What if the film fails? And if it fails, will I know it?
A murdered doll floating face down in a bathtub—that will be the opening shot. A “cold” opening, but with faint intimations of the happiness of childhood and the pleasure we take in water. Then, the credits superimposed on a hanging side of beef. Samisen music, and a long speech from a vandal spokesman praising vandal culture and minimizing the sack of Rome in 455 A.D. Next, shots of a talk program in which all of the participants are whispering, including the host. Softness could certainly be considered a motif here. The child is well behaved through the long hours of shooting. The lieutenants march nicely, swinging their arms. The audience smiles. A vandal is standing near the window, and suddenly large cracks appear in the window. Pieces of glass fall to the floor. But I was watching him the whole time; he did nothing.
I wanted to film everything but there are things we are not getting. The wild ass is in danger in Ethiopia—we’ve got nothing on that. We’ve got nothing on intellectual elitism funded out of public money, an important subject. We’ve got nothing on ball lightning and nothing on the National Grid and not a foot on the core-mantle problem, the problem of a looped economy, or the interesting problem of the night brain.
I wanted to get it all but there’s only so much time, so much energy. There’s an increasing resistance to antibiotics worldwide and liquid metal fast-breeder reactors are subject to swelling and a large proportion of Quakers are color-blind but our film will have not a shred of material on any of these matters.
Is the film sufficiently sexual? I don’t know.
I remember a brief exchange with Julie about revolutionary praxis.
“But I thought,” I said, “that there had been a sexual revolution and everybody could sleep with anybody who was a consenting adult.”
“In theory,” Julie said. “In theory. But sleeping with somebody also has a political dimension. One does not, for example, go to bed with running dogs of imperialism.”
I thought: But who will care for and solace the running dogs of imperialism? Who will bring them their dog food, who will tuck the covers tight as they dream their imperialistic dreams?
We press on. But where is Ezra? He was supposed to bring additional light, the light we need for “Flying to America.” The vandals hit the trail, confused as to whether they should place themselves under our protection, or fight. The empty slivovitz bottles are buried, the ashes of the cooking fires scattered. At a signal from the leader the sleek, well-cared-for mobile homes swing onto the highway. The rehabilitation of the filmgoing public through “good design,” through “softness,” is our secret aim. The payment of rent for seats will be continued for a little while, but eventually abolished. Anyone will be able to walk into a film as into a shower. Bathing with the actors will become commonplace. Terror and terror are our two great principles, but we have other principles to fall back on, if these fail. “I can relate to that,” Frot says. He does. We watch skeptically.
Who had murdered the doll? We pressed our inquiry, receiving every courtesy from the Tel Aviv police, who said they had never seen a case like it, either in their memories, or in dreams. A few wet towels were all the evidence that remained, except for, in the doll’s hollow head, little pieces of paper on which were written
JULIE
JULIE
JULIE
JULIE
in an uncertain hand. And now the ground has opened up and swallowed our cutting room. One cannot really hold the vandals responsible. And yet . . .
Now we are shooting “Flying to America.”
The 112 pilots check their watches.
Ezra nowhere to be seen. Will there be enough light?
If the pilots all turn on their machines at once . . .
Flying to America.
(But did I remember to—?)
“Where is the blimp?” Marcello shouts. “I can’t find the—”
Ropes dangling from the sky.
I’m using forty-seven cameras, the outermost of which is posted in the Dover Marshes.
The Atlantic is calm in some parts, angry in others.
A blueprint four miles long is the flight plan.
Every detail coordinated with the air-sea rescue services of all nations.
Victory through Air Power! I seem to remember that slogan from somewhere.
Hovercraft flying to America. Flying boats flying to America. F-111s flying to America. The China Clipper!
Seaplanes, bombers, Flying Wings flying to America.
A shot of a pilot named Tom. He opens the cockpit door and speaks to the passengers. “America is only two thousand miles away now,” he says. The passengers break out in smiles.
Balloons flying to America (they are painted in red-and-white stripes). Spads and Fokkers flying to America. Self-improvement is a large theme in flying to America. “Nowhere is self-realization more a possibility than in America,” a man says.
Julie watching the clouds of craft in the air . . .
Gliders gliding to America. One man has constructed a huge paper aircraft, seventy-two feet in length. It is doing better than we had any right to expect. But then great expectations are an essential part of flying to America.
Rich people are flying to America, and poor people, and people of moderate means. This aircraft is powered by twelve rubber bands, each rubber band thicker than a man’s leg—can it possibly survive the turbulence over Greenland?
Long thoughts are extended to enwrap the future American experience of the people who are flying to America.
And here is Ezra! and Ezra is carrying the light we need for this part of the picture—a great bowl of light lent to us by the U.S. Navy. Now our film will be successful, or at least completed, and the aircraft illuminated, and the child will be rescued, and Julie will marry well, and the light from the light will fall into the eyes of the vandals, fixing them in place. Truth! That is another thing they said our film wouldn’t contain. I had simply forgotten about it, in contemplating the series of triumphs that is my private life.
