Polyamorous Love Song

by Jacob Wren

  Love to you,

  Terry

  Abbas Kiarostami being denied entry to the United States and Terry Tempest Williams’s email above: From 2002, or around that time, those are the two things I remember most. I am aware that by including such a letter I am highlighting how much better written, how much more heartfelt and concrete, it is than anything I have come up with, but I believe it is worth it. Sometimes memories can feel almost like dreams.

  After watching the award-winning German film, Filmmaker A went to yet another festival party. In cocktail conversation after conversation, she rolled out her feeling that what was happening now in America was just like what happened in Germany in the years leading up to the war. She was amazed how few people agreed with her, and even those who did seemed to feel she was exaggerating. How could so many people not see? Everyone thinking one thing and you thinking the opposite of course does not guarantee you are wrong. Over time your views might still prevail. All it means is you need to fight, persuade, take the time and energy required to show the world what is what.

  The next reply came from Andreas Lewin. After an introduction concerning other matters, he writes about Close-Up:

  I think there is too much interpretation of the border between fiction and reality. More important is the relationship between lies and the truth. Kiarostami actually wanted later to make a documentary about the “criminal actor,” after he was hired for other films! So they met several times again. But unfortunately Sabjan died before they started shooting . . . Also interesting is what Kiarostami said about Close-Up, that it is the only one of his films which he can see together with an audience, because “it wasn’t my film.” . . . I think many of the themes of Close-Up are also in his other films. And he also liked to build myths around his films . . . One can find a line from his early films until his new film Copie conforme, which is dealing with the relationship between original and copy. I can highly recommend the book by Jonathan Rosenbaum about Kiarostami. The book starts with a quote by Orson Welles about theater: “I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theatre meaning: when it becomes a social act.”

  Filmmaker A kept thinking about her film, about the cast who weren’t even here for the screening, so rough in front of her camera and so generous with their time and ideas, some of whom she might, for whatever reason, never see again, and about Close-Up, and the fact that Kiarostami was denied entry, and somehow, in her mind, these things became intertwined. She knew soon it would be time for her to make a new film, but how could she make fiction as her country was throttling towards Fascism. And she knew it wasn’t a matter of making documentaries, of shining a light on the problems, of showing people what was really happening. People didn’t care what was happening. Even when they knew, it seemed too disconnected from their daily lives. She was too ambitious to give up on art and devote herself to full-time activism.

  That morning she had a meeting with a distributor. He had been in the business much longer than her. She couldn’t tell if he was in his late sixties or mid-seventies but, if you didn’t look too closely, he could have easily passed for fifty. “I liked your film, it’s refreshing,” he began, probably just to break the ice or have something to say.

  She hated that word – refreshing – always felt it was a backhanded compliment, playing off the incredible staleness of everything else on the market.

  It was a breakfast meeting. He had ordered a cappuccino and she was drinking a double espresso, black. They were both looking at the menu when suddenly she had one of those moments when everything on offer sickened her. All the wealth and unacknowledged sense of entitlement summed up in line after line of overstuffed, overpriced choice. What did this food mean? How could she eat these things when bombs were being dropped on children in Iraq? Every ingredient listed and tastefully described felt like poison. She could almost taste them and they tasted like ashes. She’d had a similar sensation a few times before, mainly in supermarkets, walking slowly along the aisle and for every can, box and item that surrounded her she could feel there was someone in the world who was going without. That everything flowed in only one direction: from the natural resources and labour of the poor into the shopping malls and supermarkets of the rich. She would look at her empty shopping cart and it would feel like a crime to place even a single item into it. At the same time she found such reactions absurd, a bit too much, over the top. Of course it was only a supermarket, only a rather average menu in an upscale New York brunch restaurant. But her thoughts were no less disturbing in light of their absurdity. She put the menu down.

  “Maybe I’ll just stick to coffee for now.”

  “I know you’re most likely on a budget. You know that quip from Godard: Movies aren’t a good way to make money, they’re a good way to spend it. He was really onto something there. But breakfast is of course on me.”

  “No, really, it’s all right. Just coffee is fine.”

  “Trying to prove your artistic credentials by starving yourself?” He was openly laughing at her now. He thought she was pretentious. Maybe he had already thought she was pretentious from watching her film, and her refusal of breakfast only confirmed his first impression. He continued: “All right, I’m absolutely famished, but I’ll just stick to coffee as well. I hate to eat alone. What’s more, I really hate to eat alone with someone watching me. Makes me incredibly self-conscious.” He looked straight at her with a big shit-eating grin. “Come on, meet me halfway here. Order something small. It’s my treat and my pleasure.”

