by Leyner, Mark
“ ‘Through its furious incomprehensibility, The Tetherballs of Bougainville radiates a kind of white light. It attains a white opacity toward which sloughed molecules of our own autobiographies float. These are the motes seen drifting in the projector’s beam in the darkened theater—the spores of our own autobiographies pulled towards the white, blank screen. And this superstratum of autobiographical spores that colonize the silver media ultimately becomes “the movie.” So, in a sense, power accrues to “the movie” parasitically.’
“ ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ asked Siegel.
“ ‘Would you two please shut up?’ said Michael Medved (Sneak Previews), who was seated in the row directly behind us.
“ ‘Hey, fuck you!’ Siegel shot back, doffing his eyeglasses to add, I suppose, swagger to the macho retort.
“This was a mistake, because then Medved took a purse-size canister of Mace from his jacket pocket and sprayed Siegel point-blank in the face.
“And Siegel lurched out of the theater, howling, ‘My eyes! My eyes!’
“I can’t say I really felt sorry for the guy. I mean, he must make like half a million bucks minimum on GMA and I write reviews totally gratis for Der Schweißblatt, this German armpit-fetish ’zine out of Düsseldorf, and he’s like ‘What does this mean? What does that mean?’ y’know, pumping me for information … Let him do his own fucking work.
“The Tetherballs of Bougainville first finds Mark (played with pitch-perfect menace by Chandrapal Ram, a 16-year-old contortionist dwarf from the Great Raj Kamal Circus in Upleta, India, who is little known in America, but, if we’re to judge by this astonishing, galvanic debut, seems destined for instant megastardom and then an equally precipitous descent into obscurity, impoverishment, substance abuse, a spate of botched suicide attempts, and, finally, a day job) at The Carousel, a topless bar on the outskirts of Princeton, several hours after the failed execution of his father and his subsequent sentencing to NJSDE. The Carousel is a state-operated, officially alcohol-free, topless club for minors. Youthful patrons skirt the booze prohibition, though, by simply going to the ‘Gourmet Shoppe’ located conveniently next door and purchasing 10-ounce bottles of ‘Cooking Vodka,’ ‘Cooking Beer,’ ‘Cooking Jagermeister,’ ‘Cooking Captain Morgan’s,’ even ‘Cooking Robitussin,’ and ‘Cooking Methadone,’ and bringing it back to The Carousel, which provides setups. Designed to simulate an airport baggage carousel, the club features topless women who slide down a long chute and then revolve on a conveyer belt until customers, seated around the belt, signal them for table and lap dances. Mark and his heavy-lidded, barely coherent compadre Felipe are knocking back rum-and-Cokes and puffing cigarettes. Felipe wants to know why the execution took so long, and in a close shot of Mark’s face, which fills the frame for some eight minutes as he offers a précis of his day, Chandrapal Ram’s virtuosic skills are given full rein. I have never seen such a finely calibrated choreography of affect, such a deft, protean composition of smiles, pouts, smirks, winks, and scowls, as he recounts, in eidetic detail, his attempt to reach 40,000 points in the Game Boy version of Gianni Isotope. And then this physiognomic kaleidoscope of emotion so vividly manifest as he recounts rescuing future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees such as Oasis singer Noel Gallagher, Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn, Shirley Manson of Garbage, and Eye Yamatsuka of the Boredoms from the gruesome processing plant in the Lwor Cluster, abruptly (and brilliantly!) collapses into impassivity when, distracted by the continuous cascade and slow, mesmerizing orbit of nearly naked women, he assumes a perfunctory singsong to describe the ensuing events (Then he had to tell me this whole long story about turning a brunette without a cranium into a blonde, and then they tried to execute him and then he didn’t die, and then I had to go talk to the prison doctor, and then he was resentenced to NJSDE, and then they had to explain what NJSDE was, and then we had to pick a song to go with the video, and then we had to say good-bye all over again, and then I got high with the warden, and then I had sex with the warden, then I read my talismanic movie review to the warden. It was just one thing after another.’) and he admits to