Vernon Subutex One

by Virginie Despentes

  *

  Ever since, he has been unable to shake off the feeling of having a long rusty needle planted in his throat. Panic is second nature to him. Sometimes the attacks are so intense that he has to shut himself away. He is in perfect health. It is the pressure. He has learned to take deep, slow breaths from his belly. His therapist sometimes gives emergency hypnotherapy sessions via Skype. Laurent locks himself in his study, leans back in the reclining chair, puts on his headphones, though he is not always able to relax, but more often than not it works, his heart rate returns to normal.

  The woman director is explaining that she refuses to shoot in Luxembourg, that she has had her fill of Europudding co-productions and strongly feels it harmed her last film. Her creative vision suffered from the ludicrous constraints imposed upon her. She still thinks she is living in the 1990s. Her “creative vision”. It’s something people used to say back then. When Laurent learned his trade, you had to listen to directors maunder on about inventing new shots and everyone considered it normal for productions to go wildly over budget. It was considered acceptable to sink a fortune into a film that earned nothing but prestige. These days, people think about being No. 1 at the box office, no-one sees any prestige in films that make no money. And even good films can bomb. The public don’t like shit. But Audrey has not noticed time passing. If she thinks that she is going to impress anyone by larding her movie with pretentious drivel, she is kidding herself.

  Laurent has done a lot of work on himself. He knows why he is in this business. He is fifty years old. He is honest with himself. He enjoys the power. He is long past the age of bullshitting himself. He has flair, he is good at betting on a winning project, he knows how to pull a handsome financial package together, he has connections, he is hard-headed, he is a tough negotiator. What he is looking for is success. He likes the excitement that goes with it. He enjoys the panicked euphoria of a team when the phone calls keep coming in, he likes soaring figures, that incredible boost, the thought that anything might happen, and anything does, and it is exceptional. He likes to think that people fight for the privilege of getting access to him. Smiling at the two-faced flattery of colleagues and scorning those who dish it out. He likes coming home late, being the only person awake in the house, pouring himself one last whisky, gazing at Paris from his window and being able to say to himself “I pulled it off”, trying to feel the pulsing of success through his body, through the streets of the city below. He wants to experience this feeling of power with the same intensity as he will feel the sting of failure when it comes. But he likes to lose, too, to bite the dust and feel a rage coursing through him, an unrelenting determination to exact revenge.

  Those who have never wielded power do not know what it is. They think it means sitting at a desk, giving orders, never being contradicted. They imagine it is easy. On the contrary, the closer you come to the summit, the harder the struggle. The higher you climb, the more every concession costs. And the more you have to make. To have power is to smile when someone more powerful crushes your ribs. Humiliations are brutal at the top, and there is no-one there to listen to you if you want to moan. It means playing with the big boys, not staying in the sandpit with the little snowflakes. Only tinpot managers revel in their power, when you rise above that, you feel only the fear of being stabbed in the back, the fury of betrayal and the poison of empty promises.

  For Laurent, the worst thing is another man’s success. The release of “The Intouchables”, and “The Artist” in quick succession has royally screwed up his year. Everything in his stable that has done well seems trivial by comparison. He has taken up sport – one hour, five times a week, at home with a personal trainer, a taciturn black guy who only smiles when he sees Laurent is really suffering. The important thing is not to lose sight of the fact that everyone else is subject to the same rules as he is: they are kings of the world, until the next turn of the wheel.

  He knows that he should not feel so unsettled because someone at the party last night talked to him about an interview with Alex. It is magical thinking, lending credence to intuitions that are based on empty talk. He has no real reason to worry. He must look within himself, to find an anchor that will help him get through this. He controls his emotions by eating his way through the bread basket while he waits for his oysters to arrive. God, this woman is so mind-numbing . . .

