Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  “You see how long Daniel had been working on this?” says Carl Boyer. “The film wasn’t even close to being greenlit when that video of him and his brother was recorded, but he’d obviously written it already. He was trying to remember his own lines. He was quoting his own script. He was inhabiting the narrative tradition. With total respect for the words and the story. Anyone who uses that as evidence that Cane was ‘self-hating’ is a fucking tool. That’s a technical term.” He raises an eyebrow.

  Boyer teaches cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. He’s the author of Reading Signs in your Timeline and Whoops! Subversion. The walls of his office are festooned with movie posters. Casablanca; Last House on the Left; what I think is a Nigerian remake of Blood Beach.

  Boyer leans across his desk and taps the recorder.

  “Now look at what that speech ushers in,” he says. “What Jewishness invokes.

  “It’s a masterpiece of the violent sublime.” I feel like I’m in a lecture hall. “It ranks with the Matrix vestibule scene, the hospital sequence in Hard Boiled, Crouching Tiger’s restaurant. Fuck it, it surpasses them. Even if the rest of the film sucked—which it does not—it would still be a classic just for these few seconds.”

  He presses play on his laptop and we watch.

  Mr. Henk finishes shouting. And when he has spoken, as the armed men come closer, silence stretches for a long time. It’s easily long enough for the audience to get uncomfortable. “A strange scoop of Tarkovski in the popcorn,” Empire’s review said.

  The window above Henk’s head explodes in very slow motion, still without the slightest noise. A figure encased completely in fire, burning in agony, somersaults into the ruins of the warehouse, lands in front of the two old men, and in the last few seconds of his life, dispatches five heavily armed gray-clad enemies in an exquisite balletic fight scene.

  You don’t have to be an aficionado of the cinematic brutal to see Boyer’s point. Even the film’s many critics acknowledge this.

  “Check it out,” Boyer says. “He’s using the very flames that are killing him to kill his enemies, and to ignite the fuse to the explosives. To save the day. If that doesn’t strike you as an incredibly poignant comment, an incredibly humane comment, then I’ve got nothing.”

  Is he serious? With that poker face, it’s impossible to tell.

  A weird thing happens.

  I’m still drawing a total blank at City Hall. My trail’s dried up.

  Maybe my name’s on a yellow stickie on the side of every monitor, with a big red X next to it.

  But just as I’m thinking maybe I have to rethink my mystery-solving plans, I get a call, number blocked.

  “I heard you been asking about stuff,” the voice says. “I work at Beit Olam. I can tell you some things.”

  And I’m scribbling as frantically as if I’m Bernstein and Woodward combined, agreeing, absolutely, no names, certainly I understand my contact’s position, no, I don’t know it but yes, I can find that bar.

  “We started hearing rumors about this movie a couple of years ago.” Robert Foxer, head of the Anti-Defamation League’s LA office, sits back in his chair and folds his hands. “I have to tell you, when we got word, I thought there had to be some mistake. I could not believe what I was hearing. This is a joke, I thought. I checked to see if it was April Fool’s Day.”

  He shakes his head. “This movie,” he says slowly, “is nothing but a collection of the oldest, hate-filled stereotypes. It’s something that would have made Streicher proud. It’s the most shocking, disgusting, the most anti-Semitic movie I’ve had to deal with in twelve years in this role. That this should be an American movie, made with American money … I have no words.”

  What about all those Jewish kids for whom this has become a touchstone text? Surely he’s aware of organizations like Jew-das and Heebie-Jeebies and the like organizing raucous midnight screenings. What about the themed costume parties?

  “They’re wrong.” He shrugs. “They think I’m old-fashioned? Is being against racism and hatred old-fashioned? OK, I’m old-fashioned.”

  What about the arguments for free speech?

  “Hate speech isn’t protected. This is hate speech. And I can tell you without any embarrassment or hesitation that we intend to shut it down. By any means necessary.”

  Any?

  Foxer sighs and looks at his ceiling.

  This year there was a campaign of what the organizers called “punk seders.” You know who they said the empty chair was for?

