By Stuart Mitchner

Well, it’s been pretty damn weird…. But the train ride through crazy town shows no sign of slowing…. Again, I refer to that word: weird. It’s just all so weird.
—J.D. Vance

I don’t live by all these rigid, weird rules that make me feel all fenced in…
—Taylor Swift

In my rush to finish J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy I missed that triple-weird crazy-town run from the 2018 afterword, which my wife marked with an OMG! in the margin as she finished the book. Thanks to her catch, I went back to the chapter about his time at Ohio State, in which he says, “In my entire life I had oscillated between fear at my worst moments and a sense of safety and stability at my best. I was either being chased by the bad terminator or the good one.” In the same context, he admits “Poker was in my blood,” as he goes on to describe how he made $400 playing poker online, money he gave to his grandmother (“Mamaw”) for her health insurance, which she took after saying she didn’t understand the f-ing internet and warning him not to “pick up a gambling habit” that would lead to “booze and women.” As for his reference to the bad and good terminators, he and Mamaw both “loved Terminator 2” and “probably watched it together five or six times. Mamaw saw Arnold Schwarzenegger as the embodiment of the American Dream: a strong capable immigrant coming out on top.”

When Weirdness Works

In a song from Taylor Swift’s weirdly titled latest album, The Tortured Poets Club, she sings “I look in people’s windows like I’m some kind of deranged weirdo.” That line from the song of the same title effectively outweirds a more-than-year-old Washington Post article, “The Unprecedented Weirdness of Taylor Swift.” In Swift’s case, weirdness is just another word for creative genius. Whatever she gets out of refusing to live “by all these rigid, weird rules,” it’s working spectacularly well — well enough to evoke the “I’ll have what she’s having” moment in When Harry Met Sally. Meg Ryan’s faked public mealtime orgasm is one of Hollywood’s many moments of performative weirdness, like Gene Kelly joyously singing and dancing in the rain, which he stops doing only when he realizes a cop is standing there staring at him as if he were guilty of Disturbing the Peace. After a moment of feigned embarrassment, Kelly makes a whattaya gonna do gesture that says, “Hey, man, life is a movie.”

“Out of the Woods”

Around the time Kamala Harris emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee, I watched Taylor Swift’s video for “Out of the Woods.” I’d been impressed by it once before, but this time the epic grandeur of the singer being pursued through an enchanted forest was spread out on a 46-inch screen. Now the obsessiveness of the repeated chorus, “Are we out of the woods, are we in the clear,” made exciting political sense — were we out of the woods of Biden’s age into the clear of Kamala’s run? For what it’s worth, “Swifties for Harris” is already an online phenomenon.

Why “Weird”?

It’s been a Babylon Berlin summer at our house. As soon as Season 4 became available on June 25, with two episodes streaming every Tuesday on MHz, we started watching the whole show over again from the beginning, mainly to make sense of weird plotlines, characters, and other references to people and events in the new season, but also simply to relive the experience. Meanwhile, we began watching Showtime’s Your Honor, which revived fond memories of another great television experience, thanks to the magnetic performance of Bryan Cranston as a wise judge breaking bad to save his son. Half the weird fun of watching Your Honor is thinking “It’s so Walter White!” every time the judge’s unlawful struggle to rewrite history blows up in his face.

Inspired by J.D. Vance’s afterword and the apparent weaponization of weird since Biden passed the baton to Harris, I’ve been taking a closer look at the word, which I just now used before “plotlines,” where it can mean twisted or hard to follow, and before “fun,” because it’s weird to be enjoying the tragic chain reaction Cranston’s judge sets in motion with his fabrication about the deadly motorcycle accident involving his son. What makes the w-word especially applicable is the idea of enjoying a moral nightmare because it happens to a man played by the same actor we knew and lived with as a high school chemistry teacher/Crystal Meth King.

Weirded Out

Reading Volker Kutscher’s novel Babylon Berlin (translated from the German by Niall Sellar) is weirdly disorienting when compared to the addictive weirdness of the television series. Police stenographer Charlotte Ritter’s first appearance in the book comes when Inspector Gereon Rath is struck by the way “her smile conjured up a dimple on her left cheek.” Rath and the dimple meet again a few pages later when it “almost caused him to lose his composure.” Forty-odd (as in weird) pages later: “Her dimple almost knocked him off his feet.” After the couple is briefly estranged, when “he saw her dimple forming he knew he had won.”

