by Leyner, Mark
As far as most intense scenes, I’d say the scene from the fitness version of Mary Karr’s memoir The Liar’s Club where Mary comes home to confront her fourth husband and former bodyguard after an Italian magazine has published photographs of him cavorting naked with Fili Houteman, a 26-year-old woman who holds the title of Miss Nude Belgium. Mary storms upstairs to their bedroom and finds Peter and Fili on the floor doing abdominal crunches. And instead of denouncing the two of them and demanding that they leave her home at once—which is what we’ve been led to expect—Mary joins them, and for the next twenty minutes, they take us through one of the most demanding ab routines you’ve ever seen. Designed to work the upper and lower abs, obliques and intercostals, this killer workout includes front and reverse crunches, incline board and Roman Chair sit-ups, and vertical bench leg raises. It’s intense!
And, of course, there’s that exquisite, defining scene from the Renny Harlin “Beautiful Backs” version of Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy’s late-Victorian masterpiece. The video was shot on location in Great Fawley, the Berkshire village that is the prototype of Hardy’s fictional “Marygreen.” Jude Fawley, a rustic stonemason with aspirations to someday study at Christminster (a fictional Oxford), is walking hand in hand with his cousin Sue Bridehead, who’s just separated from her husband, the dull, middle-aged schoolmaster, Phillotson. They’re strolling down a forest path, tentatively broaching their love for each other. Just as they reach the end of the path, Jude looks at Sue and says: “I think and know you are my dear Sue, from whom neither length nor breadth, nor things present nor things to come, can divide me. And because, my darling, I desire nobody in this world but you, I have gotten you this splendid lat machine!”
And at that moment, the forest gives way to a daisy- and violet-dappled pasture in the middle of which sits this brand-new shimmering lat pulldown machine.
We’ve all been so culturally indoctrinated to only expect multistation gym equipment inside a gym, that to see this lat machine in a flowering meadow, its overhead cable and chrome-plated weight stack gleaming in the sun, surrounded by the verdant undulations of this arcadian countryside, is an astonishing epiphany.
Jude, clad in a dark frock, waistcoat, breeches, and boots, and Sue, in a lavender sunbonnet and mulberry-colored gown with dainty lace at the collar, proceed to work their trapezius muscles and latissimi dorsi with an unbridled enthusiasm that’s absolutely contagious!
Later, as the setting sun imbues the landscape with rich tints of crimson and sienna, Jude spots for Sue, as the hypersensitive, Swinburne-spouting, sexless coquette works her lower and upper back, traps, buttocks, and legs with a five-rep set of 400-pound deadlifts.
And as Jude urges Sue to complete that one last repetition, Harlin wisely sticks to the original dialogue from Hardy’s unbowdlerized final revision:
“It’s all you, baby!” Jude exhorted.
Sue Bridehead, her face hideously contorted with exertion, slowly straightened until she was upright, the barbell at her thighs. She sighed and dropped the bar to the thick grass.
“Good set,” grunted Jude, their crisp high-five flushing a bevy of quail from a nearby copse of linden trees.
Dude, that’s an intense scene. I mean, that’s an awesome amount of weight for a woman in a Victorian novel to lift. And even on that final rep, she maintains perfect form—back tight and straight, head up. Like so. Check this out—
The WARDEN uses her feet to pry MARK’s face from her crotch. She gets up and mimes the starting position for a dead-lift—knees bent, leaning forward over an imaginary barbell, ass canted at about a 45-degree angle to the floor.
This rear view of a naked, partially jackknifed WARDEN inflames MARK’s inchoate sense of phallocratic imperialism.
MARK
Can I fuck you now? Are you, like, ready?
WARDEN reaches around, takes hold of MARK’s dick in her hand, and guides it in toward her pink, flared orifice. And at the very instant that his penis makes contact with her vagina, MARK ejaculates.
One would have to say that this constitutes a loss of virginity only in the most technical sense. In fact, to ascertain irrefutably whether penetration actually occurred would require such sophisticated equipment—e.g., the femtosecond X-ray photo-electron strobe spectrometer used to aid line judges at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, which is très cher and would send the movie spiraling so far over budget that it would have to gross, like, $300 million just to break even—that it’s probably best to simply call it “intercourse” and proceed.
CLOSE-SHOT of MARK making an arrogant, self-satisfied, vacuous face that is so thoroughly ludicrous, given the instantaneousness of the coitus, that it makes you wince with embarrassment. But it’s significant because it’s the same facial expression that MARK will assume after sex for the rest of his life.
