Prisoner's Dilemma

From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of BEWILDERMENT

Richard Powers

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781848871410
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838950132
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED BEWILDERMENT AND THE OVERSTORY Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humourist and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and with his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls 'Hobbstown', a place that he promises will save him, the world and everything that's in it. 'Richard Powers is the most intellectually stimulating novelist at work in the English language today... Sentence after sentence has the razor-sharp quality of aphorism about the weird wired world we have made' Daily Telegraph

1944

THE BOY IS perfect: Walt knows it from the first set of the singing waiter’s act. Disney snatches teenaged Eddie Hobson from the jaws of current events and whisks his lead-to-be back to the safe haven of World World. He snares the boy just in time, before he is touched by outside developments. The nisei pilots scrape the belly of their DC-3 while bringing it down in the cornfields, but the director and his discovery reach the hidden kingdom intact. As young Eddie steps down onto the simulated Tarmac, his eyes open in astonishment. For spreading in front of him is a miniature, picture-perfect Lost Domain.

The insignificant swatch of cornbelt has transformed beyond recognition into a panorama of steep mountains, dismal swamps, forbidding tundra, mysterious forests, and meandering rivers. It fills with great cities that start, peak, and drop off again within a few yards. Traffic clogs the congested arteries of a hundred towns, turns the corner at shimmering intersections, and just as suddenly disappears. Villages and farms dot nearby rolling meadows in an optical illusion of plenitude and miles. Animals from every niche of the food chain graze the layout, side by side.

And the people: the most miraculous of all, they pass back and forth in constant industry, building and refining the outskirts of their still-growing creation. Eddie cannot tell how many they are. They swell to millions and in the next minute shrink down to a dozen. It seems only moderately strange, then, that they are all black-haired, umber-skinned beings of another country.

“Where are we?” asks the boy, although he recognizes the place better than his own home. He has spent whole years here, lifetimes. He grew up in this place’s shadow, the magnificent portal of Perhaps that has always run just alongside his own life, hidden a few steps behind or ahead, to the right or left. The Maybe his movies have always hinted at. The one place necessity cannot touch.

Up close, he sees that the Shangri-La is only a pasteboard nation. But that hardly matters. All Eddie has ever known of moonlight anyway is the little bit that sifts into his chamber. Nips and tucks by the busy countrymen produce so strong a suggestion that the resulting castles and countryside serve nicely for the real thing. The boy Hobson is still young enough to believe that a hole is a well if he can drink the resulting water. Halfway down the airplane steps, he promises Disney full allegiance. “I’ll do anything. Just let me be a part of this.”

The world’s most popular artist explains to the boy that he already is a part, and more. He is the crucial ingredient, the guest of honor, the moral and motive force. He is the one the sovereign state has been built for. Disney fills the kid in as they tour the shooting set. Every person they pass, he explains to the uncomprehending child, would be in jail if not for this project. “You locked up your own neighbors in order to win the current fight,” he tells young Hobson, “a sin you didn‘t even know was on your hands. How would you like to make a little compensation?” The boy gives a stunned and furious nod of his head.

Together, they explore the live-in models and locations. A sweep of Disney’s hand indicates the size of his support staff, its magnitude. “Of course we didn’t need ten thousand pairs of hands to pull this off. We could have brought the project in with twenty dozen.” But from the beginning, he says, the point has been the same as that animating his most modest cartoon: to set free as many as possible, to coax them into acting on their own. Now these folks are free. “But we still live in a world that needs to jail them.”

They walk in silence along a line of A-frame houses, flat movie props, piecing things together. “Life as we live it,” Disney says, “is about to become a free-for-all. Completely up for grabs.” The anger and the beet-red violence that comes into his protégé’s face forces Disney to laugh and quickly add, “Don’t worry. The Nazis and Nips haven’t a prayer. The good guys will win this one.”

“What danger, then … ?” As bright as he obviously is, Eddie has bought into the same morale-raising that Disney himself has hawked since Pearl Harbor: the sucker’s hope that the fighting will be over when the fighting’s over. Slowly and succinctly, Disney explains it to him. We have reached the point where we imprison ourselves by the hundred thousand, commonly agreed to be in the best collective interest. We must, because the Other Guy is even less scrupulous about playing by the rules. Such a moment never fades. The world is now so treacherous and immense that the private citizen in the postwar world will lock himself up rather than face the prospect of prison.

