{"id":11296,"date":"2013-09-15T13:33:44","date_gmt":"2013-09-15T20:33:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/?p=11296"},"modified":"2013-09-15T13:33:44","modified_gmt":"2013-09-15T20:33:44","slug":"sons-of-anarchy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/sons-of-anarchy\/","title":{"rendered":"Sons of (A)narchy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Men of Mayhem, Heirs of Anarchy<\/h1>\n
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From\u00a0LA Review of Books<\/a>\u00a0– by Diarmuid Hester<\/p>\n

TONIGHT,\u00a0<\/i>SONS OF ANARCHY, FX\u2019s popular TV series about a fictional Californian biker gang, enters its sixth and penultimate season. Fans of the show will no doubt be looking forward to more beards, guns, and gasoline, as the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club fights its way tooth and nailbat through ever more sensational and fractious storylines. And it looks like they\u2019ll get their wish: the FX promo released in July shows the central characters amid a violent, slo-mo melee, in a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all \u2014 anarchy as usual then.<\/i><\/p>\n

But it wasn’t always like this. The show\u2019s opening season explored a more politically and historically engaged notion of anarchy than the chaotic, prurient representation that\u2019s taken hold in the last four years. Before we\u2019re plunged back into the new season and its characteristic maelstrom of violence and melodrama, it\u2019s worth reflecting on the show\u2019s initial exploration of radical politics, to see how\u00a0<\/i>Sons of Anarchy\u00a0lost its way.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a4<\/p>\n

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE<\/a>\u00a0of the series\u2019 indebtedness to Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0Hamlet,<\/i>\u00a0and the Bard does lend some cultural heft to a setup reminiscent of trashy biker movies of the 1960s: the eponymous Sons of Anarchy (SOA), a gang of bikers based in the fictional town of Charming, spend their time drinking, fighting, illegally running guns, and riding obsidian Harleys through the winding wastes of sun-drenched California. The pilot episode, however, impresses Shakespearean coordinates onto the show, and it\u2019s pretty deftly done. Jackson \u201cJax\u201d Teller (Charlie Hunnam), the vice president of the SOA, is a kind of tortured Hamlet, whose customary suit of black is here a leather kutte (or vest) bearing the club\u2019s patch: a grim reaper holding an M16 rifle-cum-scythe and a crystal ball in which the anarchy \u201cA\u201d appears. Rummaging through a pile of dusty old boxes, Jax unleashes the \u201cghost\u201d of his dead father, SOA co-founder John Teller, in the form of a book written by him called\u00a0The Life and Death of Sam Crow: How the Sons of Anarchy Lost Their Way<\/i>. During the first season, Jax routinely takes time out from the killings and occasional castrations to pore over his father\u2019s words, intoned in a gloomy, ponderous voiceover as the sun sinks over the SOA clubhouse. The SOA president Clay Morrow, played by a mean, grizzled Ron Perlman, is the treacherous Claudius, while Gemma Teller (Katy Segal), widow of John and now wife of Clay, is a powerful and vindictive version of Gertrude.<\/p>\n

Everyone remembers\u00a0Hamlet<\/i>\u2019s private vengeance theme: the foul and unnatural murder of the father and the procrastination of the son. However, when Jax picked up his father\u2019s mouldering manifesto, the public theme of Shakespeare\u2019s play \u2014 that of Hamlet\u2019s responsibility to Denmark, his duty to root out rot in the state and set the divine order to right \u2014 became one of the show\u2019s immediate concerns, albeit viewed somewhat askew. Reading his father\u2019s words, seeing what the club once was and could be once more, Jax is convinced the old order must be restored. Its order, however, is not one of kings but of anarchists.<\/p>\n

Premiering in the fall of 2008 in the immediate aftermath of the US subprime mortgage crisis and three years before the birth of the Occupy movement,\u00a0Sons of Anarchy<\/i>\u2019s initial 13 episodes ran another storyline underneath the\u00a0Hamlet<\/i>\u00a0one. Using John Teller\u2019s book as a diegetic foothold, it sought to locate the origins of the gang within the context of 1960s counterculture and an avowedly anarchist ideology. Referencing the work of anarchist writers like Emma Goldman and gesturing towards anarchist debates about liberty, the law, and so on, Teller\u2019s book allowed the show to juxtapose the original vision of the SOA with the gang\u2019s contemporary incarnation, plainly corrupted by power and paranoia. The first season seemed to lament the passing of a more egalitarian, noncoercive social order, and hinted that future seasons would see the pull towards a pure past in conflict with the drag of a more sullied present. If the\u00a0Hamlet<\/i>\u00a0storyline riffed on the Sons of the show\u2019s title (\u201cI am too much in the sun,\u201d Hamlet spits at Claudius), this one explored its anarchy in a specifically American context, beyond a pejorative definition of mere chaos:<\/p>\n

