by Jacob Wren
As she was speaking, I wondered if she looked tired, realizing that all the photos I had seen were from a time when she was much younger, that since she began this particular journey she hadn’t allowed photographs, so all of them must have been from before.
“For it to become a genre, for it to have any rules whatsoever, is anathema to its very formation. Nonetheless, tonight I will attempt to provide a few basic guidelines. You can take them or leave them. But I have given a great number of talks over the past fifteen years and was beginning to feel that this activity was a bit meaningless if I wasn’t willing to take a stand. Because for me the new filmmaking can mean very little if it is not, in some sense, also a new form of humanism, a new form of ethics.”
We could not believe what we were hearing. Our hearts sank. Not anarchy, not joy, not freedom, risk and ‘the sensational unexpected’ – all the reasons we were doing it and loving it and in it for. But humanism, that oldest and emptiest of all shop-worn clichés. I looked down the aisle and could tell we were all thinking the exact same thing. Not only did the emperor have no clothes, but she was artistically bankrupt to a degree that none of us could have previously imagined.
“For me – and of course each of you must find you own entry point and approach – but for me the stories we enact must, on some level, be based on compassion and empathy. Stories of lust, stories of violence, rebellion and betrayal – I do not see how such enactments can add positive meaning to the shared, lived value of the world, the world to which our films both add and simultaneously reimagine.”
She had barely even finished this sentence when five audience members stood up and, altogether, with a rather precise efficiency, made for the door. And somehow we knew, even though they were in regular clothes. Without saying a word we stood up and followed. The five of them left and the eight of us followed and every single person in that auditorium was provided an opening, the potential to see the situation, her position, differently, like an electricity striking the room, the perfect little exodus.
The Mascot Front were somehow legends in the new filmmaking community. We had never seen them up close, but we spoke of them often, rumours and hearsay: the two modes at the very heart of our common endeavour. And now we were all standing in the parking lot, looking at each other, angry at our mentor but this anger mitigated by how excited we secretly were to finally meet each other. We knew they had heard of us as well. I’m not sure how we knew, perhaps the same way we intuited phone numbers. And we all stood there in the parking lot, overwhelmed, no one speaking a fucking word. Until finally one of them said, I think he was ‘the Popsicle’ but there was no way to be sure: “No, it was bound to go this way. I’m not surprised.”
We all quietly agreed. We wanted to agree, strengthen this first contact. In retrospect, it did seem inevitable. But if I think back to that ice-pick phrase, a new form of humanism, to the negative ripple it sent through our row as we sat in the auditorium waiting for a light to shine us in the right direction, the only thing I can say for certain is that we had been nothing if not surprised.
* * *
It was a perfectly nondescript suburban house. Every six months this house changed: changed neighbourhoods, changed cities, changed countries, changed forms. This constant changing was one of the many things it meant for them to be underground. From the outside (but were we actually outside?) it seemed exhausting. We went to this house many times over the course of six months. They had just moved there, and after six months they moved again. We did not know exactly where to and, at least so far, were never to visit the new location.
In the basement of that suburban house a man was chained to a radiator. Strangely, he did not seem unhappy about his predicament. We did not know exactly who he was but Steve, also a visual artist, did know who he was and told us he was in fact rather famous, or at least acclaimed within a certain sector of the art world. We no longer knew precisely what we felt about fame – his, our own, or anyone else’s.
There was a very beautiful woman who sat a few feet away from the apparently famous man chained to the radiator, a woman whose job it seemed was to sit there and watch over him. She had a box of old sketchbooks in front of her and read and reread them constantly. It seemed to me that the sketchbooks belonged to the man. From time to time the woman would read something to him, or say something, or just look up and stare at him with possibly curious eyes. One time, as she glanced up from a notebook, I overheard her say: “So . . . you really thought we’d make a good art project?” I couldn’t precisely identify her tone, she was slippery that way, but I believe a noticeable degree of sarcasm tinted each word. I was in the other room, watching through the doorway, and didn’t hear his reply. But I did hear her reply to him. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain how many unintentional, but also, I don’t know . . . pathetic, layers of irony there are in that idea.” And she laughed a little, I believe in a rather relaxed way given the situation.
It was also a period during which I was spending much more time alone with Melanie. It was always fantastic with Melanie, and often, when I was with her, I wondered quietly to myself if I even needed the others. It wasn’t always fantastic with the others, but sometimes, yes, it was also fantastic, or at least very good. Eric was also spending more time alone with Steve. When we saw them around, they were never together, but when we didn’t see them you could pretty much be sure they were entwined. Melanie never stopped by the Mascot house, never came along. Guns made her nervous, that definitely wasn’t part of the game she signed on for. Eric also rarely dropped by the house, I believe for similar reasons. Sometimes, when Steve was with me, I had a feeling that Eric was also with Melanie, but couldn’t be certain.
And of course, within everything that we were doing and attempting and standing in for, all of that was completely allowed.
