by Leyner, Mark
“When I returned to my seat, Sylvia was still staring into the middle distance, her eyes misting.
“ ‘Well, where’d you move from?’ Mark reinquires, thrumming the pavement.
“And finally she says tragically, ‘Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, near Nice.’ Then, brightening, she says: ‘Well, we lived most of the year in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, but we spend summers in Seaside Heights.’
“Two quibbles here.
“Her family lived on the French Riviera and summered on the Jersey shore? I don’t think so.
“Secondly, I hate to cavil about continuity, especially with a filmmaker this young and exuberant, but inside the TV studio when Mark helps Sylvia in the stampede, she’s wearing a sky-blue and black bustier, black satin pants, and a delft-blue jacket. Outside, only minutes later, she’s wearing a tailored pinstriped jacket and a leopard-patterned chiffon skirt with ruffles. Hello?
“School begins that September and the plot accelerates.
“Up to this point, Tetherballs has suffered from an unaccountable tendency to suddenly lock onto a particularly banal object—a disfigured Nerf ball, a piece of brisket on the highway, a price tag dangling from a bra entangled in a treetop and buffeted by a hurricane—and then subject it to exceedingly minute and prolonged scrutiny. We’re talking about a movie in which a peripheral character—a lovelorn quantum electrodynamics professor at nearby Seton Hall University, played by a woefully miscast Willie Nelson—paints a wall in his apartment, and we’re then treated to—I kid you not—a one-hour close-up of the paint drying. Although I appreciate the concept of rubbing an audience’s nose in its own clichés, and the witty cross-reference to the Musée des Beaux-Arts trampling scene (Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus is an illustration of the Flemish proverb ‘Not a plow stands still when a man dies’), thank God it was a flat coat and not gloss enamel, or we’d still be there.
“The junior-high milieu, though, is one in which this filmmaker obviously feels comfortable, and the story line picks up major momentum, each scene invested with kinetic vitality and propelled by split-second transitions, dizzying montages, and frenetic line readings by superenergized actors. (Not to harp on the film’s amateurish lapses, but there are times when production assistants’ hands are visible in the frame, administering methedrine suppositories to those actors and actresses whose recitations have flagged.) By the way, apparently all of Maplewood Junior High’s boys wear Versace leather motocross trousers and no shirts, and all the girls wear sepia lipstick, plaid skirts, and no shirts.
“Sylvia and Mark become inseparable, with Felipe a resigned, albeit happy-go-lucky, ‘wised-up-about-girls’ third wheel. Mark desperately wants to have marathon freaky sex with Sylvia, but Sylvia rebuffs him, arguing that it would jeopardize their friendship. She advocates a kooky regimen of abstinence and fennel. Crudely updating an exchange from Michael Curtiz’s 1945 classic Mildred Pierce, in which Joan Crawford says to Jack Carson, the horny, cynical bachelor, ‘Friendship is much more lasting than love,’ and Jack replies, ‘Yeah, but it’s not as entertaining,’ Sylvia here assures Mark that ‘Our relationship is too precious to be spoiled by a tablespoon of warm goo,’ to which Mark replies mordantly, ‘Yeah, but a tablespoon of warm goo is, like, more entertaining.’ Although Sylvia is resolute in her refusal, Mark’s efforts to undermine her resolve are indefatigable. He’s constantly moaning as if in actual physical agony, the purple head of his raging boner rakishly protruding from the waistband of his Hugo Boss boxer briefs, and he’s incessantly licking and biting and humping her, and reading her excerpts from Anka Radakovich’s old Details columns, or just turning up on her doorstep naked and hogtied, but the unflappably good-natured Sylvia’s always like ‘Tsk tsk tsk, now c’mon, settle down, settle down!’
“Sylvia’s idea of a good time is to chill on the couch, munching caramel-covered popcorn and Rolos, and watch hidden-camera shows like America’s Funniest Violations of Psychiatrist / Patient Confidentiality. Mark returns home from these strictly platonic trysts, and takes out all that pent-up libidinal fury on the tetherball in his backyard. The tetherball scenes are filmed in a bluish haze with severe fun-house mirror distortion that lends them a hallucinatory, ritualistic quality. (These scenes can induce flashbacks of recovered-memory sequences from made-for-television movies with Patrick Duffy and Lisa Hartman, which some viewers may find disturbing.) And then, later, drenched in sweat, his palms and knuckles raw and bleeding, he collapses onto his bed and, as the camera dollies out of his bedroom window and tracks across the moonlit rooftops of Maplewood, we hear his primal howls of onanistic release echoing throughout the slumbering suburbs: ‘Aaaaahhhh-ooooo-unnnnng-ohmigod-gh-ghrrr-oh-oh-oh-like-whoa!’