  “Daniel Cane,” Foxer says heavily, “was no Elijah. Look, what do you want me to say? Do I support what happened to Daniel Cane? Absolutely not. Do I want the people who did it brought to justice? Absolutely I do. Let me be completely unequivocal about that. Am I surprised that someone did this? No.” He shakes his head sadly. “I’m not surprised at all.”

  Some of the other hacks ask me why I’m ducking out on a meet-and-greet with Tommy Durois. They’re looking suspicious.

  “I’m doing a sidebar about the campaign,” I say. “I have to go check out all the old posters.”

  It isn’t even untrue. It’s just that before I do that, I make a list of questions for the dude—or dudess, I can neither confirm nor deny the gender of my source—who called me. Mostly they boil down to one query: where’s the stuff from the grave?

  I drive by the offices of BB and Bones. They’re surprisingly low key. If you’re an industry-insider, you know about this advertising firm, about the viral videos that are repeatedly, ostentatiously disavowed by the companies to whose products they attract such attention.

  Legal insists that I put this carefully: those illicit ads are unauthorized, works in progress inadvertently released, or similar. Whatever. Still, the torture ad for the Kia, the Courvoisier dead horse, Reebok’s pornathlon, these are the fodder for hundreds of thousands of tumblrs and retweets.

  As regards the work they did on this movie, BB & B’s line is simple and familiar. It was never their intention to offend: the images were intended to subvert racist ideas.

  “They don’t subvert a thing,” is Foxer’s judgment. “They don’t even try.”

  It was the teaser posters which first, quite understandably, caused such a storm of disbelief. They showed no title, just a faint outline of a shadowy face, dark eyes, a dark door. One of various taglines in white script.

  “I hunger for my pound of flesh.”

  “Wandering and eternal.”

  “We are the international conspiracy.”

  Most provocatively of all, and the cause of a litigation campaign in the UK, Canada, and the U.S.: “Blood. No Libel.”

  The outrage, unsurprisingly, ramped up to an extraordinary pitch when the title and details of the movie were finally released. But simultaneously, this provoked the first wave of countercultural backlash.

  The hipster website J-Cool published an article describing the film as “the ultimate revenge fantasy,” pointing out that the writer, director, lead actors, and everyone closely associated with the movie were Jewish. When the official T-shirts went on sale, the Brooklyn-based magazine Is it Good For? (which later wrote up the movie in ecstatic terms) ran a photo shoot of its staff modeling them, alongside a now-famous essay titled “Can the Goyim Wear the Shirts?,” which consisted of the single word “No.”

  “There is something here,” Abi’s voice says. “There is something in the attic with us. Something that keeps us safe. That visits me at night.”

  Outside the cinemas, rival demonstrations turned into fights, and you never knew who was going to be fighting whom, who would take which side. Whether the antifascists or the taqwacores, the Palestine Solidarity activists, Hillel, the Likudniks, Jews Against Zionism, even the various motley fascists, would be demanding that the film be shown, or that it be not shown.

  “About the only good thing,” Foxer allows, grinning, “is that the anti-Semites were pretty much as confused as everyone else.”

  The white supremacist website antizog.
org wrote a highly favorable review—a fact jumped on by the film’s liberal critics—because the film, it said, did not “flinch from the truth of the Jew.” However, according to Volksfront.truth.net, “bloodsuckers or not, the Jews are the good guys here. Make no mistake.”

  The death threats started. Some were directed at Johnny D, but most went to Daniel Cane.

  “It’s true that in the age of Edward Cullen it’s ridiculous to say that fangs make a bad guy,” Boyer says. “See, I think a lot of the attack on this movie is less to do with anti-Semitism or philo-Semitism than it is basic simple cultural snobbery. This is an exploitation film. Sure, you can call it jewsploitation if you want—everyone else is—and sure there’s work and research in there—there really was a Nazi Operation Werewolf, by the way—but the point is it’s trash culture.

  “Now you might say—and I would say—that in this day and age, when quote trash unquote is doing a better job of picking at bullshit than the goddamn news, that it’s kind of absurd we’re still having this argument. But hey—here we are.”