Felipe that he’s terrified by the prospect of his father resurfacing out of paternal concern for him (‘I know how much he cares about me, man, but those motherfuckin’ NJSDE agents—they could come for him anytime and they’ll take out any sorry assholes who happen to be around, including us.’). Mark signals one of the strippers circulating on the baggage carousel, a blowzy woman with huge, cantilevered silicone boobs, who comes over and dances at their table, fondling herself, writhing, moaning, and taunting the young boys, who are promptly apoplectic with lust. And then Mark espies a scar on her thigh—the characteristic scar from a scrimshaw-engraver impaling. ‘Daddy!’ he screams, a scream recapitulated from multiple angles to the horror cliché of shrieking strings. ‘Dad, it’s you!’ he gasps, in the first of this movie’s numbing succession of epiphanies. Felipe, one of those adolescents who’s unctuously ingratiating to his friends’ parents, is like: ‘Mr. Leyner, sir, those are the most gorgeous fuckin’ tits I’ve ever seen, man. You had that done this afternoon? Unbelievable, dude!’ Unbelievable indeed. Sex-change surgery and complete recovery in several hours? ‘This is just Plan A,’ says Mark’s father, Joel (hauntingly portrayed by Gérard Depardieu), cupping his breasts and twitching his G-stringed mons in a campy air-hump. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were OK.’ He hugs Mark and buries his son’s head deep in sweaty cleavage, muffling his plaintive ‘Dad, would you please get out of here.’
“Suspension of disbelief aside, what the hell are we supposed to make of a scene like this?
“Are we supposed to be moved by this father’s extraordinary efforts to keep watch over his young son? Or appalled by the danger in which he (as an NJSDE releasee) heedlessly puts this same child? Or amused by a parody of the typical adolescent’s mortification at being seen socializing with his parents? Or are we to read this as a sort of transsexual twist on oedipal conflict?
“Leyner’s attention-deficit style of editing gives us scant opportunity to ponder any of this.
“As Mark tries to wriggle out of his father’s embrace, The Carousel is hit by several 152-mm howitzer shells, followed by a barrage of AT-3 Sagger wire-guided missiles and rocket propelled antitank grenades, and then several thousand rounds from a turret-mounted .50-caliber heavy machine gun and an M163 Vulcan 20-mm Gatling gun. There’s a brief lull, and then a hit team of NJSDE agents appear, some in neoprene rubber wet suits, some in olive green Nomex flame-retardant overalls and bulletproof Kevlar flak vests. They lob in a dozen F-l antipersonnel fragmentation grenades and then enter, raking the interior with AK-47s and German-made Heckler & Koch 9-mm submachine-gun fire. The massacre inside is luridly illuminated by thin red laser beams from the commandos’ aiming devices and the glow of crisscrossing tracer rounds ricocheting off the walls.
“Mark and Felipe—probably because they were drunk and their bodies relaxed—miraculously escape unharmed. Joel, the putative target of this assault, presumably survives and disappears—we don’t see his metamorphically full-figured physique among the dead and wounded as the camera slowly pans the smoldering carnage.
“It’s worth reiterating—as we ponder this tableau mort, in which corpses wheel in a spasmodic, warped orbit on the crippled baggage carousel, many of them headless and gushing great plumes of thin, pink ‘blood’—how astonishing it is that the 13-year-old Leyner was able to stage scenes like this in his small, second-floor bedroom in his parents’ suburban home, particularly when you consider a production schedule limited to after-school hours and weekends.
“One can’t, of course, overestimate the centrality of the male-adolescent bedroom in the history of western art. It is the sanctuary where the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy seeks refuge from his shallow peers and uncomprehending parents. It is the laboratory where he invents himself. And it is invariably the site of that great initial aesthetic frisson that not only determines the trajectory of h
is artistic life, but is often its crowning achievement. We rarely surpass in beauty or audacity those first raw, untutored riffs cooked up in the clamorous, totem-packed sancta sanctorum that we (the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boys of America) simply call our ‘rooms.’