Jax:<\/b>\u00a0<\/i>When you and Dad hooked up \u2014 he ever talk to you about his vision? About what he wanted from the club?<\/p>\n

Gemma:<\/b>\u00a0<\/i>His vision was \u2014 you know \u2026 what it is. A brotherhood. Family.<\/i><\/p>\n

Jax:<\/b>\u00a0<\/i>And running guns? He want that? Seems like his original idea for the MC was something simpler \u2014 you know, social rebellion. He called it \u201ca Harley commune.\u201d It wasn\u2019t outlaw; it was real hippie shit.<\/p>\n

Gemma:<\/b>\u00a0<\/i>We had a lot of bright ideas back then. We were kids.<\/p>\n

Initially, Jax\u2019s study of\u00a0The Life and Death of Sam Crow<\/i>\u00a0features in the final minutes of each episode and works as a kind of weighty reflection on the week\u2019s action. In episode two (\u201cSeeds\u201d) Jax reads his father\u2019s notes on living beyond the reassuring bonds of society: without the social regulation of violence, freedom of the outside has its own problems. \u201cMost of us were not violent by nature,\u201d Teller remarks with foreboding; \u201cWe had our problems with authority but none of us were sociopaths. We came to realize that when you move your life off the social grid, you give up the safety that society provides.\u201d These wistful thoughts stand in stark contrast to the various unfettered acts of brutality committed by Jax and the others earlier in the episode (one particularly bloody scene has a victim taking an axe to the head).<\/p>\n

Later, in episode four (\u201cThe Patch-Over\u201d) the anarchist foundation of Teller\u2019s remarks is made explicit. On the wall of a cave somewhere in the Nevada hills, scrawled in red, Jax finds abridged lines from anarchist Emma Goldman\u2019s 1917 essay \u201cAnarchism: What It Really Stands For,\u201d and reads them aloud:<\/p>\n

Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I saw those words,\u201d John Teller\u2019s voiceover tells us, as his son reads his book, \u201cit was like someone ripped them from the inside of my head. [\u2026] The concept was pure, simple, true. It inspired me, lit a rebellious fire.\u201d Anarchism is the restless, beating heart of the original Sons of Anarchy. Before being usurped by the ideologically vacuous notion of mayhem and disorder, the word meant social revolution, political dissent, freedom. It was an ethos.<\/p>\n

Goldman\u2019s simple anarchist principles form the basis of Teller\u2019s original vision: the rejection of religion, property, and government and the production of a noncoercive collective. However, as he later remarks, \u201c[U]ltimately I learned the lesson that Goldman, [Pierre Joseph] Proudhon and the others learned. [\u2026] Most human beings only think they want freedom; in truth they yearn for the bondage of social order, rigid laws, materialism\u201d: the schism between the SOA\u2019s founding principles and their systematic weekly violation by Clay and his boys generates a dramatic tension that falls, finally, on the shoulders of Jax Teller.<\/p>\n

Religion is rarely addressed in the show so it\u2019s unclear how much Goldman\u2019s first principle is transgressed; however, not only do the Sons plainly believe in personal property (a notion abhorrent to Proudhon), they cleave to it, orient their lives around it, and seem to derive all satisfaction from ensuring an accumulation of it in the form of illegal firearms. Similarly, though they\u2019re frequently at odds with some kind of federal organization that\u2019s out to get them (usually the ATF), the SOA\u2019s own laws and customs are often shown to be every bit as restrictive and repressive as that of the US government, if not more so. In \u201cThe Patch-Over,\u201d avenging an ill-chosen comment about Gemma made by Kip, Clay taunts him and beds his romantic interest, Cherry. This whole scene not only foregrounds the rigid, unjust hierarchy of the club\u2019s structure that finds Clay (the king) at its apex and Kip (a \u201cprospect\u201d or rookie) at the bottom, but illustrates the lowly status of women in this sclerotic macho society. Finally, though the SOA regularly vote on matters pertaining to the club, which would appear to suggest the club\u2019s noncoercive organization, members are frequently abused, threatened, and cajoled into sacrificing their better judgment so that the club (perhaps better named Sons of Bureaucracy) may prevail.<\/p>\n