  Daniel Cane’s scripts were fervent, energetic, generic, and predictable. If he’d adapted the aftermath of his own murder, his parents would have kept his room untouched. They’d show visitors in, as if to a shrine.

  But this is real life and the room’s been packed away. His mother has to show me photos instead. “That was what he loved,” she says. “It was always the monsters.” She holds up pictures of a sweet-looking, nerdy little boy in front of shelves of D&D tchotchkes.

  Hallie Cane is a tall woman in her fifties, with greying fair hair in a long braid. She looks very tired. We talk by Skype, me sitting in the LA sunshine, she in the rain, telling me things she’s said a thousand times before. She turns her camera to show me the view Daniel would have seen every night. My view sways and pixelates. The tall brick tower of a ridiculous folly in suburban Boston.

  It’s impossible not to be put in mind of the movie’s moonlit tower scene, when the Watcher climbs the Oude Kirk spire, with a motion something between lizard and cat. It’s impossible not to imagine the twelve-year-old Daniel picturing such things in the view from his window.

  Well, it’s impossible for me.

  “There’s nothing he could have done that would have shown more love,” Hallie says. “You watch the film and tell me he doesn’t love her.”

  I nod and repeat a couple of things Boyer said, about appropriation and subversion and respect. Her response surprises me.

  “I never really bought that,” she says. “To be honest I find that whole ‘irony’ thing very unconvincing.” She smiles at my expression. “It’s like when people say ‘That’s the whole point,’ as a defense for telling racist jokes or whatever. Me and Daniel used to argue about this.”

  So they disagreed about his script?

  “I don’t know,” she says. “He was always persuasive.” She smiles again. “I don’t think he thought he was being disrespectful, for sure. He wrote what he did out of love.”

  Whether it was an appropriate love, a love that should speak its nerdy, ironic name, is an open question. That it was love is not in doubt.

  The SS officers climb the stairs.

  “What’s that noise?” one says.

  There, visible under the slope of the roof, is the wooden attic door. The officers lift their weapons.

  “What is that … ?” whispers the commander. He pushes open the door onto darkness.

  “It’s snobbery,” Boyer writes to me in an email. “Look at Auslander—Hope’s a provocative book, but no one would say he’s disrespectful, and he has her, probably the most famous victim in history, as a cantankerous, stinking old woman. But because he’s a ‘serious writer’—and I’m not hating on Auslander here, it’s a great book—that’s fine. Whereas here?”

  Here.

  There is a moment’s quiet. A rising growl.

  And out of the attic shadows comes a young girl, her hair and dress ragged and gusting in the rush of her motion and a cloud of dust and darkness. Her eyes glow. Her mouth is open wide. Her fangs shine.

  Cut to the sight of her hiding mother, her face frozen in horror. The sound of tearing, of men screaming. A bolt of blood.

  This juxtaposition, of the schoolgirl’s ferocious predatory face and of her aghast, blood-spattered mother’s, have become the two most iconic images from Anne Frank: Vampire.

  Twenty hours after the phone call declaring justice, another person, male this time, called the LAPD and gave an address in Pacoima.

  In the basement of the empty house they found the remains of Daniel Cane. A stake was driven through his chest. His head had been cut from his body. His bled-out body was in a bathtub, below a dribbling hose—keeping him under flowing water. He had been repeatedly stabbed, and old kitchen knives made of cheap silver protruded from his wounds. He was scattered with garlic.

  Within a week, three groups claimed responsibility for the murder. The first was the White People’s Alliance for Survival, whose message started: “You mock the wolf, bloodsucker Jew? Now you’ve felt our teeth. Let the war begin.”

  The same day a previously unheard-of offshoot of the Kahanist Jewish Defense League, styling themselves the Masada Guards, announced that “the decadent self-hating traitor who sniggers in the rubble of our people, who spreads Nazi filth and lies, has been dealt with.”

  Two days after that, a short video was uploaded by a spokesperson for al-Qaeda in the Belly of the Beast, announcing that Daniel Cane had been punished for his Zionist fantasies.