“I don’t mean chaos or collapsing buildings. The explosions and insurgencies will all disappear, except for livable doses, far away. But our lives a few decades from now will be a closet hell: each person passive, static, too terrorized to leave the apartment. The standard of living will keep creeping upward, but everyone will be dead bankrupt. Life will be endlessly entertaining, with nothing to dig into. Trust will have flown, and we will all know it. Each for himself, and the group against all.”

Disney listens to himself speak. He stares full face into the scene he is painting. For a moment, he despairs of taking arms against it, he, the national spokesman against Despair. He takes a breath, and is ready again. “It’s up to the two of us to fend that off. To convince the world to keep trusting. You with me, buddy?”

“But how will we ever do that?” the child asks.

According to Walt, nothing could be easier in the whole of creation. “We will tell a fable. We’ll rewrite your life, spin it from the top all over again.” He describes the long and revered tradition they will extend. “A creature of another order will come to show you what you otherwise could not suspect: where you fit in, what difference you make.” He speaks of Dante’s Beatrice; Scrooge’s Ghosts; and George Bailey’s Clarence, AS2, Angel Second Class. “Your job is the easiest of all. All you have to do is live. Wait for everything to come clear. Go through what the shooting script asks you to. Keep your eyes open, and believe.”

A scowl passes over the seventeen-year-old face, and Disney fears for a moment that the boy is already too old. The scowl shows the knowledge of howitzers and political upheavals, strategic power plays spreading over seven continents. But he gives the boy a chance to speak. “How will telling my story do anything?”

“Easy,” reveals Disney. That silent and well-mannered free-for-all is not inevitable. The world is not millions; it is one and one and one. It does not become an impasse until those ones start to renounce it. And they will have no cause to, if they stay tied to the good faith of others. “That’s where we come in,” the cartoonist croons. “We show them how one life, yours, changes all the others it touches on. How the game remains worth the candle, so long as one walks by faith and not by sight.”

Young Eddie still cannot see it. “Who will believe that what happens to me makes any difference whatsoever?”

“They will if you will,” Disney corrects him. “Don’t worry about the global tie-in. That’s my job. Our artists will paint that in. Look at it this way. If we can make forty million people weep over a cartoon woman, we should be able to swing it with flesh and blood. If our Duck can take on the Nazis, surely you can chip in. These things have ways of propagating. The audience will think they matter, if you believe you do,” he says again. “And if everyone thinks they matter, then they do.” Disney again falls silent, darkly so. “But the minute you lose faith, down comes the whole house of cards. Everybody might just as well run for cover.”

“So who’s my guardian angel?” Eddie asks with a grin.

“Haven’t you guessed?” replies the high-pitched voice that Walt himself has always supplied for his most powerful creation. The voice heard around the world.

They begin shooting the following week. Eddie meets his parents-to-be, Samuel Hinds and Beulah Bondi. Jimmy Lydon is the older brother. The boyhood home shifts from Teaneck to Hell’s Kitchen. The nisei carpenters create a family apartment more rustic and more comfortable than any Eddie has ever seen. The first few weeks of shooting cover domestic scenes, with everyone except the lead speaking in delightful immigrants’ accents that Eddie can barely understand.

Disney’s elegant and simple scheme is to shoot all of the Eddie Hobson story in black and white. At critical points, he will set the little man afoul of periodic crises, small showdowns with history. Then Mickey will appear and pull child Hobson out of the celluloid frame into another world, a place of unsuspected connections and living color. There, the mouse will explain enough of the ineffable to get the boy through his next segment of gray scales and halftones.

The story starts in Flushing Meadow in September of ’39. Eddie is there, with cameras rolling, when they sink the time capsule. The seventeen-year-old gives a stunning portrayal of himself at thirteen. The camera catches the dream of Progress in his eye as the model future unfolds at the fair. Through the time-honored device of time compression, Disney has the first news of total war flash over the fair’s loudspeakers. Eddie has his first moment of doubt, his first confrontation with the other sphere.

“Who’ll be around to open the capsule?” he asks his dad. An ashen Sammy Hinds is too terrified to answer. Then a nose peaks out from around the pavilion corner, and the unmistakable ears. The twentieth century’s spokesman for kindness appears.

“Your children will,” the mouse assures him. Mickey takes Eddie by the hand and the two of them disappear. The cameras stop, and Disney explains that this entire segment will be colored in later, by artists at drafting tables in distant studios. He briefly blocks the segment in: Mickey lifts the boy straight up from New York until the contours of the coastline smooth away. Mouse and man sit in a magical aerie in the stratosphere, watching the map change colors below. Mickey explains the necessity of the moral war, how many will die, how most of what is beautiful will be forever lost, but how we must and ought to throw our strength into the fray and clear away the rotting parts of the ancient and corrupted world.