  She opened the menu again. She had this feeling that whatever she did next would determine how the rest of their meeting would go. Maybe even whether or not he would choose to distribute her film. She felt her own youth and inexperience as she tried to decide, then smiled slyly.

  “All right, have it your way. I also hate to watch a man eat alone.”

  The waiter was already approaching. She looked up at him.

  “I’ll have number eighteen. And another one of these.” She lifted her cup a few inches off its saucer, at the same time keeping an eye on the distributor as he scanned to see what she had picked, the most expensive item on the menu. If she was going to feel sick, be disgusted, she wanted to feel sick and disgusted in style.

  “I’ll have the same,” he said.

  Near the end of the meeting, as they were finishing their third coffees, and her spell of consumerist disgust was now long behind her, a spell she now thought of as a panic attack triggered by the stress of having to try to sell her film, the distributor started to say some things that genuinely interested her. “People say movies are escapist, just entertainment, but I think that’s only an alibi, a way of hiding from ourselves just how effective what we do actually is. When something is in a movie, and especially when something is in a particularly successful film, its language, its grammar, is added into the grammar of possible reality. The banal fact that sharks are terrifying was cemented into our cultural imagination after Jaws. We have no idea how much power we have and absolutely no idea how to use it. It’s like we invent people’s dreams.”

  And suddenly she realized what it was that infuriated her so much about the Kiarostami incident. They hadn’t turned him away because he was important, because he was influential, because some people listened to what he said or because he was a great filmmaker. They had turned him away only because of the colour of his skin. It was like the ultimate insult. In a split second all of his work, his influence, was washed away, suddenly meant nothing. That was how stupid this administration was, they had silenced him almost by accident. And she felt in that moment that this government would eventually fail, that in the long run they would not win, and began to wonder again about the content of her next film.

  The distributor was still speaking but Filmmaker A had drifted off.
She pulled herself back into the room and listened. “Every film is also a documentary, because when you watch a film from fifty years ago, the costumes, the haircuts, the ways of walking and talking, the cars and buildings, all give a glimpse back into that time. Like in your film: the mix of political apathy and rage your characters have when they’re watching the bombings, the shock-and-awe footage, on stolen cable. The way they’re talking about it, like when the lesbian with the dreadlocks says: ‘What does it mean to live in a world where, even if you’ve lived your entire life as an avowed pacifist, all you can think about is strangling the president with your bare hands.’ I think fifty years from now that way of speaking, that way of thinking, will seem utterly of our time. That shock of transition.”

  “You think so much will have changed?”

  “Of course things are going to change. Maybe not in fifty, maybe in a hundred years. But things are changing already. Pacifists want to strangle people for God’s sake.”

  “Pacifists have always wanted to strangle people. If you didn’t want to strangle someone there would be no point in calling yourself a pacifist. That’s why you make the decision in the first place, to give some ideological counterweight against your natural urge for violence.”

  “I don’t think that’s why people become pacifists. I think it’s more of a strategy. Because if you stick to the road of pacifism then, whatever happens, you can always claim the true moral high ground. And on moral high ground you might hit an impasse, but you will never face an absolute dead end. You can always say, on questions of strategy at least, we were right, we were pure. It keeps the battle open indefinitely. If the enemy is wrong and you are right then there will always be someone new to take up the mantle.”

  “I heard that in Tibet now the younger monks want to take up arms.”

  “That’s what I said before. Things are changing.”

  She thought about this. She couldn’t tell if things were changing, and if they were, she felt they were only changing for the worse. Was the world becoming a more violent place as she sat here digesting Eggs Benedict and being entertained by the theories of an older, more successful crank? The world had always been violent. But there is ‘always,’ there is history, and then there is one’s own immediate lifetime. Maybe for the first time in her life she was witnessing, she was about to witness, a real increase in the bloodshed of the world. She didn’t know. Predicting the future was a sucker’s game. Anything might happen.

  Godfrey Cheshire writes: “Close-Up invites endless interpretation, but Kiarostami is clear about his reading of it. He says it is about the power of imagination, and of cinema as a vehicle of dreams. As he put it to me: ‘With the help of dreams you can escape from the worst prisons. Actually, you can only imprison the body but dreams flee the walls and without visas or dollars can travel anywhere. In dreams, you can sleep with anyone you want. Nobody can touch your dreams. In a way dreams exactly embody the concept of freedom. They free you of all constraints. I think God gave human beings this possibility to apologize for all the limitations he’s created for them.’”

