by Jacob Wren
He looked up. There was a large metal cage swaying a few feet above his head. From where he stood he could only see the underside of its metal floor, could not see what was happening within, but the swaying of the cage was clearly fucking. In fact, everywhere was fucking, there was no need to guess. He calmly retraced his steps, making his way back to Claire, new lust growing with every step. Claire lay on a couch by the front door. He sat down beside her. She was there to give him the initiation. She was waiting.
“Are you really dying?”
“Yes.”
“It’s strange. Maybe I don’t know what to believe any more. I don’t quite believe you.”
“Belief has nothing to do with it.”
He wasn’t sure. He thought: If you believe you are going to live then perhaps you live and if you think you’re going to die then your chances grow slimmer. He wanted to say this, convince her, throw in his vote of confidence, but was too afraid. She would think him mystical, just another boring mystic wanting to start a religion and con the masses. Instead he reached over, looking into her eyes for permission as he did so, slowly sliding his hand up into her skirt. He was again about to speak, not sure what to say but wanting to say something, not do this only in silence, but she gave a shiver of pleasure, pushed her hips up into his palm and all thoughts, all words, fled from his mind. Through her underwear he could feel she was wet, softly starting to grind, pushing the wetness up into his palm. He remembered back at the shop she had told him she was in love with someone else, a woman, that falling in love had made her want to live. She slid her legs around him, wrapping him in a tightened embrace, scratching her short nails through the back of his hair. Suddenly this is what he wanted more than anything and if he died he couldn’t care less. He wondered if he would ever fall in love, thought that soon it would be too late. They were real revolutionaries, Claire and the rest. Did he care about revolution? He was impressed by how much they’d accomplished, how hard they’d fought, but looking into their future he saw only failure. She was undoing his belt, his pants, as she kissed him, biting at the edge of his lips, licking his cheek up toward his eye, her teeth dragging lightly over his ear and back down his neck. There was fumbling, his pants, his underwear, awkwardly down over his ankles, propping himself up on one elbow, a slight discomfort and, suddenly, he was inside her. She bit his shoulder hard, straight through his shirt, as with one hand he eased off the rest of her clothes, his other arm wrapped tightly around her back, keeping her close. Why was she doing this? he wondered. But she was a revolutionary, part of a secret society, and in revolution you do what you must. They were two people fucking in a room full of the same. He kissed her and she licked and held his mouth, pressed against him for everything he was worth, new moans, purrs and grunts with every off-balance thrust. His mind was both here and elsewhere, still thinking back to the meeting, how the questions had continued, confused him, growing harsher and more critical, as if they’d brought him to the meeting not for his ideas but to debate. She pressed her thumb into his asshole as he rolled on top.
“You can say my plan for a religion is unethical. But I could just as easily turn it around: What’s so ethical about a virus? I thought the point was to win.”
“With the virus, we’re killing only our enemies. Our friends remain free. With a religion, you’re manipulating friends and enemies alike, manipulating people we hope will someday march alongside us. You’re coercing them, taking away their free will.”
“But the main people we’d be manipulating aren’t our fri-ends. It’s by manipulating them we can turn them into friends. Convert them to the cause.”
For a moment he thought he was going to come, but didn’t. He pulled out and slid his face down between her legs, licking and sucking, short little licks, his hands clenching her ass, barely able to breath but wanting nothing else but to lick and feel her tremble, still thinking back, unable to bring his mind into the present. They had been looking for a fight, considered him, as the unintentional founder of their endeavour, the most worthy, but also most difficult, adversary.
“We’re trying to move towards a world in which subjecting people, manipulating them, becomes a thing of the past. You can’t use poison to cure the disease.”
“You can in a homeopathic dose.”
“Starting a world religion doesn’t sound like homeopathy. It sounds more like surgery, like a heart transplant, like replacing the heart of their business and religion with the heart of ours.”
“But you’re killing people. There must be an ethical argument that converting them is better than killing them.”
“It just depends on what kind of life you think is, and isn’t, worth living. Conversion is another kind of death.”
