AlmostPeople can be programmed along a spectrum of attention. Presets include the Successful Friend, the Penitent Husband, the Public Servant, the Therapist (Sober), the Therapist (Under the Influence), the First Date, the Second Date, the Second Date (Alternately). Cocktails at the pitch brunch made Jonson playful. He insisted the company manufacture a model of his body, but his first name, Harris, did not test well, so the model is the Lawrence, which was determined by focus group to be a trustworthy name. The muscles are exaggerated. Jonson shipped me a Lawrence, who stands in my kitchen, modeling scarves.
Lawrence says, Pour out the cup of rage.
He says, The past is a pile of rotting carpets.
He says, Climb the mountain of your anxieties.
In addition to being a sympathetic ear, he is something of a philosopher.
Lawrence said, Do you think free will is an illusion?
I said, There’s no way we are so lucky.
My money. We think we do not need the stuff until we get some of our own. When Jonson and I see a film, we flip a coin. The loser reviews; for instance, in this review.
Which reminds me. You can see Bruja at the Runaway Seven, but you shouldn’t.
Jonson couldn’t make the coin out in the dark. I have a double-sided quarter from a novelty shop. We flip for lunch, for socks, for ownership of trees we both admire. We flipped for financing, after I’d irritated him enough. One hopes his mind was made up already. Even for Jonson, it is a lot of money.
He says, You have great luck. You ought to try investing.
Back to Bruja. Mariposa, a swamp witch, has a drawer of stolen voices. Maite is jealous of a couple in her village. In return for Maite’s fertility, Mariposa agrees to steal the voices of Florencia and Agustin. For Maite’s sense of smell, Mariposa offers Maite the ability to speak from their mouths. Maite has a talent for mimicry. Surprised, angered by what they’ve said, seeing, through the callous act of speaking, the truth of their words, the pair begin to hurt each other even without Maite’s intervention.
Florencia walks off a cliff. Agustin starves himself to dust.
How Maite sobs. It is difficult to have nobody to resent.
Mariposa allows the voices of the deceased to flap from her drawer. Unable to find their owners, they roost in Maite. The voice has no connection to the soul. The voice is air, not to be trusted. Words cannot be. Noises to get this or that. Maite gains regional distinction as a singer of tragedies and an augur of weather. She finds her own happiness, with a farmer, as intense as that of Florencia and Agustin. There is no punishment for what she has done. Though we pretend otherwise, the lack of judgment from the universe we inhabit is the joy of our lives. Maybe there will be a day when we all sit up and point our fingers at each other, a final adjudication at the end of death, but it is not today, and it is not likely to be tomorrow.
Ahead of ourselves in the street. We spoke of Bruja with the weariness of veteran auteurs, who had given up on commercial success in favor of the ineffable but were amused by the efforts of middlebrow directors to get recognition.
Under the streetlight we pronounced.
Jonson said, Great film must offer no mimetic pleasure.
He said, Cinema conceals itself from the viewer.
I said, One will find one’s film in the place where one has thought oneself barren.
He said, The rhythms of cinema are polyphonic.
The sounds of neighborhood vice were absorbed by the vegetation in bloom, our laughter was free and derisory, and neither of us crossed the threshold of our homes sorry for ourselves.
20.
THE MARTYRDOM OF POLYCARP OF SMYRNA
DIR. KARL ARN
65 MINUTES
Notes on my filmmaking technique.
ON DIALOGUE
Bellono in Altarpiece is not one for conversation. Intentions wither in speech. Dialogue is superfluous. I will allow myself, say, ten lines. Fifteen. And it will not run over eighty-four minutes. It will be a fling that doesn’t drag on too long, and when it’s finished, one will leave without resentment about the abuse of their time.