* * *
After the talk, Filmmaker A went for a long walk along the river. When she had spoken out against lust and violence, two groups had gotten up and left. She had no idea who they were, but then again she could guess. She was amazed so many people had even come to her talk. She was amazed she could still say something that would incite a dozen or so practitioners to stand up and leave. She knew her star was in decline, could sense it. The new filmmaking was no longer so new. People were no longer startled by it, if they ever had been. But she was trying not to think so much about all that now, though she had been thinking of it a great deal, perhaps too much, over the past few months, wondering what to do, if there was some shift she could make in direction or emphasis that would effectively re-spark things, re-energize at least certain aspects of a waning reception.
Tonight, instead, she found herself thinking of Silvia. She didn’t know why she was thinking of Silvia. In fact, she hadn’t thought so much about her in many years. A few weeks ago she had heard that soon Silvia would be publishing a book. Perhaps that was what had put the name back in her head. She wondered what the book was about, if there was any chance she might appear in some minor role, in some chapter as a background character. But she didn’t actually think it was vague news of an upcoming book that brought Silvia back to mind. It was true what some of them were saying, she was perhaps getting a bit tired, or at least nostalgic. Those first trips overseas, with Silvia at her side: every stop had been so new, fierce and energizing. At the time she would never have thought such things, but now, tonight, walking along the still shimmer of the riverbank, she realized just how much Silvia had contributed to that original excitement and energy.
She wondered if she could call her. She wondered how long it had been since they last spoke. She took out her phone and clicked through the numbers, checking to see if she still had Silvia’s in her phone, just to check, just to wonder whether she might have the guts to actually call. She closed her phone and opened it again. As if she couldn’t remember whether or not the number was actually there. She closed it again. Stopped. Looked across the river. The night wa
s crisp. She raised her phone and looked at it and as she did so it rang. She was looking at the phone in the foreground, with the river behind it, watching it ring, not recognizing the number. She secretly hoped it was Silvia but knew that that was unlikely if not impossible. She answered.
“Hello.”
It was a woman’s voice, one she didn’t recognize.
“I’m wondering if you’d like to come join me.”
She didn’t recognize it. She was looking at the river, wondering again, just for a moment, like a split-second flash across her mind, just what the fuck she was doing with her life.
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
“Let’s not speak about that for the moment. For now, I have just one question. I’m wondering if I were to give you an address, if you’d like to come join me.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Where are you?”
“In my bedroom.”
* * *
Samantha lay naked on the bed. Now all she could do was wait. As she waited, she masturbated. She liked the idea of their mentor walking in on her as she was just beginning to stroke herself, a deliciously inappropriate idea, smiling as she thought this, recalling how often they had said to one another that they were free of such restrictions, that they had left the inappropriate behind. She was wet quickly, almost as soon as she reached down, realizing how excited she was by this new scenario, a scenario whipped up on the fly and set into motion with a single phone call, more excited than she previously imagined. She touched herself lightly, charged with the idea of being walked in on, of being walked in on by a woman who had just, albeit indirectly, denounced them to a room of almost three hundred and yet who remained, in some sense, responsible for everything they were doing or had done.
The front door was unlocked. The lights in the downstairs hallway and on the staircase were both on. Her bedroom door was open, the lamp by her bedside also shining. As her excitement grew, she listened for the turn of the door handle, and then she thought she heard it. She imagined the front door now open, her new friend standing in the open doorway, seeing the light, deciding whether or not to go in. The others had complained that their former mentor looked tired, washed up, but to Samantha it was clear exactly how she looked: lonely. She imagined that loneliness drawing Filmmaker A down the hallway, up the stairs, and as she imagined, she heard footsteps, rubbing herself more firmly now, feeling her breathing become just that little bit more quick, more sharp, imagining how these sharp, sweet breaths might sound in the staircase, in the downstairs hall – enticing – and turning her head towards the door, stroked the inside of her thigh with her other hand.
As she started to come she realized that Filmmaker A was already sitting at the foot of the bed, looking uncomfortable, not looking at her at all. Samantha must have closed her eyes for a moment, not noticed her come in. She stopped moving her fingers but didn’t remove her hand.
“Why don’t you take off your clothes?”
Filmmaker A didn’t look over but started to silently undress. Samantha slowly sat up, slid towards her, and began to help, kissing her neck, her shoulders, her back, unclasping her bra, slowly caressing her inner thighs.
“Aren’t you glad you came?” Samantha purred, her lips just a few inches from their mentor’s, licking and gently biting.
Filmmaker A stopped, went limp. She had started to caress Samantha but now stopped.
“I don’t know. There’s something I don’t like.”
“But there’s so much to like.” Samantha kissed her again, stroked her face and kissed her neck, all to no response.
“I don’t like the fact this isn’t real.”
* * *
During the few months we were allowed to hang out at the Mascot house, the famous artist chained to the radiator exerted a strange fascination upon us. In the art press he had been reported missing, presumed dead. Museums were considering the possibility of posthumous retrospectives. His prices were skyrocketing.
