Action Figure

Think like a man of action...act like a man of thought.

I have always loved Action Movies and Action Heroes. I think the first 2 non-kid movies I remember watching were Batman (1989) and Top Gun (1986). I have perhaps watched both of these movies more than any others in my entire life. Star Wars and Indiana Jones followed shortly after this and how could I not fall in love with those series they are universally designed to appeal, especially to kids and white folks. After this I distinctly remember my cousin Michael showing me Goldeneye, the first and best of the Pierce Bronson James Bond films and the birth of a lifelong love of Bond. This led me to director Martin Campbell’s follow up to Goldeneye; The Mask of Zorro - which may still be the best swashbuckler of all time. I remember watching Die Hard for the first time at a Christmas when I was about 11, a revery for my cousin Becky and I. After that Bruce Willis was god and soon after that I got to enjoy some grade A cheese in Armageddon before having my mind blown by The 5th Element. From here on out I was always looking for the best possible action movie to watch.

Sometimes they were hand picked like with SPEED, a film highly endorsed by both my Mom and Dad. They were right, SPEED is one of the best action films of its era. The first films I ever saw in the theatre were: Snow White (re-release), The Lion King, Beethoven’s 2nd, Toy Story and then Mission Impossible. I can’t say that I understood Mission Impossible at the time but I did love it. Then there were chance occurrences of inspiration like my Dad taking me to see The Mummy (1999), which to my mind is still the best not Indy but not Indiana Jones movie. My mom specifically got me to watch Terminator 2 : Judgement Day in a viewing that may have inadvertently shaped my entire mindset. There was a trip down to the coast for my brother’s, a diabetic, children’s hospital appointment - I remember dying in the Vancouver summer heat in a hotel room with no AC and in one of those beautiful random chance encounters Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, uncut, came on TV. It was everything I’d ever wanted from a movie. Eventually I got to Lethal Weapon, with its undertones of suicide, drugs prostitution rings and criminal syndicates being much more R rated than the rest of the lot I’ve previously mentioned. Predator. Alien. Robocop. Big Trouble in Little China. The Hunt for Red October. Tombstone. Every Sequel of every thing. I saw Reservoir Dogs for the first time one Thanksgiving when I was bored of the family gathering and it just happened to be on TV. It was a revelation. It felt like a movie I’d already seen a million times but was encountering here for the first time. After that I surreptitiously rented all of Tarantino’s available catalogue, my Mom did not approve of his films. I watched all the Rocky movies. I loved the cinematic brilliance of the first film and was easily seduced by the pyrotechnic montages and radical comic book like nature of the sequels. Then the big one. The Matrix. I had come home from staying at a friend’s for the weekend and my parents had rented and watched it the night before and my Mom was like You’ll like this it’s about a computer nerd. The Matrix fucked my shit up. It was one of those movies that I’d watch maybe 20 times over the next couple years. Then I went digging in the family’s old VHS collection; filled with Disney classics, rom-coms and all sorts of movies that had released over the past ten years - including one of my favorites Batman Forever - but I finally landed on what I consider to be my favorite movie ever Michael Mann’s HEAT. It’s a perfect movie, don’t even try me. It blew my mind in ever way possible. Looking back on it, its strange that we didn’t have The Godfather or it’s sequel, or even Apocalypse now, especially considering my Dad loved the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula so much. The action, intensity, viscerality, characters, plot, music and cinematography of Heat will never leave me. I will never forget sitting in my parents basement watching the end of the film as Moby’s God Moving Over the Face of Waters plays, wondering if I’m DeNiro or Pacino. Verdict’s in: I’m DeNiro. I think in that moment I knew that what I wanted the most was to tell Action stories. Stories about criminals, or cops, sci-fi heroes, fantasy badasses - it was all the same to me. ACTION was the name of the game. Compelling stories punctuated with action set pieces where the game was show not tell. The heroes of great action stories acted they did the thing, they didn’t wuss out and bail. They showed up in the clutch. They faced the impossible odds with a sneer and a quip and they delivered.

There is no doubt to me that Mad Max: Fury Road is the greatest action movie ever made. Literally no one can hold a candle to the flame of the vision, direction, focus, and wisdom of George Miller. Star Wars? Indy? Fast and the Furious? Die Hard? Lethal Weapon? Rocky? Rambo? Pffffff! There is no other film made that so meticulously captures the carnage and rock and roll sensibilities of an Action movie - but while also having so much to say within the subtext of the action. A review I remember said: This is the Sistine Chapel of Action Movies - and that about sums it up to me. The ending shot of Fury Road: where Furiosa, who has overcome so much, rises to rule looks to Max only to catch a fleeting glimpse of him as he offers a nod before disappearing into the crowd, to me, is the perfect portrayal of an action hero. He is akin to Toshiro Mifune’s Yojimbo or Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name, but Max is above and beyond them because his journey has been about redemption for himself through the success of others and he desires nothing as the results of his action. He moves on. I may only exist in a world of text, but it has always been my dream to convey action adventure, with meaning, in a way that is fun, accessible and has something to say.