He could see they had been through all this before, had worked every angle, while he was thinking everything for the first time. Someone who has never had sex writing about sex. Someone who has never killed or fought writing about violence. He scrambled back up her body, thrusting his hips downwards as his lips met her neck. The moment he was inside he again feared he might come, and slowing down, clinging to her, tighter and tighter, everything moving more slowly now, tried to silently pull her into his thoughts of the meeting that was still only a few hours ago.
“But then who are you to decide?”
“As you said twenty years ago, we have found our true course and are following it through to the end.”
“I wasn’t talking about people, I was talking about viruses.”
“That is the beauty of our group: We have taken biology, the virus, as our model.”
“And then how many people do you plan to kill?”
“We don’t think of our project in terms of numbers. We think only of following things through until the end.”
“Let’s say I wanted to think of it in numbers.”
“If the virus kills half of the planet, more than half of the planet, that’s simply a step along the path. The people who are left will be the good ones, can start again, will be the people who can begin to build a more realistic, a more constructive, a better, world. What we destroy opens up possibilities that humanity has never dreamt of. How can you put a price on such a thing?”
The frightening thing is everyone has their reasons.
7. The Fascist Now
Early in 2002 there was a rumour: that while on his way to attend the New York Film Festival, the internationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was denied entry to the United States, presumably because, for them, everyone from that part of the world was the same and therefore a potential terrorist. This rumour was true and, at the time, seemed to me absolute evidence that, post-9/11, the United States had gone completely to hell. (As we know, endless waves of further evidence were to come.)
Early in 2002 Kiarostami still represented something for me, as if he was the last man standing, the last in a long line of untarnished art-house cinema auteurs. It seemed to me, from reading about it in magazines and newspaper articles, that the Tehran cinema of the nineties was a situation comparable to Paris in the sixties – a new wave of cinematic ingenuity, freely mixing documentary and artistic rigour.
What I did not yet know was that at that same 2002 New York Film Festival, Filmmaker A, still a young woman, long before any thoughts of new filmmaking had crossed her mind, was premiering her first feature, a slice-of-life drama about a group of young anarchists living in a shared home in Arizona, a sly mixture of fiction and documentary that skilfully used non-actors, genuine young anarchists, for its cast.
Along with Kiarostami, the Iranian New Wave included the filmmakers Jafar Panahi, Majid Majidi, Bahram Beizai, Dariush Mehrjui, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Masoud Kimiai, Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Parviz Kimiavi, Samira Makhmalbaf, Amir Naderi and Abolfazl Jalili. Most of these names mean nothing to me, except for two. Jafar Panahi, often described as ‘Kiarostami’s disciple,’ who came to my attention when in 2010 he was arrested and jailed (he
was released three months later). And Mohsen Makhmalbaf who is the narrative linchpin in Kiarostami’s film Close-Up, the film that meant the most to me over the course of the nineties, and also the film that Filmmaker A first saw by him, raising so many questions within her. This was the film that led her to want to meet Kiarostami at the New York Film Festival, a desire of course thwarted by his non-arrival.
In a review from 1999, the film critic Godfrey Cheshire writes: “An unusual mixture of found reality and fictional elaboration, Close-Up documents the case of Hossein Sabzian, the Makhmalbaf impersonator. The film began with a story in the Tehran weekly Sorush, which said that a man had been arrested for pretending to be Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of Iran’s most famous film directors, to a middle-class family. The ruse apparently was somewhat innocent at first. The family, the Ahankhahs, invited the supposed Makhmalbaf into their home after the wife met him on a bus. He regaled them with tales of his career and offered to put them in his next film. But the deception soon began to unravel. ‘Makhmalbaf’ didn’t know anything about an international award the papers said he had won. More crucially, he borrowed money from the family and didn’t return it. Suspecting they were being set up for a bigger rip-off, Mr. Ahankhah contacted the authorities.”
In July 2010 I sent the following email to a handful of people:
Dear ,
I’m currently in this one-month writing residency just outside of Viborg, Denmark, in the middle of Danish nature. There are green rolling hills, sheep and cows, and an amazingly placid lake. There is absolutely nothing to do here and it is very, very quiet. I am here with a writer from Uganda, one from Italy, one from NY, plus a few from Denmark (who rotate).
