ESSAY // 1.30.03

THE MOST IRONIC LUNCH BOX IN THE WORLD
by John Hanley

Chris Ware's recent project, a metal lunch box featuring his current protagonist, collector/loser/sicko Rusty Brown, is a unique object of irony. If all irony may be said to be based upon contrast-as between expected and actual events in situational irony, for instance-the disparity here is particularly disturbing. On one hand there is work that at least implicitly passes harsh judgement on the collector mentality, as seen in the Rusty Brown pages collected in the latest issue of THE ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY. On the other, here is a product that exploits that same diseased attachment to objects for reasons beyond their intrinsic value.

Yet just as Ware's stance toward collecting is far more complex and conflicted than the simplistic characterization above, so the Rusty Brown lunch box goes beyond hypocritical opportunism to enact the same conflict it critiques. In this respect, this most ironic lunch box in the world may also be the most poignant, as Ware presents his readers with the chance to become their own Rusty Browns, if only by facing the same dilemma encountered by Rusty and his best pal Chalky White-the problematic pleasure of being enthralled by things. In fact, while Chalky is presented as a relatively healthy counterpart to Rusty, it's clear that they share an impulse for accumulation that places their differences on a continuum, as opposed to the separation of discrete types. Thus, the larger implication occurs every time we gaze with admiration at the lunch box, as we are invited to contemplate the discomforting fact that there is a little Rusty Brown in all of us.

Make no mistake, the box itself is a thing of beauty. Simultaneously, in a coldly academic sense, it can be justified as a post-modern artifact by virtue of its sheer self-referentiality. Its front side depicts a friendless Rusty in the school lunchroom, while the rear panel features a shot of tearful Rusty fleeing the cruelty of a pair of bell-bottomed, rock-throwing teenage sadists, one of whom is in the act of kicking Rusty's own beloved lunch box to pieces. The side band's sequence of images provides an impressionistic account of Rusty's acquisition of that box during back-to-school sales, his fantasies of a super-heroic persona, and of course, his estrangement and isolation from his peers. The latter is punctuated by his mother's note, salvaged from the ruined lunch box, declaring "Rusty, I am so proud of you and love you lots! hugs and kisses, Mom." Consistent with Ware's work, the most beautiful image is also the most painful, as the teenaged thugs put the boots to Rusty in a bucolic summer scene (left side of handle) that is repeated in the midst of a snowstorm (right side of handle). The effect is simultaneously heartrending and comic: seasons may come and go, but Rusty's torment is eternal. As summer yields to winter, his persecutors don overcoats to continue their dirty work while Rusty huddles against a gorgeous, quintessentially Warean backdrop of bare trees and pointillist snow.

No amount of space is wasted on the box, as the inside contains the insanely detailed, eight-point-type supplementary material typical of ACME. "Games, puzzles, mysteries" abound, as the viewer is enjoined to help Rusty pass through a maze in order to get that all-important doctor's note excusing him from gym class, assist him in tape recording his favorite television show without picking up the savage arguments of his parents (Sample line: "GET YOUR FAT ASS OUT OF HERE! YOU DISGUST ME!"), and an optical illusion panel in which the viewer is invited to judge, "Which line is longer-the one from Rusty to the approaching burnouts who are going to pound him or the one to the exit door?" All in all, the sort of fare we've come to expect from Ware, whose picture belongs in the glossary of literary terms next to the words "black humor."

However, the nine panel, black-and-white Rusty Brown strip on the inner bottom panel of the box is undeniably its centerpiece. It continues the rough narrative begun on the outside, portraying the grown Rusty discovering a mint condition specimen of his long-lost lunch box at "The Nostalgia Shoppe," exorbitantly priced, of course. As pear-shaped Rusty crawls into bed clad only in his (no doubt pee-stained) white cotton briefs, surrounded by fast-food detritus, his initials hang askew on the wall, indicating his continuing residence, symbolically or actually, in the room of his childhood. "*Choke*-- I want it so bad… I want it so bad!" he writhes in the agony of desire, thumb in mouth, a truly pitiable creature.

It is worth noting that the reader's sympathy toward Rusty's pathetic entrapment has been considerably reduced by the events of the later pages in ACME #15, in which his arrested development is shown to be not quite so infantile, through his lusting after "puss" and attempted seduction, by means of a gift of an anatomically correct doll, of Chalky's barely pubescent daughter. In fact, as he crouches on the floor in those same white cotton briefs, attempting to catch sight of Brittany through the keyhole of the bathroom door, Rusty crosses the line from pathetic to sinister. Meanwhile, Chalky, who has escaped the collecting trap at least to a degree, enters stage left with his wife Candy not far behind, eliciting a final, mortal shift in sympathy.

At this point, in light of the depths to which Rusty sinks, the reader may be compelled to ask whether the world can really afford this lunch box. After all, doesn't it represent just one more brick in the prison walls of the literally thousands of Rustys out there? However, the lunch box may be seen as ACME #15 1/2, based on the amount of original material therein, and therefore, a legitimate chapter in the narrative. And in terms of Ware's story, it is clear he considers that the range of collecting behaviors makes a healthier outcome possible, as seen in Chalky's marriage, fatherhood and accompanying easy-going approach to possessing these objects of desire. At the same time, Rusty Brown charts the malign forces that create and sustain the compulsions of those like Rusty, as they pursue the fetishistic impulse that makes pornography of Happy Meal toys.

All that said, to reduce Rusty Brown to such a screed does an injustice to a work that presents a complex mix of emotions: guilt born of obsessiveness, sorrow at loss of human contact, pity for the spiritually stunted, fear of the warped misplacement of desire, even a kind of perverse joy at the consummation brought by things. In this final aspect, it must be said that Ware's story is not his stance; despite his presence as a character in Rusty Brown and his implied complicity in the syndrome associated with its protagonist's maladjustment, to make the leap from that theme as subject of the work to its statement of belief is to fall into a fatal trap. For if the degree to which a piece of literature may be reduced to a simple "about" is inversely proportional to its value, then the fact that Rusty Brown is only in part about the disease of the collector's mentality argues for its potential greatness.

Finally, the lunch box may be seen as a remarkably compressed piece of interactive concrete irony-here the contrast is between what is represented and what is brought into being-a kind of crossroads device allowing the reader to enter Rusty Brown's world, reflecting on his or her own place on the Rusty-Chalky continuum. From the moment the consumer takes possession of the lunch box, its seductive sway must be confronted: how much will it be seen as itself, appreciated aesthetically or embraced for its utility (or both), and how much as portal to a different, darker sort of satisfaction.