Fuck hope
This week I watched George Carlin’s American Dream, a two part documentary by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio on HBO. It’s a gripping, inspiring four hours that covers Carlin’s entire life, from his rough childhood in uptown Manhattan to his emergence as a suit-wearing fixture on 60s television, his countercultural explosion in the 70s and his later years as a searing truth teller.
Carlin’s comedy always highlighted the hypocrisy and injustice in the world, especially in American society. But in his later years, as he was approaching death, his outlook took a turn, becoming overtly nihilistic and bitter. He “joked” about being glad that humanity was killing itself, welcoming mass deaths from natural disasters as the revenge of a planet humans had treated with contempt. He noted high suicide rates, and suggested his audiences follow suit. “Fuck hope,” he says in an interview from the period.
I wasn’t expecting to be so emotionally affected by what I thought would be just another hagiography of an influential 20th century cultural figure (albeit one I enjoy). But watching Carlin’s descent into despair, it felt uncomfortably familiar. I found myself nodding along to some of his bleakest sentiments. It sounded like the darkest part of my own internal monologue over the last few years, the part of me I try to fight against, but that also feels the most real.
Around 2016 I changed my “tagline” on Facebook to “A better world is possible,” a slogan popular on the socialist left. It’s still there, and I now laugh bitterly when I see it. What better world could be possible when year after year we ignore the climate crisis or, at best, make meaningless, insignificant changes that will do nothing to address it? When a psycho death cult has a supermajority on the Supreme Court that will likely last most of my lifetime? When workers are crushed by corporations and one million people die of a virus that could have been prevented? When a racist massacre in a supermarket one week gives way to a horrific slaughter of children the next week?
Of course, these things have been happening forever. But the moment feels uniquely hopeless. Amid all this chaos and carnage, the one thing it feels we can be certain of is that nothing will change. There is no way out. No one is coming to save us, not even ourselves.
“People say he got bitter when he got old,” Carlin’s brother says in an interview. “Bullshit. He got tired. He gave up. I sensed his disappointment in the human race.”
Thus Carlin’s story, as enthralling as it is, has an unsatisfying ending. After a groundbreaking, virtuosic career, beating death and irrelevancy multiple times, he ended up in a place where he couldn’t see a worthwhile future. And then he died of heart failure at 71.
Apatow and Bonfiglio, like the good liberals they are, try to temper this depressing conclusion. A powerful ending montage juxtaposes Carlin’s many prescient quotes with images of the atrocities he may as well have predicted: pointless foreign wars, police brutality, Ted Cruz. These are interspersed with images of protests and uprisings, as if to say, see, we still have a chance!
If he was alive, Carlin would have made some great (and likely very cancellable) jokes about pussy hats at the Women’s March. He would have laughed at the idea that these actions, or what’s left of our democracy, could really change entrenched systems. He knew individuals had little power to create change when he was still alive, and things have only gotten worse since then.
And yet, as dark as Carlin’s outlook became, his own life was seemingly full of love and meaning. His stage persona was still just a persona. Well into his 60s, he was so giddy and lovestruck with his second wife Sally Wade that he told a young Ben Affleck all about their weird fairy role play. We see footage Carlin took in this era with his dogs, speaking to them in a joyful baby talk. He repeatedly says that he loves individual humans, even if he hates what they do in groups. “He didn’t like to watch people die [in natural disasters],” Sally says, rolling her eyes at the suggestion.
His daughter Kelly, with whom he had a deep if troubled relationship, says she confronted Carlin during this period, asking why, if he was so hopeless, he would bother writing and performing. He didn’t have an answer.
“I believe he was always trying to be of service to this species,” she says.
What else can we do? We have to get up and live another day. There are dogs, there are friends and family. There are jokes. There is our shared experience of this often brutal reality, on this tiny rock spinning through an endless void.
In a famous monologue from his 1992 special “Jammin’ in New York,” Carlin berates environmentalists for their hubris in believing they could possibly “save the planet.” But at the end, after an hour of brutal cynicism, over the cheering crowd, Carlin ends the show with an order:
“Take care of yourselves. Take care of someone else.”