I am working on a new novel entitled Artists Are Self-Absorbed. [Later the title was changed to Polyamorous Love Song.] I didn’t mean it to happen, but somehow Abbas Kiarostami has become a character within the book, in and around his film Close-Up, how it plays with the boundary between reality and fiction. Also how Close-Up seems to be extremely different from any of his other films and what that might mean.
So I thought I would send a question to a handful of people who might have some thoughts. Don’t feel in any way obligated, but I was wondering if you have any stories about, or insights into, Kiarostami, Close-Up or Mohsen Makhmalbaf? Or if they mean anything in particular to you?
Very much hope all is well.
Jacob
The first reply came almost immediately. It was from someone I didn’t know, who I stumbled upon on the internet around the same time I was composing the above email, a complete stranger living somewhere in Iran.
To tell you the truth, I’m not that familiar with Kiarostami or Makhmalbaf, it is ages that they do not live in Iran and their movies are not shown in Iran, because of our totalitarian regime. Censoring their movies and political reasons were the cause of their immigration to other countries. I am not a fan of Persian cinema, but your message motivated me to go and watch their movies, especially Kiarostami. Thanks and sorry that I couldn’t help you. Wish you luck and success.
Filmmaker A turned twenty-six in the summer of 2002. She was excited she had made her first feature before turning thirty, and that it had already been accepted at such a prestigious festival. She was thinking so much about how to use real people, real life, in her films. What were the repercussions and ethics of using non-actors, their stories, their improvisations? To what degree did she want to take the things they said and did and shape them, script them, make their stories into her own works of art, and to what degree did she want to let things stand, to cut the material into her story unaltered, into a narrative she would create in and around it? When she shaped the material more, it sometimes felt like she was betraying the very performers who had been so generous with their time and ideas, that she was twisting the semi-improvised scenes so they were no longer recognizable to those who cared most about them. But when she used the material unaltered, it was as if she wasn’t doing her job, she might as well leave the set and let them make the film themselves – a more politically radical move but possibly less strong on an artistic level.
The next response I got was from the Iranian playwright and theatre director Amir Reza Koohestani.
I am very much interested in your project and will be more than happy to help . . .
I personally met Kiarostami twice, as he was supposed to adapt one of my plays, Dance on Glasses, for cinema. We met in the hotel in Brussels during the Kunsten Festival 2004 and then in Tehran. That project never happened, because of so many different reasons, although we are still following each other’s works. Accidentally, I am writing a film script for Mani Haghighi based on Kiarostami’s plot. So we talk a lot about Kiarostami’s cinema and his manifest. Besides, I am a fan of Close-Up, so don’t hesitate to write to me any further questions.
In New York that year, when people would speak to Filmmaker A about her film, it seemed they always wanted to know the same thing: How much of it was real and how much was invented? And Filmmaker A couldn’t tell them, either because she couldn’t remember or because answering such a question in anything resembling a direct manner felt like a betrayal of some sort. A betrayal of the spontaneity of the adaptations, of the porous barriers between reality and fiction that wrapped around and weaved through every day of the shoot and edit.
At the same festival there was a German film, I believe it might have even won a prize, about the years leading up to World War Two. It covered the slow rise of Fascism and how powerless those who were against it felt, how difficult it seemed to do anything to stem the tide. Filmmaker A watched the film at the gala along with everyone else, and as she watched all she could think was: They wouldn’t let Kiarostami into the country, they’re interring ‘suspected terrorists’ in camps, it’s just like what happened in Germany, just like this fucking boring film, the same thing is happening here. The film was well made, clean and sleek, and as the young intellectual protagonists watched the Nazi parades, the music swelled ominously to indicate that the noose was tightening.