According to Britannica, the verb form of “weird” is “to make someone feel strange or uncomfortable,” as in “I don’t mean to weird you out.” What weirds me out about the belaboring of Charlotte’s deadly dimple is the way it demonstrates Kutcher’s failure to find language worthy of the character that Liv Lisa Fries brings gloriously to life as the heroine of the series.

Love, Life, and Death

Of all the romances played out in 21st century series television, including even Homeland’s embattled lovers Carrie (Claire Danes) and Brody (Damien Lewis), the most fascinating and compelling story belongs to the couple at the heart of Babylon Berlin. The life-and-death chemistry between Fries’s Lotte and Volker Bruch’s Gereon is in devastating contrast to the stereotypical romance in Kutscher’s novel. In the series, the first real scene between them takes place on the floor of a toilet stall, where he’s shaking with shellshock and she’s feeding him a capsule of morphine from the packet the combat vet carries with him at all times. They’ve barely met and already the attraction binding them is powerfully intimate. From that point on, they share a sense of fated connection that is uncanny. You might call it weird, but a more fitting term would be “mad” as in l’amour fou even though they don’t actually have sex until early in Season 4.

As for “unprecedented weirdness,” it’s hard to top the underwater life-and-death love scene in the penultimate episode of season 2. Put simply, without reference to the larger plot, their car has been deliberately broadsided into a lake: suddenly you’re with them in a deadly silent-movie world of water — he’s unconscious, his head on the steering wheel, her jacket is caught in the door. Terrified, she punches his arm, he comes to and tries to get her free, but can’t. In the extremity of the moment, when they look into each other’s eyes all they can see is love. They are face to face “speaking” but unable to speak in a silent romance of trapped lovers. There are two long underwater kisses — in one he seems to be saying goodbye, in the other he’s kissing her to life after swimming to the surface for air and coming back to free her.

Except by then we’re sure she’s dead — we’ve seen the moment in which she cries out, eyes shut, mouth open, no resistance, she’s gone, and she’s beautiful in death, and you’re thinking no this can’t be, the series can’t go on without her, she’s the heart and soul of it; he’s shouting his grief, roaring it into the deepening silence. Finally he manages to pry her loose, swimming with her in tow to the shore, and as he lays her body on the ground, we’re thinking, yes, her body, she’s done for. At this point, the producers stun us with the mother of all cliffhangers. Never mind, we’re streaming, we can move right on to the last episode; anyway, we know she makes it; this is our second viewing. And is this really any more sophisticated than the grand old Perils of Pauline serial fandango? Yes, however improbably improbable, we accept this bravura master stroke of cinematic weirdness because such is our investment in these characters, we believe we’ve witnessed the making of a bond that transcends reality. And we’ll never forget the moment when we were sure she was gone.

Weirdos

What about the third season of Babylon Berlin? Do Lotte and Gereon finally consummate the relationship? No, sorry, too much else was happening. Here’s how I described it a few years ago during the pandemic: “My wife and I have just survived the recently released third season of Babylon Berlin. Released? — imagine a maddened bull charging out of the gate of the Weimar past. Grab it by the horns and off you go.”

Just as Weimar weirdness is deep in the beating noirish heart of Babylon Berlin, Louisiana macho gumbo weirdness haunts Your Honor’s noir vision of New Orleans, where four prison inmates play poker in a bull ring while being charged by a bull for the amusement of a cheering crowd. Weird? Apparently the Angola convict rodeos are for real. And sitting there playing his hand, as if unaware of the bull charging toward him, is a bearded man who could easily be mistaken for Walter White, 15 years this side of Breaking Bad in his actor’s afterlife as a corrupted incorruptible judge named Michael Desiato.

I have to ask myself is it fair to say that when you come right down to it, Walter White and his D student Jessie are, well, a couple of weirdos cooking meth in their underwear inside a stifling trailer? According to the OED, that particular variation of the word has been in circulation since the mid-1950s and I’m pretty sure we were using it when I was a high school senior hanging out with a gang of jazz-loving weirdos. Come to think of it, only a weirdo could spend a whole column riffing on weirdness.