ON INTERTITLES
I have experimented with intertitles, as in The Martyrdom of Polycarp of Smyrna, a film I admire. I could not say if I admire it for sadomasochistic Polycarp—with his lachrymose terrorist’s eyes, whose god is so inflexible he won’t forgive a white lie to save Polycarp from burning alive—or because it documents the grotesque politics of ranking clergy, or because, as a critic, I am expected to adore a film adored by other critics. See it tonight at the Central Hub Film Institute and decide for yourself.
How we decide what is best.
From motion, from cause, from existence, from goodness, from design.
ON LIGHT
Intertitles may be perceived as an affectation. Light will suffice to convey how the venial nobles have inflamed the painter’s ambition, as if they’d slammed it in a door.
As a child, I had an ambition to subdue light. My brutality and aggression were expended splitting and bending the spectrum. My exhibitions, at the major museums, were to simulate various effects; for instance, sunrise, cobalt shade thrown by concrete, the blushing harvest, bright orbs underwater, prisons of icicles.
I envisioned a career trajectory. My youth exploring the spectra of morning, kindergarten, the beginning of business hours, honeymoons, eastern-facing monastic cells. Next, when the ignorant knew how to pronounce my name and I was in magazines, of flirtation, recess, vacations, reprieves, athletics, anxieties. During my fellowships, the light of belonging, nature, literature. As I aged, fell from vogue, my wives beggared me and my children spurned me as a narcissistic fool, of eclipses, executions, twilight, and, with relief, finally, exhibitions of darkness. This was my plan but life did not work out that way. I have, as of yet, done little to subdue light.
ON INFLUENCE
The problem of influence. It is leprous. Sleep evades me as I try to identify my antecedents. I am not so arrogant to believe I possess a unique sensibility. Haupt was vigilant against the possibility of imitation but he lifted the structure of New Athens from Parker’s camp dystopia Swoon for the Colonel anyway. The senses are sources of contamination. Memories, the patterns of nature. I will avoid Weide’s whip pans, Farboksky’s elemental continuity. The masters and mistresses are not the problem. It is the hacks, the language of the middle, which must be avoided. Jockeys riding their content as far as it will go. The meanest journeyman has, if one digs enough, a perceivable and singular style.
ON POSSIBILITY
As a plastic art, cinema’s possibilities have winnowed. As a narrative form, its possibilities remain without boundaries. If, after months of toil, my film was revealed to have affinities with a Trinidadian feature playing in the background on the rail and my unconscious seized it, ravaged it for parts, I would be disappointed.
ON STYLE
The smudges of an auteur’s incidental style are their legacy. Take Polycarp. Critics mention the shot of Polycarp kneeling, Polycarp bound to the stake, Polycarp ignoring the entreaties of the priests to recant his vows and be forgiven, but rewatching the film, I was struck by the similarities of its slow pans to those on the storyboards of Altarpiece. One must quarantine one’s style.
A rich, distinguished genealogy of theft recedes into prehistory. The first practitioner was Cain, the thief of life. Homage can be better than invention. Satires, attacks, refutations, tributes. Theft refreshes art. After cataloguing the idiosyncrasies of the great directors, three shots remained unclaimed: the extremely close, the medium-long, and the extremely extremely long. These shots were not, I felt, of my vocabulary.
21.
HIS MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY
DIR. REGINA EARWHEAT
86 MINUTES
Lawrence said, Why are you combing your hair?
I said, Never mind, Lawrence.
He sai
d, It’s strange that the correct arrangement of a protein filament can indicate desirability to potential partners.
I said, It’s strange that you exist for no reason except to listen to the problems of neurotic and affluent urban professionals, and even then you’re only turned to after the drugs exhaust their particular neural pathways.
The listings on the night of my appointment with Dr. Lisa were dismal. There was King Louie at the Baxter and The Civil Civil War at the Runaway Seven. There was Eat or Be Eaten at the Conspicuous, which is too erotic for a date.
Another tactic I thought I might try was to take her to the Heights, which was temporarily closed for renovations. Then I could ask her if she wanted to dine. Although that could also backfire, given my face.
