Calvin and Eric, Dylan and Hobbes – Part 1 (of 3)
by Douglas Ord, Lear’s Shadow
The three parts of “Calvin and Eric, Dylan and Hobbes” date from the summer of 1999, just after Columbine, and were part of the first
Lear’s Shadow
upload to the internet in May, 2000. This means they also date from
before the release
of Eric Harris’s and Dylan Klebold’s journals, along with many other documents, on July 6, 2006.
This 2006 release, along with multiple other factors, made for extensive re-assessment, and when these texts were taken offline in 2008 it was partly to facilitate the return to print syntax required for sustained rethinking. This further development is available in
The strangeness of Columbine, an interpretation
, which was published via ebook in January 2012, and which contains no duplication of this or other earlier material.
“Calvin and Eric, Dylan and Hobbes” is being restored as first published in part because it provides an early record of stunned recognition of … something. There are flaws: among them too tight focus on Eric Harris to the exclusion of much else. But it is also restored because foolishness has circulated that it articulates a belief that
Calvin and Hobbes caused Columbine. This at least sets the record straight.
As for the collage: it dates to December, 2000.
It was produced, amid the density of early internet exchange about Columbine, so other people could see, in immediate terms, the similarities that had propelled the texts already on Lear’s Shadow.
These were uncanny.
Eric Harris as a human Calvin (as the name had been re-applied, with utmost genius, by Bill Watterson). And Dylan Klebold as a human Hobbes (as this name, too, had been re-applied, ditto, by Watterson).This human Calvin and this human Hobbes, however, were at the ages of just-eighteen and seventeen, mass murderers.
All four of the above images were in circulation, in media ether, in 1999.Columbine, a terrible magnet, drew them together, into collage.
From 1985 to 1995, the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes ran in newspapers throughout North America. As conceived by Bill Watterson, the six-year old Calvin was perhaps the most nakedly sensitive, exotically intelligent, and pathologically imaginative character ever developed in a comic strip. But Watterson stopped producing Calvin and Hobbes in December 1995. Why? Did he begin to realize that, were he to keep Calvin at six years old, the strip would soon slide into the tired repetition that befell Peanuts after the brilliance of the 1950s and 60s? But did he realize also that, unlike Gary Trudeau with his Doonesbury characters, there was no way he could keep the strip funny if he let Calvin age with the times? For Calvin, growing older, would not only have had to face adolescence. He would also have had, so as to have human friends at all, to get rid of Hobbes, whom others saw simply as a stuffed tiger. And this might have been very difficult, for Calvin as a character, as for the strip itself.
Why so difficult?
Because Hobbes, as brought to life within the strip by Calvin’s waking dream, was obviously so much more than what “others” saw. As a truly noble beast, he became, at different times, the voice of sophistication, of charm, and of irony. A voice, that is, which was almost entirely denied, in Calvin’s real world American suburban vicinity. Part of Watterson’s genius was to create that voice without a history, and without a past: the voice, in this regard, of a truly American tiger. Yet this was also a voice that, in its understated wit, its eloquence, and its sensitivity to shades of meaning, paradoxically suggested Europe. Not contemporary Europe, but the Europe of Proust and Camus, Joyce and Beckett, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. The Europe that, speaking through Hobbes, could remind Calvin gently that he had misspelled the word “Weltanschauung.”
But Hobbes, while being an awesomely indulgent and intelligent playmate, was also complex in a different way. As a presence, he both personified and contained the projection outward of a coiled spring rage that – as kept within the waking dream – could then rebound on Calvin harmlessly, as he and Hobbes bantered with one another, mocked one another, sometimes even thrashed one another, in the privacy of Calvin’s backyard. How big was that rage, though, that potential for violence? In this there was a critical uncertainty, and even a mystery, because Hobbes himself had a night-time side that, apparently on Watterson’s whim, could stalk and terrorize Calvin: the side that was captured in Calvin’s own description: “homicidal psycho jungle cat”.
So what would have become of Calvin had he grown older, and was gradually weaned by “society” from his dependence on Hobbes? Calvin who, as he lay bruised after yet another beating at school by the brutish Moe, whispered: “It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.” But Calvin who also fantasized himself, vengefully, as the C-Bomb, “about to unleash the pure destructive force of a million A-bombs!” Calvin asked for “a long-range thermonuclear ‘smart’ missile launcher” from Santa Claus for Christmas. Sought at the age of six to purchase bomb-making materials from the local hardware store. Dreamt of using an F-15 fighter- bomber to turn his public school into “a smoldering crater.” Even wrote a report extolling “natural selection”, in which Susie Derkins gets devoured by a pack of dinosaurs, and in which his classmates “huddle in stupefied horror,” wondering “which one of them will be next.” Calvin also, in one especially… prescient sequence, grouped fourteen tiny snowmen at the bottom of a hill, climbed to the top, got on his toboggan, and said: “For the townsfolk below, the day began like any other day.”
