Faces of fear

One of the things that fascinates me is the difficulty of getting into a character’s head when they have attitudes on race or class that are alien and unpleasant to me; I’ve blogged about that here and here.

Working on The Enemy Within, I’m beginning to think that writing characters with outdated fears realistically would be just as difficult.

Consider being one of the anti-Masonic groups who seriously believed the Freemasons were a monstrous cult that drank blood from their enemies’ skulls.

Or go back about 90 years, to when the big foreign Bogeyman [edit: More accurately, “a” big foreign bogeyman] was—Mexico! In the wake of Pancho Villa’s raid on New Mexico, the threat of a Mexican invasion of the Southwest was apparently taking very seriously, becoming the basis for more than a few movies (Patria, the brainchild of Germany’s propaganda machine, presented the threat of a joint Japanese/Mexican attack on US soil). That would be a hard fear for me to portray realistically from the vantage point of a century later.

I don’t think I’m alone in that limitation: There’s a strong tendency to look back on what we now see were overblown fears and and treat them as ridiculous and comic, which doesn’t usually work well. In Spielberg’s 1941, for example, fears that Japan had secret bases along the West Coast,are played strictly for laughs; I’m not sure anyone watching without knowledge of history would know how terrifyingly plausible that seemed in the weeks after Pearl Harbor.

Likewise, one reviewer’s comment on the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire was that the movie laughs condescendingly at all the fuddy-duddies who thought rock and roll was bad—and thereby ignores how dangerously intense, sexy and uncontrolled it seemed back in the day.

How do you get into that fearful mindset and make it work? Truthfully, I don’t know, because I haven’t had to do it yet; when I need to do it, I guess I’ll figure it out.