“Whenever anyone says something derisive about tetherball, Mark—who typically employs the impoverished lexicon of his hydrocephalic cronies—quotes ominously from Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ intoning, either in voice-over or viva voce, ‘Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made,’ and then appending his own patented ‘See you in hell, my soon-to-be-dead friend.’
“Sylvia loves Mark deeply, though she limits demonstrations of her affection to hugs and chaste pecks on the cheek, and even these often precipitate the licking and biting and humping. Functioning in loco parentis, she’s the only one he can really heart-to-heart with about his absent dad, who hasn’t been seen since The Carousel. Mark’s mother isn’t eliminated entirely from the movie’s diegetic space, though she is reduced to the by-now-familiar icon of Mom as booze-sodden, semi-invalid. But there’s a brilliant scene—a schistlike melange of horror, porn, melodrama, and sentiment—in which Mark opens the door to his mother’s bedroom one afternoon and finds her ‘partying’ with three men. (‘Partying’ is as delicate a euphemism as I can think of to describe a woman engaging in simultaneous anal, oral, and vaginal sex with three different musicians from a klezmer band that had appeared that morning at the Short Hills Mall.) This scene (which plays to a klezmer version of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webbers ‘Close Every Door’) powerfully correlates Joel’s NJSDE exile and the wife and son he leaves behind in Maplewood with Agamemnon’s fabled absence and the more sinister machinations of Clytaemnestra in Aeschylus’ stylish shocker The Oresteian Trilogy.
“This section of the movie, though more tautly paced than what’s preceded, is nonetheless marred by two completely superfluous characters who seem to have wandered in from other films: a crooked boxing manager and a cemetery groundskeeper—a hulking, gargoyle-like mute with a child’s mind. Luckily, they are ignored by this movie’s cast and eventually leave.
“There’s also the de rigueur joyriding/wilding scene. Mark and Felipe hot-wire a jet-powered car they find parked in front of a Benihana. Outfitted with two General Electric J-79 engines from a U.S. Navy F-4 Phantom fighter jet, the 25-foot-long, dart-shaped vehicle, emblazoned with the logo Spirit of America III, is capable of reaching speeds in excess of 650 miles an hour. Guzzling small-batch bourbon, they take it out for a spin, careen out of control, the car loses both its wheel brakes and drag parachutes, flips over, and smashes into telephone poles at 400 miles an hour before sinking in a salt brine pond. Mark and Felipe walk away unharmed, all giggles and high-fives. After smoking a blunt and swigging a bottle of Bailey’s, they set off on a mini crime spree that I can’t begin to describe in detail here; suffice it to say that it begins with targeting yuppies in Burberry raincoats and injecting them with the drug Versed, a central-nervous-system depressant that leaves a person conscious but paralyzed; negotiating to buy a bottle containing about an ounce of liquid VX nerve gas (an amount that, if released in a crowded area, could kill 15,000 people); a clumsy, halfhearted attempt at sodomizing a police horse; the vicious, completely unprovoked beating of a waiter outside Osteria del Circo; shooting a neighbor’s seeing-eye dog because, the day before, the woman had casually remarked that Naomi Campbell ‘looked bloated’ on Leno; and culminating with spraying graffiti o
n Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center including swastikas, slogans praising cancer, and gruesome, smiling ‘oncogenes’ with obscenely misogynist speech balloons.
“Predictably, reviewers have criticized this scene as ‘irresponsible,’ ‘morally reprehensible,’ ‘pernicious,’ etc.
“I disagree. An unintended consequence of liberalism has been to deprive sullen, alienated adolescents of a language or iconography of transgression, forcing them to turn to ever more blasphemous rhetoric and imagery, and, when these are invariably co-opted, to sociopathic behavior, and then, when even these modes of behavior are appropriated by the entertainment and advertising industries, to increasingly deviant and destructive acts. So I actually don’t see what choice Mark and Felipe have but to behave precisely as they do. And as far as the woman with the seeing-eye dog goes, what does she mean Naomi Campbell ‘looked bloated’ on Leno? I thought she was supposed to be blind. So, apparently, what we have here is some lowlife pulling an insurance scam that’s going to mean higher premiums for the rest of us. So why not shoot her fucking dog? But let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that the behavior depicted is ‘vile and repugnant.’ I think that’s exactly what makes this scene such an intrepid act of filmmaking—the adamant refusal to airbrush, candy-coat, or sentimentalize reality, however unpalatable.
