“It’s voiced by a woman—Diego’s girlfriend or wife?—who has a slight Southern accent. You picture her telling this story sitting on the back stoop of some remote cabin, smoking a cigarette, as an owl watches her from the woods. The way she says slaves, it sounds like slayves, the ay coming from the very back of her throat. Then the screen goes black for a few seconds before the Polaroid appears again, this time blown up so that what Diego’s pointing toward is at the center of the screen. What he’s pointing at doesn’t matter though because it’s his finger that draws our attention, bent at a weird angle, an impossible and painful angle, as if broken. And tattooed on the back of his hand is what appears to be a small black star.
“At least that’s how I remember it,” Laing says, as if there’s anyone to question how he remembered it, or as if to distract me from the sliver of sun shaped as a knife which has now taken on an orange hue, a persistent orangeness that suggests a secret passageway beneath the motel to a furnace so enormous that it could only be understood in terms of Miltonic Hell. “I saw the film only once, on late-night cable, in a distant country where I didn’t speak the language. I had been sent by the university in Pennsylvania to Warsaw, of all places, to learn about the latest methods in humidity stabilization as it applied to microfiche and other silver-gelatin and vesicular film-based storage devices. This was in the spring of 1987, or the fall of 1988. It was the first English I had heard in days, and so I watched it straight through. The story was convoluted and hard to follow but just when it verged on the ridiculous some small dark moment kept the film frightening enough to keep watching.
“It turns out that the kid in the Polaroid—Diego—has been sent to Mexico to live with an aunt after his parents were killed in an auto accident. The aunt, who attempts to seduce him, is a former model who goes around her apartment in a pink silk robe and with rollers in her hair and a cigarette whose ashes she taps into the clay flower pots scattered around the apartment. Diego runs away, working various jobs at the tourist hotels up and down the coast of Zihuatenejo, Mexico, and where he eventually befriends a rich childless couple from Germany whom he manages to con, after an elaborate weeks-long performance that begins innocently enough but that ends with an act of violence that leaves stains on the walls that, in another setting and another context, could be viewed as abstract art. The movie suggests that Diego discovers that the couple are Nazis, not neo-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers or far-right extremists but actual Nazis, which is impossible because it’s the mid-1980s, and yet when Diego discovers their Nazi uniforms in the hotel room closet on a rack hidden behind the main closet rack it’s clear the uniforms aren’t antique or vintage but new, new but worn, so it’s not like they’re collectors. They actually wear these things. And this shot—as Diego parts with both hands the first set of hanging clothes to reveal, behind them in the closet, the Nazi uniforms with their bright red armbands and the black swastikas (which seem to be in motion, as if marching through history)—this shot, especially, looks as if it was filmed not just on film stock from the 1940s, but in the 1940s. Just how he escapes their hotel room with over one hundred thousand dollars isn’t exactly clear but I do remember that in the next scene he’s in disguise, or else time is supposed to have passed and he’s grown older. He’s gone deeper south yet into the remote mountains north of Tarija, Bolivia.
“Years pass in the movie. Maybe a decade. The transitions don’t seem linear. It’s as if the movie was edited by people who have a mixed-up or perverse sense of time. Next thing you know, Diego is the owner of three indigenous Bolivians—two men and a woman—who look like their costumes (such as they are) were designed by someone with a poor memory of those anthropological photos of tribesmen and women from 1970s issues of National Geographic. We assume Diego has purchased them with the money filched from the Nazi couple. The movie uses English subtitles when the slaves talk in what sounds like a made-up, mixed-together language of Spanish, Quechua, and Tacana, but the subtitles are riddled with spelling errors, and Diego’s name is spelled at least three different ways. There is a quickly edited, heavy-handed sequence (really the only Jodorowsky-like part of the entire film) that I think is supposed to depict the slaves’ increasing love and devotion to Diego, although maybe it’s intended as a metaphor for hegemony itself: how the oppressed often internalize the very values of the oppressors thus becoming compliant in their own disastrous fates. In one shot, a naked slave smashes his iron ankle chains with a stolen hammer and instead of fleeing or using the hammer on the unarmed Diego, he drops it and embraces Diego with tears in his eyes. ‘My master, mi padre,’ he says, sobbing.
