by Leyner, Mark
FADE TO BLACK
INT. WARDEN’S OFFICE
RACK FOCUS to MARK slumped on couch.
WARDEN is bringing him to with smelling salts.
WE HEAR dark, hip-hop ambient-techno mix of “A Whole New World (Aladdin’s Theme).”
And then, WE HEAR the following original lyrics written and performed by the WARDEN to the melody of “I Will Always Love You” from The Bodyguard.
WARDEN
(gazing into Mark’s eyes,
and singing)
Look, I really don’t understand
Why you’re getting so upset about all this.
It’s been my experience that whenever you
Introduce drugs and alcohol into the workplace,
You end up in sexual situations with people whom
(in all likelihood)
you ordinarily wouldn’t have had sex with …
It’s just human nature.
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
This is like any other office—
You’re with the same group of people
Day in and day out,
You’re dealing with them in this very artificial,
So-called “professional” context,
Interacting in these habitual, stultifyingly banal
Situations, and eventually you just start wondering
Who these people really are and what they look like
When they have orgasms.
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
Because that’s when I think a person is
Most real, most genuine—at the moment of orgasm.
It doesn’t matter if it’s some gorgeous, flaxen-haired,
Blue-eyed, dimpled, buff, monstrously hung UPS man
Standing in my foyer sucking on a mint,
Or my Panamanian midget gynecologist with the
Black peach-fuzz mustache, gold caps, toothpick, and Velour pants—my sleazy little “Doggie Hauser” [sic]—
Or Bob Vila, Bernard Goetz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Henry Waxman, Ralph Reed, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario … I try to envision what they look like
When they come.
FLASH CUT TO
Computer-extrapolation sequence of Waxman climaxing—from the scurrilous PBS “rockumentary” Sex Lives of the Anti-Tobacco Zealots.
OVER-THE-SHOULDER SHOT of WARDEN
WARDEN
(continuing)
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
You see, orgasm is all about surrender—
You surrender all the pretense,
All the dissimulating,
All the vanity.
That’s the trouble with this country.
We’re a nation of poseurs.
I say: Off with the masks.
The orgasmic face is the unmasked self, the true self.
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
Imagine, for example, an orgasmic Mount Rushmore.
Wouldn’t that be so much more inspiring?
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt
Carved in granite coming.
Looking out from the Black Hills with these
Contorted rictuses of ecstasy on their faces,
Instead of the stolid, constipated expressions they have.
That would be a great monument.
A monument that actually said something about this country.
WARDEN stands, and extends her arms, entreating MARK to dance.
MARK demurs, tapping his temples and rolling his eyes, as if to say: thanks to the drugs and blows to the head, my equilibrium is, like, completely fucked.
WARDEN smiles at him tenderly, takes his hands in hers, and gently pulls him to his feet.
The WARDEN stands in back of MARK, her right hand raised above MARK’s head with the index finger pointed downward. MARK grasps her finger with his right hand. The WARDEN’s left hand is held forward to the left side of MARK with his left hand resting on it. MARK does a sous-sus to the fifth position on pointe, takes his right foot to retiré and executes a développé croisé devant. From this position he pushes from the WARDEN’S left hand, executes a fouetté rond de jambe en tournant, and continues turning with a series of pirouettes, still holding the WARDEN’S index finger. At the completion of the pirouettes he stops himself by quickly grasping the WARDEN’S left hand.
They gaze deeply into each other’s eyes and sing together.
WARDEN AND MARK
(in full-throated rapture)
Imagine, for example, an orgasmic Mount Rushmore.
Wouldn’t that be so much more inspiring?
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt
Carved in granite coming.
Looking out from the Black Hills with these
Contorted rictuses of ecstasy on their faces,
Instead of the stolid, constipated expressions they have.
That would be a great monument.
A monument that actually said something about this country.
(Chorus)
And I will always love you.
Etc.
