Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  “What can I get you folks?” No doubt she’s an actor too, this waitress, looking to be up on the wall someday. Pretty, but not pretty enough.

  Kate’s been laying more of her fancy physics on them. River’s fancy physics. “The universe has ten dimensions, but we only get to experience four of them. What happened to all the others? Where did they go?”

  “Up Matt’s ass,” said Zane.

  “Fuggoff,” said Matt.

  “You fuggoff.”

  And so on.

  “Clubhouse,” says Matt, and the others go diner as well, Denver sandwich, chicken caesar.

  “Hey, Matt?” says Kate. Switch in tone here. “If it’s yours?”

  “Mine?” says Matt. “Oh.”

  “I mean no matter … I’m good at taking care, is what I want to say. Really good. I’ve been practising for this, even though I didn’t know it.”

  “Terrific.”

  “It’s like I’ve been pregnant for years. And I’m not going to, you know, come after you. That’s not why.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I think so.”

  She smiles. She frowns. “It’s a lot to let go of. I know that.” And she’s up and off to the loo.

  So, just the two of them. It’s weird. Is it weird? Craning over his shoulder at Kate’s retreating form Zane says, “She’s nice.”

  Matt shrugs.

  “This must be strange for you.”

  “Master of the under fugging statement.”

  “Hey, Mercedes says to say sorry.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I guess she ragged on you pretty good the other day. She feels like a bitch.”

  “She is a bitch,” says Matt.

  Zane puts up his dukes. “That’s my wife you’re talking about there, fella.”

  “But she was right, I haven’t been good enough. And Nico, I’m really sorry.”

  “Yeah.” Zane extracts a vial from his hip pocket, tips a pill into his water glass, watches it fizz. “I wish it’d been the other way around. I wish he’d made me sick.”

  “Right.”

  “It wasn’t even sex, that’s not how I got it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It was that time out west.” Zane sips from his water, wincing at its effervescence.

  “But you just said it wasn’t sex.”

  “Who did the killer turn out to be? Remember that movie I was working on?” Zane’s got the knee-jiggle thing going bigtime.

  “Yeah, so anyway.”

  “That basement suite of yours, what a dump. And you were raving about this woman.”

  “Mariko.”

  “She was the one, you just knew it. You’d planned not to see her, which was sweet, but I didn’t want to cramp your style. Nico and I had just met too. He was into me but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure about much of anything at that point.” Zane picks up the Clark Gable salt shaker, the Vivien Leigh pepper. He taps them together, kissy kissy. “So I went out and met a guy. Narfi. Do you think that can have been his real name, Narfi? My one and only one-night stand.” Vivien gets Clark down on his back, starts bopping up and down on top of him, obviously into it. “Sweet guy, and he had condoms and everything but he wanted me to shoot up with him first. He was so insistent, he wanted me to feel that, what that’s like, to do it when you’re different.” Clark and Vivien have switched places now, Clark looking pleased with himself on top. “I knew it was stupid but I let him stick me anyway.”

  Here comes Kate, pinballing her way through the tables.

  “Stay home,” says Matt. For one addled instant it feels possible, that he could actually pass this message to himself back through time. “Just stay home.”

  “Hi guys,” says Kate. “Hey, lean in.” She’s got her cellphone out and she’s aiming it at them camera-fashion. “Okay, now smile. No, not like that.”

  Long before he met Mariko, Matt had hit upon the proposition that the most beautiful people are half-breeds. Hybrids. Mutts. There was Winnie Fulton back in high school, black mum and white dad. There was Freda something-or-other in undergrad. The guys called her Tex-Mex—behind her back, of course, since you couldn’t actually look at her and speak at the same time. And then the movies. Rita Hayworth for instance, Spanish-Irish, or Merle Oberon, Anglo-Indian. Something about the blending of races, the cross-pollination—you get this unearthly grace, this Platonic rightness of form. Surely this manifests a bedrock truth of some sort, surely it’s got the flavour in it of redemption, of transcendence.

  Such was Matt’s theory. He laid it on Mariko the very night they met. In its own little way it was, for him, a transcendent sort of experience. They were seated side by side on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver. Mariko had been on business, Matt had just completed the business of burying his mum. Was that it, was that what tore him open, the loss? Matt babbled through most of the in-flight movie, a pretty decent murder mystery, waxing verbose about the essence of the form—its trick of transforming death into a solvable puzzle, its quaint notion that humans make sense, that they’re driven by neat little things called motives. Mariko kept having to tug at her headphones and turn to him, so he was treated, alternately, to the profile and the dead-on view of her, a moving mug shot.

  “You should be one of those movie guys,” she said as the headsets were being collected. “In the paper. Or on TV, find an Ebert and be a Siskel?”

  “Where are you from?” said Matt, as though this were an enigma that had haunted him all the days of his life.

