As Kevin parked his little red Honda Civic we caught sight of the theater marquee.
"Valis" Fat said, reading the words. "With Mother Goose. What's 'Mother Goose'?"
"A rock group," I said, disappointed; it did not appear to me to be something I'd like. Kevin had odd tastes, both in films and in music; evidently he had managed to combine the two tonight.
"I've seen it," Kevin said cryptically. "Bear with me. You won't be disappointed."
"You've seen it?" Fat said. "And you want to see it again?"
"Bear with me," Kevin repeated.
As we sat in our seats inside the small theater we noticed that the audience seemed to be mostly teenagers.
"Mother Goose is Eric Lampton," Kevin said. "He wrote the screenplay for Valis and he stars in it."
"He sings?" I said.
"Nope," Kevin said, and that was all he had to say; he then lapsed into silence.
"Why are we here?" Fat said.
Kevin glanced at him without answering.
"Is this like your belch record?" Fat said. One time, when he'd been especially depressed, Kevin had brought over an album which he, Kevin, assured him, Fat, would cheer him up. Fat had to put on his electrostatic Stax headphones and really crank it up. The track turned out to consist of belching.
"Nope," Kevin said.
The lights dimmed; the audience of teenagers fell silent; the titles and credits appeared.
"Does Brent Mini mean anything to you?" Kevin said. "He did the music. Mini works with computer-created random sounds which he calls 'Synchronicity Music.' He's got three LPs out. I've got the second two, but I can't find the first."
"Then this is serious stuff," Fat said.
"Just watch," Kevin said.
Electronic noises sounded.
"God," I said, with aversion. On the screen a vast blob of colors appeared, exploding in all directions; the camera panned in for a tight shot. Low budget sci-fi flick, I said to myself. This is what gives the field a bad reputation.
The drama started abruptly; all at once the credits vanished. An open field, parched, brown, with a few weeds here and there, appeared. Well, I said to myself, here is what we'll see. A jeep with two soldiers in it, bumping across the field. Then something vivid flashes across the sky.
"Looks like a meteor, captain," one soldier says.
"Yes," the other soldier agrees thoughtfully. "But maybe we'd better investigate."
I was wrong.
The film Valis depicted a small record firm called Meritone Records, located in Burbank, owned by an electronics genius named Nicholas Brady. The time—by the style of the cars and the particular kind of rock being played—suggested the late Sixties or early Seventies, but odd incongruities prevailed. For example, Richard Nixon didn't seem to exist; the President of the United States bore the name Ferris F. Fremount, and he was very popular. During the first part of the film there were abrupt segues to TV news footage of Ferris Fremount's spirited campaign for re-election.
Mother Goose himself—the actual rock star who in real life is rated with Bowie and Zappa and Alice Cooper—took the form of a song writer who had gotten hooked on drugs, decidedly a loser. Only the fact that Brady kept paying him enabled Goose to survive economically. Goose had an attractive and extremely short-haired wife; this woman possessed an unearthly appearance with her nearly bald head and enormous luminous eyes.
In the film Brady schemed constantly on Linda, Goose's wife (in the film, for some reason, Goose used his real name, Eric Lampton; so the tale narrated had to do with the marginal Lamptons). Linda Lampton wasn't natural; that came across early on. I got the impression that Brady was a son-of-a-bitch despite his wizardry with audio electronics. He had a laser system set up which ran the information—which is to say, the various channels of music—into a mixer unlike anything that actually exists; the damn thing rose up like a fortress—Brady actually entered it through a door, and, inside it, got bathed with laser beams which converted into sound using his brain as a transducer.
In one scene Linda Lampton took off her clothes. She had no sex organs.
Damdest thing Fat and I ever saw.
Meanwhile, Brady schemed on her unaware that no way existed by which he could make it with her, anatomically-speaking. This amused Mother Goose—Eric Lampton—who kept shooting up and writing the worst songs conceivable. It became obvious after a while that his brain was fried; he didn't realize it, either. Nicholas Brady began going through mystifying maneuvers suggesting that by means of his fortress mixer he intended to laser Eric Lampton out of existence, to pave the way for laying Linda Lampton who in fact had no sex organs.
