Caution: this article contains major spoilers for the S-Town podcast.
Our lives are not just our lives. Even at our most isolated, or our most misanthropic, or our most closed off, the trudge of seconds and minutes and years which pass through us make a path through other lives as well. In order to know someone, to understand who they are and to feel the weight of their life and death, you have to know the individuals they connected themselves to, willingly or otherwise. And you have to know the place they emerged from, the culture and community that shaped them.
If you want to know someone, really know them inside and out, then you have to examine each gear and lever and pulley, the intricate, interconnected machinery of their lifetime, that moved them, regardless of whether they embraced it, fought it, or even knew about it.
As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist, that’s what the S-Town podcast, created by This American Life stalwart Brian Reed, tries to do for John B. McLemore, an eccentric, tortured resident of the small Alabama town that is his hometown, eternal punching bag, and long-lamented final resting place all at once.
Reed offers any number of feints in this effort. He initially frames the podcast as a murder mystery or a treasure hunt, always offering some little tease or hook to keep the listener flowing through each episode and leave them hungry for what comes next. But at root, S-Town is something more like a character study, or a stone-turning investigation that’s less interested in any vast conspiracies or hidden prizes than it is in examining who this unusual-but-unforgettable individual is and how he sees the world.
It ultimately amounts to an aural memorial to John B. McLemore, one that absorbs and encompasses the biggest landmarks of his life and death, and marks him as someone worth understanding, however inscrutable or hard John might have made that at times.
McLemore himself devoted his life to similar efforts: to measuring the march of time and to preserving parts of the past and the totems of its passage. As an “antiquarian horologist” (read: old clock-restorer), he could understand real life intricate machinery like no one else, combing and picking at the wood and other constituent parts of antique clocks and nursing them back to health using the techniques of the times in which they were crafted.
And yet at the end of his days, McLemore was blind to the presence of the same interwoven pieces and parts of his own life, laden with anxieties from what he believed to be the unavoidable end of the world as we know it, He left this world exhausted by the minor indignities that had accumulated and become immovable in his brain, and perhaps even sick from the work that he loved and pursued.
The irony, revealed over the course of S-Town’s seven-episode journey into the life and of John B. McLemore and its backdrop, is that for all his sense of loneliness, despite his premonition of certain doom, John was loved. He was possessive, seemingly at the ready to alienate and push away the people who became close to him for fear that they would grow closer to someone else and do so first. But he was missed, cared for, and mourned. In that, S-Town becomes a telescoping story of a man who thought himself bereft of connections and care, and yet touched so many lives, so many people, who are ready to acknowledge his faults, but readily sing his praises all the more loudly into the public record.
That’s the yin and yang of John B. McLemore. He seemed to hate Woodstock, Alabama, giving it the appellation, “Shit Town,” that became the title of this series, but he also helped build the town, seeming to take pride in it as something he had improved. He was someone endlessly worried about what doom and gloom the future would certainly hold, but also someone devoted to recreating and preserving the past.
As captured on S-Town, McLemore would lament the presaged, ignoble ends of every project in his life — from the young men he tried to set on the right path to Woodstock, Alabama itself — but he missed the ways in which the people he knew, the things he set his mind to, were better off for him having been a part of their lives and progress. He constantly feared losing the important souls in his life to imagined rivals or to their poor opinions of him, and would often push them away in the process. But after he left this world of garbage he so disdained, there was an outpouring of sadness and praise for the man who thought himself so precarious in the lives of those for whom he cared.
And most of all, McLemore is someone who railed on and on about the things missing from his existence, about the misery of his hometown, about the end of the world. And yet, in his final, characteristically voluminous message to all assembled to hear it, he celebrates the life that he led, the chance to pursue the passions he feared would end in ruin. He lived in what he considered a beyond backwater burg and demeaned the greater things it kept him from, but also celebrated it as a vantage point from which he could nevertheless become a citizen of the world. He cut his own life short from some combination of depression and physical illness, but nevertheless considered it a life well-lived.
S-Town doesn’t just present all of this — in exquisite, heart-rending detail — in order to cast John as a man of contradictions. It is, instead, devoted to the idea that we all contain multitudes. It would be easy to reduce John himself to a crank or a tortured genius, to reduce his friend and surrogate son Tyler Goodson to a wronged crusader or a heartless conman, to reduce John’s cousins to carpet-bagging interlopers or well-meaning kin, to reduce Woodstock to a backwards hole or close-knit small town, to reduce the world as a whole to crumbling pit of snakes or an upward march of progress.
S-Town resists that urge. It is devoted to the opposite idea — that there is endless complexity to people, and that towns, being made up of people, are full of their own broader set of interwoven, endless complexities, and that the world, being made up of towns and people and even cantankerous, antiquarian horologists, is bigger and more intricate and ever more full of surprises and different perspectives and lives than one could ever imagine.
At times, S-Town makes it feel as though John B. McLemore had glimpsed those boundless complications and gone mad from then. He seemed burdened with sight, to know the scope of possibility enough to fear it and miss what parts of it he couldn’t keep a hold of. But he was also likely sick, whether from his work or from the indignities life slings at those unfortunate enough to bear the brunt of the withering passage of time.
That sickness made John B. McLemore blind, to the people who loved him, to the good things he’d brought to this world, and to the idea that with that tremendous complexity came a tremendous capacity for kindness and caring. Brian Reed and the countless people he spoke to for S-Town cared about John. This podcast stands as a monument to him, and to those uncountable, unknowable intricacies that tick within us and within the places we live, and to the value of the unending quest to comprehend them, and thereby ourselves, a little bit better.
