faces a massive entertainment complex with all the latest bells and whistles, accented with a few tennis trophies from his wild youth. The television itself has a plasma screen, and there are so many speakers in the family room that he can’t even remember where they all are. He has a scotch on the rocks, and he is sitting in the black leather recliner, and he has turned off every phone in his gigantic and empty house, and he has put his cell phone under a pillow on the sofa, and he has prepared himself for the one unalloyed bit of good news in his programming week. He can’t remember exactly what happened in the last episode, and he can’t remember what’s supposed to happen for the rest of the season, but he can remember what the advertising rates are for the program. The programming executives should be really pleased, even if they will have to pay millions per episode to renew beyond the 2001 season. But that’s what’s so great about a television program where any character could be killed at any time. You can always hire a new cast.

So where were we? A pack of wolf pups is trained on two bow hunters, all of whose machismo, all of whose high-visibility gear and Ted Nugent rhetoric, cannot save them now. Hesitating only momentarily, like hunting dogs pointing at prey, the pups now stutter-step toward the two huddling figures. One man has let his weapon drop out of his hands in perfect terror, while the other manages to fire off a single camouflage-colored arrow from its high-tension firing mechanism. Because a network television show doesn’t have the budget to do one of those camera-mounted-on-the-arrow-as-it-rips-through-the-forest-and-into-

the-flesh-of-the-enemy shots, we just hear the arrow sizzle in the dusk until there is the searing howl of one of the werewolves. Someone is hit! This of course doesn’t stop the pups. In fact, it emboldens them, and in seconds the two hunters are a pile of bloody laundry. The rest of the pack, almost casually, brings down two magnificent bucks.

When dawn comes, the wolves rise up out of their satiety in a circle around the vivisected bucks. The wolves, human again, with their human clothes in tatters. There’s Devon Porter, the daughter of one of the founders of the Central Intelligence Agency and one of the best interior decorators in Greenwich, her mouth ringed with gore. Beside her is Laney Carrington, also an heiress, who seems to have torn a rather expensive gown during last night’s feast. Beside them is Laney’s housekeeper, an Irish lass called Siobhan McCallister, and Siobhan is making a joke about how venison is not meant to be eaten as sushi is eaten. The three women have a good laugh. A contractor from Norwalk, Bob Gallace, wearing an expression like he is full of worries, is dusting off Clay Goldberg, the internist from Scarsdale. Bob tells Clay he really ought to wipe around his mouth and offers him a handkerchief. Clay says, “If only venison was Thanksgiving fare. I’d take a side of it home to the wife.”