The German intellectuals – each played with panache by photogenic, most likely ambitious, young actors – had endless conversations, fretting about strategy, about what could be done, conversations in bars, smoke-filled coffee shops and on the street, until the climactic scene in which the male and female leads, who, without realizing, had gradually fallen in love over the course of the film, smuggle a group of Jewish children over the border into Switzerland. A happy ending to Nazism. Just on the other side, they stand in the frame of a panoramic shot, dawn softly breaking in the background behind them, and discuss whether to stay in Switzerland or return to the struggle back home. She decides to stay. His conscience won’t let him live in peace while others – friends, relatives and strangers – are in such overwhelming danger. Music swells over the closing credits as a futile quest for justice takes precedence over new love. This is bullshit, Filmmaker A thought under her breath, this isn’t the cinema we need.
It was also sometime around 2002, or perhaps just after, that I read the following on the internet, written by Terry Tempest Williams in response to a friend asking if she was out of jail yet.
Dearest Bert:
Yes, I am out of jail. And here we are hours from war. I appreciated receiving the NY Times editorial. You are right, it articulates perfectly our feelings. On Saturday, there was the “Code Pink” Rally at Martin Luther King Park. I honestly cannot articulate the power of that day. We walked four miles or so to Lafayette Park directly across from The White House only to find a blockade of police dressed in black, bullet proof vests, rifles, clubs – standing shoulder to shoulder. We were not allowed to enter the park, this park that is a public park, this park I had just sat in hours before, this park where “Pro-life demonstrators” were standing in with their hideous, brutal pictures. They were standing in front of The White House – where we could not. We tried to negotiate with the police. It was clear they could barely uph
old the law they were being asked to enforce. We made the decision that 25 of us would test the waters . . . Rachel Bagby, one of the most powerful, beautiful African American women, began singing with the strength of her voice (her voice is legendary). She began singing, “All we are saying . . . is give peace a chance.” She would not stop. We joined her, thousands of women joined in this song. Her eyes locked on the African American policeman blocking her. His eyes met hers . . . and in that moment, you could see the instant recognition that both of them were there because of dissent, the dissent of their mothers and fathers before them. He quietly stepped to the side and created an opening, the opening we walked through. This is how I remember it. Once “inside” we walked toward the White House, now prohibited. Slowly, incrementally, we just kept walking backwards, singing, quietly, peacefully. The police said our arrest was imminent. That at 4:05 p.m. they would begin the arrests if we did not leave. 4:05 came, 4:10, 4:20 – We had managed to simply be there, as people have always been allowed to be there before all this “Homeland Security.” The local captain of the police said he was not going to arrest us. He then asked Nina Utne, in a whisper, if he could have a Code Pink button for his wife. The atmosphere changed abruptly when the federal police arrived. They arrested Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, press – They took her camera. She was yelling, “You cannot arrest me I am press, I am protected by the First Amendment. I am bearing witness. I am not with these women.” It didn’t matter. They then went over and arrested a second press person, took her camera. It was only then I became frightened. We kept walking until our heels touched the White House fence. We turned and faced The White House . . . our “illegal act.” Two cars arrived and wagons – the FBI police arrived, set up a tripod with a video camera and filmed us, each one of us – after they were done – the arrests began. Can I tell you what that felt like to watch Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Griffin and the Reverend Patricia (I have forgotten her last name) who had just returned from Iraq, handcuffed, photographed like criminals against a white sheet taped to the paddy wagon and taken away? Can I tell you what it felt like to be stripped of all possessions, notebook, pen, handcuffed, photographed, then yanked into the back of a dark vehicle and shoved into a makeshift cell and find yourself sitting next to Amy Goodman who almost died in Timor – and then hear the door slam shut and locked. In the back of the vehicle, we listened to these women tell their stories about what was it in their lives that brought them to this place. None of us had any intention of being arrested. And then we were taken to Anacostia Corrections Facility, booked, fingerprinted, and locked in a cell. Alice, Maxine, and I were in one cell with a brave student named Holly, 19 years old, and a wonderful housewife from Houston who told us her name was “Mrs. McWhorter.” Four hours later, we were released. As Maxine said, “It was the least we could do.” Forgive this long letter, but my heart is full and what can we do but tell our stories and stand on our ground, even as we go to war. I read the other day in one of the poems sent to Congress that “our personal anarchy is composed of deep pain and intense joys.”