Popcorn

by Ben Elton

  “OK now, Scout,” Wayne said, further composing his shot, “get down there beside Bruce, ‘cos that’s where we gonna to be sat, OK? Right next to the man.”

  But he was still not quite satisfied.

  “It seems all right to me,” Kirsten commented nervously. “I mean, it contains all the elements, doesn’t it?” She wanted to get done and get out of there.

  “The elements is just the basics of the shot,” Wayne replied. “What we got to do here is make one compelling fuckin’ image. I mean compelling. Because if we ain’t good, pretty soon the networks are going to go back to their regular schedules and all we’ll be left with is CNN. What are we up against, honey? What’s the opposition? I guess you know more about daytime TV than any woman of your size and weight in the whole USA.”

  “Star Trek: The Next Generation, Family Ties, Cosby and Oprah repeats,” Scout recited proudly. “I don’t know all the cable stuff.”

  Kirsten looked up from her equipment. “Wayne, when this goes out live, every station in the country will pick up on it. You’ll be the only thing showing nationwide.”

  “Y’hear that, Bruce? I’m making you bigger than you was already. Now, you sure you’re going to be able to get all this in, Bill? What’s your edge of frame?”

  “Edge of frame”. Scout nearly cried, she was so proud of Wayne.

  “We have plenty of width,” Bill said. “I’ll just lock it off and take the whole thing in a static five shot. Have another look.”

  Wayne did so and then, with a thoughtful frown on his face, crossed to the two handcuffed women. He studied them for a moment and then ripped open Velvet’s smart little pink jacket, causing the buttons to fly off.

  Scout was not at all happy with this development. Nor, of course, was Velvet, but she was in no position to protest.

  “Wayne, take your hands off that girl right now!” Scout shouted.

  “You want the ratings, honey? Huh? You want people to watch this thing? Sex is important on TV, sex sells.” Wayne tore open Velvet’s blouse and pulled it down off her shoulders, revealing her brassière. “Cute, huh?” he said. “Can’t show too much. There’s strict rules. Just enough for the couch potatoes out there in TV land to get themselves off on…OK, I guess we’re just about ready. Bruce, in just a moment or two you’re going to sit here on this couch ‘tween me and Scout and tell America what I said to tell them.”

  “Look, Wayne, this is—”

  “And if you don’t, I’ll kill sweet little Velvet here, and Mrs Delamitri — not that you give a flying fuck in a thunderstorm ‘bout her. Also of course, I’ll kill you. I think you’re going to do what I tell you. Ain’t you, Bruce?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Outside they were waiting for pictures. The media, the police and, increasingly, the nation were all waiting for pictures, because the siege was now the number-one news story US-wide.

  “So is this asshole going to make his statement or not?” said Chief Cornell, pacing about outside his command truck. “How long do we wait before we hit him?”

  Already the police chief could sense his splendid day getting away from him. He wasn’t the only one, either. His subordinates were getting increasingly frustrated and were putting Cornell under enormous pressure to take control of the situation. Sieges, in their opinion, were a matter for the police, not the media, and a lot of cops felt pretty bad about being usurped and upstaged in this manner. Particularly the SWAT boss.

  “We’re being blackmailed,” he said. “This killer has bought his piece of immortality by murdering people, and now we’ve brought every TV station in the country to his door. The guy is making us kiss his ass, when what we need to do is kick his ass. We should pull the damn plug, get in there and show that motherfucker, and every motherfucker watching, that you do not mess with the LAPD.”

  That was easy for the SWAT man to say. His wasn’t the uneasy head that wore the crown. Chief Cornell was the cop with whom the buck would stop, and he knew that if he crashed in now and deprived the media of its prize they would finish him. If even one hostage got killed, which in all truth would almost certainly happen, he and his force would be pilloried as gung-ho, macho assholes, Neanderthals who couldn’t wait and talk like responsible adults but had to barge in like the over-excited thugs they were.

