(here’s what they call a blog……. I used to do this all the time….)

….this is one of those posts where there IS NO IMAGE to put up as accompaniment…. No one knows what Holden Caulfield looks like… Perhaps that is because J.D. Salinger never allowed Catcher in the Rye  to be made into a Hollywood film… You know by now that he died the other day, and might I say from what little I’ve read it appears Salinger was much more of a misanthrope than Caulfield… How he lived for roughly 50 years in self-imposed exile I do not know… What kept him going?… We may never know… I doubt he’d been guarding his memoirs vigiliantly, the man clearly didn’t care about contact with the world while he was alive and I can’t see him being concerned with contact from beyond the grave via his autobiographical writings, if they even existed…..

……….anyhow…………. I do remember reading Catcher, it was 1990…. I was 16…. I remember identifying with Holden not so much because we were both chronically nauseated by the inauthenticity and insincerity of those around us (which I certainly was)… It was more  the sense of weariness, and the sense of wanting to literally escape… Not daydreaming or fantasizing about being somewhere else, but literally picking up and GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE…  Like Holden, I finally did just pick up and go, a couple of times… And like Holden, my baggage followed me anyway… And like Holden I probably just needed to be around an adult who was grounded, who was centered, who wasn’t stuck in some adolescent pattern… One who was authentic… Y’know… Someone who wasn’t completely full of shit… One who wasn’t such an effing phony…….

……. I’m reminded of this episode of Daria, of all things… One where her aunt or cousin comes to town, a woman in her 30s… And she served this role exactly… I don’t think I saw it until I was in my 20s, probably in college, and by that time I’d been fortunate enough to find a good number of adults who were very grounded and authentic indeed………………..

………..which brings me to the idea of the “antihero”… A word you really only see get used to describe fictional characters….. Here is the dictionary definition: “a protagonist or notable figure who is conspicuously lacking in heroic qualities”……. Was Holden Caulfield THE all-time antihero???   Got any good recent examples from movies??  Or what about in real life????    And where is the line between antihero and villain? Because it’s all too tempting to say that charismatic bad-guys or people who are conspicuously assholes in real life are “antiheroes”…