MARK (voice-over)
I don’t know if I buy any of this, especially the orgasmic-rictus-as-true-self business. I mean, what makes the expression of someone coming any more genuine than the expression of someone being drawn and quartered? Or the expression of someone just sleeping and drooling.
But the Mount Rushmore idea is really cool.
Blood from gash in forehead trickles down MARK’s face and drips onto rug.
WARDEN
You could probably use a couple of stitches for that.
MARK
I’m OK. Listen, I apologize for getting so pissed off before. It’s not about you. There’s just a lot of shit going on in my head about my father, and I’m mad at myself for having waited until the last minute to do the screenplay, and now it’s too late to even plagiarize something from the library, and sometimes DMT, marijuana, white wine, Demerol, and cough syrup make me a little tense, anyway.…
WARDEN reaches behind her back, unzips her dress, and lets it fall to the floor. She steps out of her panties and stands naked in front of MARK.
MARK
Can I fuck you?
WARDEN
I’m not ready. Do you want to help get me ready?
Now the notorious and achingly beautiful CUNNILINGUS SCENE.
The scene is notorious because of its extraordinary length—over three and a half hours; the scene is extraordinarily long for several reasons.
There are a few brief intervals when it all just clicks, and the clitoral stimulation is perfect—inadvertent perhaps, but perfect—and MARK is this precocious, humming champion, and the WARDEN whimpers and yelps and nearly growls with pleasure.
But there are more frequent and more protracted periods during which MARK earnestly endeavors but, because of his relative inexperience, endeavors to no discernible effect. The WARDEN, never turning tetchy or disagreeable, maintains as positive and encouraging a tone as you could ever hope for—and this from a woman who brooks neither ineptitude nor carelessness from her subordinates. But sometimes her attention does wander.
In fact, there are stretches where, as MARK heedlessly works away, his head bobbing incessantly at her crotch, the WARDEN catches up on neglected paperwork.
During one infamous 95-minute span, amid an endless variety of loud sucking and slurping sounds, with his fingers in her vagina, and a finger in her anus, and his tongue darting and lapping everywhere at once—the clit, the labia, the perineum—in a blind, unmodulated fury of licking and trilling and swirling and churning, with frenzied, accelerating oscillations of his entire head, the WARDEN is on the phone calmly negotiating the end to a potentially deadly hostage crisis in Cell Block D.
Later, in a similar 12-minute episode, as MARK lavishes her pu
ssy with the frenetic diligence of an insect colony servicing its queen, the WARDEN impassively eats a pretzel.
The scene’s aching beauty derives primarily from the fact that for over three and a half hours, MARK’s face never leaves the vulva of the WARDEN, no matter what she is doing. When she’s splayed across the couch, MARK ministers to her from his knees on the floor. When she’s seated at her desk working, MARK is under that desk, gripping the steel arm-supports of her chair so as not to be shaken from her pudendum as she swivels one way to attend to a stack of documents and then suddenly swivels in the opposite direction to shuffle through another. And as she grimly paces her office, this naked virago, phone to her ear, struggling to save the lives of several veteran guards being held by a gang of ax- and icepick-wielding psychopaths, MARK at first scrambles crablike between her legs, in an inverted crawl on his feet and palms, and then, finding this too ungainly, he actually dons her in-line skates so his feet can roll across the floor, an arm wrapped around each of her thighs, his mouth pinioned to her genitals.
To achieve maximum aching beauty:
Include frequent CLOSE-UPS of the WARDEN’S LABIAL KEY RING—a double-strand gold coil pierced through her upper left labium—dangling from which are the front and back door keys to her condo, the ignition and trunk keys to her Mazda RX-7 rotary twin turbo, the key to a summer house in Belmar, New Jersey, that she shares with two other wardens and the director of a juvenile detention center, and mailbox and safe-deposit-box keys.
