THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND and the Struggle To Be Present (Patreon)

1. No Person

I spend a lot of time trying to normalize discussions of suicide.

In doing so, I can tell you that few subjects make people more uncomfortable. There’s often a lot of nervous silence and a complete lack of eye contact. Some of it is because they’re terrified they’ll say the wrong thing or make it worse for you, but often the lack of actual dialogue can make it feel more empty, like a hollow reverberation. The deeper truth is that the idea of real, actual suicide terrifies them. It’s such a radical, abstract notion because they could never ever imagine wanting to do that. And for many years, I was the same way. But that’s not true for me anymore. Now it’s something that feels like old hat. And the entire point of the dialogue is to make people understand what it really feels like, so we can be less afraid to express it.

So you know how almost everyone just naturally has the survival instinct? That fight or flight thing that will kick in and ensure the will to stay alive in desperate situations? Well, some of us just have that switch flipped off. Why? How? Well there can be a lot of reasons, whether it’s the depths of depression, the ongoing pain of trauma, crippling guilt, financial distress, struggles with mental health issues, you name it. But the net result is that death feels like the solution to those problems, a welcome alternative to the moment-by-moment pain of being alive. 

Some who are suicidal still very much fear the death part. But some of us really don’t fear it all. Some of us learn to do great work even in the midst of those feelings. For others it can be completely paralyzing. Likewise, some of us have the feelings come in waves. For others, it can be a persistent feature of every second of their lives. Either way, it’s all fucking brutal. And the feelings can still manifest even if we genuinely, truly have things to live for. The feeling exists simply because the switch has been flipped off. And there is no way around that reality. And the reason it’s so important to talk about it is because there are few feelings that are more isolating in the world.

Culturally-speaking, this all manifests in an odd way across our society. Because there are so many people who casually joke about killing themselves even though they never, ever mean it. It’s almost just like saying “oh no, this moment is embarrassing!” And on the flip side there’s a huge rise in people who genuinely struggle with depression and suicidal tendencies and it manifests a lot in the way we make jokes in the meIRL culture of the internet. But the reason we’re all making jokes is because trying to talk about it seriously can not only result in the silence described above, but sometimes in animosity. You’ll see people with toxic masculinity mindsets who see the act as “cowardly.” I’ve had people (mostly online) literally freak out about my normalizing of the issue because it somehow “allows it” or even glorifies it (trust me, there are way more troubling glorifications of death). And for others, talking about it can just be an ongoing drag. But those feelings just become another barrier in communication. And what “allows” it to pervade and fester the most is the silence. And right now, I am trying to make a hard thing to talk about way less hard. And sometimes it’s really nice to not feel like you aren’t alone in that struggle.

Which is why I was so moved by The King of Staten Island 

I feel comfortable talking about it’s role in the film because its really not a spoiler, nor the core subject. But the film makes this suicidal context clear from the very opening scene where Scott (Pete Davidson) closes his eyes while driving and well, you can call it tempting fate. But don’t worry, the film isn’t really *about* suicide in a traditional sense. Meaning it’s not building to the dramatizing of more scenes or attempts. It’s simply providing you with context and an understanding of Scott’s baseline head state. The idea then hangs over all that follows as he tries to manage the changing relationships in his life with family and friends. Especially as conversations dance around the topic and Scott tries so hard to communicate the undercurrent of his mental health issues in so many different ways.

But the thing he struggles most with is simply being present in his life. Sometimes it presents as comic levels of laziness, sometimes it’s falling into a haze of drugs, or sometimes it’s just letting bad decisions happen around him. But it all adds up to his not being there. Scott doesn’t want to go to places. He doesn’t want to work. He doesn’t want to be in an actual relationship. He doesn’t want to be piloting his life. He just wants to be left in a corner. Because he wants to be turned off. As much as some people admonish him for this, the “good” news is this…

Some places make it easier for you to turn off.
 

2. No Place

Hey you remember that time you were wearing your Emmet Smith jersey at your town’s 350th anniversary parade and there was this bully kid who threw a stink bomb at you and then a few years later that same kid went on to get attacked by police dogs when he tried to rob a CVS of oxycontin? No? Huh. Okay, how bout growing up with that person you swore who was a good guy, but they went on to become a cop who unnecessarily shot a guy in the heart? No? Okay, remember that time one of your acquaintance’s dad killed another friend’s uncle at a youth hockey game? No? How bout family members flipping over tables when confronted about their alcoholism? Kids you played baseball with dying of heroin overdoses? Didn’t another kid on your baseball team’s dad kill his wife and hide her body in the basement? Still no? Just me?

Okay, I’m clearly being facetious with the specificity here, but these are very real events. The truth is I don’t know what kind of town you grew up in, so maybe this sort of thing happened where you grew up, too. Hell, this is America and chances are you grew up in places that were much, much worse. 