  Besides which, as the police publicist pointed out, there was another way of looking at it. “With respect, we have no right to go in now. By any standards at all, a televised confrontation between the country’s top action film-maker and the country’s top criminal is an astonishing event. It’s genuine and important news, no matter how it may have been brought about. The police have to allow the media to do its job. It’s our responsibility to defend, and if necessary facilitate, an open and democratic society.”

  The SWAT commander had never heard so much pansy bullshit in his entire life. “It’s our responsibility,” he barked, “to fuck all over these scum until we have made damn sure that they never fuck with us again. Besides which, you know damn well that if someone gets killed while we’re hanging around and holding the media’s hand, the media will turn right round and blame us for not intervening. They can’t lose and we can’t win, so we should ignore the fuckin’ parasites and get on with our damn job.”

  Ignore the media? The police publicist nearly fainted.

  Even Chief Cornell knew it was a stupid thing to say. “You might as well say ignore the traffic, ignore the buildings, ignore the public,” he said. “TV isn’t an observer any more. It isn’t two hours of news and entertainment in the corner of people’s lounges, in the corner of people’s lives. It’s in the middle, right alongside of food. There’s two results to every event, what actually happened and what people think happened. That’s a fact, pal, and if you believe you can ignore it, then you don’t have no election to face come the spring.”

  If Brad Murray had heard Chief Cornell speak, he would have nodded sagely. Like it or not, the chief was right. It had long been accepted that TV shaped events, that things happened because the cameras were there, that what the cameras saw was what the event became. Now, however, TV was the event. Before, events didn’t get seen without television; increasingly events no longer existed without television.

  “We wait,” said Chief Cornell. “Let the guy have his air time.”

  “It’s our duty as democrats,” said the police publicist.

  “Bull-double-shit,” said the SWAT commander.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Inside the house Bruce found himself sitting on the couch between Scout and Wayne. The camera was directly in front of him and he was staring down the barrel. He knew he was about to enter the national consciousness as a patsy, a pathetic loser, coerced and abused into making a snivelling, never-to-be-forgotten, cowardly confession on live TV.

  He would be like those combat pilots who are shot down by foreign dictators and then trotted out the next day, drugged and bleary, to renounce the US and profess allegiance to their adopted country. Everybody knows those guys have no choice, that they have been coerced, but somehow people never feel quite the same way about them afterwards. You can’t just forget it when your hero suddenly and publicly denies every principle he has ever held dear. There is a secret feeling that he should have fallen on his sword. Unfair and unreasonable, of course, but none the less there.

  Bruce struggled to master his panic and anguish.

  “Wayne, this isn’t going to work,” he pleaded. “You’re both hated murderers and one single statement from me, made under duress, won’t change that. All it’ll do is screw up my life for ever.”

  “Well that’s a shame, Bruce, because it’s the best shot I’ve got and we’re going to try it. Bill? Kirsten? Everything ready?”

  “Yes it is, boss,” said Bill, who had deduced rightly that Wayne would enjoy being called ‘boss’.

  Bruce decided the time had come to make a desperate pitch, one he had been considering ever since the camera crew had arrived. He turned and tried to look
Wayne in the eye — not an easy thing to do when you’re sitting next to someone on a deep, soft couch.

  “Debate me,” he said.

  “Say what?”

  “Debate me.”

  Wayne frowned; he didn’t understand. Bruce hurried to establish his idea.

  “Listen, Wayne. You’re not stupid, and neither is Scout. You know that the best you have here is a long shot. You know, deep down, that me sitting here with a gun at my head, claiming reponsibility for your actions, is not necessarily going to cut a lot of ice.”

  “Like I say, it’s all we got,” Wayne said. “OK, Bill let’s—”

  Bruce pushed on. “It isn’t. It isn’t all you’ve got. You could take a risk. Debate me, prove your point without coercion. Establish your case live on TV.”

  “You be careful, Wayne.” Scout was uneasy. “You got a plan, you stick to it.”

