Last year, I submitted a short piece for an essay contest. The theme was "enemies." My piece was rejected almost immediately, which I get is part of the deal when you submit things. (A buddy of mine who writes poetry told me yesterday that his goal is to receive fifty rejection letters before the end of the year. He is up to thirty-one.) Anyway, I think it's not bad, but I also can't find a home for it. So, here you go!
You’ve Got a Frenemy
Every so often, the Oxford English
Dictionary decides to update its entries, which prompts a run of amusing news
briefs about the words that have made the cut. The new words are usually what
most of us think of as trite neologisms –
“twerk,” “selfie” and “muffin top” are all recent additions – and we
tend to scoff or roll our eyes at the unlikeliness of their being added to a
formal written record of the English language. Without the benefit of at least
a decade’s worth of perspective, it’s hard to tell which of these words will
end up surviving their generation, and which are doomed to one day sound
hopelessly dated. The jury is still out on “frenemy,” which was added in 2010,
despite having made its first recorded appearance in 1954 (in a Walter Winchell
column about U.S.-Russian relations, no less). There’s still plenty of time for
it to go the way of “betamax,” which the OED saw fit to add to its 1975 edition,
but which has now been so thoroughly expunged from the language that Microsoft
Word underlines it with a red squiggle.
So I’m aware that it’s premature to
anoint “frenemy” as a timeless term – and yet, has there been a more important addition
to the language in the last decade? The word undoubtedly fills a need. To
properly assess its value, just think of what it replaced when it entered the
vernacular: “rival,” “adversary” and most obviously, “enemy.” All three serve
their purpose, sure, but compared to “frenemy,” they seem a little bit
simplistic. The relationship between frenemies is a complex one: to the
untrained eye, it looks the same as a friendship. It should be a friendship, and in some cases, the two participants may
have even convinced themselves, and each other, that it is one. But a
frenemy-ship (the OED’s next entry?) is rife with underlying tension that crosses
the boundary of normal friendly competition into something darker. Of any rough
synonym, “rival” probably comes the closest, but still falls woefully short of
capturing the conflict between inner thoughts and outer semblances that all
frenemies have experienced.
Surely, “Frenemy” describes a more
specific type of relationship, than its parent word, “Enemy,” and as a result,
we might expect its use to be fairly narrow, but I’m not so sure. Frenemy-ships
are universal and vastly predate the term itself. One of my favorite novels,
John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, which is as poignant to me now as it was when I
first read it in high school, rings true because it sensitively and realistically
illustrates the feelings of its narrator, Gene, towards his ostensible friend
(and actual frenemy) Finny. So powerful are these feelings that they ultimately
bring Gene to impulsively injure Finny – by shaking him out of a tree as the
two of them prepare to jump into the river below. In the past, when I prepared students
in my ninth grade English classes to read this novel, I asked them whether they
had ever experienced an intense, yet unspoken rivalry with a friend, and I often
saw a glint of recognition on some faces as I scanned the room. A girl once
confided to the class that she sometimes purposely over-salted her sister’s
food in an effort to take her down a peg, by causing her to gain an extra pound
or two.
A complicated relationship with a
frenemy is a consummate part of the fourteen-year-old experience, but unlike
acne, it’s likely to linger into adulthood as well. At any age, quickly
identifying a frenemy tends to be far easier than identifying a true enemy. Every fall, when my ninth graders have
finished first drafts of their essays, I encourage them to read their work
aloud. “Read it to a family member or a pet or a friend,” I suggest. And here I
pause to give the impression that I’m grasping for words, even though I know
exactly what I want to say: “Or an enemy.” That usually gets a chuckle – maybe
because it’s inherently funny to even think of using an essay draft as a
weapon. But I also wonder if perhaps the mere notion of having an enemy is in
itself fairly ludicrous. The word’s connotations are highly melodramatic: we
reserve it to describe a person whose only purpose on earth is to oppose us –
to create obstacles that we must surmount. Honestly, in this day and age, what
kind of narcissist speaks about his or her “enemies” with a straight face?
Superheroes have enemies. So do supervillains, west coast rappers and,
probably, Donald Trump. The list is really short: even the president, when
referring to a country with an adversarial relationship to the U.S., shies away
from the E word.
I remember a brawl during the 1998
baseball season between outfielder Gary Sheffield, then with the Dodgers, and
Pirates catcher Jason Kendall. (I think it was precipitated by a play at the
plate, but the circumstances aren’t really important.) An awkward situation was
created just a week later when both players were forced to share a dugout as
teammates on the National League All-Star team. Rather than making amends, or
at least keeping himself at a comfortable distance from Kendall, Sheffield told
the press, “He’s my enemy. I wouldn’t walk down to the other end of the
clubhouse to shake his hand.” It seemed to me a cartoonishly aggressive line:
one that could have been convincingly attributed to a sneering movie villain
like Clubber Lang, Mr. T’s memorable character from Rocky III. It made for good theater, though, because the
protagonist vs. enemy, good guy vs. bad conflict is a time-honored story
construction that never seems to get old. There is something comforting about Little
Red Riding Hood vs. the Big Bad Wolf, Peter Pan vs. Captain Hook, Simba vs.
Scar. We like knowing exactly who to
root for, and we often find it refreshing and invigorating to encounter an
antagonist so obviously evil that we can boo and hiss with absolutely no
reservations.
But we also tend to tire of such
reductive characterizations. We learn, upon reaching adulthood, that real
people are too complex to be defined simply as heroes or villains – and most of
us demand television and movies that reflect this complexity. Actually, there
is a strong argument that despite the interminable parade of generic super hero
flicks that grace movie screens every summer, audiences have grown more
sophisticated than ever when it comes to their expectations for fictional
characters. The success of recent HBO shows like The Wire and Game of Thrones
can be attributed in large part to characters like Omar and Tyrion Lannister,
who are so morally ambiguous that they are bound to evoke a wide array of
reactions. Even a thoroughly evil character like Joffrey was able to elicit
sympathy from some fans (though certainly not all) in his final hour.
Two-dimensional villains generally don’t do it for us anymore. Witness the
evolution of the Joker: Jack Nicholson’s malevolent lunatic from the 1992 film
is no longer enough. The Dark Knight ,
released in 2008, delved into the same character’s backstory, attempting to
satisfy our questions about what made him tick. As Chris Rock once asked, in
response to the popular tendency to psychoanalyze the Columbine shooters,
“Whatever happened to ‘crazy’?”
Crazy. Villain. Evil.
Enemy. We have become increasingly
uncomfortable about applying these labels too rashly. Should we pat
ourselves
on the back for being more empathetic than our parents, who
flung them around
willy-nilly? Judging from the pleasantries exchanged
during the rush hour
commute, or the invective hurled at Red Sox fans
with the gall to enter Yankee
Stadium, or the political discourse on cable
news that often develops into
petty arguing, cruelty and antagonism are
alive and well. There are plenty of
people in my life whom I dislike. I call
them frenemies, or I call them rivals,
or opponents, or else, if they really
deserve it, I call them jerks. But with
words like these, who needs
“enemies”?
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