There in the basement, the beautiful woman sitting just a few feet away from him, patiently flipping through a seemingly endless series of notebooks, he seemed amused, sometimes tired but just as often alert and engaged. The woman flipping through the notebooks was genuinely striking, it seemed obvious he was in love. We often asked the other Mascots about him, about both of them, but as usual were given little information.
It occurred to me that while, for both us and the Mascots, our activities were strong examples of the new filmmaking, for him, being chained to that radiator, watched over by a woman he was growing to love, was in a similar way an artwork, perhaps an artwork he was hoping would last for the rest of his life.
The first time I spoke to him – a short conversation as I stood in the doorway and, for obvious reasons, he remained in place – I was startled to realize he knew nothing about the new filmmaking. That, from his perspective, the activities of the Mascots were considerably more real. And also that the Mascots continued to conceal this crucial piece of information, as if no one wanted to let him in on a joke.
I thought of how many of us were drinking the cocktail now, how there must be people taking the cocktail, perhaps many, who also didn’t know. And I found myself appreciating the delicate pleasure of these subtle slippages between filmmaking and pure reality, how when filmmaking was at its best the two were so evocatively indistinguishable.
Also during this first conversation he told me how, before he came here, he had been working on a piece or series about the Mascot Front. And how, over the course of working on this particular theme, the project had sent him into a kind of crisis, led him towards the conclusion that making work for galleries was rather feeble when compared to the much more dangerous pursuit of attempting real interventions within politics or society. How of course there had been various times in history during which artists had been persecuted, but in his lifetime they had not, and persecution itself felt like evidence of a richness and validity he had come to see as artistic, alluding to the fact that no one we knew had been more persecuted than the Mascots.
I agreed with him hesitantly, feeling uncomfortable that I possessed certain information he did not, at the same time not wanting to upset the overall balance of the situation by revealing anything the Mascots did not wish to be revealed. Just then the woman returned – it was strange I never learned her name – and her arrival signalled the end of our short conversation. She picked a notebook off the top of the pile and continued to read.
* * *
Steve and Eric sat in Steve’s studio, every kind of possible object and configuration of objects strewn around them. Eric was naked, Steve fully dressed, Steve’s hand tightly gripping Eric’s erection, both crying, but crying in a manner that brought them closer together. Still crying, Steve brought his face down towards Eric’s cock and rubbed his tears against the foreskin, wetting it, licking off the tears with short, sad but playful licks. They didn’t know exactly why they were crying. Maybe they were only crying in order to try something new together, they had already done so much, or maybe it just happened naturally, the way tears sometimes do.
They had started crying in discussion, a discussion that began when Eric said he wanted to talk about the films, wondering, the way one wonders aloud to a lover, if they were still fun, still vital. Noticing that sometimes he felt bored or jealous, and yet within the scripts neither boredom nor jealousy were allowed, and how dirty never felt quite dirty enough if you couldn’t honestly speak your mind. And they had started to talk about jealousy, Steve saying that so often in the very best scenes jealousy was the subtext, the unspoken element that made everything, every element and moment, more compelling, conflicted, alive. As Steve took Eric more fully in his mouth, the tears slowing but not stopping completely, Eric reached over, as slowly as possible undoing Steve’s fly, then just as teasingly starting on the belt buckle. As he did so he remembered how, just minutes ago, he had been so insistent that he did
n’t want jealousy to always be the subtext (did it have to be so repetitive?). Sometimes he wanted the subtext to be love.
* * *
I told Melanie about the man chained to the radiator and the woman watching over him. She seemed intrigued, more interested than I had expected. Before she had refused to join me on my many excursions to the Mascot house but now, suddenly, she wanted to. I thought maybe she wanted to fuck the beautiful woman or the man chained to the radiator or both. I thought maybe I wanted to watch or join in. I imagined various scenarios, scripting them in my head as we stood at the front door and I gave the correct password.
In the front room several versions of each Mascot outfit hung, newly pressed and cleaned, ready replacements for the ones being worn somewhere out in the world at this very moment. I was watching Melanie carefully, trying to sense her reaction to each room, each new thing. The outfits seemed to attract her, as she took a few steps towards them, looking back at me with a smile.
It had taken me weeks to figure out who went with which outfit. Bear was the tall solid one, in some sense I thought of her as the leader, though I also knew very well that, from their perspective, they had no ongoing leaders. (She was in the room with us now.) Rabbit was short, maybe South Asian or Portuguese, I was never a particularly good judge of such things. Tortoise looked kind of tough, barely spoke. I believed he was the one who organized most of the weapons. Melanie turned away from the outfits and smiled at Bear, who smiled back. “You’ve killed people?” she asked.
“What kind of question is that?” Bear wasn’t offended, still smiling slyly.
“Just trying to get a feel for the territory.”
“There are between 150 million and 1.5 billion insects for every human being on earth. We’ve both killed insects but they’re by far the majority. What does it mean to keep things in proportion?”