  “Come on, Scout.” Bruce twisted round on the couch to face her. “Think what you were saying earlier — all that stuff about me exploiting the ugly and the downtrodden, how I get rich leeching off the suffering of the poor. That’s a better argument than just using me as some kind of puppet. Put your case. Establish my guilt and let me deny it. Think what extraordinary television it would make…You guys could be real stars, not just blackmailing hoodlums but proper participants. Stars.”

  “Stars?” said Scout. That had got her.

  “Of course stars. It’s obvious. The public loves a fighter.”

  Bruce had to win them round. He knew this was his chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, to turn himself from a victim into a hero, to be the man who stood by his principles even when the very forces of darkness and reaction had invaded his own home. To be the man who gave America its wake-up call establishing for once and for all that ‘We are all responsible for our own actions’ — particularly violent criminals.

  “Think about it, Wayne,” Bruce said. “I represent the cultural élite of this country. You represent the dispossessed, the underclass, the lowest group in society. What a confrontation, what an image!”

  “Yeah, and what’s in it for you, mister?” Scout was no pushover. She had already demonstrated in her terrifying defeat of Brooke that she was not to be taken in.

  “I get my chance to refute your allegations. I get a chance to present you as the independently minded, personally responsible murdering maniacs that I believe you to be.”

  “Daddy, be nice,” Velvet pleaded, but Bruce did not even hear her.

  “That’s the risk you take,” he continued. “Put your case, see if you can beat mine. If you win, you really win: the nation will never forget you or forgive me. If you lose, I honestly don’t think you’re any worse off.”

  “Don’t do it, hon. Your plan’s better. Just make him say the stuff.”

  But Wayne was intrigued. “Well, I don’t know, babe. I mean, I think we’ve got a pretty good argument here. Let’s face it, half the Republican Party plus just ‘bout every preacher in the country reckons Bruce here’s the devil incarnate…”

  For the umpteenth time that terrible night, Bruce allowed himself a moment of hope. “Think of your image, Scout,” he said. “What do you want that camera to see? A couple of sullen thugs on a couch, or good-looking, articulate anti-heroes? If you survive all this and avoid the chair, you’ll be on every teen T-shirt in the country. You’ll be able to name your price.”

  This was the right button to press for Scout.

  “You really think we’ll be stars?”

  “Of course you will. This is national TV. Win or lose, half the country’s going to fall in love with you. In actual fact you can’t lose.”

  “You want to be a star, baby doll?”

  “Of course I do, honey, but…Oh, I don’t know…”

  Meanwhile the outside world was getting impatient, and poor Kirsten, the recordist, crouching in her underwear in front of Bruce’s fireplace, was getting the sharp end of their anger.

  “What the hell is going on, Kirsten?” The producer’s voice screamed along the cable link and into her headset radio receiver. “When are we going to see some pictures?”

  The producer completely ignored the delicate nature of Kirsten’s situation, demanding, as TV producers often do, that everyone be told to jump to the command of the cameras. In some ways it was not his fault. He had a whole line of senior producers, editors, section chiefs and channel-controllers crushed into his ENG truck, not to mention the chief of the LAPD, accompanied by an angry man in a flak-jacket who kept muttering, “Bullshit. Bull-double-shit.” Outside the truck there were countless more police and media operatives milling around, and all of them, inside and out, were demanding that the producer punch up some visuals pronto.

  “What’s going on, Kirsten? Talk to me,” he shouted into Kirsten’s headset. “We have over two hundred stations nationwide requesting footage, and all the majors have crashed into their schedules. We can’t broadcast pictures of the outside of his house for ever. The studio anchors are running out of crap…”

  The studio anchors were indeed getting a little desperate.

  “Our cameras are still located outside the Delamitri mansion,” Larry and Susan were able to confirm for the millionth time. “And we have with us an expert on the exteriors of celebrity homes. Doctor Ranulph Tofu, of the New Age Academy of Astral Learning, will be able to give us a reading on Bruce Delamitri’s state of mind, based principally on the colour of his garage doors.”

  In the control truck they were tearing out their hair.

  “What are we waiting for, Kirsten?”

