I'd offered myself to experiences beyond my control in numerous countries of war, terror, corruption and disaster. Places where what can go wrong will go wrong, had gone wrong, and yet in the end, had delivered me in one piece with a deepening situational awareness (though not a perfect science) of available cautions within the design in chaos.
--Sean Penn, "El Chapo Speaks," Rolling Stone, Jan. 9, 2016
I kind of like Sean Penn.
And not just as an actor, though I've seen him be very good in a lot of movies, including some you might not think of right away. His work as mob lawyer David Kleinfeld in Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way (1993) is one of my favorite performances of all time, and he was similarly impressive as the second greatest jazz guitarist of all time in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999). I'm not sure Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be the Place (2011) was theatrically released in Arkansas, but it's worth hunting down. I even liked Penn in I Am Sam (2001) which, though it earned Penn an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, is widely considered an embarrassment.
I've never met Penn, not even for one of those 10-minutes-in-a-hotel-room sessions publicists set up to plug movies, but we have a friend in common. He was with Penn in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, and he says he witnessed the actor doing genuinely heroic things. He says Penn risked his life to help people, and that he exhibited quiet courage in the absence of TV cameras or witnesses likely to carry the news far and wide. My friend was impressed--he vouches for the actor's passion and integrity, and that's good enough for me.
And I'll say this about Penn's writing style: it's aspirational. He goes for it. It's not a mature style, it's probably not as good as Penn thinks it is, but it's not all bad. I saw on the Internet where some wag identified Penn as a "first-year journalism major" and I smiled at that, but the truth is I wish more young aspiring journalists would go for it the way that Penn does in his now infamous piece that ran in Rolling Stone. You know, the one where he "interviewed" fugitive Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman, the one who was re-captured a few days after publication after six months on the run.
As an editor, it's far easier to rein in exuberance than to polish some sparkle into flat prose. Most beginning writers are too timid; they rely on familiar rhythms and the assurance of clichés. They repeat and pander, courting the good opinion of their audience. They embrace conventionality like a novice rock climber hugs the mountain. Never mind how well they're harnessed in, there's still the fear of falling.
Penn has no fear of falling. And while it's easy to make fun of his style---which borrows from Hunter S. Thompson, James Ellroy, Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski, with too much Bret Easton Ellis for my taste--it's at least indicative of a seeking intelligence. Penn has some taste. Were he really a first-year journalism student I'd say he has some promise.
That doesn't mean his piece in Rolling Stone is any good. But I have a lot bigger problem with the editors who agreed to run the story, who gave Guzman the opportunity to read it in advance, and who apparently didn't tell the Big Face movie star that he'd embarrassed himself any more than I do with the poor celebrity scribbler. Penn attempted a really difficult free climb, and was provided with absolutely no safety. He probably mistook his flailing in the void for flying.
And it's a long way down to that soft poof on the canyon floor, ain't it, Coyote?
I still kind of like Sean Penn. He tried, and he failed. He said so himself on Charlie Rose. We're all playing literary critic, talking about his style rather than addressing the complex, seemingly intractable problem that is our unending War on Drugs.
I know a little bit about this. A year or so after Penn played Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I reported and co-wrote a 27-part series on the cocaine trade--specifically the trafficking pipeline that ran from Miami to northeast Louisiana--for the Shreveport Journal. Thank God I don't have access to my rough drafts of these stories; the ones that actually ran in the newspaper are painful enough for me to read. But I did a lot of legwork for the piece, some of it what Penn might call of an "experiential" nature. I am embarrassed to admit that I was excited to interview outlaws.
But I also stood in houses where entire families had been hacked to death by machetes.
Penn is right: The U.S. government is to a degree culpable in the rise of ruthless drug lords like Guzman. And so are our friends and neighbors who like to smoke a joint now and then. (One of the biggest reasons to be in favor of the legalization of marijuana is because when grass is legal we know where it comes from, and American-grown product is both cheaper and of higher quality than the stuff that is produced by slave labor in Mexico and trucked in illegally by the cartels.)
I've always been the one to say journalism isn't a terribly complicated trade, that it's basically ask questions, transcribe answers and try to make sense of it all when you get back to the office. Usually you try to leave yourself out of it as much as you can while acknowledging your own biases. You ought to approach every story with a certain humility, painfully aware how difficult it is to really know anything about anything.
But maybe that's not as easy as I thought.
I've always known it's hard to do it well, and that if you mean to do it well you should be grateful to anyone willing to help. Hug your copy editors; and if you find a strong editor willing to tell you when you're slipping, do what I did and marry her.
Yes, the Rolling Stone interview with the little murderer they call El Chapo was a travesty. But it wasn't all Sean Penn's fault.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 01/21/2016