MARK (voice-over)
I felt as if my virginity had been a kind of cryonic capsule which encased my childhood. A frozen bubble which maintained my childhood in a perpetual state of suspended animation. And now that bubble had been shattered … And I began to feel as if I were bleeding. But bleeding time. Time was flowing from me, inexorably, unstanchably. A hemorrhage of time. I experienced the loss of my virginity as the violent culmination of my childhood, as the beginning of this inexorable hemorrhaging of time … but, of course, all I was able to say to the Warden was:
MARK
That was cool … like a video!
The WARDEN repairs to a private bathroom adjoining her office.
WARDEN (off-screen)
Remember when I asked you what you’d say at the presentation ceremony if you won the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award and you said something about thanking your agents for sticking by you even though you hadn’t produced anything except for an imaginary movie review? What was that all about?
MARK
It’s not an imaginary movie review. It’s a review of an imaginary movie. I pretended to be a critic who’s reviewing a movie I made—well, never actually made.
We HEAR a toilet FLUSH and then the spray of a stall SHOWER.
WARDEN (off-screen)
(her voice raised in order
to be heard over shower)
That’s interesting … that you’ve never written a screenplay—in fact, you’ve never exhibited the slightest interest in even attempting to write a screenplay—yet you’ve concocted this ersatz critique.
MARK
I guess I can picture things once they’re done—I just can’t picture actually doing them.
It’s not laziness. Concepts excite me. Theory. Form. But the actual screenwriting seems so tedious, so superfluous. I’m not into praxis. I’m more a dialectician of absence. Writing per se always struck me as terribly vulgar. To actually commit an idea to paper is a desecration of that idea, a corruption of the mind. It’s not laziness. Heavens no. It’s simply that I’m loathe to violate the Mallarméan purity of the blank page. “Le vide papier que la blancheur défend … Le blanc souci de notre toile.” And let me tell you, teachers, particularly in the 7th grade, do not appreciate the Mallarméan purity of the blank page. But I suppose I’ve always been rather precocious. After all, I’m only thirteen, and I’m already a screenwriter-manqué! One must resist succumbing to the blandishments of actual accomplishment.
WARDEN (OFF-SCREEN)
(shouting)
What? I can’t hear you.
MARK
(shouting)
Sitting down in the morning, sipping coffee, smoking a cigarette, and opening up the newspaper to read a review of my movie … that just always seemed like it would be the coolest fucking thing in the world. So one day I just wrote a review myself. I was like, let’s just skip the boring part (i.e., coming up with a story idea and a treatment, writing the script, shooting and editing footage, etc.) and go right to the cool part—reading about it in the paper. I figured that writing the review obviated the need to write the movie.
WARDEN (off-scr
een)
(shouting)
I’d like to read it sometime.
MARK
I … uh … have it with me.
WARDEN (off-screen)
(shouting)
What?
MARK
(shouting)
I have the review here. I carry it with me at all times … like a talisman.
WARDEN (off-screen)
(shouting)
You have it with you?
MARK
(shouting)
Yes!
WARDEN (off-screen)
(shouting)
I’d love to hear it. Why don’t you read it to me?
MARK
You sure?
WARDEN (off-screen)
(shouting)
What?
MARK
(shouting)
Do you really want to hear it?
WARDEN (off-screen)
(shouting)
Yes!
MARK locates his trousers on the floor. He reaches into a pocket and retrieves the review, which has been compulsively folded into a compressed rectangle the size of a commemorative stamp. He carefully unfolds the sheet of paper and smooths its creased grid.
DISSOLVE TO:
SOFT-FOCUS MEDIUM-SHOT of MARK at window.
He is naked, seated on sill, holding review, framed by casing and profiled against the vermilion gloaming.
This is definitely THE SHOT to use for commercials, print ads, billboards, posters, Web site, and licensed merchandise.
There’s a SERAPHIC, almost EPICENE quality to the image that has allure across the demographic spectrum from the CHRISTIAN COALITION to NAMBLA.
INTERSPERSE several single-frame FLASH CUTS of Formula One god Ayrton Senna’s blue and white Williams-Renault slamming into a concrete wall at 190 mph on the seventh turn of the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, in order to SUBLIMINALLY create a disquieting undercurrent of dread in anticipation of this movie’s shocking climax.