Osvald’s possession of me is not yet comprehensive enough for him to gain control of my limbs, except for one special condition. Osvald hates to brush his teeth and will only do so under special duress. Because he has avoided dental problems in his life, he believes brushing destroys protective bacteria in one’s mouth. He resists my attempts to use a toothbrush, although he tolerates mouthwash, and enjoys the good brands of whitening gum. During certain hours, when Osvald has less power, I have made it my habit to casually walk by the sink, and, thinking hard about this or that mystery, brush my teeth without keeping the act in my mind.
The date of my appointment with Dr. Lisa, this was not possible. My tongue needed scraping. I raised the instrument to my mouth, without incident, but as I cleaned it, the scraper jerked from my hands, slicing my tongue. The scraper flew from my hands into the recycling can. Conscientious Osvald. Blood on my tongue. I went to the kiosk down the block to buy coagulant spray.
I said, Osvald, if you insist on doing this, I’ll stay home tonight and watch Interpermanence on repeat.
Osvald was averse to Interpermanence, a psuedo-intellectual examination of the male role in contemporary society, and would not remain in the building if it was playing. It related to some Jurassic personal drama of his own, when a woman he was dating went to the film with some man after he gave her a dumb speech about human sexuality, about the uselessness of jealousy. Maybe something happened, maybe not. This threat pacified him but for one more rebellious jerk of my arm, when I was raising my toothbrush to my mouth. Toothpaste in my hair. I needed another shower to get it out, but had run through my water allotment on my first. To the charging station latrine. The attendant took in my bloodied face, my disheveled hair.
He said, Do you need me to call someone for you? Or maybe you’d like to eat?
I said, The key, please.
He said, Here you go, but please be advised that the use of illegal narcotics is prohibited on the premises.
I said, The use of illegal narcotics is prohibited everywhere. You don’t need to distinguish between the charging station and the Hub at large.
It was my luck to catch a local going near the hospital.
How to proceed with Dr. Lisa? To ask her too early would be too eager. To ask her too late, as if it were an afterthought, might seem timid.
Lobby, nurse, questions, office.
Dr. Lisa in makeup, not much.
I said, Hello, how are you?
She said, Open your mouth.
She said, It’s bleeding.
She said, Tongue out.
Her hand on my jaw.
She said, I’ll stitch this real quick. How did it happen?
I said, Licking a mailer.
Scissors, thread, needle, syringe.
She said, I’ll numb it up. Keep your tongue out.
In my mouth, her cold hands. The pinch of the needle. These procedures frighten me but the prospect of seeming fearful in front of Dr. Lisa was worse. She was sloppy, quick. It took less than two minutes.
She said, Your tongue is going to hurt for a couple days. Now. What will we see?
On the rail to the Bombay Cinema I told her about Altarpiece. She learned I was married before. We discussed the occupation of myself by Osvald and the subsequent negotiations for my motor functions. I mentioned my neighborhood, the outages, the cameras.
Dr. Lisa’s turn. Safe Zone born and raised. At sixteen, she signed the public service contract, which meant her medical education was paid for in return for a modest salary at an assigned hospital until the age of thirty-nine, and the agreement to practice medicine in the public sector for her entire career. No marriage but a relationship lasting six years. Together in school, in the first years of their careers, then it was used up.
She said, Turned out I didn’t care about vestibular disorders. Every night, after work, he went on and on. I suppose I wasn’t any better.
She said, Never marry a professional.
He had children now. Her parents were myco-remediation workers who had succumbed to the toxins they cleaned up.
She tended hothouse plants in a small room in her condominium with glass windows on two sides and on the roof. Her husband had had it installed after she agreed to sign the papers. There she grew plants I had never seen or heard of, but she promised to show me: Devil’s Tongue, the Variegated Porcupine Violet, the Murderer’s Fig.
