DARK MATTERS
Eric Bogosian on his latest novel, making art, being political, and what's next
By Don Waller
"One of the things that comes up - and this has always been the criticism of my work - is that the book is really dark," muses Eric Bogosian, talking about reaction to his second novel, Wasted Beauty (Simon & Schuster, $24), which filters such questions as "What is love?" and "What is happiness?" through the intersecting tales of a heroin-addicted fashion model, her guilt-wracked brother, and a doctor's midlife crisis. "It may be that I'm writing with a dark tone, but it doesn't come close to how dark the stuff is that's happening in the real world, such as the two little girls who got murdered in Chicago [on Mother's Day].
"If I wrote that in a book, people would say, 'You are so twisted. It didn't have to be one little girl who got stabbed to death. You had to have two little girls stabbed to death,'" he continues during a recent interview at a Westwood hotel. "But that's real. That's what's really happening. So don't tell me about how dark my work is."
To Bogosian, "A dark book is one that celebrates a dark lifestyle. And you couldn't possibly read this book and think I'm saying you should go do heroin. The very first scene in the book is something that I actually witnessed - this beautiful young girl repeatedly, desperately trying to get a needle into her arm - and I thought it was a travesty and really disturbing, 'cause she was such a sweet kid.
"But just because the book's characters aren't ecstatically happy, doesn't mean it isn't a pleasurable experience for the reader," he adds. "I don't have to be happy reading a book. I've got a beautiful wife and two beautiful kids. I'm happy in real life."
Although Mall, published in 2000, was his first foray into hardcover storytelling, Bogosian is best known as an actor and a playwright, whose credits stretch from a trio of Obie Award-winning solo performances (Drinking in America, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, and Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll) to starring roles in two fistfuls of films, notably Talk Radio, Wonderland, and Ararat.
Born in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1953, Bogosian is proud of his Armenian heritage, and his appearance in Atom Egoyan's 2002 Ararat, which centers on the Turkish massacre of a million Armenians in 1915, reflects that. "I'm actually a contrarian," he says with a shrug, "in that Armenian Americans - which is what I consider myself to be - are more analogous to the Turkish citizens of the Ottoman Empire, because today America is the empire, and under the smoke of war we're creating all kinds of havoc among women and children and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan."
The best way for Armenian Americans to memorialize their ancestors' fate, Bogosian says, "would be to become as politically involved as possible, to make sure that such things don't happen again. Right this afternoon, horrible things will be happening to the women and children of Iraq, and as an American, I can do something about that. I can write a letter to my Senator. I can vote. As an artist, I can create work that says something about this. And I think that's the best way."
Not that Bogosian is thinking of running for office, or even writing essays for the op-ed page. "But when I'm making work, I'm looking at things that are going through my head," he says. "And that's a political act, too. Because if you come to terms with who you are and what you want out of life, how your desires fuel the way that you make decisions on what you're going to do with your life, that's a progressive thing to do. That's self-understanding."
He contends that "the right wing doesn't spend much time on self-understanding, and I think those people are fucked-up, because a healthy human being has empathy and cares about the world."
Sitting on a couch in his hotel room, a half-dozen of his latest literary acquisitions (among them Jervy Tervalon & Gary Phillips's Cocaine Chronicles, Philip Larkin's Collected Poems, and G.K. Chesterton's St. Francis of Assisi) stacked neatly on an end table, Bogosian masks his machine-gun delivery in a matter-of-fact tone. "I'm looking at how the deep underground currents that course through my heart and soul fuel what I end up doing in my art," he says. "For instance, if I have tremendous materialistic urges, but I'm not really sure what I would do if I had all that money, then that's something I might like to look at."
These questions are obvious, he says, but they're not often addressed, "because everybody thinks they know what the answer is, so they go right on accruing - especially in Hollywood, where there are pretensions to meaning and substance, yet it's a tremendously venal scene - and people can make so much money, they become like frozen, like Barbra Streisand. If she hadn't made the money she made, maybe she would've just kept singing and performing the rest of her life. It's almost like she died in 1972.
"She didn't die. She became so rich that she couldn't be bothered to ever work again," Bogosian continues. "And I definitely feel that in myself. I get more. I get spoiled. But having the opportunities to make work is the ultimate wealth that I've afforded myself. I don't rock-climb. I don't collect stamps. I don't do anything really interesting. I just do this."
In fact, Bogosian is currently writing two plays and a graphic novel, and is planning to start work on a new solo performance with composer Elliott Sharp. "That'll be different from what I was doing before," he says. "There was a very cynical sense of humor in the last solo [2000's Wake Up and Smell the Coffee] that involved people on planes and terrorists and passengers knowing their planes were going to crash. And then a year later, we had 9/11, and I'm going, 'Fuck! Thinking about this makes my head hurt.' So I had to get some distance.
"I'm a writer," he continues. "I'm thinking about taboos, about what scares people the most, so I'm writing about planes and buildings exploding and so forth. These things are in the air. And I think the 9/11 terrorists knew exactly what would scare the shit out of Americans more than anything else, 'cause we authored the scenario - just reel back and watch the movies. I'm even in one of 'em, Under Siege 2 with Steven Seagal, back in 1995."
But after Coffee, Bogosian felt he was "just entertaining people with negativity. So I sat down to write the way I felt, the way my heart spoke to me, and I wrote Wasted Beauty. And now people are saying, 'Man, this is dark.' So, now I say, 'Well, there's just no way to escape it. I'm doing this for myself, and that's just the way it comes out.'"
Published: 05/26/2005
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