  After brunch, Filmmaker A wandered aimlessly for hours. There were films she had planned to see at the festival but she no longer felt like it. It was in those years that her habit of wandering, those long walks without beginning or end, began in earnest. The empty hours of thinking, questioning and reflection. Every artistic idea she had ever made use of had been thrown into her head during the space and melancholy freedom of those walks. There were so many people she could be meeting, so many connections to be made at the festival, it felt like a wasted opportunity to spend her time just wandering. But, at the same time, this feeling of intense wastefulness made the wandering all that much more delicious.

  She thought about what the distributor had said, how things in a film can become reality. And how he must have meant, in some sense, that reality is society, reality is whatever we all agreed it is. This didn’t relate to some core scientific idea of reality, to the fact that a chair was solid and you could sit on it, but to something more general and ever changing. She liked the idea that films could be important, could change the world, though she didn’t quite believe it. She suspected the things films were allowed to bring into reality were only things already there, things that reinforced the status quo. Sharks were already threatening, and Jaws simply increased and solidified this general preconception. But if it was possible to bolster the status quo, then it must also be possible to undermine it. If reality was malleable, then it must be malleable in many different directions.

  She walked, letting her mind wander down many such unproductive avenues. The walking and thinking felt analogous, turning this way and that, without direction but always going somewhere, turning down any street that seemed intriguing. She found herself in a shop, at first unsure what kind of shop it was, browsing shelves full of designer knick-knacks. The owner, or at least the man behind the counter she assumed was the owner, asked her if she was looking for anything in particular and she said no. But then she reconsidered. She was feeling a bit crazy from all the wandering and thought anything was worth a try.

  “Do you have anything that can help me?” she asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought maybe you had something that might help.”

  He stared straight at her. Was she crazy? Or rather, how crazy was she? After a long moment of looking, it seemed to her that he decided she was relatively harmless.

  “Let me think about it for a moment,” he said.

  She turned back to the shelves and continued to browse. But then another thought occurred, she had noticed the owner’s skin colour, and she turned back.

  “Are you by any chance Iranian? From Tehran?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m sorry. No reason. It’s just I’ve been thinking about Tehran a lot lately.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “No.”

  They looked at each other again for a long moment.

  “Would it be impolite if I were to ask you where you are from?” she finally said.

  “My family is originally from Peru, I think that’s what you’re asking, but I’ve lived in New York my entire life.”

  “Yes, of course.” Now that she’d started, she really wanted this to go somewhere. She had the sudden, unrealistic hope that it might somehow turn into an interesting or even important encounter. “Have you ever heard of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami?”

  “No. Who is he?”

  “There’s a film festival right now. And he was supposed to come for a premiere. But they turned him away at the border.”

  “Stuff like that happens all the time.”

  “Like what?”

  “We turn people away.”

  She considered this. Did the fact that it happened all the time change anything, make it any less significant? She wanted him to explain something to her. He was a complete stranger but she felt irrationally certain that he knew something that could help. He stood looking at her in perplexed silence. The only thing she could think was to ask more questions.

  “But then how do you feel about it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a border. You can’t let in everyone.”

  “But Kiarostami is important. An internationally recognized auteur.”

  “I see. Well, it was probably just a mistake.”

  “You think it was a mistake?”

  “I mean, not a pure mistake. The border guards in this country are obviously racist. But it’s the kind of racism that happens all the time.”

  “Yes, that’s true. I suppose it does.” She wanted to continue but the conversation had clearly hit a dead end. After a moment of reflection, she turned back to the shelves, picked up an object almost at random, took it to the counter and paid for it, mainly in order to give him some business, but also to give a clear ending to their exc
hange. He smiled at her warmly as he handed over her change and the receipt.

  Life should be more interesting, she thought to herself as she was leaving the shop. I wish there was something I could do to make life more interesting.

  8. As Close as Possible to Absolute Sincerity

  Write me about ordinary things that will make me feel tender and give me hope.

  —Nicole Brossard

  We didn’t count how many had been killed. There was no time so instead we guessed. I guessed one hundred. She guessed seventy-five. And they were gone so what did it matter. The entire operation had been an utter and total catastrophe. Every stage of the plan took a turn for the worse and the worst was exactly what happened. There was no reason for anyone to be dead but this lack of reason suddenly didn’t matter at all. We knew one thing: we had to escape. The outfits had been thrown in a bin along the way, several hours ago. She poured the lighter fluid and I set fire to an old newspaper and tossed it on top. We would miss those outfits most of all. They were the whole fucking point of this disaster but there was no time for any of that now. We would go back to our normal clothes. If we survived there would be opportunity to mourn everything later, when things blew over, if or when the world finally forgot.