Explaining the interpolated scenes, Disney delineates the dark edge between political science and fairy tale. “The special effects will knock the viewers out.” The living, shifting atlas, from above, will be like nothing ever seen before. But Eddie has to take his word for it. To shoot these scenes, they put him on an empty sound stage in front of a neutral scrim. Tom Ishi, off-camera, reads the rough draft of Mickey’s lines for the boy to act against. Eddie must respond in character: “Oh, I see. I’ve never thought of it that way before.”

These scenes are extremely difficult. Hobson has to deliver a thousand looks of astonishment, gazing at the empty sound stage as if it were filled with wonder. “It will be,” Disney promises. It will be. When Mickey rushes him on a rainbow back into the black-and-white belly of his family, nobody, to Eddie’s amazement, even suspects he was away.

After the sweet burst of success in filming the scenes from ’39 to Pearl, the next black-and-white sessions seem dismally forced and strained. The Hobson family goes wooden, and nobody knows why. Then, during especially wretched multiple takes of the scene where older brother Art tells of his enlistment, walking out of the apartment vowing to “teach those fanatical Japs to keep their hands off,” the entire camera crew breaks out laughing. The problem dawns on them. The segment director, Ralph Sato, Disney’s right-hand man, fixes everything. “Try not to worry about our feelings,” he tells the embarrassed cast. “We are as American as the rest of you Germans.” Lydon performs his bit with flying colors and is gone.

Next comes the pivotal Drugstore scene. The set crew creates a brilliant replica of a soda fountain and druggist’s, down to the last magazine rack and candy bar. They populate it with extras including two nisei and a beautiful, young, since-forgotten ingenue whose career will end with this film. Sato tells Eddie there’s no script for this one. “Just go over to the right side of the magazine rack and browse the photo weeklies.”

Eddie does, and discovers the poison image planted there. In shock, he forgets the cameras, forgets entirely where he is, and breaks down like a child for a family that cannot be kept from loss. His face flashes hot and bitter at the shopgirl’s attempted consolation. He tenses himself to charge off the set, to run out of the project altogether.

“Believe, son,” yells Disney from off-camera. “Only believe.”

“Keep rolling,” Sato yells at the reticent cameramen who want to turn away in shame from this hot grief they capture. “Don’t you dare stop. This is what we are after.”

After the take, Hobson pushes his way through restraining hands and locks himself in his trailer, refusing all entreaties to come out. Shooting stops for three days. When Eddie at last emerges, emaciated, he storms Disney’s office. “Is the magazine for real? Is it really Artie? My brother?” Disney says nothing. The mouse must speak for him.

Back on the empty stage, Eddie, in front of a curtain, pretends revelation. The mouse meets the grieving boy outside the soda shop, tears in his own mammalian eyes. He takes Eddie to a vantage point from which they see how even the sacrificed life, seemingly wasted, contributes in mysterious ways we cannot understand. The magazine photo of the meaningless tragedy at Brownsville becomes an inspiration and rallying point for countless American pilots. Mickey shows how big brother Artie’s death trickles outward and, by putting boys on their cautionary mettle, saves lives.

Even with guiding synopsis, Eddie finds this scene the most difficult in the movie’s production. In loss and suffering, he must conjure up from imagination alone what the studio animators will add only months later. He must see the mouse, and his face must radiate full understanding. Somehow the boy does it, hallucinating his reconciliation with the meaningless accident, inventing acceptance from the shoals of sorrow.

The hope of screen enlistment sees him through. They shoot the draft-board scene next, Eddie camping out in bedroll on his eighteenth birthday, waiting to make his private petition. But in the Disney version, he is too tall. He receives the crippling news of assignment to a noncombatant’s role. Stern Sato keeps his cameras turning. Eddie goes to purgatory, hell; Aircraft Training School, Amarillo. Sweet Mickey comes like Virgil to steady him in his darkest hour.

“You see,” says the rodent, wise beyond his species, “your e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Riddles
• Hobstown: 1939
• The Dominant Tense
• 1940–41
• Spring, 1942
• Tit For Tat
• Fall. 1942
• 1943
• If You Can Fill the Unforgiving Minute
• 1944
• 1945
• Breaking the Matrix
• V-J
• Calamine
• 1979