“Let’s not be naive. Kids are going to experiment with drugs and alcohol, vandalism, callous violence, semiautomatic handguns, chemical weapons, and neofascist hate crime—it’s inevitable behavior for adolescents trying to determine what ‘truth’ is in a world torn between the self-replicating apocrypha of the Internet and the info-hegemony of Eisner-Murdoch-Turner. We did it when we were kids, our kids will do it, their kids will do it, their kids’ kids will do it, etc., etc., until the end of the world. And surely that’s how the world—or at least the human species—is going to end. I don’t care what lofty endgame scenarios the pundits concoct: asteroid collision, global warming with melting polar icecaps, biosphere toxic shock, iatrogenic plague, the ultimate Darwinian triumph of Artificial Intelligence, cosmic entropy, etc. The end will lack any such grandeur. It will be undignified, banal, and breathtakingly stupid. The world is going to end because, one night, a carload of solvent-sniffing 15-year-olds from Long Island mess around with something they shouldn’t have messed around with. Take all your unsolved disasters from history—mass extinction of the dinosaurs, Pompeii, the Black Death, the great Siberian explosion of 1908, the Andrea Doria, the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, the Lindbergh baby, the Hindenburg, Amelia Earhart, JFK, Hoffa, the Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, Chernobyl—ultimately there’s only one consistent explanation for each of these—a bunch of skanky, dyslexic adolescents, high on drugs, looking for trouble.
“Ironic, isn’t it, that the civilization of Dante, Caravaggio, Keats, and Einstein will end with some fried, feebleminded kid breaking into a Level 4 maximum-security biological weapons facility, mumbling ‘Yo—what the fuck …?’
“And so, eighth-grade transpires. Wracked by his unconsummated passion for Sylvia and the loss of his father, Mark is a surly, apathetic student. The only class in which he pays the slightest attention is ‘The Punic Wars,’ a seventh-period elective taught by a Ms. Hogenauer (Steven Dorff, for all intents and purposes, reprising his role as transvestite superstar Candy Darling in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol). Hogenauer, a veteran of the downtown performance-art scene, has relocated to Maplewood after a series of disastrous marriages with Mafioso restaurateurs, and moved in with the director of a Satanic day-care center in neighboring Mil-burn, played with over-the-top lesbian-supremacist fervor by Kyra Sedgwick. This section is firmly in the To Sir with Love, Dead Poets Society, Mr. Holland’s Opus, pedagogue-as-charismatic-hero tradition with scenes like the one in which Hogenauer shimmies up the down escalator at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square on a purple-and-aquamarine ACG snowboard with a big stuffed Dumbo draped across her back, symbolically reenacting—I assume—Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants, and lines like: ‘Gosh, Ms. Hogenauer, nobody ever made the Carthaginian victory at Cannae come so alive before!’
“In all his other classes, though, Mark sulks and daydreams, filling his notebooks with drawings of grotesque heads.
“Sylvia is continually preaching this nauseating Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within–style self-empowerment, and urging him to accomplish something, anything—to actually start a project and finish it. Mark insists that he wants to write and direct a film that will do for tetherball what The Poseidon Adventure did for synchronized swimming. But, of course, he never does. He’s too busy getting fucked up with Felipe. Finally, disgusted with his inertia and excuses, Sylvia takes matters into her own hands. Through some relative’s friend of a friend, she’s able to finagle Mark a summer internship with Game Face, an inane MTV-style cable sports show whose target audience is 12-to-14-year-old boys, and which entails going to—guess where?—yes, Bougainville!—and gathering information, maybe even writing and producing a short feature about the glamorous and bewilderingly arcane world of Bougainvillean tetherball.
“The day before he leaves for the Solomon Islands, Mark makes a last-ditch plea for the ever-unattainable marathon freaky sex. ‘I may never see you again,’ he says gravely. ‘Nonsense, silly boy. It’s merely a summer internship. I’ll see you in September,’ says Sylvia, deftly parrying his grubby little hands.
