The Mind Game

by Norman Spinrad

  “Yeah,” Gomez said. “You’ve got to convince me that what you just said is true. That’s what your life analysis is all about. It ends when I’m convinced you’re telling the truth or when I’m convinced you’re lying. So convince me.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Gomez said with a feral smile. “It’s my job to get it out of you. You just answer the questions. Now, what do you think of Changes Productions?”

  “Uh … it’s a pretty impressive outfit.” Weller said cautiously “Pretty high-energy people … and it seems to have a lot of potential. …”

  “Don’t hand me that bullshit, Weller!” Gomez roared. “I’m a Monitor, not one of your dingbat co-workers! We don’t wear rose-colored shades! The truth, Weller, not patronizing crap!” Once again Weller was stunned and disoriented by Gomez’s blunt and contemptuous honesty. None of his previous experiences with Transformationalism had prepared him for this. He couldn’t game it through, he couldn’t come up with the correct response to program. He was left with only an edited version of the truth.

  “Okay, so professionally speaking, it’s a mess. A lot of rank amateurs who have no idea of what they’re doing.” Weller paused, made his voice soft and plaintive. “But I meant what I said about potential. The work you’ve got lined up, the facilities, the capital. …”

  “We’d really have something if we had the right people in the creative end?”

  “Yes.”

  “Such as yourself?” Gomez said sardonically.

  “Such as myself,” Weller shot back automatically. Then, backing it up softly: “Harry Lazio knows where it’s at.”

  “Harry Lazio …” Gomez muttered peculiarly under his breath. Then, louder: “Harry Lazio knows where Harry Lazio is at. John knows where Transformationalism is at. Never forget that, Weller. You talk about you being the right kind of person for the creative end—but what do you conceive the creative end to be?”

  “Huh?”

  “Huh?” Gomez mimicked. “Not whatever Lazio told you. What do you think the movement really wants to do with Changes Productions? Why are we into something like that? And no superficial bullshit, please!”

  Once more Weller couldn’t guess what the right response was supposed to be; once more he chose a guarded version of what he imagined was the truth. “Aside from making money, it would seem that the idea is to get the Transformational message on the tube, to plant the terminology and some of the feeling in the public consciousness when people think they’re watching something else. ‘Subliminal advertising,’ they used to call it.”

  Gomez smiled faintly; for once he seemed to be pleased. “Very good, Weller. The true goal is to promote Transformationalism, and everything else is a means to that end. Thank God you didn’t try to hand me any bullshit about Art. So the question is, if you were in a creative position, could you really optimize yourself behind those parameters?”

  “I think so,” Weller said. For once the right answer seemed obvious.

  But not to Gomez. “Come on Weller, don’t jive me,” he said. “You’re an ambitious professional director. You expect me to believe that you’d be functioning at optimum churning out Transformationalist propaganda?”

  Lord, but this guy is disorienting! Weller thought. I’ve got to steer this into an area he knows nothing about. “But it’s not overt propaganda,” he said. “It’s subliminal stuff sneaked into commercials for other things, eventually fiction films and TV episodes. Just underlying ideology, right?”

  “So?”

  “So what do you think doing episodic TV is like?”

  Gomez looked at him perplexedly. I’ve finally got this guy out of his league, Weller thought. Time for a highfalutin’ snow job!

  “You think there isn’t an underlying ideology in network TV?” he said cynically. “You think a rash of cop shows, for example, doesn’t have anything to do with subtle government pressure? Creative artists always have to work within ideological parameters. Look at the paintings that were produced during the Middle Ages and tell me they had nothing to do with Catholic ideology. Look at Socialist Realism. As long as you’re free to do the best work you can within the parameters you’re given, you really can’t expect anything more.”