Anyone who’s seen the infamous video of Richard Speck—pendulous, hormone-spawned breasts swaying back and forth, snorting coke, threshing hundred-dollar bills and getting a blow job from one of his degenerate jailhouse paramours—has to be astonished by the capacity of human beings to enjoy themselves in seemingly infernal circumstances. This is not to say that it would be appropriate in this movie to feature a mass murderer sporting a pair of mutant tits, snorting coke as he’s fellated by transvestite convicts. (This isn’t Joyce Carol Oates, for god’s sake.) I’m just trying to locate a certain cinematic tone.
In a recent issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Liz Tilberis writes in her “Editors Note”: “In an issue like this, it becomes clear that we at Bazaar set almost unreachably high standards for ourselves. There may be times when we present images and ideas that you are not instantly comfortable with; the idea isn’t to shock, but to bring you along with us to the cutting edge of fashion, photography, design, and the arts.”
With this scene, you want to position yourself—in terms of cinematic tone—somewhere between the Speck video and Harper’s Bazaar. As Tilberis says, you want to “set almost unreachably high standards” for yourself. And if a 13-year-old boy, whose father has just survived execution by lethal injection, going down on a warden whose car keys are jingling from a ring in her pussy lips, as she attempts to end a siege by Jheri-Curled homicidal maniacs with ice-picks pressed into the temples of their hostages, as Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti sing “White Riot” isn’t “the cutting edge of fashion, photography, design, and the arts,” then I don’t what is.
Tilberis goes on to say: “I liked wearing pastels this summer, and at long last I’ve had it with black. Brown seems a good way to go instead. Beyond that, I’m thinking it’s just a matter of choosing a bag and a pair of shoes or boots to go with everything.”
Yes. Totally.
Pledge of Integrity
If the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award selection committee is leaning toward giving me the award, but some members are vacillating, and if the only thing holding these members back from unequivocal support for me are qualms about the CUNNILINGUS SCENE, I will remove the scene in its entirety and I pledge never to bring up the subject again.
Up until this point, I’ve scrupulously refrained from making any appeals that smacked of self-pity, pathos, or groveling. But at this time I wish to make an additional pledge: Because my father has been effectively exiled thanks to his NJSDE sentence, my mentally infirm and alcoholic mothers financial well-being is in, like, grave jeopardy. If you, the selection committee, choose to award me the $250,000-a-year prize (this sum to be bestowed annually for the entirety of the winner’s life), I solemnly promise to issue my mother a small and time-limited monthly stipend until she is able to get on her own feet. (I say small and time-limited—I’m thinking of something in the neighborhood of $300 a month until she secures employment, up to a maximum of six months—because I don’t wish to rob my mother of her self-esteem by plunging her into an interminable cycle of dependence and shiftlessness. I love and respect my mother far too much to do that to her.)
Financing Suggestion
If your producers are depending on rich Persian Gulf backers for financing, keep in mind that most financiers arrive with a long list of prohibitions necessary to make any work palatable back home. (A three-and-a-half-hour cunnilingus scene between a drugged adolescent and a 36-year-old female prison warden will probably not be acceptable in a country where it’s considered blasphemous to simply show an unmarried man and woman alone in a room together.) There’s also the MPAA ratings problem back home to consider. And you may be thinking Palme d’Or at Cannes. And what about the possibility that the movie might someday be selected by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for recognition and preservation?
Don’t despair.
You can delete the footage for general release—I know, I know, it’s a very cool scene—but you can always restore it, in toto, for the deluxe letterboxed director’s-cut laser disc.
And none of this precludes you from simultaneously releasing a straight-to-video The Vivisection of Mighty Mouse, Jr. (Hard-Core Mix), which would be just the CUNNILINGUS SCENE. No establishing zoom from the KH-12 photoreconnaissance satellite, no Contraband Control Room, no “Gravy” trip, no white Burgundy, no fiberoptic lapping slurry or endoscopic pull-back shot, no instant Spätzle or in-line nunchakus, and none of what follows. Just 210 commercial-free minutes of nonstop cunnilingus and music.