“It should also be noted that the decapitated torso disgorging a geyser of blood is one of Leyner’s signature effects and marks a recurrent, obsessive motif in The Tetherballs of Bougainville. To give just one example: In a scene which takes place during a reading by playwrights David Hare and Wallace Shawn at the 92nd Street Y, the camera scans the auditorium and then stops at a seat occupied by a headless torso, its savagely hewn neck spewing a fountain of blood at least ten feet high. The other members of the audience, including those seated directly next to the spouting trunk and those being drenched by Leyner’s egregiously ersatz fuchsia concoction, are absolutely oblivious and listen with rapt attention to Hare and Shawn reading from their own work. Whether this represents some sort of Buddhist memento mori, an absurdist harbinger of the coming millennium, a symbol of how inured we’ve become to one another’s suffering, or is simply an image that the filmmaker finds so perversely satisfying that he can’t help but insert it almost everywhere, blithely indifferent to its relevance, one can’t say with any certainty. But I suspect the latter.
“It’s no surprise that this zeitgeist-savvy film next finds Mark as a guest panelist on a daytime talk show. The theme: ‘My Dad Is an NJSDE Releasee.’
“ ‘Is there anything you’d say to your dad if he were here right now?’ asks the host, eyes moist with empathy.
“And Mark responds, ‘I’d probably say: “Dad, I love you and I know you love me and want to be near me and watch over me and everything, but please don’t come anywhere near me or Mom because they could call in a fucking NJSDE air strike on our house the minute you walk in.”’
“The host winks at the audience.
“ ‘How about saying it to him, because he’s been listening backstage and here he comes …’
“Mark leaps up and tears his microphone off, shrieking, ‘Are you out of your mind?! Run! Run, people, run!’
“Panic engulfs the studio audience. There’s instant pandemonium as terrified people rush frantically for the exits.
“Predictably, battered and suffocated bodies soon litter the floor, some pounded and literally flattened into two-dimensional scaloppini by the throng’s trampling wingtips and Birkenstocks. (This is far from the only instance of people being trampled to death in The Tetherballs of Bougainville. In fact, rarely do three characters congregate in this movie without one of them stumbling and dying under the feet of the other two. Whenever we’re shown people emerging from a crowded elevator, we invariably discover, once that car has emptied out, the lifeless body of someone who’s been inexplicably crushed to death by fellow passengers. I can understand the Ma Ling Stadium disaster scene in which drunken Bougainvillean tetherball hooligans supporting Wamp Kominika storm the stand filled with Wuwu-Bulolo Puliyasi supporters, and hundreds of people die in the ensuing stampede. But take the scene at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels—a group on a museum tour is clustered in front of Pieter Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, and when, at the behest of their guide, they continue on to the next painting, we find, remaining at the Breughel—surprise, surprise—the crumpled, broken body of some hapless art maven who somehow fell and was pummeled to death by the shoes of his companions as they scurried off to Hans Memlinc’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. I mean, what’s up with that? I’ve never seen a movie before in which: (a) people can’t manage to remain upright for more than several seconds, and (b) when they do fall, passersby can’t seem to avoid stomping them into unrecognizable pulp. If scenes like this bother you, you may consider avoiding Tetherballs altogether, although the gore is so unrealistic and mannered that I can’t imagine anyone finding it really disturbing. We’re not talking Industrial Light and Magic here. I don’t claim to be a special-effects expert or anything, but I think we’re talking raw chicken cutlets, dressed in Ken and Barbie outfits, and then pounded with a meat mallet. Whether this is an improvisation born of budgetary constraints, or a deliberate aesthetic device—a sort of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt—or simply an excuse for the adolescent filmmaker and his crew to bludgeon meat with a hammer, one can’t say with any certainty. But again, I suspect the latter.