  Gomez leaned back. He fingered the dossier. “Now that is a nice fancy answer,” he said. “I’m not sure whether it’s bullshit or not, but it sure is nice and fancy.” He hunched forward and glared at Weller. “If I were a commissar, I’d want to know whether you were really a dedicated Communist, though, now wouldn’t I? If I were a Jesuit, I’d have to know whether you were a sincere Catholic, or just a heretic determined to get along.”

  “Would you?” Weller said. “Or from your point of view, wouldn’t it be the end product that counted?”

  “It depends, doesn’t it?” Gomez said. “The Communist Party might be satisfied with your work, but the Church wants your soul.”

  “And which way do you see Transformationalism?” Weller asked.

  Gomez laughed. “What a question to ask a poor simple boy from the barrio,” he said. He got up. “We’ll have another session in two days. Same time, same room.” Clutching the dossier, he walked toward the door. He paused, extracted a white envelope from the folder, came back, handed it to Weller.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, “this is for you.” Then he was gone. Knowing what it was going to be, Weller tore open the envelope. Inside, perfectly typed on Transformationalist letterhead, was another letter from Annie. Or her ghost-writer.

  Dear Jack:

  So you’re working for Transformationalism! I can’t tell you how much that means to me. I can’t tell you how happy it’s made me. But you must know. I know you do.

  Now that you’re working for the movement, and now that you’re in life analysis, I’m allowed to tell you that I’m working for the movement too, and in a very important project. God, how different it is from the old days! Every moment has meaning. I feel like a different person. No, not like a different person, like the real me, the me I always wanted to be. I’m dying to tell you all about it, and once you’ve passed your life analysis, I’ll be able to tell you, not in a letter, but in the flesh.

  In a few short weeks we’ll be together again, they’ve promised me. And what we’ll have to share!

  Until then, work well, love, think of me, and eptify yourself behind this brief period of waiting. Remember that we’ll be together again before you know it.

  Love,

  Annie

  Mechanically Weller folded the letter, put it back in the envelope, and stuffed it in a pocket. Only then was he brought up short by his own lack of any really deep reaction.

  Is it because it really told me nothing? he wondered. Because of the jargon? Because he wasn’t even sure that Annie had actually written it? Because it seemed so impersonal, so abstract, so … so Transformational?

  Why did the words on paper conjure up neither an image of her face nor the sound of her voice nor the aura of her presence …? Why did the letter remain an abstraction? Can it be that it’s Annie that’s becoming an abstraction to me? he asked himself. Like an old soldier, is the Annie I remember just lading away?

  Or is it that this room just seems so empty without Gomez in it? Now that he thought about it, Weller realized that there had been so much electricity sparking between himself and Gomez during the life-analysis session that the letter from Annie had been like an afterthought. Face it, Weller, a bringdown.

  For he had definitely contacted a whole new level here, a hint of vast, unplumbed depths within the Transformationalist scam. There had been more brutal honesty, more gut-level intellectual depth, more sheer psychic power in those few minutes with Gomez than in his entire previous experience with the movement. The Monitor had been really impressive, somewhat infuriating, and slightly terrifying. And he had definitely gotten off on the confrontation. There was dread here, but there was also a fascination twisted around it.

  Whatever
it had been, Weller found that it still held the focus of his attention, even in the face of this letter from Annie. Annie seemed so long ago and far away now, and the life-analysis session, even in retrospect, seemed so hyperreal, so immediate.

  Jesus, Weller thought, I land of enjoyed that. I’m almost looking forward to the next one! Somehow Gomez had fed a hunger he hadn’t even known he’d had. A hunger he still couldn’t name.

  Nine

  Owen Karel had been on the set for at least half an hour now, and although Weller knew that the Monitor had other things to watch on this shoot, he felt the continual pressure of those cold hard eyes on the back of his neck. For he knew they were extensions of Gomez; in their last session Gomez had made it clear that the verbal fencing was only half of the life-analysis process.

