Last night I rewatched Paul W.S. Anderson’s sneaky little 1997 horror/sci-fi masterpiece/disaster Event Horizon, in which a spaceship—thought to be utterly lost after attempting to manipulate gravity in order to travel through a black hole—begins sending out a distress signal somewhere near Neptune, and a rescue crew, led by Laurence Fishburne, gets sent to investigate. I don’t want to get into a whole Event Horizon recap here. This is a basketball newsletter for chrissakes. Suffice to say that where the ship has been is far more haunting than simply getting lost in space. The ship seems to have been to hell.
Event Horizon, in all seriousness, is fucking scary while you are watching it. It asks a lot of wild questions about what the outward trappings of an encounter with hell might look like. How does a brush with true, honest-to-goodness, supernatural evil manifest in the natural world? Event Horizon posits that people start seeing terrible shit only they can see. Horrible fears and secrets are revealed to them in twisted, monstrous visions. This is useful, since it has the effect of isolating the minds of individuals. If I see some awful, harrowing, nightmare shit that you can’t see, then we’re not operating under the same set of rules anymore. It’s a learned kind of loneliness, no less lonely for being terrifying.
Again, just to be clear, this is a basketball newsletter; it really is. In order to really scare the shit out of you, a movie has to show you really, really scary things that you can see with your eyes, but it has to also manage to show you those things in a way that lingers and haunts you somehow. To really scare the shit out of you, the scare has to remain beyond the runtime. It has to stick to the blood. Event Horizon, as gory and creepy and imaginative as it is, does not quite get there. There’s this one scene where the rescue crew finds a bit of footage from the log of the ship they’ve been sent to investigate. The footage shows a horrible sequence of images of the lost crew involved in a nightmare death orgy of fucking and violence. It’s pretty terrible! But then it is over, and I’m not sure anything in Event Horizon—in spite of its exploration of what might be possible in actual Hell—really gets sticky in me. Ultimately—and, I suppose, fortunately—the visions that quite literally destroy the lives of the characters in the movie do not carry over to my experience. When Sam Neill is like, “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see,” I’m like, ha, that’s pretty funny; I need to remember to use that on my friends. It’s just a movie. I am able to move on.
Some movies are stickier. There are horror movies that have, at least in small ways, ruined my life. This is ostensibly, I swear to God, an essay about basketball. The woman behind Winkie’s in Mulholland Drive is a vision I now have to carry with me, day after day, every time I go put my trash in the stupid dumpster. If I’m alone walking down the hallway in a hotel, I’m suddenly Danny in The Shining and it feels like anything could just appear in front of me any time I turn a corner. There’s nothing I can do. It isn’t a choice. It is something I have learned; something I can’t forget.
Realizing that true horror involves learning—the process of making sensory input stick—made me think about basketball. Specifically, because I am an obsessive Celtics fan, I found myself thinking about Jayson Tatum and his career-long propensity for not getting to the foul line often enough. It might seem unfair to critique Tatum for this during a season in which basically the entire league has stopped getting to the line, but this isn't actually a critique. What I’m wondering about is what sticks and what doesn’t.
Getting to the line has been this thing with Tatum forever. He spends off-seasons bulking up ostensibly to be able to absorb more contact, and then in the games he avoids contact like the plague. Of course, there are all the times that’s not what happens. Take a look at this chart of Tatum’s FTr (free throw rate, a measure of how often a player gets to the foul line). Tatum has games in which he gets to the line a ton (the blue line traces his FTr this season, game-by-game, through the first 18 games). The green line, amazingly enough, is Tatum’s career FTr in the playoffs. The gap between that and his career rate (in black) is wild, and it shows that there are mitigating factors at work. The big, red line is how his FTr is trending this current season. I suppose it is going up. I suppose he’s learning.
And yet, at some point in the next week, just after watching Tatum attempt nine free throws in Monday night’s win over the Houston Rockets, I’m sure there will be a game in which Tatum is back to Matrix-dodging would-be foulers in the lane on his way to missed layups and not enough free throws. Is it possible that what’s going on here is that learning has nothing to do with it? The real problem is that even though we know what we need to do, we just can’t do it. We can only do it sometimes. We can never do it enough. In a letter to Sophia Hawthorne, Herman Melville once wrote, “For tho' we know what we ought to be; & what it would be very sweet & beautiful to be; yet we can't be it. That is most sad, too. Life is a long Dardenelles, My Dear Madam, the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck, but the bank is too high; & so we float on & on, hoping to come to a landing-place at last — but swoop! we launch into the great sea!”
The problem, I guess, is that life—and basketball—goes on a little too fast. We rarely get the chance to consolidate whatever motes of knowledge we are lucky enough to perceive, to take in, and to remember. Even worse, some of what we learn hurts us. It makes us fearful. We learn or we don’t, and what we learn either helps or destroys us. We think we know what’s coming, and we might, or we might not, and either side of that possibility has a chance to be woefully misinterpreted by us. There is so much doubt you can have if you are seeing things clearly. Sometimes I worry I’m nothing more than a collection of bad habits and unreasonable fears. Still, sometimes the data suggests that the big, red line trends upward. Over off the edge of the right side of that graph, there could be anything.