“The day began like any other day…”
The day did begin like any other day. Didn’t it. Or to rephrase the question “What would have happened to Calvin?” in a slightly different way:
How many people were killed at Columbine High School, besides Eric Harris?
Fourteen.
What did Eric fantasize himself as, in one of the stories that he wrote for school?
A shotgun shell.
And what was Eric wearing, underneath the trenchcoat that he quickly removed, once he and Dylan Klebold started shooting?
A white T-shirt. Across whose front were inscribed the words: “NATURAL SELECTION”.
Perhaps Calvin did grow up. In some sense.
The slight build. The expressive features. The spiky hair. Even the slightly crooked smile, that gets – or got – longer and thinner toward one side.
“I don’t want to catch the bus,” Calvin says. “I don’t want to go to school. I don’t want to be here at all. I’m sick of everyone telling me what to do all the time! I hate my life! I hate everything! I wish I was dead!” A pause. "Well, no, I don’t,“ he continues after a moment’s thought, "Not really.” He scowls again. "I wish everyone else was dead.“
How did this sort of wish mutate for Eric? At nearly twelve years older, he had done some reading. "If you recall your history,” he wrote in his journal, “the Nazis came up with a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem. Well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I say ‘Kill mankind. No one should survive.’”
Or consider Calvin’s fantasy, drawn by Watterson in appropriately Fraktur script, as he plays with his tinker-toys:
…then there was Calvin!
Calvin, the mighty god, creates the universe with pure will.
From utter nothingness comes swirling form!
Life begins where once was void!
But Calvin is no kind and loving god.
He’s one of the old gods.
He demands sacrifice!
Yes, Calvin is a god of the underworld!
And the puny inhabitants of earth displease him!
The great Calvin ignores their pleas for mercy and the doomed writhe in agony!“
Not a word-for-word duplication. But pretty close.
In ten years of comic strips, Calvin, of course –and Bill Watterson via Calvin– revealed immense complexity. And even though Eric Harris, as a person, got to be twelve years older than Calvin did, as a character, there is not the availability of a daily text –or for that matter very many of his writings– to reveal the complexity in quite the same way. But there are some texts, as well as comments by others.
The description of Eric by his friend Brooks Brown, for example, as "an incredible individualist. Charismatic, an eloquent speaker, well read.”
Was it not Eric who took an incandescent delight in putting words together, as in the long “Jo Mamma” chant on his website: “Jo mamma so stupid she think dat PTA stands for Paranormal Transindustriational Activators… when it doesn’t. JJJEEEEYAAA!!” And was it not Eric also who came up with the Latin compound “Rebdomine” for his website? And who quoted Shakespeare’s Tempest, to say that “Good wombs have borne bad sons.”
And who also said, on the videotapes that were made before the shootings: “I wish I was a fucking sociopath, so I didn’t have any remorse… To everyone I love, I’m really sorry about all this… But war is war. And this is war.”
Back in May 1999, TIME Magazine referred to Eric as a “Bad Seed”. As the quasi-official voice of middle-brow America, it has also called him “cold and manipulative”, and –with Dylan Klebold – “evil”, a “monster”, and a “natural born killer.” How comforting this must be, in the effort simply to label him dismissibly Other. A “bad seed”? The simple- mindedness of the label is comforting, for those who do not want to think too much about Columbine.
But for those who are willing to think: these resonances are only a few among many, in that strip after strip of Calvin and Hobbes can now be read differently after Columbine, and can seem to suggest a strange anticipation. They are so striking, these resonances, as to suggest also that, in some uncanny sense, Eric Harris –small of build and brilliantly articulate, but full of rage – was the Calvin that Watterson did not let age, perhaps was afraid to let age, and so simply tried to make –as both a character, and as part of his own imagination– go away.
Except that, in “creating” Calvin, Watterson’s genius had perhaps escaped this status of being “owned” by an author, to become a conduit for something stronger, bigger, scarier. For a cultural energy which was not going to go away.
Any more than would the energy that found shape in Hobbes. For would Calvin, growing older, and having been obliged for the sake of propriety to put Hobbes away, not likely have met, perhaps, another boy who reminded him… of Hobbes?
When would he have met this boy? And what might have happened when he did? Consider this exchange:
Hobbes: “Interesting title.”
Calvin: “Thanks.”
Hobbes: “Specifically what exploits are you referring to?”
Calvin: “That’s the problem. Can you help me think of some I could do?”