  “Not to make you paranoid, Weller,” he had said, “but you do realize that trying to con me would be futile? I get actual life-situation reports on you from Karel, and by the time this is over, I’ll have integrated what you do with what you say. What’s significant is not absolute consistency—no one expects that—but what the patterns of inconsistency reveal. Patterns of patterns, and you have to be really Transformed to read that, so there’s no point in you trying to figure out what I’m looking for and putting on a little act. ”

  So Weller knew that he was being watched like a bug under a microscope, and every time he saw Karel, he pictured the Monitor representative writing mental notes on him in a phantom dossier. But he couldn’t figure out how Karel could learn anything significant from watching him stand quietly behind a camera. He wondered if the paranoia cut both ways—if the Monitor’s cold eyes read significance into the way he stood, the expression on his face, the clothes he wore.

  This commercial, now, seemed to be a straightforward pitch for Transformationalism itself. The set was a typical suburban living room, and four actors played a typical suburban family. Dad in a dark business suit. Mom in women’s-lib fatigues. Sonny in long-haired hippie gear. Sis in a Jesus Freak persona with an unsubtle wooden cross around her neck. According to the shooting script they preached their respective ideologies at each other in the first twenty seconds. Then a voice-over made a twenty-second pitch for Transformationalism as the bridge which transcended conflicting life-styles. Cut to the same family, now discoursing sweetly together, all harmony and light. In Transformationalist jargon, of course.

  Georgie Prinz had shot the final sequence yesterday, and except for the inevitable technical foul-ups, it had gone pretty smoothly, since the actors were all dedicated to the cause and therefore had little trouble spouting Transformationalism at each other with total conviction. But this morning Georgie was trying to get the opening sequence on tape, and in take after take he just couldn’t find the handle.

  The problem was partly technical. Shooting a scene in which four characters gibber at each other all at once at cross-purposes was very hard to do realistically under the best of circumstances. The director had to get the actors to crossinterrupt each other in a way that sounded realistic. It helped if the actors were professionally competent, which these were not, and it helped if the director knew enough to keep them from reacting to each other’s lines as cues. Neither being the case, poor Georgie just kept trying the same thing over and over again and kept getting stuff that even he could see was totally stilted and dead.

  Weller wondered if the presence of Karel was exacerbating the situation; Georgie kept glancing surreptitiously at the Monitor, as if he realized he was fucking up and believed that Karel knew it too. Weller also wondered if Karel was knowledgeable enough to recognize incompetent directing when he saw it, or whether he just liked to make people nervous.

  “Okay, let’s try it one more time, and then we’ll break for lunch,” Georgie said, returning to his position beside the camera. “Please, people, ah … try to be spontaneous … er … stay inside your own heads, let me hear you all at once.” He paused, cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at Weller. Weller nodded back, indicating that he was ready. Oh boy, was he ready! “Lights … roll ’em …”

  “Transformationalism is the Bridge, scene two, take twleve.”

  “Speed.”

  Georgie hesitated, and Weller, peering through his viewfinder, could imagine him nibbling his lower lip and sneaking a look at Owen Karel. “Action!”

  “—grow up and think about a real job—”

  “—getting fed up with your chauvinist attitude—”

  “—don’t know why I stay around this uptight house—”

  “—accept the love of Christ as the answer to—”

  Pure blind awful! Weller thought. They were still spouting bits of dialogue sequentially, straight from the script, politely cuing each other. Instead of sounding like a babbling argument, it sounded like the silliest sort of chopped-up stage dialogue.

  “Cut!” Georgie shouted. Weller turned off the camera and stared at him. Georgie gave a nervous little shrug and finally seemed about to ask Weller something when he was stopped short by something he saw across the sound stage.

  Weller turned to look. Karel had quietly disappeared, which he had a habit of doing, and Sara English, enticing in a short red dress, was walking across the sound stage toward them, accompanied by Shano Moore, dressed in his inevitable jeans and army shirt. How much had she seen? Was Georgie going to get a chewing out? Might there soon be a crying need for a new director on this turkey … ?