The Sandman
DEAR DR. HODDER, I realize that it is probably wrong to write a letter to one’s girl friend’s shrink but there are several things going on here that I think ought to be pointed out to you. I thought of making a personal visit but the situation then, as I’m sure you understand, would be completely untenable—I would be visiting a psychiatrist. I also understand that in writing to you I am in some sense interfering with the process but you don’t have to discuss with Susan what I have said. Please consider this an “eyes only” letter. Please think of it as personal and confidential.
You must be aware, first, that because Susan is my girl friend pretty much everything she discusses with you she also discusses with me. She tells me what she said and what you said. We have been seeing each other for about six months now and I am pretty familiar with her story, or stories. Similarly, with your responses, or at least the general pattern. I know, for example, that my habit of referring to you as “the sandman” annoys you but let me assure you that I mean nothing unpleasant by it. It is simply a nickname. The reference is to the old rhyme: “Sea-sand does the sandman bring/Sleep to end the day/He dusts the children’s eyes with sand/And steals their dreams away.” (This is a variant; there are other versions, but this is the one I prefer.) I also understand that you are a little bit shaky because the prestige of analysis is now, as I’m sure you know far better than I, at a nadir. This must tend to make you nervous and who can blame you? One always tends to get a little bit shook when one’s methodology is in question. Of course! (By the bye, let me say that I am very pleased that you are one of the ones that talk, instead of just sitting there. I think that’s a good thing, an excellent thing, I congratulate you.)
To the point. I fully understand that Susan’s wish to terminate with you and buy a piano
instead has disturbed you. You have every right to be disturbed and to say that she is not electing the proper course, that what she says conceals something else, that she is evading reality, etc., etc. Go ahead. But there is one possibility here that you might be, just might be, missing. Which is that she means it.
Susan says: “I want to buy a piano.”
You think: She wishes to terminate the analysis and escape into the piano.
Or: Yes, it is true that her father wanted her to be a concert pianist and that she studied for twelve years with Goetzmann. But she does not really want to reopen that can of maggots. She wants me to disapprove.
Or: Having failed to achieve a career as a concert pianist, she wishes to fail again. She is now too old to achieve the original objective. The spontaneous organization of defeat!
Or: She is flirting again.
Or:
Or:
Or:
Or:
The one thing you cannot consider, by the nature of your training and of the discipline itself, is that she really might want to terminate the analysis and buy a piano. That the piano might be more necessary and valuable to her than the analysis.1
What we really have to consider here is the locus of hope. Does hope reside in the analysis or rather in the piano? As a shrink rather than a piano salesman you would naturally tend to opt for the analysis. But there are differences. The piano salesman can stand behind his product; you, unfortunately, cannot. A Steinway is a known quantity, whereas an analysis can succeed or fail. I don’t reproach you for this, I simply note it. (An interesting question: Why do laymen feel such a desire to, in plain language, fuck over shrinks? As I am doing here, in a sense? I don’t mean hostility in the psychoanalytic encounter, I mean in general. This is an interesting phenomenon and should be investigated by somebody.)
It might be useful if I gave you a little taste of my own experience of analysis. I only went five or six times. Dr. Behring was a tall thin man who never said anything much. If you could get a “What comes to mind?” out of him you were doing splendidly. There was a little incident that is, perhaps, illustrative. I went for my hour one day and told him about something I was worried about. (I was then working for a newspaper down in Texas.) There was a story that four black teenagers had come across a little white boy, about ten, in a vacant lot, sodomized him repeatedly and then put him inside a refrigerator and closed the door (this was before they had that requirement that abandoned refrigerators had to have their doors removed) and he suffocated. I don’t know to this day what actually happened, but the cops had picked up some black kids and were reportedly beating the shit out of them in an effort to make them confess. I was not on the police run at that time but one of the police reporters told me about it and I told Dr. Behring. A good liberal, he grew white with anger and said what was I doing about it? It was the first time he had talked. So I was shaken—it hadn’t occurred to me that I was required to do something about it, he was right—and after I left I called my then sister-in-law, who was at that time secretary to a City Councilman. As you can imagine, such a position is a very powerful one—the councilmen are mostly off making business deals and the executive secretaries run the office—and she got on to the chief of police with an inquiry as to what was going on and if there was any police brutality involved and if so, how much. The case was a very sensational one, you see; Ebony had a writer down there trying to cover it but he couldn’t get in to see the boys and the cops had roughed him up some, they couldn’t understand at that time that there could be such a thing as a black reporter. They understood that they had to be a little careful with the white reporters, but a black reporter was beyond them. But my sister-in-law threw her weight (her Councilman’s weight) around a bit and suggested to the chief that if there was a serious amount of brutality going on the cops had better stop it, because there was too much outside interest in the case and it would be extremely bad PR if the brutality stuff got out. I also called a guy I knew pretty high up in the sheriff’s department and suggested that he suggest to his colleagues that they cool it. I hinted at unspeakable political urgencies and he picked it up. The sheriff’s department was separate from the police department but they both operated out of the Courthouse Building and they interacted quite a bit, in the normal course. So the long and short of it was that the cops decided to show the four black kids at a press conference to demonstrate that they weren’t really beat all to rags, and that took place at four in the afternoon. I went and the kids looked O.K., except for one whose teeth were out and who the cops said had fallen down the stairs. Well, we all know the falling-down-the-stairs story but the point was the degree of mishandling and it was clear that the kids had not been half-killed by the cops, as the rumor stated. They were walking and talking naturally, although scared to death, as who would not be? There weren’t any TV pictures because the newspaper people always pulled out the plugs of the TV people, at important moments, in those days—it was a standard thing. Now while I admit it sounds callous to be talking about the degree of brutality being minimal, let me tell you that it was no small matter, in that time and place, to force the cops to show the kids to the press at all. It was an achievement, of sorts. So about eight o’clock I called Dr. Behring at home, I hope interrupting his supper, and told him that the kids were O.K., relatively, and he said that was fine, he was glad to hear it. They were later no-billed and I stopped seeing him. That was my experience of analysis and that it may have left me a little sour, I freely grant. Allow for this bias.