Dylan Klebold, in contrast with Eric, was described in Time Magazine as simply having made a “wrong turn”, following Eric’s lead. But as with Eric, were matters really so simple, or even this way at all? According to Peggy Lowe, writing in The Denver Post after seeing the videotapes the two boys made, it is actually Dylan who comes across as “monstrous.” "He shows no contrition,“ she wrote on 14 December 1999, "only deadly aggression.”
Similarly, in the last, haunting photograph that appeared on Time’s December 20th cover, taken with a security camera in the Columbine cafeteria, only minutes before the two boys shot themselves, it was not Eric who seemed to be leading.
Eric was by this time standing still, looking much smaller than Dylan,with his back to the camera, as he stared out into the cafeteria. There is the sense that his mind was working, as, probably, it always worked: non-stop.
Dylan by contrast stalks the foreground, all business, with the TEC-DC9 machine pistol in his hand.
Just as Dylan was bigger, stronger, even furrier than Eric, so there is something panther-like about him in that image. Another photograph, taken earlier, appears inside this same magazine. Dylan is shown wearing sunglasses, grinning.
And in this case, the actual facial resemblance to Hobbes is startling. But to Hobbes as he was drawn by Watterson precisely for the “homicidal psycho jungle cat” comic strip.
“Maybe tigers just don’t eat people in heaven,” Calvin says in one strip. “But then we wouldn’t be happy,” Hobbes answers.
“You want help?” Dylan is alleged to have said, to an already wounded Lance Kirklin, as he lay on the ground. “I’ll help you.” And blew off the side of Lance’s face with his shotgun.
“Hee hee hee!” says Hobbes, after terrorizing Calvin as the “homicidal psycho jungle cat.” “You should’ve seen the look on your face.”
If a report of the investigation that appeared in The Denver Post is to be believed, it was actually Eric who declared an end to what he had earlier called their “killing spree,” by placing in his mouth the barrel of the shotgun he had called “Arlene”, and pulling the trigger shortly after noon.
Eric who had obviously decided that his stated program of “starting a chain reaction” needed no more killing, even though there were certainly still potential victims in the library.
The photograph from the cafeteria, however, gives the impression that it was Dylan who could well have continued.
What were the subtexts of Eric’s and Dylan’s conversations with one another, that would lead to such an outcome? Are there further clues to this question, in the exchanges between Calvin and Hobbes?
Consider this one, following Moe’s theft of Calvin’s toy truck in the school playground, and his refusal to give it back.
Hobbes: “The problem with people is that they’re only human.”
Calvin: “Well, you’re lucky you don’t have to be one.”
And: “We’re the only two who have self-awareness.”
And: “Nobody else is like us.”
And: “We’re the only two people who seem to understand
the meaning of life.”
Calvin: “A toast to us!”
Hobbes: “To us!”
Calvin: “Best friends forever!”
Hobbes: “Right!”
Or at his tiger friend, who, after dropping a water bomb on Calvin’s head, says: “It’s that moment of dawning realization that I live for.”
No, the hacks at Time must have really felt for poor Susie Derkins, who called Calvin “the terminal weirdness poster child”. And for the rest of the kids who were stuck in Calvin’s class, who looked at him as though he belonged on a different planet, and at Hobbes as though he was simply inert.
Eric Harris was treated, according to virtually every report as though he belonged on a different planet, while Dylan Klebold was often ignored as though he, too, were simply inert. Reports speak of Dylan, in earlier years of high school, often eating lunch alone in the cafeteria. But they speak of how Eric – smaller, thinner, brighter, more different– was verbally abused, and smashed into lockers regularly by the jocks among the school’s so-called elite.
Watterson was able to get his revenge, as an adult, and via his immense artistic gifts, by depicting such bullies as the brainless Moe, whose brow is so low that his hairline covers his eyes, and who is, as Calvin describes him, a six year old who shaves.
But Eric was almost twelve years older than Calvin, and was still enduring the taunts, the violence, the bullying. And not from one Moe, but from many, who even, if “the media” are to be believed, formed the dominant culture of Columbine High School, so their bullying went ignored, unpunished, even tacitly accepted by teachers.
Imagine Calvin, after twelve more years of Moe.
Imagine Calvin, as he realized that Moe was not a grotesque aberration in his Grade One class, but an entire culture, that would surround him, pick on him, grind him down.
Imagine Calvin’s fantasy life, after twelve more years of this, and without even Hobbes to come home to.
Imagine how it felt to be Eric Harris.
—–
The strangeness of Columbine, an interpretation explores the relationship between Calvin and Eric, Dylan and Hobbes in a very different way, based on a communication from Dylan’s friend, and Eric’s sometime-friend Brooks Brown.
The Everlasting Contrast 