  The producer got no reply. Kirsten heard him but said nothing, so he kept on shouting, turning up the volume until Kirsten’s head shook.

  “How long does this jerk think we can tie up the networks on his behalf? Ask the asshole what he thinks he’s doing.”

  In his desire to make TV, the producer was forgetting that Kirsten was ten feet away from a mass murderer. She rightly felt that to ask the asshole what he thought he was doing was not tactically the right way to go about things. But she had to say something, if only because, after ten minutes of her producer’s voice screaming directly into her brain, a bullet in the head was beginning to look like a reasonable option.

  “Excuse me,” she said, trying to appear as detached an observer as possible, “the people in vision control are asking what kind of timescale we’re looking at here. Just so they can give you the very best coverage they can. They don’t want to lose the audience we’ve built up.”

  Wayne looked at Bruce and made a decision. “You want to debate me, Bruce? Let’s do it.”

  “And will you let Farrah and Velvet go afterwards? Will you let Brooke get to a doctor?”

  “Maybe. I never know what I’m gonna do, Bruce. It’s my job: I’m a maniac.”

  Kirsten finally spoke into her talkback. “Stand by in the truck.” She turned to Wayne. “OK, Mr Hudson, they’re ready whenever.” She was desperate to get out of that room and into some clothes.

  “You ready, Scout?” Wayne enquired. “Ready to be a TV star?”

  Suddenly Scout realized the enormity of what they were about to do. She hadn’t checked her hair, her make-up, her clothes…“Oh Wayne, I look a sight. Can they send in someone to do make-up?”

  “You look gorgeous, honey. Brooke did your hair just peachy. Are you ready, Bruce?”

  “Yes I am, Wayne.”

  “Can I give control a picture?” Kirsten asked.

  Wayne said she could, and Bill turned his camera on.

  “Speed,” said Bill. Kirsten flicked a switch. In the control van ten screens jumped into life and the assembled opinion-formers finally got what they wanted.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Jesus!” The producers and cops whistled as they caught their first glimpse of the little tableau Wayne had created.

  “Stand by to broadcast,” Brad Murray shouted, forgetting for a moment in his excitement that, within the control truck, etiquette dictated th
at he should relay his commands via the producer.

  Outside, in the grounds of Bruce’s mansion, a hundred hairsprayed anchors alerted the viewing public to the imminence of developments.

  “I believe we should be getting pictures from inside of the Delamitri abode any moment now. It appears there’s going to be some kind of joint statement from the multimillionaire director and his captor, mass-killing Mall Murderer Wayne Hudson.”

  In the studios, the anchors hurried to explain the situation yet one more time. “The ratings computer is fed by a representative sample of the nation as a whole, whose televisions are connected to a central monitor. This monitor can then give an instant picture of what people are watching. Wayne Hudson will be aware, quite literally second by second, how many people have tuned in.”

  “We know that!” the viewers of America shouted as one. “You told us a million times. Get on with it.”

  Inside the besieged house, Kirsten informed Wayne that control had a picture. “We can go live to air any time.”

  “OK, let’s do it,” said Wayne.

  “Let’s do it,” said the Chief of NBC News and Current Affairs.

  “Yes, let’s do it,” his opposite numbers at the other networks and major cable stations agreed.

  “Stand ready, you guys, in case we have to pick up the pieces,” the chief of police said loudly to his senior officers, attempting to remind the media types that there were people around who didn’t work in television.

  “We’re live!” the producer screamed into Kirsten’s ear.

  “We’re live, Mr Hudson,” Kirsten said calmly, “live across America.”

  It hardly seemed real, sitting there as they were in Bruce’s lounge. Wayne grabbed Bruce’s remote control and flipped on the TV. Sure enough, there they all were on the screen, the framing exactly as Wayne had wanted it. He tried another couple of channels. There they were again, and again. Scout screamed in embarrassment, and buried her head in her hands. Wayne turned the sound down on the TV but left the vision on: he wasn’t taking any chances that the bargain would be broken.