Wolfmen Investigations is a serial pulp action adventure crime story following a team of special investigators who exist outside the normal police. The main protagonist is your prototypical Action Hero. He’s the hot shot amalgamation of characters like John McLane, Martin Riggs, The Driver, Popeye Doyle, and Dirty Harry. What do all these characters have in common? They’re either psychopaths in their own right or total assholes. I mean sure in the movies it looks great to have a guy like Martin Riggs or John McLane on your side but I had started thinking, based on my own need to grow up at the time, that to actually be around one of these action hero types would get really fucking annoying. Then I started to think about how we’ve totally allowed this type of action hero to hold sway over our consciousness and ultimately it makes sense. I think deep down everyone fantasizes, at least a little bit, about flipping off your boss, doing explicitly what you were told not to do, making your own rules and being a little psycho on purpose - but as we get closer to the second half of this century I found myself wondering: What would a better action hero look like? How would they get there?

Surely they weren’t going to step out of the packaging like a perfectly formed Batman figure. There would need to be some growth and development that happened there. To take a character like John McLane and expose him, then rehabilitate him and somehow still manage to keep an audience interested? Keep myself interested? Was it even possible?

This first novel in the ongoing series of Wolfmen Investigations is the baby steps towards this concept. It is essentially a portrait of who this central protagonist is and has been, and leads to an inciting incident that will change his life. By the time I got to the end of writing this book I had a pretty clear concept for what would need to happen in the story and my own life to get the results I wanted. I’d already incurred a tremendous amount of awareness, gratitude self respect and honesty about myself through the process of experiencing and healing from a broken leg. I think in the following years I really put in a lot of effort to raise my standards and capability and plan a new path forward into a more woke way of being. A great term, that goes beyond the simplistic nature of saying something is woke, or even just classic intersectionality, is Kyriarchy - a term coined by Romanian/Germin feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in her book But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation.

Schüssler Fiorenza describes interdependent "stratifications of gender, race, class, religion, heterosexualism, and age" as structural positions assigned at birth.

She suggests that people inhabit several positions, and that positions with privilege become nodal points through which other positions are experienced. For example, in a context where gender is the primary privileged position (e.g. patriarchy, matriarchy), gender becomes the nodal point through which sexuality, race, and class are experienced. In a context where class is the primary privileged position (i.e. classism), gender and race are experienced through class dynamics. Fiorenza stresses that kyriarchy is not a hierarchical system as it does not focus on one point of domination. Instead it is described as a "complex pyramidal system" with those on the bottom of the pyramid experiencing the "full power of kyriarchal oppression". The kyriarchy is recognized as the status quo and therefore its oppressive structures may not be recognized.

In my summation: there’s a lot of factors at play that make up what someone’s positions of privilege are and they all deserve a decent amount of consideration. And I was open to restructuring how I thought about the intersections of those above mentioned categories - so at least I could really think about where I stood in all of it. And that’s exactly what I wanted my Action Hero to experience. A total paradigm shift from where and what he was and what he recognized he needed to do to move forward. But how was I going to make this guy’s healing path cathartic, meaningful but also entertaining? I didn’t want to just have a big public therapy session; I wanted to make something that was an nitrous enhanced action ride full of comedy, heart and a decent amount of explosions. The things that make great Action stories great.

So how was I going to do that? I realized that, eventually, decentralizing the obvious protagonist from what one might think is the main story and giving more of a central stage, a whole book even, to people that would have otherwise been secondary characters in any other iteration of the story. It went from being a singular protagonist to a team of them, not to mention an anti-hero thrown in for good measure. The seemingly central character still has his whole own arc and story of discovery and reinvention to go on, but in Wolfmen Investigations the protagonists each inhabit a different style of story. They’re intended to contrast each other and explore the different ranges of personality, background, intensity and methodology for being an action hero type.

So why has this book sat in the drawer for a better part of a decade? Because I didn’t actually know how to be a better action hero. I hadn’t lived long enough with principles that were better than my default settings. Maybe I’d had the idea that I needed to learn how to be better, but as I was finishing this first book I had about less than 2 months on my record of trying to upgrade my operating system. More personally, as someone put it to me: It’s really easy to look and feel like a good guy if all you surround yourself with is assholes and scumbags. This is in reference to the greasy punk world and the rather seedy pub I worked at for an extended period of time. I like to think that I was a good guy but I think that there was serious reasons for me to begin having a big time attitude adjustment. By the time I finished writing this book I saw what the path ahead of me looked like and I had to go live it. And then of course a bunch of other crazy stuff happened because that’s the nature of life, but I would now argue that its only through those experiences, relationships, disasters, failures and fleeting happiness and reassurances that I can actually write the rest of the stories in Wolfmen Investigations.

This first novel is simultaneously a loving homage to all the hot headed action movie stuff that I just mentioned, not to mention my own wish list of cool stuff, while also being a relatively sharp piece of self parody. I’m not known for being the most subtle writer when it comes to this stuff so I think that it will all become relatively self evident by the time you’re done the first couple chapters. I love macho shit. I also love making fun of it.

This one is steeped heavily in needle drops like The Who’s Eminence Front, Steve Winwood’s Valerie and Higher Love, and Wang Chung’s Dance Hall Days and The City of Angels from the movie To Live and Die in LA. Not to mention the entire score of Beverly Hills Cop. If this was a movie and had a opening title sequence like a James Bond movie it would be to the song Bellbottoms by John Spencer Blues Explosion.

So without further adieu I present:

Wolfmen Investigations: Thrashin’