  But Georgie didn’t seem worried. “Take an hour for lunch,” he called out, and sure enough Sara didn’t even mention what was going on on the set.

  “Come have lunch with us, Georgie,” she said. She turned to Weller and gave him a long, hot smile. “Why don’t you come along too, Jack?” she said casually. But she was looking straight into his eyes, pouring out the vibes, and Weller imagined he had heard something carefully casual in her voice. Did she want to get to know him personally, was he reading the vibes right? On the other hand, she was inviting him to lunch with two directors. Was there something significant in that? A signal of some subtle alteration in his status, foreshadowing an imminent change?

  Or is it just wishful thinking and hominess? Weller wondered nervously. Am I starting to read significance into everything?

  That was as good a definition of paranoia as any.

  The significant lunch with Sara English and the two directors turned out to be nothing more ceremonious than hamburgers at a nearby coffee shop. Weller sat on one side of the booth with Shano Moore, Georgie and Sara on the other. Sara still hadn’t said anything to Georgie about this morning’s futile work by the time they had ordered, and Weller toyed with the idea of saying something himself.

  But he damn well knew how he would have reacted to some friendly little tips on directing from his cameraman, and he didn’t know how Sara would react to his pulling rank and credits, so he held his peace. He had the uneasy conviction that not even Sara had any idea of how lousy the whole operation was, and that she would take any negative criticism as an attack on Transformationalism and report it to Gomez through Karel. Gomez seemed to have no illusions about what was going on, but he was judging Weller according to unknown parameters, and anything might be some kind of hidden life-analysis test.

  “Georgie tells me you’ve done a lot of directing, Jack,” Shano said as their orders arrived. “How come you’re just doing camera work?”

  Weller nodded at Sara, tossing the question to her. “Jack has to wait for Monitor clearance,” she said. “He hasn’t reached a high enough level yet. ”

  Shano nodded. “I can dig it,” he said. “A guy needs a lot of processing to get his talent behind serving the movement, especially when his trip is as authoritarian as directing.”

  A lobotomy would help, Weller thought sourly. “What do you mean by that?” he said instead.

  “Man, I come from the same place,” Shano said. “I mean, a director is like a general, right, and the crew and actors are his army, and he gives like orders. He gets to feeling like what
ever he’s shooting is his thing.”

  “Ah, a believer in the auteur theory,” Weller said lightly. Shano looked at him blankly. Apparently he had never heard of the auteur theory, and neither had Sara or Georgie.

  “That’s not where I’m coming from,” Georgie said. “We’re all soldiers of Transformationalism, like, doing our optimum thing for the movement.”

  “For sure,” Shano said. “That’s the transformation you’ve got to go through. Same thing in the old Revolution. Guys who were into creating their own stuff had to get a lot of bullshit about art out of their heads before they could get behind the idea that they were serving the cause, not their own egos, before they could get behind taking political direction. You wouldn’t believe the shit that went on! That’s what I dig about Transformationalism—we transform consciousness first, before we put someone in that position. Otherwise you get all kinds of crap from creative people whose egos keep them from really serving the movement.”

  “You sound like Mao Tse-tung,” Weller said dryly.

  “You dig Mao?” Shano asked brightly.

  “I haven’t read the book, but I’ve seen the movie,” Weller drawled.

  There was a moment of silence during which Sara leaned forward on her elbows and seemed to be studying Weller intently over her cheeseburger. Have I put my foot in my mouth? he wondered. Do I lose brownie points for being a smartass? But it was Shano who seemed to have said the wrong thing.

  “You’ve still got some of that political programming in your head, Shano,” Sara said, all the while looking at Weller as if this was for his benefit. “We don’t want people suppressing their creativity for the sake of the movement; we want our people in a state of eptified creative consciousness while they’re working on getting the message across. Otherwise the product is low-level stuff with no life to it.” She gave Weller a stunning smile that went straight to his crotch, and, under the table her foot brushed accidentally against his calf. “What do you think, Jack?” she said.