“In desperation, Mark scrawls the following in the margin of Sylvia’s New York Review of Books:
“ ‘Are you a petite, buxom, free spirit with liquid-food-secreting glandular ductules and a piezoelectric ceramic-fiber fecundating cleft who’s interested in romance, egg creams, Glenfiddich, the Cirque du Soleil, ‘31 Duesenbergs, Newports, forties, blunts, GHB, khat, keepin’ it real at Rancho la Quinta, Bauhaus furniture, Janet Jackson, quiet walks in the Everglades, ceviche, and fiery curry, and who has the self-confidence to feel just as feminine and desirable in a cranial halo, nasogastric tube, and cervical collar as she would in a Hervé Leger evening gown, and who wouldn’t mind occasional binges that end with the two of us stinking-drunk, incoherent, and penniless in the offal-strewn gutter of some squalid equatorial port? Extremely attractive, slim, 5’1,” athletic, vivacious, affectionate, intelligent, down-to-earth, erudite, warm, upbeat, energetic, sincere, loyal, evolved, solvent, nurturing, 13-year-old mensch wants to come on your tits.’
“ ‘Settle down,’ chides Sylvia.
“That night, we see a close-up of Mark’s open mouth and vibrating uvula, as we hear his long onanistic howl, and then a match sound-cut to what is discernibly someone else’s open mouth, with corresponding vibrato of the uvula, as whoever it is sings ‘Aaaaahhhh-ooooo-unnnnng-ohmigod-gh-ghrrr-oh-oh-oh-like-whoa-di spela pisin savvy tok bullseet!!’ The camera pulls back to reveal the bushy-haired Melanesian megastar Offramp Tavanipupu on a video screen in a multimedia information kiosk at Bougainville International Airport.
“And at long last, we have arrived at our eponymous destination. “Bougainville … Volcanic island in the Solomon Sea … 3,880 sq. miles … Population 150,000 … First explored in 1768 by the French navigator Louis de Bougainville, namesake of the vine … Declared independence after seceding from Papua New Guinea … Major exports: copper, ivory nuts, green snails, copra (dried coconut meat), cocoa, tortoise shells, and trepang (sea cucumber).
“All according to the info-kiosk touchscreen.
“Mark encamps in Kieta, the island’s main port, and sets out the following day in his rental Jeep with driver to interview the venerable coach of the national junior tetherball squad. Not far from his hotel, the Jeep is forced off the road by a Cherokee Chief full of Bougainville Treasury Police—a sextet of surly, Uzi-toting motherfuckers, wearing San Jose Sharks caps and chewing wads of the narcotic leaf khat. The Cherokee’s license plate number is 77 R-K5.
“I mention this only because in the very next shot of the car, the license reads 78 KxP and in the next, 79 R-KKt5, and then successively 80 R-KB5, 8
1 RxP and 82 R-K7. There was something so familiar to me about this alphanumerical series, yet, as I watched the scene, I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Then it hit me … Of course! These were Alexander Alekhine’s final six moves (playing the white pieces) in the 34th and conclusive game of his world championship chess match against José Raul Capablanca, which took place in Buenos Aires in 1927.
“And at about the same time that I realized the source of the license-plate sequences, there were corresponding murmurs of recognition throughout the theater.
“Capablanca resigned on his eighty-second move, giving six wins and the championship to Alekhine, who was renowned for the brilliance, viciousness, and zeal of his attacks on the board, and for the heavy drinking, sadism, and phallo-narcissism that characterized his social behavior.
“Clearly, a correspondence is being drawn here between Alekhine’s psychopathology and Mark’s burgeoning emotional disorders. I found the use of chess notation on license plates to elucidate the psychology of this movie’s 13-year-old protagonist to be an especially effective device and not at all cryptic.
“One of the goons casually shoots the driver in the head (ars longa, vita brevis) and then hands Mark an embossed invitation that reads:
Col. Nusrahana Vanipapobosa Alebua
requests the pleasure of
Mr. Mark Leyner’s
company at luncheon
on Tuesday, the Twenty-sixth of June
at one o’clock
The Presidential Palace
“Now, I’ve always been amazed at how long written material is kept up on the screen in theaters—whether it’s a no-smoking announcement, one of those cinema trivia quizzes, or some piece of text in the movie itself. And this particular item is no exception. I mean, c’mon, how long does it take to read those seven lines? And yet as I sat there in the theater, I could hear people all around me struggling out loud to phonetically decipher the words: ‘ree-kwests th-th-thuh ple-ah-zhoor … kumpah-nee at lun-chee-on.’ Sadly, today, even people who are capable of picking up sophisticated cultural references, such as Alekhine’s last six moves in his 1927 match with Capablanca, have terrible difficulty reading simple text. Surely this is further proof of the deteriorating literacy of our intelligentsia.