There are only two substantive exchanges of dialogue in the CUNNILINGUS SCENE.
In one, after MARK peeks at his Tag Heuer and whines about how he won’t be able to get to the library in time to plagiarize a screenplay, the WARDEN advises him to concoct a script “out of this,” suggesting that, as soon as he gets home, he type out everything that happened—i.e., everything that’s transpired between the two of them in the WARDEN’S office—and simply reformat it into a screenplay.
I’ve decided not to incorporate this dialogue into the screenplay. This colloquy between the WARDEN and MARK in which they discuss how to turn their encounter into a screenplay is essentially an ad hoc story conference and putting a story conference into this movie just seems too “inside Hollywood,” too “fashionably self-reflexive,” for me. Would Steven Spielberg’s The Harelip of B’nai Jeshurun be the whimsical delight it is if in the middle of the movie he’d inserted an animated rendition of the development meeting at which Katzenberg first suggested a DreamWorks answer to Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame? No, that would have ruined the whole spirit of the movie. Same here.
The other exchange occurs during a momentary respite, when MARK asks the WARDEN a provocative question concerning fitness tapes.
I include this conversation in its entirety because I feel that it enables the audience, for the first time, to fully appreciate the WARDEN’S erudition, and I think there should be some erudition in this movie, which, in its unflinching verisimilitude, has been so raw and dankly self-abasing. Also, this dialogue provides a necessary segue into the elusive and fleetingly beautiful FUCK scene.
INT. WARDEN’S OFFICE
CLOSE SHOT of MARK
MARK
(Picks a hair from his tongue and scrutinizes
it between his fingers, like Edison assaying a
test filament for his lightbulb prototype.
Then, looking up at the WARDEN)
You recently published a monograph in the
prison staff newsletter on the evolution of narrative in exercise videos, and in it, you argue that early exercise videos like Buns of Steel, Kathy Smith’s Aerobox Workout with Michael Olajide, Jr., Your Personal Best Workout with Elle Macpherson, etc., were morphologically equivalent to early pornography, and that with the later introduction of narrative elements associated with the conventional film—e.g., plot and character development, measured pace, laboriously constructed scenes, the story arc with its conflict and resolution, etc.—the exercise video is no longer disparaged as a marginal, “specialty” category, but is now critically regarded as a valid genre. Do you think that with its new-found respectability, the exercise video has sacrificed the totally monomaniacal narcissism that made it such a galvanizing form when it first came out, and what do you think are, like, the most intense scenes in the neo-narrative exercise video today? And I have a follow-up question.
As the WARDEN replies, MARK resumes his marathon oral lovefest.
WARDEN
I think, sure, we’ve lost some of that exhilaration. I’ll never forget when I saw my first exercise video. I think it was at the old Film-Makers’ Cinematheque at the Gramercy Arts Theater on 27th Street. One hour of frenzied, context-less exercise, unencumbered by all the clunky interstitial devices that are required to move characters around in a plotted film. It was a revelation. There was a kind of pure, classical proportion to it, an Aristotelian unity—men and women in a single room for sixty minutes, laboring, sweating …
So, yes, the so-called maturation of the exercise video entails a certain loss—a loss of that formal rigor that was so thrilling. But the recent trend to graft exercise into the structure of traditional movies has resulted in some superb work. There’s a richness and complexity that’s absolutely new and unprecedented, particularly in the way that the neo-narrative exercise video illuminates the rote narcissism and abject fear of mortality in our most ordinary encounters. As I argue in my monograph, the neo-narrative exercise video is uniquely suited to analyzing the ways in which all of our interactions—intimate, social, economic, political—are carried out as a kind of exercise, as rites of vanity, and, on another level, as strenuous, albeit overweening, acts of protest against the brute, vanquishing inevitability of death.