The problem is I’ve spent so many years out here in Los Angeles, working in an industry with people who often grew up very wealthy and thus rarely come close to these kinds of experiences. I know that because sometimes I tell these stories and I get these amazed wide-eyed stares and comments of incredulity. That’s usually when I can tell they likely didn’t have high school jobs where they had to do things like shovel literal shit. No, their parents were lawyers and surgeons and traders. Almost everyone I knew had parents who worked construction, payroll, firefighting, nursing, public school teaching, and so, so many damn cops. Meaning they were all part of the rapidly-dwindling middle class that we once used to define the spirit of Americana (often falsely so, as if purposefully ignoring the dark heart of this country’s history).

To make it specifically about Massachusetts, most of the people I know out here in Los Angeles came from Newton or towns just west of Boston. Meanwhile, there are not a lot of kids from Lynn or Lowell or Revere. But the people from these areas generally fit this specific white kid East Coast culture of working class toughness and posturing (it pretty much goes from Philly to Boston). There aren’t mass levels of poverty in these towns, but there is this very specific streak of chaotic debauchery and violence. It’s the kind of place where bar fights break out and no one is arrested (at worst, someone has to spend a night in the tank with no other consequences). The kind of place where kids start drinking in sixth and seventh grade. The kind of place where corporate businesses are despised and every local restaurant is a pizza place or sub shop owned by a guy named Nino. The kind of place that loves labor unions, but has no room for feminism. The kind of place that hates every other surrounding towns, but if you’re not from around here and you make fun of one of those towns they will defend it like its the own. The kind of place with such rampant insularity that leads to so, so much inherent racism while simultaneously usurping Black culture (particularly hip hop) and usually subconsciously or consciously trying to force the few minority kids who grow up in these towns into stereotypical social roles. So, you know, that kind of place.

On one level, what I am describing is all very real. And on another level it is, of course, overblown and romanticized. A lot of the kids who are from these areas are just “normal.” They keep their head down, don’t think too much about it, and grow up with the comfort of suburbia and stability. But on another level, there are the problems created by people who love that romantic image of working class white culture and thus steer very, very hard into that identity. They were a chip on their shoulder and shout things like, “What, you think you’re bettah than me?” or my personal favorite “you’re, like, wicked conceited.” Between the two groups, it all presses against each other with reckless abandon and manifests in a number of weird ways. But everything feels so tied to where you’re from. Some kids feel deep shame about wanting out of the relative madness of the area. Meanwhile, other kids moved to Southie because they thought it made them look tougher and just ended up gentrifying it. These spectrums are all realities bouncing against each other in a culture that is both disappearing and being reborn every second. But that just means that adopting these different identities is always a present choice in your life. That’s the whole thing that most people don’t realize… the place you live is what makes certain life choices available.

Which is also why I was so moved by The King of Staten Island.

It’s not just that it all felt so familiar to where I grew up, it’s that the film depicts all this effortlessly. Scott still lives in a modest little suburban house in Staten Island. His mom is a nurse (I knew so many who split time between schools and ERs because of budget and the fact that both can therefore get paid as part time). Meanwhile, Scott’s aunt has far more money (whether through her work or marriage, it is not said) and you see the way he feels so out of place. It’s the same burrough, but feels like a different world. Meanwhile, his younger sister gravitates toward that different world. She dresses like them and feels ready to get out of Staten. And now, she’s leaving for college and saying goodbye to place he has no interest in leaving. For that, and for so many other reasons, she worries for Scott. But Scott isn’t so worried. He’s at home.

I talked earlier about Scott’s desire not to be present, but that headspace is exactly when the comforts of “your home” mean more than ever. Because it means you can feel safe and hide in the familiar. There aren’t new eyeballs and new pressures. The routine can make you invisible in that desirable way. You can just do drugs and smoke weed with your friends all day. You can give each other bad tattoos. You can make fun of some kids little brother for trying to buy Xanax (“Who buys six Xanax?”). You can fall into dumb waiting jobs with people who also don’t want to be there. And most of all you can find yourself making the dumbest possible choices. I honestly spent all that time talking about East Coast culture precisely because I wanted you to understand why a bunch of seemingly chill guys could just decide to rob a local drug store. That stuff really happens all the time. It’s dumb crime. Dumb kids with dumb plans to act like they’re in dumb movies. And it often goes very wrong… But the place you live in can just makes it happen so easily.

Which is part of why Scott and his friends feel such a sense of identity there. It’s not overblown or anything, as these aren’t really aggressive dudes. They’re stoners. And it’s just this low-key pride and identification with their home and why they like it. Even Kelsey, the girl Scott’s kind of seeing even has a more pro-active version of it. She wants it to go to school in Manhattan and come back and help turn Staten island into the new cool part of the city. But Scott can’t imagine wanting to go into Manhattan and facing, well, all that. He wants to stay at home. He wants to be in the familiar. He wants to be invisible. And now that I’ve spent so much time talking about suicide and the sense of place, I want to clarify out right that neither of these are the so dramatic crux of the movie.

They’re just backdrops for what the film is really about…

3. No Thing

When we want to feel nothing, we often struggle with the things that make us feel something.

The incident that stirs up Scott’s emotions is that his mother (Marisa Tomei, who is great in this) begins dating again. That may seem an odd instigation for such a big change in his emotional state. At most it could just feel awkward, right? Well, the reason Scott has such a strong reaction is because it’s what brings him back to his source trauma: the loss of his dad. 