MARK
(reading aloud)
“There are those who will not want to miss The Tetherballs of Bougainville for its opening scene in which two revoltingly sleazy teenagers in filthy, reeking Terribly Toothsome warm-up jackets unzipped to the pubes, automobile air-fresheners dangling from cheap gold chains around their necks, cruise the Piazza Navona in Rome, hustling tourists for loose lira and doing grappa shots until they’re vomiting into the Fountain of the Four Rivers, as other kids sit around, high on the popular club drug Special K, strumming guitars, singing ‘Mandy.’ There are many, many more who will want to make sure to miss it. Especially when they find out that this scene—surely unsurpassed in its rapt depiction of emesis—has absolutely nothing to do with the movie that follows—a movie that takes place not in Italy, but briefly in suburban Maplewood, New Jersey, and then primarily in Bougainville, a squalid, war-torn island in the Solomon Sea.
“The Tetherballs of Bougainville was written, directed, and edited by 13-year-old Mark Leyner, whose only previous credit is as musical director of a video of the abortive execution attempt of his father, entitled ‘I Feel Shitty.’ Extravagantly mannered and constantly undermined by a nose-thumbing nihilism and hollow flashiness that reflect its creator’s rock-video affinities, Tetherballs is an autobiographical account of the year that follows the sentencing of Leyner’s father, Joel, to New Jersey State Discretionary Execution (NJSDE). One can’t help but marvel at the sheer chutzpah required to actually base a movie’s formal structure on the vertiginous mood swings of adolescence, so that moments of flabbergasting kitsch (the control tower at Bougainville International Airport is a 160-foot statue of Herve Villechaize as Tattoo from Fantasy Island) and Grand Guignol sadism (a philandering insurance adjuster, archly played by Charles Durning, is filled with candy, hung from the ceiling like a piñata, and savagely beaten to death by the sugar-frenzied, bat-wielding, blindfolded children at his own daughter’s 6th birthday party) alternate with wrenchingly passionate scenes of paternal devotion and filial ambivalence.
“Unfortunately, the movie’s self-congratulatory misery, showy camera tricks, and overindulgent, almost compulsive emphasis on medical imaging are frequently unbearable. For example, in what would otherwise have been an extremely poignant scene in which Mark returns home from the New Jersey State Penitentiary at Princeton and attempts to console his disturbed, kamikaze-guzzling, Thierry Mugler-accoutered mother (smolderingly played by Nell Carter, who was absolutely riveting as Madame Verdurin in George Romero’s terrifying remake of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past), Leyner inexplicably chooses to shoot the scene using a positron emission tomography scanner, emphasizing the glucose metabolism of the characters instead of their emotional interaction.
“With the exception of several Bougainvillean tetherball stars who play themselves—most notably Offramp Tavanipupu, whose sinuous, taunting performance conjures up a Melanesian Adam Ant—the movie’s characters are predominantly 13- and 14-year-old kids played by adult actors. Mark’s best friend from Maplewood Junior High, Felipe, who suffers brain damage from a skateboarding accident, is played with great magnetism and triumphant bluster by Roddy McDowall. Stellar cameos include Ze’ev (Benny) Begin, son of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, as ‘Creepy Man at Futon Store’ and Tommy Hilfiger as ‘Demented Kid on Railroad Trestle.’
“Amazingly for a movie that includes scenes of wild-haired men with bones in their noses eating ‘long pig’ (cooked human being) aboard the Mir space station; boy soldiers who, having just looted a women’s clothing store, lurch down some blighted boulevard in flouncy hats, billowing dresses crisscrossed with cartridge bandoliers, huge spliffs in their mouths, lethal fusillades bursting errantly from their AK-47s each time they stumble in their spike heels; and supermodels Nikki Taylor, Helena Christensen, Carla Bruni, and Yasmeen Ghauri backstroking in an Olympic-size pool filled with gin and vermouth, its lanes demarcated by strings of olives; The Tetherballs of Bougainville was shot entirely in Leyner’s bedroom in his parents’ Maplewood home.
“Although we may deplore the film’s scatological language, sexual explicitness and gratuitous gore as seemingly designed only to shock, in the manner of an angry, attention-craving child, we must remember that this movie was actually made by an angry, attention-craving child.
“And if you’re an aficionado of witty dialogue, be prepared to find The Tetherballs of Bougainville a singularly ungratifying experience. The movie bristles with such urbane repartee as:
‘That’s me playing Super Mario 64 with this guy in his stepmom’s condo in Teaneck.’