“One morning, Diego—who has grown a full beard and looks like you’d imagine a character might in a Robert Louis Stevenson novel—wakes up to find a letter pinned to his night-shirt. The letter—shown in close-up and read in voiceover by the same woman’s voice that first introduced us to the Polaroid of Diego—is, in effect, a ransom note for a kidnapped German priest who had been in Bolivia to establish an orphanage. Diego has no idea who delivered the letter and, worse yet, has never heard of the priest. He goes outside and there’s a terrible screech in the forest trees and Diego watches as an enormous bird attacks what appears to be a brown sloth which, after a struggle, tumbles crashing through the branches to the forest floor. Diego understands, we are made to see in a close-up of his troubled, sweaty face, that to use his slaves to rescue a priest would be the sort of culminating paradox that his life had tilted toward and the particulars of such a rescue-action would make his mark on history. The next morning, swatting away the flies, he inspects the base of the tree and finds the sloth’s body, already shredded and mostly devoured.
“The movie switches gears yet again. We are shown, via flashback, the priest’s kidnapping a few months prior by the splintered remnants of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army which, the film suggests, probably amounted to no more than five or six delusional, authoritarian, ex-Bolivian soldiers, unshaven in the Che Guevara-Allen Ginsberg fashion, whose obsession with the Nico phrase ‘you’re number 37, have a look’ from that first Velvet Underground album was, in fact, a decoy. For in truth, the Tupac Katari Guerilla Army despised what they perceived as the weak, narcissistic indulgences of ‘the sixties’ and in fact saw The Velvet Underground as an extension of, rather than mocking rejoinder to, The Beatles. Diego understands that the ransom note pinned to his shirt has nothing to do with ransom. Instead, it’s the priest’s death sentence, delivered to Diego by the priest’s captors in order to entice Diego to stage a rescue operation (an assault, really) that will, of course, result in the death of the priest. That way, his captives won’t have to do the dirty work of killing him themselves, as they are Catholics, a splinter group of a splinter group of the Liberation Theology spectrum.
“‘Kill them all, including the priest.’ That was the deal, as Diego understood it, ‘them all’ referring to the nameless others who had also been kidnapped so as to disguise the fact that the priest was the real target. And how to recognize the priest? The slaves would recognize him, the slaves in the aluminum canoe pulling across the river in strokes. The priest scarred by acne and humbled by one leg shorter than the other, from childhood polio, his pretext for a life defined by self-pity.
“The movie switches back to the present and goes quiet as Diego and his three slaves navigate the wide, glassy, green river deeper into the hot jungle. The strong current pulling time itself downward into the river-bottom muck. The peeling bark on the shore. The fungal, persistent stench of decaying jungle. A grouping of sloths in a tree, a congress of fur and shiny brown marble eyes. The film turning into a nightmare, a real out-and-out nightmare. This is all shot from the point of view of the boat, and we see as the metal and twig cabin on the river bank comes into view where the priest and the others are held. There’s a smash cut and suddenly the assault on the cabin is underway. Images on the screen burst forth like explosions. The camera is in on the action, its movement as violent as what’s happening on the scre
en. The cabin, of course, is not well-guarded, as the whole point of the plan was for the kidnappers to allow the priest and the other hostages to be murdered during the so-called rescue.”
Laing stops here. He stands up from the table, untucks his shirt, and takes a small red object that had been attached with white adhesive or hospital tape somewhere on his lower back. It’s about five inches long and is shaped like a cone, narrowing to a sharp point at one end. He sets it on the table. This doesn’t come across as a threatening gesture, as you might expect, but rather a protective one. I’m somehow grateful and relieved to see the object there before us even as the first word that fills my head when I see it is annihilation. Laing sits back down and continues his description of Black Star.