Because when Scott was 7 years old, his firefighter dad died on the job (for biographical reference, this is true of Pete’s own father, a firefighter who actually died on 9/11, last seen running into the World Trade Center). The film doesn’t directly express the traumatic effect of this in his youth, but it certainly talks around it. In real life, Davidson stated he started to act out and even tore out his own hair out until he was almost bald. This is the power of immense grief and death touching a kid who doesn’t have the ability to process it. For many kids who deal with that kind of trauma, they gravitate towards things that ease the pain. So the life he adopted? The haze of drugs? The not wanting to do anything? It’s all the reaction to the pain of this moment.

But it all comes rushing back again, because it turns out the new man in his mother’s life also happens to be a firefighter (Bill Burr, who is also incredible in this). Now all the loose thoughts get pulled into direct confrontation. It’s not that Scott has any real protective feelings of his mom or even uncomfortable with her having sex (he even willingly makes jokes), it’s that he hasn’t really come to grips with everything that happened. So now out pops the latent anger, the resentment at the “selfishness” of firefighters that have families, and the basic angry juxtaposition of someone who risks nothing versus someone who risks everything. But their developing relationship soon becomes the core of the film, as it examines the push-pull of sensitivity, understanding, and finding out what’s really at the heart of how we change.

From everything I’ve written, I feel like I’m describing a movie that’s overly contentious, serious, and / or maudlin. It’s really not. The movie is consistently hilarious. But it often has this low-key emphasis and ease of feel. It’s direct, but rhythmic, much like the Kid Cudi music that populates the soundtrack (and frequently juxtaposes against Burr’s classic rock). There’s a confidence to the construction here. The film strikes a mostly perfect tone, it rarely reaches too hard for jokes and knows when to let moments sit, which makes it feel effortless. Feature-wise, it is absolutely Apatow’s most mature work to date. I remember recently going back and being struck by some of the emotional crassness of the 20 somethings in Knocked Up, something which was hitting me so much different now. Maybe it’s norms changing. Maybe I’m just older. Maybe it’s that Apatow is too. But there’s something that feels so much less toxic here. There’s this snark, but it’s also achingly sensitive, anxious, and apologetic at the heart of this (much like the best work from Davidson himself). It’s reflects a changing world of comedy that is much more understanding of where they punch. And mostly understanding that most devastating punches go inward.

Which is also what can make human connection so hard. Scott tries communicating his problems to Kelsey, “I’m not okay… up there” and the gravity of what he feels sets in. I admit, the scene is among many where I cried. I mean, I don’t have borderline personality disorder, but I sure know what it’s like to have pathological issues, which can often make the prospect of dating painful. Because it’s not that you don’t want to connect, it’s not that you don’t have feelings, it’s not even that you can’t communicate that your brain is sick, it’s that you’re worried it’s just too heavy for others to hold. That you’ll inevitably drag them down into the deep with you. That nothing will ever make you happy in the way you want to be for them. But in the end, by doing this, you’re just pushing people away. And even then, the film isn’t making excuses for Scott, either. When he comically deadpans people should be worried about him (and he’s not lying), they push back. Because it’s trying to highlight the way mental health can be weaponized to manipulate others into feeling an unhealthy sense of responsibility for something that might go wrong with you. But with all this swirling, Scott stays disconnected. He can’t find the way out. Until he gets at the heart of the confrontation.

The reason Scott struggles so much with the very concept of fire fighting is not just the trauma of his past, but because it’s really about choosing life. These are people who are diving into burning buildings, risking such incredible loss, precisely for the sake of preserving the lives of others. Because if they don’t go in? There surely will be loss. But if they do, maybe everyone lives. Meaning it is the act of preservation. The act of maintaining life itself. And to someone who really wouldn’t mind dying, like if that car just happened to careen off the road, it is everything that is terrifying. Because it is not staying in. It is not turning off. It is turning on. It is caring. It is giving a shit. And it is letting everything that is scary, that is everything you can lose, back inside you.

With that understanding, what is perhaps most remarkable about The King of Staten Island is (and I guess this is sort of tonal spoiler?) is that there isn’t some big third act confrontation where it all comes to a crux and Scott reaches a low point. Instead, there’s just a gradual pulling back of those layers of defensiveness. It’s just a person slowly learning to put themselves out there. To show up. To walk kids to school. To do the things that people ask you to do. And so what it ultimately reflects is the very real way people can learn to enter “the good periods” of their mental health battles. The moments where the sun shines and you can look up at the sun and new buildings in new places and be comfortable with their newness. The moments where it is okay to be seen. The moments where you have the ability to risk something and understand the world might not end. And the moment you can tell someone that you love them and you always have. Even if the characters struggle with the trauma of real fires, these moments are the metaphorical ones. And coming out the other side of that struggle?

They represent the simple ability to be present in your own damn life. 

And to those who don’t really understand that struggle of why that is so hard, know that it’s okay. Just understand that for some of us, those who have a switch that has unfortunately been flipped, there are few things more difficult.

And few things more earned.

<3 HULK