Meanwhile, Ferris Fremount kept showing up in dissolves that baffled us. Fremount kept looking more and more like Brady, and Brady seemed to metamorphose into Fremount. Scenes shot by which showed Brady at enormous gala functions, apparently affairs of state; foreign diplomats wandered around with drinks, and a constant low murmuring hung in the background—an electronic noise resembling the sound created by Brady's mixer.
I didn't understand the picture one bit.
"Do you understand this?" I asked Fat, leaning over to whisper.
"Christ, no," Fat said.
Having lured Eric Lampton into the mixer, Brady stuck a strange black cassette into the chamber and punched buttons. The audience saw a tight shot of Lampton's head explode, literally explode; but instead of brains bursting out, electronic miniaturized parts flew in all directions. Then Linda Lampton walked through the mixer, right through the wall of it, did something with an object she carried, and Eric Lampton ran backward in time: the electronic components of his head imploded, the skull returned intact—Brady, meanwhile, staggered out of the Meritone Building onto Alameda, his eyes bulging ... cut to Linda Lampton putting her husband back together, both of them in the fortress-like mixer.
Eric Lampton opens his mouth to speak and out comes the sound of Ferris F. Fremount's voice. Linda draws back in dismay.
Cut to the White House; Ferris Fremount, who no longer looks like Nicholas Brady but like himself, restored.
"I want Brady taken out," he says grimly, "and taken out now." Two men dressed in skin-tight black shiny uniforms, carrying futuristic weapons, nod silently.
Cut to Brady crossing a parking lot rapidly to his car; he is totally fucked up. Pan to black-suited men on roof scope-sights up with cross-hairs: Brady seating himself and trying to start his car.
Dissolve to huge crowds of young girls dressed in red, white and blue cheerleader uniforms. But they're not cheerleaders; they chant, "Kill Brady! Kill Brady!"
Slow motion. The men in black fire their weapons. All at once, Eric Lampton stands outside the door of Meritone Records; close shot of his face; his eyes turn into something weird. The men in black char into ashes; their weapons melt.
"Kill Brady! Kill Brady!" Thousands of girls dressed in identical red-white-and-blue uniforms. Some strip off their uniforms in sexual frenzy.
They have no reproductive organs.
Dissolve. Time has passed. Two Ferris F. Fremounts sit facing each other at a huge walnut table. Between them: a cube of pulsing pink light. It's a hologram.
Beside me, Fat grunts. He sits forward staring. I stare, too. I recognize the pink light; it's the color Fat described to me regarding Zebra.
Scene of Eric Lampton nude in bed with Linda Lampton. They strip off some kind of plastic membrane and reveal sex organs underneath. They make love, then Eric Lampton slides out of bed. Goes into living room, shoots up whatever dope he's strung out on. Sits down, puts his head wearily down. Dejection.
Long shot. The Lamptons' house below; camera is what they call "camera three." A beam of energy fires at the house below. Quick cut to Eric Lampton; he jerks as if pierced. Holds his hands to his head, convulsing in agony. Tight shot of his face; his eyes explode. (The audience with us gasps, including me and Fat.)
Different eyes replace the ones which exploded. Then, very slowly, his forehead slides open
in the middle. A third eye becomes visible, but it lacks a pupil; instead it has a lateral lens.
Eric Lampton smiles.
Segue to recording session; some kind of folk rock group. They are playing a song that really turns them on.
"I never heard you write like this before," a board man says to Lampton.
Camera dollies in on speakers; sound level increases. Then cut to Ampex playback system; Nicholas Brady is playing a tape of the folk rock group. Brady signals to technician at the fortress-like mixer. Laser beams fire in all directions; the audio track undergoes a sinister transformation. Brady frowns, rewinds tape, plays it again. We hear words.
"Kill ... Ferris ... Fremount ... kill ... Ferris ... Fremount ..." Over and over again. Brady stops tape, rewinds it, replays it. This time the original song that Lampton wrote, no mention of killing Fremount.
Blackout. No sound, no sight. Then, slowly, Ferris F. Fremount's face appears with a grim expression. As if he had heard the tape.