  Alex Bleach was a cretin, arrogant and fragile, the archetypal fucked-up poet – a little shit who only thought about money, but played the protest singer on the covers of his albums. The artist in all his glory: they think they can do what they like and they despise those who do the work, the real work. The problem with the public, often, is that they choose the most pathetic leaders. People love to be lied to. This was something Alex understood very well. He lied in every interview he gave, and the public adored him. Laurent had had dealings with him on several occasions. Not content with ridiculing and abusing him in front of an audience, Alex had managed to get hold of his mobile phone number and once, when he was completely shitfaced, he had called in the middle of the night to insult him. The guy was deranged, he knew nothing. When Laurent heard that he was dead, he was relieved. You never know how far a lunatic like that might go, and he had no desire to have that kind of enemy. They were not in the same league. But he needed to be absolutely sure in his own mind.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sorry . . . I’ve been a little distracted lately, since I heard that Alex Bleach died.”

  “You were close?”

  “Once upon a time. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, and I was deeply affected by his death . . . But I’m listening. Please, go on . . .”

  He ripples the air with his fingertips. The director does not even take the trouble to look concerned. She carries on like a bulldozer – focused only on her goal, on the sound of her own voice. At first, Laurent thinks that young directors are ill-mannered – did no-one ever teach this woman that it is polite to feign compassion when the person you are talking to feigns emotion? Then he realises it has nothing to do with manners. In his day, children were expected to become social animals, to learn empathy. To show sympathy when someone appeared to be sad, for example. If the subject was intelligent, he quickly learned that showing sympathy could pay off, especially if you wanted something from somebody. But then Facebook came along and this generation of thirty-somethings is made up of solipsistic psychopaths verging on insanity. Naked ambition stripped of any sense of legitimacy. She picks up where she left off. She wants to make a film about a woman of fifty who works at a perfume counter. She loses her mother – they were very close – and cannot bear to see her father start a new life only three months after the funeral. The poor old codger finds someone and the daughter wages war on her new stepmother. The suspense. Audrey is convinced she has written a comedy. She cannot see how she could possibly shoot it on a budget of less than three million. No, really? A fifty-something frump out for a good time who can’t stand the thought of her old man remarrying. There’s a subject for a comedy. If the paying public have a choice between Scarlett Johansson naked and some wrinkly old bat, they’ll think long and hard before buying their ticket.

  He douses his oysters in shallot vinegar. He likes this brasserie – it is his canteen, they know him here, the waiters are very attentive. It helps him unwind. He is not materialistic. Money in itself does not interest him. He would be just as happy eating in a pizzeria and going camping for his holidays. But this place is right next to his office, so it’s practical.

  He does not think Alex Bleach was so obsessed with him that he would have badmouthed him in every interview. He tries to reason with himself. They had a difference of opinion, it’s true, but a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, even for a simpleton of Alex’s level. In any case, who would believe the paranoid ravings of an imbecile like Alex Bleach?

  Audrey is looking at the dessert menu, he cuts her short: “I’m so sorry, I don’t have ti
me, would you care for a coffee?” She orders a café gourmand, making no attempt to hide her disappointment. What a bitch. He stares at her intently, screwing up his eyes as though he genuinely cares about her story of the beautician who cannot bear to see her father happy because he is moving on too quickly – she does not yet know that men are incapable of living alone, how then can one reproach them? Laurent reminds her how complicated the business is these days, even for him. He pats the script with the palm of his hand, as though champing at the bit to get back to the office to devour her story of a bewildered fifty-something. “It has become so difficult to produce films of quality that I have to be extremely discriminating. And what I cannot abide is giving people false hope. If I tell you we’re doing it, then we’ll do it. But if I have any doubts about my ability to produce the film, I will be completely honest with you. My department is perhaps not best placed to produce low-budget films – you know how it is, technicians don’t understand anything, they are not prepared to put in the same effort for me as they would for producers more . . . familiar with art-house cinema. But I’ll give you a response as soon as I can.”