“Everything seems to be going as planned with the rescue-action assault. Inside the cabin, the priest and several others are tied to chairs. But the hostage-takers from the Tupac Katari Guerilla Army aren’t anywhere in sight. In fact, not a shot has been fired. Diego stands in front of the priest, holding a gun, and next to Diego stands his most devoted slave. ‘If you murder me,’ the priest says, ‘they will kill you, and say they did it trying to stop you from killing me.’
“‘Who is they?’ asks Diego.
“‘The ones who sent you,’ says the priest. ‘The ones watching you out there.’
“‘There’s no one out there. There’s no one here to protect you, priest.’
“‘If they wanted you to see them, you’d see them,’ he says. And then, as if addressing an unseen force, he says: ‘It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him.’
“By this time the movie has slowed down to a Henry James pace and you get the feeling that what’s being talked about isn’t really what’s being talked about. Everything’s at a standstill, but time is still flowing. In fact, you can almost see it moving across the screen from left to right and for second after second and maybe even minute after minute no one in the film says a word.
“Then, in a spasm of violence, there’s a sharp noise outside, like a gunshot, and Diego shoots the priest in the head, as if these had always been his instructions.” Laing pauses.
“Does that bother you?” he asks me. “The part about the priest?”
I want to answer with a quip but I hesitate. There is something about the red object on the table that worries me, as if Laing’s question (and my answer) was intended not for Laing or myself, but for the cone. When I don’t answer, Laing continues.
“There is no dialog or screaming or swelling music, just the sound of the gunshot. Almost at the same time, the slave who had embraced Diego turns to face him and, with a rough and worn hand axe that he must have been holding all along at his side but that we didn’t see or refused to see, strikes the unsuspecting Diego with one heavy blow to the side of the head. Diego falls where he stands, and the slave kneels down and strikes him again and again until he is up to his elbow in blood.
“There is the distant but approaching sound of a helicopter. The remaining two slaves untie the other hostages and the camera (there is a fleck of blood or mud or brain matter on the lens) follows them out and back into the jungle as someone barks instructions or warnings from a speaker on the helicopter. The jungle trees blow and shake violently as the slaves and hostages disappear into them.
“Then the screen is filled with that same Polaroid from the beginning and it’s clear that the film is about to end. This time, however, there’s no voiceover. The camera slowly pulls back and it’s revealed gradually that the Polaroid of Diego at the archeological dig is taped to a wall along with other, many other, Polaroids. As the camera keeps pulling out it becomes clear that we are in something like a police station, or a room where detectives are at work. They crisscross in front of the camera, in white shirts with sleeves rolled up, some of them wearing their gun holsters, a few of them even smoking like in the old days. There must be six or seven of them, in this large room with wooden desks and file cabinets and the wall of Polaroids, so indistinct now that Diego’s face is no longer discernible.
“The movie ends just like that, though I’ve often wondered if it was edited for TV. Is there a different ending, one that at least tries to explain what has just happened? Is Diego’s picture on the police wall because he’s a victim, or a suspect? And why, as the camera pulls back and away from the room, does it linger, for just a moment, over some official documents on a detective’s desk, one of which has embossed, on its letterhead, a black star, the very same black star tattooed on the back of Diego’s hand?”
I make a move as if to say it’s time to break but Laing gets up and walks over to the blue velvet throne-chair and comes back to the table with one of the VHS tapes, unmarked. For the first time I think of Laing in relation to that other Lang, Fritz, whose Metropolis had transformed everyone who saw it into detectives of film, and who Edison had referred to either as the German Lang or the American Lang, depending on whether the films in question were made before or after he fled Germany in 1934. Lang, for whom in M and the Mabuse films there was no such thing as truth, only illusions, pitiful illusions, his characters pretending to be one thing when they are in fact another, a duplicity which lasts only so long, until the character betrays himself. Laing brings one of the tapes back to the table.