Bending, Fremount clicks on a desk intercom system. "Give me the Secretary of Defense," he says. "Get him here at once; I must talk to him."
"Yes, Mr. President."
Fremount sits back, opens folder; pictures of Eric Lampton, Linda Lampton, Nicholas Brady, plus data. Fremount studies the data—beam of pink light strikes his head from above, for a split second. Fremount winces, looks puzzled, then, stiffly, like a robot, rises to his feet, walks to a shredder marked SHREDDER and drops the folder and its contents in. His expression is bland; he has totally forgotten everything.
"The Secretary of Defense is here, Mr. President."
Puzzled, Fremount says, "I didn't call for him."
"But sir—"
Cut to Air Force Base. Missile being launched. Tight shot of document marked SECRET. We see it opened.
PROJECT VALIS
Voice off camera; "'VALIS'? What's that, general?"
Deep authoritative voice. "Vast Active Living Intelligence System. You're never to—"
Whole building detonates, into the same pink light as before. Outdoors: missile rising. Suddenly wobbles. Alarm sirens go off. Voices yelling, "Destruct alert! Destruct alert! Abort mission!"
We now see Ferris F. Fremount making campaign speech at fund-raising dinner; well-dressed people listening. Uniformed officer bends down to whisper in the President's ear. Aloud, Fremount says, "Well, did we get VALIS?"
Agitatedly, the officer says, "Something went wrong, Mr. President. The satellite is still—" Voice drowned out by crowd noises; crowd senses something is wrong: the well-dressed people have metamorphosed to the girl cheerleaders in red-white-and-blue identical uniforms; they stand motionless. Like robots unplugged.
Final scene. Vast cheering crowd. Ferris Fremount, back to camera, making Nixon-type V-for-victory signs with both hands. Obviously he has won re-election. Brief shots of black-clad armed men standing at attention, pleased; general joy.
Some kid holds flowers to Mrs. Fremount; she turns to accept them. Ferris Fremount turns, too; zoom in.
Brady's face.
On the drive home, back down Tustin Avenue, Kevin said, after a period of mutual silence among the three of us, "You saw the pink light."
"Yes," Fat said.
"And the lateral-lens third eye," Kevin said.
"Mother Goose wrote the screenplay?" I asked.
"Wrote the screenplay, directed it, starred in it."
Fat said, "Did he ever do a film before?"
"No," Kevin said.
"There was information transfer," I said.
"In the film?" Kevin said. "As story line? Or do you mean from the film and audio track to the audience?"
"I'm not sure I understand—" I began.
"There is subliminal material in that film," Kevin said. "The next time I see it I'm taking a battery-powered cassette tape recorder in with me. I think the information is encoded in Mini's Synchronicity Music, his random music."
"It was an alternate U.S.A.," Fat said. "Where instead of Nixon being president Ferris Fremount was. I guess."
"Were Eric and Linda Lampton human or not?" I said. "First they appeared human; then she turned out not to have any—you know, sex organs. And then they stripped those membranes off and they did have sex organs."
"But when his head exploded," Fat said, "it was full of computer parts."
"Did you notice the pot?" Kevin said. "On Nicholas Brady's desk. The little clay pot—like the one you have, the pot that girl—"
"Stephanie," Fat said.
"—made for you."
"No," Fat said. "I didn't notice it. There were a lot of details in the film that kept coming at me so fast, at the audience so fast, I mean."
"I didn't notice the pot the first time," Kevin said. "It shows up in different places; not just on Brady's desk but one time in President Fremount's office, way over in the corner, where only your peripheral vision picks it up. It shows up in different parts of the Lamptons' house; for example in the living room. And in that one scene where Eric Lampton is staggering around he knocks against things and—"
"The pitcher," I said.
"Yes," Kevin said. "It also appears as a pitcher. Full of water. Linda Lampton takes it out of the refrigerator."
"No, that was just an ordinary plastic pitcher," Fat said.
"Wrong," Kevin said. "It was the pot again."
"How could it be the pot again if it was a pitcher?" Fat said.