  He looks at his watch, adopts a panicked expression, jumps to his feet, slips ten euros to the girl at the coat check and dashes out into the cold feeling a wave of relief. When he gets back to his office, he remembers his meeting with “la Castafiore”. Today is not his day, Mercury must be in retrograde. He shakes the young distributor’s limp, moist hand. Not all queers are handsome. Dressed head to foot in Prada, la Castafiore looks as though he has just clambered out of a rubbish skip. He has an unprepossessing physique. Hardly surprising he is so spiteful. Laurent wonders whether he knows that he is planning to stab him in the back. He promised to let him distribute the latest Canet movie if he was prepared to take the Bayona Laurent co-production, but he has already offered the Canet to Mars – not because they’ll do a better job, just to piss off la Castafiore. If he can do anything, however small, to help this man fail, so much the better. He has seen them come and go, these people. He settles the man in his office, asks if he would like a coffee, leaves him with Justine, whose job is to take care of such things, and excuses himself. He has something urgent he needs to deal with, he will be right back.

  He knocks on Anaïs’ door. She is watching a film – shot on video, a piece of shit, every shot horribly framed, the youth market think it’s “awesome”, apparently. He asked her to do an overall survey of the genre, he needs to decide whether it is worth getting into these movies shot by a crew of four on a budget of less than €100,000 that kids on the internet are lining up to watch. It pays to be one step ahead. He can’t simply depend on family-friendly movies, the old-style blockbusters. He needs to innovate, to be where he is least expected and to get there before everyone else. Anaïs is perfect for this. She has the eye and the mindset of the youth market. In ten days, she will present him with a report on the three or four best directors of the upcoming generation – he knows he can count on her, she will make the right choice. Laurent Dopalet decided to hire someone of her generation when his own daughter got it into her head to be a “YouTube Beauty Vlogger”. He took an interest in what she was doing because he was terrified that, as has happened with some of his colleagues’ children, she was going to post sex-tapes of herself doing it with underage boys. And to his shock, he discovered a universe of young girls who know exactly how to pose for a camera, how to frame a shot, and how to upload “make-up tutorials” that can get up to 56 million hits when filmed in their bedrooms. He realised he was missing a trick, that he needed someone in his office to scour the web for new trends. 56 million girls can’t all be wrong.

  He sits on the arm of her chair. There is nothing going on between them, but he likes the closeness. He likes her composure, her smile, the manner she has of calming him. Anaïs is radiant. She is no prettier than other girls, she is simply radiant. He sighs:

  “I’ve just come back from lunch with the queen of the ball-busters . . . and I’ve got la Castafiore in my office, you can’t begin to imagine the toll it takes on me. Maybe I’ll open a vein just so I don’t have to face the rest of today.”

  “Shall I come and get you in twenty minutes?”

  “Make it thirty. There are a couple of things we need to talk about for the release of the Bayona.”

  “It’s bound to bomb. The film is too bleak. People don’t want that kind of thing these days.”

  “Listen . . . Last night I met a young scriptwriter . . . well, not young, exactly . . . but there was something about him . . . I’d like you to put together a little bio on him. Can you track him down? His name’s Xavier. I don’t remember his surname.”

  “Are you really telling me you want me to track down the one scriptwriter at the party last night whose first name is Xavier?”

  “Well, yes actually. Jeff told me he wrote something about ten years ago, and the movie was a hit, but I don’t remember the title.”

  “Okay, that might help.”

  “I just want to find out who he is, see if you can dig up some little project he’s working on . . . just to get an idea. Oh, and I’d like to know where he lives, who he hangs out with, whether he’s working at the moment . . . Just a little recap.”

  “There were at least three hundred of us at the party last night . . .”

  “Yes. It won’t be easy. But you’ll manage. And that’s why I love you.”

  “But why exactly do you want to meet him?”

  “I’m not sure I do want to meet him. I just want to . . . sniff him out.”