  The web exploded with theories of false-flag operations by the state, of fascist-Islamist collaboration, that the studio itself had had Daniel killed as a publicity ploy. That this was a baroque assisted suicide. The last theory gained currency when a long-ago ex released a letter in which a depressed twenty-two-year-old Daniel discussed the possibility of killing himself.

  Johnny D and the studio put up a million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of Cane’s killers. Despite this, and despite what the LAPD have described as “an exemplary, wide-ranging, ongoing and totally thorough operation,” no one has been arrested for his murder.

  Production has started on the sequel. The studio has greenlit the third and fourth movies in the series. Liam Neeson is going to play Baron von Richtofen, and Eva Green Baroness Bathory.

  Daniel Cane rests in one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in LA. We’re standing, my source and I, looking at his grave.

  I’m going to call my companion Digger, though as far as I understand it s/he has always been a desk jockey. At first Digger didn’t want to come. We met in a disappointingly unsleazy lounge-bar, and he, or she, started giving me the lowdown on Another Mystery of Daniel Cane.

  “You know the grave kept getting defaced?” Digger said. At Daniel Cane’s funeral, mourners were jostled by protestors from ultraright Zionist groups, fascists and antifascists and jihadis and the Westboro Baptist Church (“Vampire Jew Fags,” “God Hates Fangs”), and for the first few weeks, it seemed as though all of them were targeting his grave. “Well that stopped, and if you think you know why, you’re wrong. You don’t know why.”

  The second time I suggested showing me exactly what this meant, Digger agreed. So here we stand, my source wearing a hat and dark glasses in case any colleagues happen to be here.

  We had to wait on the side of the hill for a long time, watching the kids gathered at Cane’s plot. They left eventually, and we came closer, and now we are alone.

  The studio paid for a security camera to be attached to a nearby tree. I eye it. When it went up, I’ve been told, the attacks ceased.

  Cane’s family are indulgent of the more macabre tokens visitors bring. “Sure I wish they’d leave something else,” his father, Roger, has said, “but I think it mostly comes from an OK place.”

  In the shade of the gravestone are rubber bats and plastic fangs. There are copies of Dracula and vials of blood that I hope is stage but suspect is real. Bobble-head bloodsucker
s and Children of the Night action figures.

  “This is it,” says Digger. “Every night all this goes. Someone’s collecting it.” On my notepad I write down Who? Where? Why?

  This stuff too? I say, and point.

  “No, that all gets left. Eventually one of our guys will clean it. When they’re faded. They get replaced, and someone always brings more.”

  Digger’s talking about the flowers. It’s not just vampire tat that sits on Daniel’s resting place. There are beautiful flowers. There is a bottle of bourbon and prayer beads, there are copies of the Torah. There are movie scripts. And of course there are stones.

  The top of Daniel Cane’s tombstone is piled high and neatly with pebbles. There are more than on any other grave I can see, far more.

  “Every day.”

  Every day unseen mourners place stones on the top of Daniel’s stone.

  “It’s great that the paint and the hammering and all that stopped. But let me tell you, it is not down to the camera. You see that?” Digger points. “That little light going on and off by the lens? That’s for show, man. Guarantee it. That’s just an empty box.”

  Digger’s face tells me we’re there. This is the secret, the last mystery of Daniel Cane.

  “This grave is protected now, but not by a camera. There’s something about this bit of ground,” Digger says. “It’s like a dead zone. You see that movie? That was a good movie. Anyway, they’ve had people come look at it a hundred times, but no one can ever make this camera work.”

  So there’s no footage?

  “Nothing.”

  Of attacks, or of the, what, offerings? So who has all the stuff? Who brings it? Who comes and takes it?

  “That’s what I’m saying.” Digger shrugs. “They never get any footage of anything. Everyone brings it, everyone. Who takes it? You want to know? What if I told you I have keys? I could maybe lend them to you, and if you wanted to sit over there out of sight and wait to see who comes, tonight, I couldn’t stop you? What would you say to that? That would be a story, right?”