‘He’s all like, y’know, “Tonight you die!” He looks so into it.’
‘OK, that’s me drinking fermented mare’s milk with this nomadic Mongolian herdsman. That’s like the summer between tenth and eleventh grade … You wanna see another picture of him?’
‘That’s him? No way.’
‘That’s him in American clothes. We were so fucked up in that picture.’
‘He looks baked. I like when you look in a guy’s eyes and you can see that he’s like totally baked. I think that’s so adorable.’
‘I like when you look at a guy who’s not high, but you look into his eyes and it’s like, y’know, total flat-line.’
‘What about when a guy’s like that, y’know, really retarded, and he’s really baked. Both!’
‘That’s the best! That is so sexy! I’d be like: Yes!!’
“I can’t think of another recent film so saturated with fin-de-siècle morbidity. Everyone is perpetually covered with seabird guano. Almost every single major character has been left with permanent brain damage from a skateboarding accident. And those few individuals who haven’t suffered from some equally disabling malady or medley of maladies, e.g., Thereza, a hard-drinking neonatal nurse, gamely played by Amy Irving, suffers from epilepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, St. Vitus’ dance, and a psychological aversion to infants so severe that even the whimsical illustration of a baby on a package of disposable dia
pers sends her into a murderous rage that can only be stilled by a self-administered Thorazine enema.
“During a scene in which an ambulance—siren screaming, lights flashing, sign on top reading ‘Caution: Student Driver’—plows into a crowd of fans waiting to purchase tickets for an Offramp Tavanipupu concert, and one of the mortally injured victims, a dissolute, syphilitic Dutch aerobics instructor, played with wisecracking sangfroid by Joe Don Baker, who recently won a People’s Choice Award for his performance in Jerry Lewis’s rollicking remake of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, looks up at the camera and rasps: ‘Roth … Hagar … Cherone …,’ reciting the succession of Van Halen’s lead singers with the portentous gravity of someone intoning the plagues visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus, and then dies, a 15-foot geyser of obviously fake blood shooting from the top of his head, the guy sitting next to me in the theater, Joel Siegel from Good Morning America, turned to me and said, ‘What the fuck does this mean?’ and I said, ‘I think it has something to do with coming to terms with your father.
“ ‘But maybe I’m projecting too much of my own filial dilemma onto it. Admittedly, I often see my own life as paradigmatic of the history of mankind, and, inversely, read complex, tragic historical events merely as allegories of my own fleeting, frivolous, trivial contretemps.
“ ‘And every object, every phenomenon becomes a mirror in this completely claustrophobic, totally solipsistic constellation, e.g., the rain … the moss … the noodles … It’s all me! I think that’s what Jude meant in Renny Harlin’s exercise video when he said to Sue, “It’s all you, baby!” Like in the Wallace Stevens song, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”: “Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, / And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. / I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself.”
“ ‘It’s the same with movies. All the movies I find most affecting, like The Towering Inferno, Dawn of the Dead, Die Hard, Bloodsport, Hellraiser, Speed, and, most recently, The Nudniks, a home-invasion comedy in which a loose confederation of North Korean teenage Cyclopes (mutants spawned in the wake of a Yongbyon plutonium plant accident), gold-fanged black superpredator congressmen, and amped-up cannibal models in blood-encrusted New York Rangers jerseys sack Karl Lagerfeld’s lavish eighteenth-century residence on the rue de l’Université in Paris, smashing the gold-spouted bidets, mosaic-and-black-terrazzo floors, trellised gardens, and marble fountains with sledgehammers, and then remove Lagerfeld’s liver and ponytail and have them FedExed to Ristorante Ai Tre Scalini (on the Piazza Navona), where they’re prepared by chefs (“Fegata e tréccia alla veneziano”) and served to the ghost of Pier Paolo Pasolini (drolly played by a wizened Paul Sorvino), as meanwhile, back in Amalfi, Lagerfeld’s muse and confidant, ex-Hüsker Dü guitarist Bob Mould, is put into a drug-induced coma and kept in a glass sarcophagus à la Snow White, where he awaits the revivifying kiss of the Antichrist, who, according to Nostradamus, will manifest himself after failing the bar exam 666 times—to me, all of these movies are ultimately about the intricate, tangled reciprocations of father-son relationships.’