Klosterman turns to the dark side
I watched a lot of professional basketball this year, probably too much. By June I was following the playoffs obsessively.
I wasn’t supporting any particular team. I didn’t really care who won or lost. I watched hoping for close, competitive games. Even without a team to celebrate or curse, there were a handful of players, from various teams, I started to dislike.
It wasn’t just their performance I would malign but also their personality and demeanour. They weren’t just bad players, but also bad people. I’d never met or had any personal link with any of them besides watching them perform, preen and sweat on television.
Some I liked, some I didn’t. When thought about objectively, now that the season is over, my disdain feels very arbitrary and weird.
Chuck Klosterman’s new book, I Wear the Black Hat, is his amusing audit of villainy in popular culture. In his return to non-fiction, following his (underrated) novel The Visible Man, Klosterman examines why we culturally disparage a portion of personalities, artists, characters, athletes, but esteem others, even those with a malicious history.
Klosterman starts from his assertion that the villain is the person who “knows the most, but cares the least.”
The Ethicist columnist for The New York Times and regular contributor to Grantland and various magazines, Klosterman’s distinction has always been his ability to humorously blend popular culture with elaborate, creative conjectures. Whether writing about sports, music, film or television, he’s made a career of it.
I Wear the Black Hat is less interested in unpacking the nature of villainy, but focuses more on how, where and why villains fit into our murals of popular cultural. It’s not a scholarly or political work, but is deceptively astute and absorbing. It has threads of memoir but never devolves into rants or arcane earnestness. I Wear the Black Hat is a quick, entertaining and diverting read. The book doesn’t try to always be funny or serious but is often both.
Instead of declarations or judgments, Klosterman is concerned with social perceptions of who becomes marked as a villain and why. He offers a variety of examples and potential explanations.
Confidence is one factor. Klosterman believes that discernible confidence is liked regardless of action or immorality. Public villains can be let off the hook if they possess extreme self-assurance, even if that self-assurance becomes narcissistic.
Physical attraction is another point, like confidence, that seems obvious. Good- looking people get away with more. But Klosterman shapes these alreadyunderstood associations in compelling ways. Not only is Bill Clinton a handsome man, which helps for his mostly non-villain classification, but he also didn’t brag, or even talk, about what happened with Monica Lewinsky.
“It mattered that he was a man … it mattered even more that he was a handsome man who never, ever spoke about what actually happened.”
Klosterman sets Clinton’s silence against basketball legend Will Chamberlain, who famously boasted of the supposedly 20,000 woman he slept with. It’s not the whopping count that people find distasteful but that Chamberlain himself is the messenger.
Klosterman comically turns the camera on himself at the end of book and, in doing so, on the reader, too. His reality, like ours, is refreshingly opaque. Most of these public figures, like the people we encounter in our lives, both real and imagined, are some composite of good and bad, hero and villain.
We are, all of us, somewhere in between.