“In those days,” he says, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms across his chest as if the red cone-like object has somehow renewed in him the stupid, blind confidence of youth, or as if the sun—which is directly overhead now, sending its rays or whatever they are down through the Wisconsin sky—was actually like the sun we had imagined as children. “In those days,” he repeats, “the only way to see David Lynch’s early short films was to start or join a film club, pool resources, and rent them from someplace like Facets in Chicago. It must have been around 1978, or maybe earlier, when they finally arrived, in brown metal canisters stamped—into the metal itself with all the finality of a tombstone—with the words PROJEKTOR CORP. They were the usual suspect early Lynch films: The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970). 16 mm prints, threaded through the projector by the president of Radiant Union. Because shipping was free, we had also ordered a third film, from 1948, called The Blood Order. It didn’t star anyone famous. It turned out that after the Lynch films screened, everyone wanted to go outside to talk about them, so I stayed behind and was the only one—no, there was other person who watched it with me, although we never spoke, a girl who should never have been there—who watched The Blood Order.
“It’s in black and white, except for the flashbacks, which are in color. Maybe colorized. An American pilot has crash-landed in a wet field outside a French village and is taken in by a family whose daughter, the pilot comes to suspect, is a Nazi collaborator. She’s beautiful, and not in a movie actress way, but rather in a way that draws attention to the dark circles beneath her eyes and a severe scar that cuts a channel across her chin, and I remember thinking that maybe this was an Italian neorealist film, but it doesn’t make sense that it was set in France and that the dialog was in English. There is a dog with a limp, I remember, that’s poisoned and that dies terribly and melodramatically, clawing at its own stomach and churning up foam, and that’s when the pilot begins to suspect that the daughter is on the Nazi side, and that she has murdered the dog—her own dog from childhood—to prove her allegiance to the Reich somehow.
“There’s a factory that looks like a castle, or a castle that looks like a factory, I think, not far from the farmhouse that shelters the American pilot, and that’s where he and the girl go to have long philosophical conversations (the French girl speaking English in a beautiful, broken, menacing way that suggested she knew English better than she was leading on), conversations about being and time that inevitably turn into Production Code-era love-making scenes that are interrupted by machine-gun fire or the breaking of dawn. The pilot and the young woman fall into deep discussions that touch on the war, of course, but also methods of torture (the gir
l says her uncle was tortured by the Germans who broke his kneecaps with a hammer that he himself was forced to provide), the indifference of God, Hollywood movies, the persistent and insane theory that Vladimir Lenin and Sigmund Freud are brothers, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and whether evil is a constant or only something that flowers (they kept using that word, I remember) when conditions are right. These passages of the film are shot in long takes, the camera quietly, almost undetectably, passing through the same space that they share in the factory. They sleep, and the film actually shows them sleeping. It’s remarkable. At dawn, as the factory engines began to ramp up for the day (it was a secret factory where bullets were manufactured for the French Resistance, although I can’t remember how the film conveyed this), the flashbacks begin. In the first flashback, The Blood Order switches suddenly to color, and it isn’t a nostalgic flashback like you’d expect, but a bloody one that shows the slow, methodical slaughter of a pig by two men whose faces are obscured on a farm from what appears to be the American pilot’s childhood memory, although why his dreams are presented in color in the film is never clear. One suspected that the filmmakers were secret experimentalists or avant-gardists subverting the war-movie genre from within.
“Then the screen goes black and we’re brought into the second flashback in full color,” Laing continues. “The film’s aspect ratio shifts and I remember feeling sick and light headed. An open meadow bathed in orange sun, a blue sky, the meadow-grass and wildflowers moving in the wind, and a man on a black horse slowly crossing the meadow from screen left to right, the camera stationary. One thing that’s always bothered me about that scene: it was silent except for what appeared to be a gunshot. At least that’s what I remember from that night, watching the film that no one else wanted to see because it wasn’t by David Lynch. The gunshot. But no corresponding action in the scene. Neither the horse nor the horseman react to the sound, as if it was meant only for the audience, some sort of secret signal from the filmmakers to us.
The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing Page 3