"At the beginning of the film," Kevin said. "On the parched field. Off to one side; it only registers subliminally unless you're deliberately watching for it. The design on the pitcher is the same as the design on the pot. A woman is dipping it into a creek, a very small, mostly dried-up creek."
I said, "It seemed to me that the Christian fish sign appeared on it once. As the design."
"No," Kevin said emphatically.
"No?" I said.
"I thought so, too, the first time," Kevin said. "This time I looked closer. You know what it is? The double helix."
"That's the DNA molecule," I said.
"Right," Kevin said, grinning. "In the form of a repeated design running around the top of the pitcher."
We all remained silent for a time and then I said, "DNA memory. Gene-pool memory."
"Right," Kevin said. He added, "At the creek when she fills the pitcher—"
"'She'?" Fat said. "Who was she?"
"A woman," Kevin said. "We never see her again. We never even see her face but she has on a long, old-fashioned dress and she's barefoot. Where she's filling the pot or the pitcher, there's a man fishing. It's flash-cut, just for a fraction of an instant. But he's there. That's why you thought you saw the fish sign. Because you picked up the sight of the man fishing. There may even have been fish lying beside him in a heap; I'll have to look really hard at that when I see it again. You saw the man subliminally and your brain—your right hemisphere—connected it with the double helix design on the pitcher."
"The satellite," Fat said. "VALIS. Vast Active Living Intelligence System. It fires information down to them?"
"It does more than that," Kevin said. "Under certain circumstances it controls them. It can override them when it wants to."
"And they're trying to shoot it down?" I said. "With that missile?"
Kevin said. "The early Christians—the real ones—can make you do anything they want you to do. And see—or not see—anything. That's what I get out of the picture."
"But they're dead," I said. "The picture was set in the present."
"They're dead," Kevin said, "if you believe time is real. Didn't you see the time dysfunctions?"
"No," both Fat and I said in unison.
"That dry barren field. That was the parking lot Brady ran across to get into his car when the two men in black were stationed and ready to shoot him."
I hadn't realized that. "How do you know?" I said.
"There was a tree," Kevin said. "Both times."
"I saw no tree," Fat said.
"Well,
we'll all have to go see the picture again," Kevin said. "I'm going to; ninety percent of the details are designed to go by you the first time—actually only go by your conscious mind; they register in your unconscious. I'd like to study the film frame by frame."
I said, "Then the Christian fish sign is Crick and Watson's double helix. The DNA molecule where genetic memory is stored; Mother Goose wanted to make that point. That's why—"
"Christians," Kevin agreed. "Who aren't human beings but something without sex organs designed to look like human beings, but on closer inspection they are human beings; they do have sex organs and they make love."
"Even if their skulls are full of electronic chips instead of brains," I said.
"Maybe they're immortal," Fat said.
"That's why Linda Lampton is able to put her husband back together," I said. "When Brady's mixer blew him up. They can travel backward in time."
Kevin, not smiling, said, "Right. So now can you see why I wanted you to see Valis?" he said to Fat.
"Yes," Fat said, somberly, in deep introspection.
"How could Linda Lampton walk through the wall of the mixer?" I said.
"I don't know," Kevin said. "Maybe she wasn't really there or maybe the mixer wasn't there; maybe she was a hologram."
"'A hologram,'" Fat echoed.
Kevin said, "The satellite had control of them from the get-go. It could make them see what it wanted them to see; at the end, where it turns out that Fremount is Brady—no one notices! His own wife doesn't notice. The satellite has occluded them, all of them. The whole fucking United States."
"Christ," I said; that hadn't dawned on me yet, but the realization had been coming.
"Right," Kevin said. "We see Brady, but obviously they don't; they don't realize what's happened. It's a power struggle between Brady and his electronic know-how and equipment, and Fremount and his secret police—the men in black are the secret police. And those broads who looked like cheerleaders—they're something, on Fremount's side, but I don't know what. I'll figure it out next time." His voice rose. "There's information in Mini's music; as we watch the events on the screen the music—Christ, it isn't music; it's certain pitches at specific intervals—unconsciously cues us. The music is what makes the thing into sense."
The VALIS Trilogy Page 15