The boos at the Linc are the sound of self-hatred. David Lynch knew better.

I turned around. The man didn’t, but he wasn’t done.

“What’s wrong with people in this town?”

My code enforcer shrugged as he walked away. I couldn’t see his face. The outrage in his voice rolled on in my head.

That genuine indignation over the code-breaking infraction: don’t wear your colors proud after a bad loss. That disbelief. Those Philly things.

A cascade of boos

The day before, the Eagles had embarrassed themselves at home against the Chicago Bears, the second of a three-game losing streak, on the heels of a monumental second-half meltdown in Dallas, and a week before yet another disastrous offensive performance at the LA Chargers. The skid ended on December 14, with Joe Biden in attendance and a 31-0 blowout of the helpless Raiders.

As I streamed the Bears game, I first heard the boos cascading down after each three-and-out. Then, the broadcast showed us the angry faces in the crowd. The legions of thumbs down. Even the local Grinch looked on in disgust.

When a professional football team gets whooped in a home-game on television, the B-roll will alternate between the following close-ups: teary-eyed children; people watching the jumbotron with dread on their face and their hands together, as if asking for mercy to a higher power; the slumped shoulders of fans too defeated to lift their plastic cup of beer.

Not in Philadelphia. Not when the Eagles self-destruct. And it doesn’t matter if, for all of their recent losing, they are way above .500, and it doesn’t matter that they are the reigning Super Bowl champions. No: in Philly, when the going gets tough, we rage, as Dylan Thomas wrote, “against the dying of the light”. The surge of negativity feels so overwhelming that the team’s offensive line tried to block it by installing a positivity rabbit in the locker room, only to ditch the lucky jawn a few days later when it failed to deliver victory.

Tantrums and antics on tap. On the worst days, Philly’s collective persona presents itself like a cross between the Anger character in Inside Out and Baby Trump. Remind me who said bad things happen in Philadelphia?

A city given to self-hatred

Now, I am not immune to criticism and sneering. Against the Bears, the Eagles looked so bad on both sides of the ball that I stopped watching at the end of the second quarter, knowing they would not dig themselves out of that hole.

But, as a soccer (the real football, BTW) fan who grew up in Paris, there’s one simple lesson I learned in those long years before the home team won the Champions League last spring: when at the stadium, it makes a lot more of emotional sense to just stand behind the ones you love, no matter how bad they look on the field.

If you give in to frustration, if you lash out on the players or the coaches, if you egg their home, it’s really not them you are hating on; it’s your own damn self. I left Paris twenty years ago. Philly has been my other home ever since. Most of the time I love it, especially when I’m in Paris, but it frequently drives me mad, chiefly because I don’t know a city more given to self-hatred (if I had to name my other sanity underminers, the state of local public transit would definitely make it to the top of the list).

That’s from someone who was born in Evreux, a small provincial town one hour outside Paris that was bombed into near-nothingness, first by the Germans, then by the Allied Forces, during WW2. Look it up, whenever you’re feeling like you as a Philadelphian deserve better sports teams.

No one likes us, we don’t care

So, what came first? The chicken or the smashed egg? The atmospheric grudge in Philly or the city’s ability to make us lose it?

Provincialism (which is not necessarily a bad thing) has nothing to do with size, population, or distance from the so-called center. Provincialism as a negative is a function of frustration, anger, and aversion to change. It’s an essentialist and defensive mindset—we are what we are, always scorned and underrated, we deserve better, you can never understand us—and it can also be a very toxic kind of entitlement. So goes Philly’s collective stream of consciousness: no one likes us, we don’t care. The US may have become the most provincial country in that respect; but I am digressing.

Besides the Super Bowl, what exactly are we supposed to be defending in this city? That question has always puzzled me, and I’m not sure I will ever come close to finding the answer.

A beautiful mood?

One hundred years ago, W.C. Fields offered this fictional epitaph for himself in Vanity Fair: “Here lies W.C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.” The joke stuck, evidence of the local self-hating tendencies. In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, David Lynch twisted the words a bit and had them delivered by FBI special agent Dale Cooper:

“I’d rather be here than Philadelphia.”

When he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1965 to 1970, Lynch was impressed by the city’s “filth”. “In the atmosphere there was fear, there was violence, there was despair and sadness. There was a feeling of insanity,” he recalled in 2014. (The third season of my Hidden City podcast, Song of the City, coming this January, examines how Lynch invented his cinematic language in Philly.)

Lynch came from Missoula, Montana. Talk about provincial. He was traumatized by Philly, but he didn’t resent it. He was in awe of the city’s “beautiful mood” and, in his art, he used the terror that he experienced here to create films of amazing beauty and strangeness.

I would be surprised if Lynch cared much about NFL football, but I can’t help wondering what he would have made of my man on South Street and of the irate faces at the Linc.