Demo - "Damaged"

I will confess upfront that I find "Damaged" to be one of less satisfying offerings in Demo. I'm not sure it entirely succeeds in what it sets out to do, but it's nice when someone swings for the fences - something Wood & Cloonan attempt pretty regularly in Demo.

Thomas Martin is young, rich, and - apparently - a creep. Or so we're told, anyway, because there really isn't any evidence of his being a creep in the story. A strange young girl of rather indeterminate age approaches him and claims to be able to "read" him. He offers her money - out of guilt or obligation at first, and then as a form of salary when she begins to act as his therapist. After two weeks of sessions and seemingly by chance, Thomas discovers that his unnamed counselor is living in the adjacent unit in his building and spying on him with all sorts of high tech equipment. Thomas chases her out into the street where he is hit by a car and killed. At his funeral, the girl gives the money Thomas had given her to his mother, and tells her that Thomas had been working hard to become a better person. The ambiguity of the girl's role in the plot is further emphasized when the final image of her shadow mirrors the blood splatter of Thomas's accident.

The question the story seems to beg comes from that very ambiguity: can you really know anyone? Thomas is alienated, as the spirit guide/con artist makes explicit. "If I had your money, your clothes, your job, your friends and your apartment, I'd feel empty inside too. And you still haven't figured out how to cope with it all." We're told more than once that Thomas has no friends. He certainly jumps at the opportunity to spend time with the mysterious girl who claims to know all about his life, a decision that no one outside of a piece of fiction would make. It all feels so very staged. During one of their sessions, she even helps Thomas with this old chestnut: why didn't that girl ever call me back? Answer: because you left too many messages, of course. The reason Thomas is lonely is that his failures are cliched pop-psychological hangups that were over-analyzed in small-budget films of the late 1990s. Obviously. When Thomas needs relationship advice, and gets a riff that could be from an early Kevin Smith movie or Swingers, the characters are not simply communicating in cliches: they're precisely not able to communicate because they can only understand their lives in cliches. Thomas is a flat character, and we will never know anything essential about him.

The story denies us an easy window into Thomas's life, and forces us to interpret it through exposition. Nor do we get an answer as to the unnamed spirit guide/scam artist's motivation. Her audio/video set-up seems to undermine her claim to magical knowledge, but she doesn't keep the money she draws from Thomas. The general lack of clarity in the plot is a reminder that these characters are essentially unknowable. The story is uninterested in whether or not the girl is a telepath or a con artist who undergoes a change of heart. The story isn't even interested in whether or not Thomas is likable. Questions of likability revolve around questions of essential identity, which none of the characters have.

There is an implication that the city is partially responsible for the characters' alienation. Thomas hasn't spoken to his mother in years, and their emotional distance is emphasized by the fact that she lives in Queens. But the urban disconnection remains an unexplored theme, lingering in the background of scenes. Thomas catches the girl out because she says she will walk, and then takes a cab (and then leaves her door open WHILE SHE'S IN THE SHOWER for some unknowable reason). Cloonan fills the issue with photocopied images of New York. They're degraded, fitting awkwardly into backgrounds and the manga-like characters who populate the story. Even the bills that Thomas uses to pay the girl, $100s, are photocopied. Cloonan helps create a world where object seem flatter, less tactile, at odds with each other. None of the characters look like they fit into this world. When the story closes on a splash page of the girl casting a shadow that looks like the blood that spilled from Thomas's head after he was hit by a car, it's a stark contrast to the images of city skylines that recur frequently in Demo. No city, no landscape in which to place the girl, no context to understand her.

No one is at ease in this story. No one quite fits. No one's actions really make sense. The inscrutability - the girl's motivation going entirely unexplained, Thomas's sudden look of murderous rage when he finds her out - is the point. The girl's motivations are never made clear and the story ends with an image that implies a certain degree of culpability in Thomas's death, but it's never spelled out. Was she scamming him, and then driven to return the money out of guilt for his death? If so, why be so careless? If she really could read his mind, why set up the spy equipment? This essential disconnect between how characters act and how those actions are interpreted lies at the heart of the story. At the funeral, when his mother explains who Thomas is, the story rings false. Thomas, she tells us, that "he was always a mess." A miserable kid, she says he was "a bully, torturing the strays in our neighborhood, stealing from me, you name it. Bad grades, horrible attitude. It's a no wonder he never had any friends." This explains Thomas's one moment of rage, but it still doesn't seem as if it's a description of the character. Thomas is all of those things, but less. He's a cipher, a mess of contradictory motivations and emotions, and that's sort of the point. Thomas tries to change how people react to him more than he tries to change anything central in his character. He is more than the sum of his parts, and much less. Who is he doesn't really matter, because there is no essential Thomas. He only exists in his encounters with others.

"Damaged" is another attempt on the part of Wood & Cloonan to tell stories about how people interact that stumbles as it overreaches but it gets a little overwhelmed in its ambiguity. Just look at that cover - angel's wings and a laurel wreath? What the what? Still, it takes on an interesting set of themes and I'd rather read a story that tries to do something substantial and fails than one that is satisfied to have two characters punch each other for twenty two pages.

Next time: "Midnight to Six"