“Anyway, as he flees this latest disaster, Mark valiantly stops to save a girl who’s tripped and fallen under the stampeding feet. The girl’s name is Sylvia, and she’s played by Reese Witherspoon with equal portions of gamine bluster, little-girl vulnerability, bewitching carnality, and a sort of arid, postwar Gallic Maoist, protofeminist, chignon-wearing hauteur that easily falls away to reveal a kind of Squeaky Fromm—like, giggly, non-compos-mentis ‘hey, whatever’ insouciance in a performance that marks a stunning comeback from Ms. Witherspoon’s disastrous turn as ‘Tante Helke’ in controversial Austrian director John Jacob Jingle-heimer Schmidt’s unwatchable S&M epic My Name Is Your Name Too.
“Once safely outside the television studio, Mark and Sylvia sit on the sidewalk and introduce themselves to each other. Sylvia’s new in town and, like Mark, about to start the 8th grade at Maplewood Junior High.
“When Mark asks her where she moved from, she hesitates for a long time, I mean a long time.
“So long that I actually got up, went to the men’s room, sat on the John, lit a cigarette, and wrote a poem—a poem whose premise had been in gestation for several days, but the refrain of which had actually suggested itself to me months ago as I gazed down from the Euganean Hills to the plain of Lombardy, with Venice in the distance:
The ground is blanketed with the deciduous wings of pupal cicadas.
Two or three lissome, chemically castrated perverts are always draped over the railing at the rink.
The corpse has been rotated.
Apply the secretions.
Heathcliffean men wearing two-toned alligator shoes, Mirabella baseball caps, and well-pressed military attire, with flutes of champagne in their prosthetic left hands, trawl the baccarat pits, whispering into the ears of scantily clad dowagers, wearing only their golden-stringed Venetian tampons.
Florid, hyperbolic allusions to vampiric sex merely elicit “been there, done that” rolls of the eyes from the dowagers as, meanwhile, miniature velociraptors run wild in and out of their profusely powdered buttocks.
“Their mannerisms are totally nha que,” they giggle to each other, mixing California syntax with Vietnamese slang for “country folk.”
The corpse has been rotated.
Apply the secretions.
It’s hard to believe that someone named “Gushy” Grubenfleisch is considered by so many to be “the great genius of our time,” that cassettes of his lectures in the grand amphitheater of the Sorbonne circulate clandestinely throughout the kingdom.
We see him on television in his multicolored Coogi sweater and freshly laundered blue do-rag and are told to imagine future generations of similar “geniuses” spawned from his cryonically preserved sperm.
And yet when he opens his mouth to speak, he’s like … way-stupid, totally nha que.
The corpse has been rotated.
Apply the secretions.
When rats are threatened, they emit very high frequency (20,000 to 30,000 cycles per second) screams.
Emerson said in Nature: “… my head bathed by the blithe air.”
I’m somewhere in between, I guess, with my own “Stoned on GHB, soft tiny duck tongues seem to lave my saddle-scorched perineum.”
Strangely, that afternoon’s $25.95 All-You-Can-Eat Foie Gras at Lespinasse doesn’t preclude an overpowering yen, later, for an eggplant parm hero and Twizzlers.
Oh well … soon enough the acacias and Jacarandas, even the shimmering ingots stacked high, will be replaced by brambles and shriveled, bitter berries.
But for now, to the strains of a scratched, warped 45 of The Boxtops’ “Cry Like a
Baby” that’s been slowed down to 3 rpm, a springboard diver—molto bèllo notwithstanding a bad-hair day—arcs slowly through the air and slices through the slime of filamentous blue-green algae that covers the surface of the pitiless canal.
The corpse has been rotated.
Apply the secretions.
“I submitted the poem, via E-mail, right from the stall, to Logopoeia, Francis Ford Coppola’s new poetics journal, and sat there waiting for a response. Finally I got one—a rejection, but fairly encouraging, I thought. It was from the poetry editor, Sofia Coppola, and it read: ‘We went back and forth on this one, but ultimately decided that all-you-can-eat foie gras at Lespinasse would cost more than $25.95. Please try us again.’