\u00a4<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an obvious correlation to be made here between the respective fates of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club and\u00a0Sons of Anarchy<\/i>\u00a0the TV show. On the one hand we find a once anarchistic club, which sees its radical ideas eroded as it progressively capitulates to easy money and a prevailing capitalist culture. On the other, a politically engaged TV program similarly loses its radical timbre by bowing to the demands of a culture of sensationalized televisual violence. In both cases an ephemeral spark of radical thought is quickly smothered by mainstream forces.<\/p>\n

Although I\u2019m tempted to lament the disappearance of anarchism as an explicit theme, I think it\u2019s important to note that by making manifest (albeit unwittingly) this very process of ideological erosion,\u00a0Sons of Anarchy<\/i>\u00a0also invokes the historical trajectory of anarchism in the United States. In other words, not merely a representation of radical social forms but also representing the progressive\u00a0dissolution\u00a0<\/i>of these forms,\u00a0Sons of Anarchy<\/i>\u00a0recalls the fortunes of numerous other movements in the history of American anarchism. A recent instance of this might be the coalescence and subsequent dispersal of Occupy Wall Street\u2019s quasi-anarchist collective in Manhattan\u2019s Zuccotti Park. Before that, groups like the Youth International Party\u2019s (\u201cYippies\u201d) idea of an anarchistic New Nation (\u201cbased on cooperation not competition\u201d) also bloomed and withered in the late 1960s. In fact, if we go right back to the beginning of anarchism\u2019s appearance in America we see the same pattern of upsurge and collapse.<\/p>\n

In the 19th century, the so-called \u201cgolden age\u201d of anarchism dawned in the US, accompanied by massive amounts of dissident tracts and newspapers promoting anarchist ideas. In contrast to their counterparts in Europe (but like the original Sons \u2014 men \u201cnot violent by nature\u201d), the writers of these works largely supported a nonviolent agenda and concerned themselves more with \u201cpropaganda of the word\u201d than \u201cpropaganda of the deed.\u201d These ideas then took physical shape in the form of independent anarchist communities that look like John Teller\u2019s \u201cHarley commune,\u201d being similarly horizontal in arrangement and founded on the notion of individual sovereignty. The mid-1800s saw colonies spring up around the United States in places like New York, Ohio, and Washington, offering anarchists liveable alternatives to coercive social forms. Anarchism was palatable to a lot of Americans at this time and in some quarters it was even affirmed as a version of the legendary pioneer spirit, upon which the nation was founded.<\/p>\n

The \u201cgolden age\u201d was brought to a swift end, however, by the waves of anti-anarchist sentiment and anti-anarchy laws that followed the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago (for which four anarchists were controversially hanged) and the 1901 assassination of President McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Popular support for anarchism dwindled as the movement found itself the focus of Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cwar on anarchists.\u201d Its mouthpieces were censored and its enclaves were scattered to the wind. Individualist anarchist communities folded from internal or external pressures and their residents moved back into the American mainstream and out of history. Nevertheless, though none of these communities lasted more than a decade, as historian James J. Martin remarks in his excellent study\u00a0Men Against the State\u00a0<\/i>(1957), their objective was not longevity but rather temporary livability. In other words, the durability of the community itself was less important than its duration, during which equity and free-will prevailed. I\u2019m inclined to see this as a recurring feature of anarchist social arrangements and, as the fate of the SOA demonstrates, an anarchist ideal is eclipsed when the survival of the community takes precedence over the individual voices of its members.<\/p>\n

Viewed negatively, this history of anarchism in the United States seems to suggest that the status quo must always be reconstituted following an anarchist eruption: just as Fortinbras must return at the end of\u00a0Hamlet<\/i>\u00a0to ensure the monarchy is set right,\u00a0Sons of Anarchy<\/i>\u00a0must become the overblown enterprise it is now, and Jax must forsake his anarchist pretensions and become the tyrannical president Gemma wants him to be. The consistency with which we find this waxing and waning, efflorescence and decay, however, also attests to the persistence of anarchist ideas in the American political and cultural imaginary: though anarchist events may not last long, a longing for the duration of livability endures.<\/p>\n

\u00a4<\/p>\n

Diarmuid Hester is a doctoral researcher in English at the University of Sussex and holds a John W. Kluge Center fellowship at the Library of Congress.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Men of Mayhem, Heirs of Anarchy From\u00a0LA Review of Books\u00a0– by Diarmuid Hester TONIGHT,\u00a0SONS OF ANARCHY, FX\u2019s popular TV series about a fictional Californian biker gang, enters its sixth and penultimate season. Fans of the show will no doubt be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11297,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11296\/revisions\/11297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}