Blood on the Illusion

pyle turns away from joker and stares into space, a strangely peaceful look transforming his face. He places the muzzle of the rifle in his mouth.

joker: No!!!

bang!

pyle pulls the trigger and blows the back of his head over the white tiled wall behind him.

scene fades to black

—Full Metal Jacket (1987)

In the summer of 1998, I bought my father a 40-inch Sony Trinitron TV for Father’s Day. He had recently retired from 37 years teaching philosophy and psychology in the Denver Public Schools, and his old TV wasn’t holding up very well. The images would suddenly become warped and then jiggle back into place. He loved the new TV and the fact that he could watch Bronco games and CNN with perfect clarity.

My father’s retirement and the boom in technology stocks were happening at the same time. He loved watching the evening news, and I remember that almost every night they would feature a story about ordinary people who were day-trading from their home computers and doubling their money. The analysts who tried to imply that an ominous bubble was about to burst were countered by those who forecast that the fabulous market levels would be around for a long time. Pensions had been converted into mutual funds, and stocks, previously reserved for wealthy investors and institutions, were the newest game for the middle class. For my father, seeing his 401(k) soar meant that he was riding the wave of the winners.

Still, in spite of having plenty of money in his nest egg, his transition into retirement wasn’t going so well. Since he had spent most of his life working, he didn’t really know what to do with his time. He volunteered a bit, but ultimately he began to feel the heaviness of not being what he called a “self-starter.” So, like many other people, he started playing stocks. He spent his afternoons watching as the ticker numbers raced across the bottom of the CNN screen. He set up an online account with Merrill Lynch and made investment decisions on his own. If he saw the numbers dropping, he would quickly pull the money out. And an hour later, he would jump back in. By the time the market crashed on March 10, 2000, he had been placing 15 trades a day. Eventually, Merrill Lynch sent him a letter warning him that his account was going to be suspended. But it was too late—he had lost 90 percent of his retirement assets ($90,000). Jane, his wife, had no idea that this had happened until November 21 of that year, when the police arrived at her door to inform her that they had found a man in a car registered to her, slumped over the steering wheel, gunshot wound to the head.

I remember the last time I visited my father, five weeks before he took his life. He had pillows over the bottom of the TV screen to cover up the ticker symbols. Every time I saw him, he was agitated and clearly annoyed about something. He wandered the house like a ghost, and panic attacks prohibited him from sleeping for more than two hours at a time each night. The TV that once occupied a privileged place in the living room had clearly become the reminder of something that was driving him crazy. The news had turned on him. And he, in turn, was turning on himself. But who else is there to blame? After all, it’s not as if Tom Brokaw forced him to invest his life savings in an illusion.

In the winter months after he died, I started watching a lot of TV to fill in my own empty spaces of time. Specifically, I sought out police shows, murder mysteries, and war films because being absorbed in violent dramas somehow helped me process the self-directed violence of my father’s death. I used to hate these kinds of shows because I equated violence with an unregulated masculinity, one that set out to destroy culture, family, and...