She said, I suppose I will discover the one which obsesses and pleases me best, like most hobbyists. For now I don’t have my hopes invested in any particular plant. One thrives, another withers. It is good practice for the conditions of existence, of simultaneously holding everything close and being divorced from or even contemptuous of certain attachments.
I said, Isn’t it courageous to care?
She said, It is courageous to care about what you care about. How much of one’s life is wasted on the extraneous? Courage is giving up what’s unnecessary.
The fidgeting conversation warping in and out of pitch. Too loud and too fast or too quiet. Outside of her authoritative space, Dr. Lisa was awkward. She would tuck her hair behind her left ear and let the hair on the right hang down, hiding her face from me, because she tended to look downward when listening. Infatuation is a horrible affliction, a cancer of the patience. In my life, I have tried to rush through this stage to whatever may come next: indifference, acceptance, friendship, disgust, romance.
I said, This is us.
She said, We have time. Let’s eat.
We stopped at a kiosk. Dr. Lisa got peanut noodles and a beer. I got a hot apple sandwich I could not eat much of, which Dr. Lisa took half of without asking, smiling. Leaning against a wall down the block from the Bombay Cinema.
She said, What did you want to be when you were young?
I said, A filmmaker. What about you?
She said, I wanted to be a surgeon, but during my residency I grew tired of cutting people open, having some of them die, telling their families. It is like a secret. You cut it out and destroy it but that’s not enough. The secret has already taken its path. I changed my specialty. Now I think I would like to be a foster parent for extinct plants. I’d have to commit to one or two. Choice is a sort of violence.
I said, The problem with choice is how does one know one has chosen? What is the sign? You can tell yourself you chose but that doesn’t mean it’s true.
She said, The action isn’t the desire or the inclination or the hidden opinion.
I said, Yes. It’s what is undertaken to relieve the cognitive dissonance.
She said, Film is a great example of what is undertaken to relieve cognitive dissonance.
I said, Maybe existence outside of human consciousness is wholly binary. Is/isn’t. We are designed to hold conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time.
She said, Within the metrics of our universe humanity is meaningless and our time excruciating in its brevity but my life is meaningful and I am supposed to feel pleasure.
I said, There is a generative force who cares for humans especially though there is no evidence of its existence.
She said, Ou
r government is the best and most free in the world but everything we do is recorded and regulated.
I said, I want to be alone; I am lonely when I am alone.
She said, I want to be with someone; I am afraid of being with someone.
I said, Watching films is a bad use of my limited time; watching films illustrates something about my life I would be poorer without, though I can’t name it.
She said, Life is precious, we die without reason.
Dr. Lisa paid. Nothing of His Mother’s Birthday gained purchase in my imagination. The mother had a birthday, and it was significant. The son loved the mother but he was also practicing for some gaming competition. I don’t know. My attention sucked into my left peripheral. I kept the right side of my face facing away from her as much as was possible, fearful of Osvald’s reprisal. I became acutely and uncomfortably conscious of Dr. Lisa’s breathing, afraid mine was unnatural, that she could tell I was nervous. The more I struggled to control it, the more difficult it was to take deep and regular breaths. I didn’t grope her knuckles or sling an arm around her shoulder. I dislike such aggressions. There is much about another one can intuit in a dark theater.
Credits, jackets.
She said, Which way are you? I’m headed into the Zone.
I said, South. Miniature Aleppo.
In a warm violet shadow near the theater. Gangs of leaves shoved along by wind. Because she was slow leaving her seat, yawning, gathering her coat, checking each pocket to see if her Pinger was there, we were alone.
She said, Safe travel.
Her hand touched my face, where it had many times before, in her office, as she tried to understand the nature of my occupation. I leaned in to her. With a mutual politeness we kissed, which relaxed into something more animal as the stiffness of the evening, the tension of pretending, drained from our bodies. My claw in her hair. She twisted my clump of stomach fat. Later, the plums of bruises. She coughed, shoved me away, spat.
A Short Film About Disappointment Page 7