Ginormous a-holes do not good heroes make: The Dice Man

(Another rewritten post from my own blog. Deals with fictional rape stuff that might be triggering).

It is a depressing fact of life that some people cannot tell the difference between cool, rule-breaking rebels and entitled jerks.

Good-guy rebels break stupid rules, afflict the comfortable and challenge the status quo. It’s an easy but erroneous leap to conclude that if your protagonist is a rule-breaker, he must be a good-guy rebel, but it’s not always so. Consider, for example, Sean Connery’s 1966 movie A Fine Madness. The movie would have us believe Connery’s Irish-American poet, Samson, is a free spirit challenging the system. He’s rude to stuffy people, refuses to pay taxes or hold a job (his waitress wife supports him while he works on his masterpiece) and believes in polyamory. In reality, he’s an entitled a-hole who treats his wife like crap and sleeps around on her. He talks about challenging the system but he only does it when the system isn’t letting him do what he wants.

I cordially loathe the movie but it pales next to Luke Rhinehart’s 1971 novel The Dice Man. Rhinehart (a pseudonym, also the name of the novel’s narrator) doesn’t endorse being a jerk, he celebrates the freedom to be a full-on-sociopath.

I bought the book because I was intrigued by the concept of a man making decisions by constantly rolling dice. I went through a long phase where I did that myself. I’m disorganized by nature so I learned to compensate by becoming hyper-organized. In my forties I began to notice that I’d become positively obsessive (“Hmm, will going to the 1:40 show instead of the 1:50 show allow me to maximize my productivity?”); to break myself out of it, I took to rolling dice for minor decisions. So when I encountered The Dice Man Abe Books’ Weird Books web page (alongside such classics as A History of Thimbles, Do-It-Yourself Coffins, Land Snails and Slugs of Russia and How to Avoid Huge Ships) I ordered it. I’d have been better off with the Russian snails.

Rhinehart — the novel’s protagonist, not the author — is a psychoanalyst frustrated because psychiatry teaches him how to live with his negative desires but not how to act on them: “Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.” Rhinehart feels if he’s suppressing part of himself, that makes his life meaningless. For example, he wants to rape his kids’ teenage babysitter. Psychiatry tells him he’s not a bad person if he has that feeling as long as he doesn’t act on it — but if he doesn’t act on it, how can he ever be whole?

The moment he tells us this, I knew the book was not going to work for me. Although Rhinehart (the author) writes in a humorous tone, he’s not laughing at his protagonist but at the absurdity of being too inhibited to rape. One of Rhinehart’s (the protagonist) patients is a serial rape-murderer of little girls and we’re supposed to find his frustrations funny too.

After a party at the Rhineharts’ apartment, the good doctor sees a die lying on a table. To inject some life into his life, he decides his next actions will be based on a roll of the die. One to three, he goes to bed; four to five, he goes out for a drink; six, he goes downstairs and rapes his best friend’s obnoxious wife. Guess which face comes up? But don’t worry, it’s one of the old school fictional rapes where she’s pissed off he didn’t ask for consent but she enjoyed it, and is even up for more. So no harm done (the flyleaf describes this as the “sweet taste” of forbidden love — come to think of it, that’s probably where I knew I’d bought the wrong book). And it’s not like raping someone based on a random die roll reflects badly on him — it was just blind chance that number came up, what else could he do?Giving in to his dark side feels so liberating, Rhinehart continues “diceliving.” That includes another rape or two, consensual sex with different partners (including men), spending a day doing whatever his wife asks, randomly changing therapies on his patients, spending a day asking himself what would Jesus do?, and eventually leaving his family. Not that the marriage was going great: his wife was understandably pissed to learn nothing she wants influences Rhinehart as much as his dice rolls. Even when Rhinehart’s not raping anyone, the book is unpleasantly sexist: women are either nagging and unreasonable like his wife or they exist as vessels for his seed.

Rhinehart also becomes evangelical about his way of life, arguing diceliving is more effective than psychoanalysis because it pushes you to confront your dark side and leave your comfort zone. Which I suppose sounds better than “it gives me an excuse to rape.”

The best thing I can say about the book is that it foreshadows 21st century America depressingly well. The fictional Rhinehart’s attitude of “do what I want is the whole of the law” reflects what we’re seeing around us every day of this pandemic. People who think they should have the right not to get vaccines or wear masks regardless of the risk to others (to see nothing of people like this). As Rick Perlstein says, they reject any idea of the common good or of even a mild sacrifice to save lives.

They’re the Dice Man, incarnate.

#SFWApro.