A response to Titans
by Bailey Williams

If you’re searching for a bitter digestif to Jesse Jae Hoon’s galvanizing, zippy Titans, and if chewing on your own mind isn’t enough (more on that later), I’d turn to the back of the Grove Weidenfeld edition of Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon for an essay from the author. In it, Shawn elaborates on his lifelong artistic theme: “the difference between a perfectly decent person and a monster is just a few thoughts.” His argument is very simple. Once you morally compromise in the name of your own comfort, your thoughts take on a life of their own. That morally compromising thought is not going to simply go away; it is going to evolve into a series of permissions and excuses to allow for maximum comfort until your morality has “sickened and died in your own skull.”

Do you consider yourself a good person? Do you act in accordance with your highest values? Or, like me, when you watched Titans did you find yourself narrativizing why, exactly, you do not have Signal downloaded on your phone? Why, in your phone’s library, there are 10,000 videos of your own cat instead of anything moderately helpful to anyone, anywhere? Why, at that very moment, faced with a banner that states “Meet Your Neighbors” and your seat neighbors are indeed meeting each other and having a perfectly lovely conversation, you stare straight ahead? Jesse’s play is full of good, moral people and you know this because of their relentless action. A teacher advocates for her students’ safety, despite the reticence of the school bureaucracy. A chicken shop manager brings food to a terrified neighbor, then gently coaxes her into doing the same for others. A mother disrupts traffic, a tow truck lady refuses to tow. They do not complain, despair, or give up. They do not stand in a casual semi-circle drinking natural wine and bemoaning the president, the news, the war, the terrible things that are happening in this country.

This is how you behave, says Titans, watch and learn.

I do not want to be a bad person. But I sat in a dark theater, watched a play, and said to myself: but I donate. As I watched heroes “become brave,” my mind made excuses and filled the vast psychic space between me and the play with reasons, really good reasons, why I am not doing what should be done. Isn’t that interesting? Faced with literal instruction, I refused to be taught. Instead I began the old, familiar process of devoting myself to the altar of my own comfort.

There are no antagonists on stage in Titans because I am the antagonist. ICE is the enemy, sure, but the enemy is also the ways, every day, I let my mind relax to the horror. You might be the antagonist too. I can’t see inside your skull. I don’t know what gives me more of that old comfort feeling. The fact that I alone might be deficient… or the fact that there might be more of us lurking in the dark of the theater.

So now what? We have a manual— a little zine— giving us some ideas. Do we dare to disrupt ourselves? Or do we let yet another excuse make the case for itself and grow accustomed, once again, to the frailty of our morality? There will be a new horror tomorrow. What will you think about it? More importantly, what will you do?