  THE HYENA SETTLES HERSELF AT A TABLE IN THE BACK OF THE bar and instinctively checks her mobile to see whether she has had any messages. Le Globe is empty, as it usually is in the afternoon. It is a little neighbourhood bar. During the day, there are young bearded men wearing djellabas and fluorescent trainers, cheerful old winos and a few local shopkeepers. When it is time for the evening apéro, round about happy hour, the bar is transformed into a hipster hangout for young binge-drinkers determined to stay till closing time and ensure none of the neighbours get a wink of sleep while they stand on the pavement smoking.

  The Hyena checks the time on her telephone, irritated that her date is unpunctual. Laurent Dopalet likes her to arrange meetings in bars he thinks of as exotic, far from the neighbourhoods he frequents. He takes his little moped and rides along the rue Sainte-Marthe, if he passes three “gangstas” he feels as though he is in the Bronx. They often meet up in strange places. Laurent does not like them to be seen together.

  She has moved into social media. For a while now, this is how she has been making a living. It happened by accident. She ran into an old friend, Tarek, who was eating on his own in a pizza restaurant near Abbesses, sat down and had a coffee with him. She had met him in the early nineties when he was working as a journalist for a porn mag – porn was fashionable in those days. Tarek used to be invited to Cannes, to the swanky parties at Canal+, he had an entourage of actor friends. Everyone wanted to hang with Tarek, it was the last word in chic. Then the internet boom had once more revolutionised the porn industry and Tarek, unable to find a job, made the most of his contacts, reinventing himself as a press officer for the traditional film industry – no-one would have bet a kopek on him succeeding – but this was the decade when the counter-culture went mainstream, and the company was a huge success. And so she found him, in great form, still going to Cannes, but much more stressed than he had been when he was writing feature articles about the latest movie by John B. Root.

  Realising that the Hyena had time on her hands – she was between jobs – he suggested she help him out on a film he was promoting, he needed someone to handle online presence. There was cash to be made. Basically, they needed to flood the web with positive reviews, supposedly written by people who had been bowled over by the film. It was a little tedious – but back then, you could still register with the same website a dozen times using different identities as long as you took the trouble to create fake email ad
dresses. The Hyena did slapdash work, but Tarek insisted he was very happy with her services. He was no fool – the movie had been well received, “real people” had posted genuinely positive comments – but he liked working with her, and he decided to believe that she was responsible for the positive buzz. They worked together on a second film. And the Hyena quickly worked out there was serious money to be made, but that writing positive reviews was not the most lucrative approach.

  She bought a list of fake identities from a former colleague who was sick and tired of spending her time posting pointless comments on pointless subjects. She ended up with about fifty aliases – to be credible, messages had to be posted by people who had been signed up to the site for years, who had their own Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. People who seemed to exist, if you googled them. Otherwise, all you had to do was routinely change your IP address, and try to keep track of who said what on which site and using which voice. She refuses to use leetspeak – replacing “E” with “3” and systematically forgetting to make adjectives agree. This is her only vanity, otherwise she does what she is asked. And very quickly, what she was asked – in return for two or three hundred-euro notes, just like back in the days when she was dealing coke except that now the Feds can search her all they like, she has nothing incriminating on her – was to spread poison. On request, she will utterly destroy an artist, a government bill, a film, an electro group. All by herself, in the space of four days, she comes down like an army. She has seriously added to her catalogue of fake identities and – without wishing to boast – her bullshit rantings go viral. She can poison the internet within 48 hours: no-one in Paris, as far as she knows, is as efficient. After that, it takes on a life of its own – the journalists check out Twitter, read the tweets and feel obliged to report on the bullshit they read there. So whatever she posts is eventually carved in stone. For the rare positive campaigns she is still commissioned to do, she uses the services of old colleagues who artificially increase the number of eyeballs in the current climate of “how many likes”. Her strategy is shockingly lucrative – it is a gold rush, no-one has a clue what is going on, but everyone wants to hit the motherlode. It is the dumbest job she has ever done. But it’s well paid, when you consider how little brain-power it requires. She has got her clients by the balls – for those with the means to pursue the policy, destroying the competition is priceless.