To continue. I take exception to your remark that Susan’s “openness” is a form of voyeurism. This remark interested me for a while, until I thought about it. Voyeurism I take to be an eroticized expression of curiosity whose chief phenomenological characteristic is the distance maintained between the voyeur and the object. The tension between the desire to draw near the object and the necessity to maintain the distance becomes a libidinous energy nondischarge, which is what the voyeur seeks.2 The tension. But your remark indicates, in my opinion, a radical misreading of the problem. Susan’s “openness”—a willingness of the heart, if you will allow such a term—is not at all comparable to the activities of the voyeur. Susan draws near. Distance is not her thing—not by a long chalk. Frequently, as you know, she gets burned, but she always tries again. What is operating here, I suggest, is an attempt on your part to “stabilize” Susan’s behavior in reference to a state-of-affairs that you feel should obtain. Susan gets married and lives happily ever after. Or: There is within Susan a certain amount of creativity which should be liberated and actualized. Susan becomes an artist and lives happily ever after.
But your norms are, I suggest, skewing your view of the problem, and very badly.
Let us take the first case. You reason: If Susan is happy or at least functioning in the present state of affairs (that is, moving from man to man as a silver dollar moves from hand to hand), then why is she seeing a shrink? Something is wrong. New behavior is indicated. Susan is to get married and live happily ever after. May I offer another view? That is, that “seeing a shrink” might be precisely a maneuver in a situation in which Susan does not want to get married and live happily ever after? That getting married and living happily ever after might be, for Susan, the worst of fates, and that in order to validate her nonacceptance of this norm she defines herself to herself as shrink-needing? That you are actually certifying the behavior which you seek to change? (When she says to you that she’s not shrinkable, you should listen.)
Perhaps, Dr. Hodder, my logic is feeble, perhaps my intuitions are frail. It is, God knows, a complex and difficult question. Your perception that Susan is an artist of some kind in potentia is, I think, an acute one. But the proposition “Susan becomes an artist and lives happily ever after” is ridiculous. (I realize that I am couching the proposition in such terms—“happily ever after”—that it is ridiculous on the face of it, but there is ridiculousness piled upon ridiculous
ness.) Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature3 (I mean the theory of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something “out there” which cannot be brought “here.” This is standard. I don’t mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a “successful artist” (except, of course, in worldly terms). The proposition should read, “Susan becomes an artist and lives unhappily ever after.” This is the case. Don’t be deceived.
What I am saying is, that the therapy of choice is not clear. I deeply sympathize. You have a dilemma.
I ask you to note, by the way, that Susan’s is not a seeking after instant gratification as dealt out by so-called encounter or sensitivity groups, nude marathons, or dope. None of this is what is going down. “Joy” is not Susan’s bag. I praise her for seeking out you rather than getting involved with any of this other idiocy. Her forte, I would suggest, is mind, and if there are games being played they are being conducted with taste, decorum, and some amount of intellectual rigor. Not-bad games. When I take Susan out to dinner she does not order chocolate-covered ants, even if they are on the menu. (Have you, by the way, tried Alfredo’s, at the corner of Bank and Hudson streets? It’s wonderful.) (Parenthetically, the problem of analysts sleeping with their patients is well known and I understand that Susan has been routinely seducing you—a reflex, she can’t help it—throughout the analysis. I understand that there is a new splinter group of therapists, behaviorists of some kind, who take this to be some kind of ethic? Is this true? Does this mean that they do it only when they want to, or whether they want to or not? At a dinner party the other evening a lady analyst was saying that three cases of this kind had recently come to her attention and she seemed to think that this was rather a lot. The problem of maintaining mentorship is, as we know, not easy. I think you have done very well in this regard, and God knows it must have been difficult, given those skirts Susan wears that unbutton up to the crotch and which she routinely leaves unbuttoned to the third button.)
Donald Barthelme Page 40