  “I’m from here, I’m from Vancouver. Oh, but before that? My dad’s from Estonia, my mum’s from Japan.”

  Which is when Matt launched into his mutt thing. Mariko must have been put off—by the brazen flattery, by the objectification—but for some reason she still relinquished her business card as they filed off the plane. That beautiful woman.

  So sure, Lee will be better looking if he or she is halfblack, fathered by 1508. Fitter too. More musical, more mathematical, just generally togetherer. So shouldn’t that be what Matt wants?

  “Inside Eve,” says Matt. Zane’s been hounding him about his work again. Grub’s arrived, they’re digging in. “I’m writing about Inside Eve. Haven’t you seen it yet? My God. Smarts and insouciance, both. I’m describing it as Buñuel’s Belle de Jour meets—”

  “No but seriously,” says Zane. “What are you going to do now? You’re free.”

  “Free?” says Kate.

  “I got sacked,” says Matt. “Sorry, did I forget to mention?”

  “Sacked?” says Kate. “From your reviewing job?”

  “Yeah, and now I’m famous.”

  “And you’re a liar-liar-pants-on-fire. Join the club. So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Step back and repulse monkey?” Matt effects a little tai chi flourish with his hands.

  “Pardon?”

  “Fall back on one of my other skills, I suppose.” He looks at Zane. And those would be?

  “Cello,” says Zane. “Join an orchestra.”

  The two share a rueful, world-weary chuckle over this one.

  “You’re musical too?” says Kate.

  “No.”

  “Oh.” A slightly fuddled pause. Then, “What about you, Zane? What are you working on?”

  “Couple of things. A new documentary, something I’m pretty excited about. Maybe Matt said? About a guy on AIDS drugs, the life they give him.”

  “Wow.”

  “And also, do you know the term mockumentary?”

  “Spinal Tap? Like a documentary, but not?”

  “Right.”

  “And what’s it about?”

  “Crop circles.”

  Mid-sip, Matt sets down his coffee. He’s instantly, absolutely at the limit of elation. “Fuggoff,” he says.

  “You fuggoff.”

  Dumbbell

  by kritik@themovies

  What have those extraterrestrials got against us Canadians? Seriously,
have you seen the crop circles they’ve been foisting off on us lately? In the old world (check out the overworked canvas of Wiltshire, around Stonehenge) you get wildly sophisticated patterns, Busby Berkeley–type things. You get fractals, infinities, magnetic fields. You get corkscrews and kabalistic trees of life, dreamcatchers and haloed heads.

  But here in Canada? Maybe a circle. If you’re lucky a couple of linked circles, a dumbbell.

  A dumbbell? Is that supposed to be funny?

  This intergalactic bigotry has failed to dissuade first-time Canadian filmmaker Aiden Zed from setting Radius—his hilarious, pathos-drenched mockumentary about “croppies” and their circles—right here at home. Word’s just gone out that a new circle’s been sighted in a soybean field near Toronto. Zed introduces us to a wild assortment of buffs as they make their frantic way to the site. They’re a gratifyingly diverse group, who in fact have only one thing in common. They’re all barmy. They’re all completely nuts.

  But nuts in a nice way. Nuts in the way I am, the way you are (if I may). The almost irresistible temptation for the director of a mockumentary is to mock, to make the film’s subjects pay big-time for their vanity and their lunacy. Like all the best satirists, Zed loves the people he’s laughing at. He nudges his viewer and says, not, “Look at them!” but, “Look at us!”

  So we meet Trish Ginch, who’s had the cataract in one eye cured by a crop circle and wants the other one done. We meet Hank Lagerfeld, who communicates with aliens telepathically through the device they’ve implanted in his head. (Hank’s scheduled to be sucked up into the mother-ship this time, so he brings his toothbrush and his hemorrhoid cream.) We meet psychics who read the circles as messages from God, from Goddess, even from good old Gaia, from Mother Earth herself.

  One of the great pleasures of Zed’s film is how evenly it spreads its dismay out between the believers and the nonbelievers, the bunkers and the debunkers. The only sensible thing to say about crop circles, surely, is that they’re a mystery. Not one of Zed’s characters can live with this. Radius captures, with uncanny accuracy, the weird combination of attraction and abhorrence we feel for what’s truly beyond us.

  This ambivalence reaches its fever pitch in Mr. Mc-Knee. A retired airplane mechanic, McKnee believes in the extraterrestrial origin of crop circles. He doesn’t want to, though, because this belief offends his sense of himself as a Thinking Man. So, with the help of his ne’er-do-well son, he goes around “hoaxing”—creating phony crop circles. His reasoning goes like this: if it’s possible for me to trick everybody else, then it’s possible I myself am being tricked—and I don’t have to believe anymore. This is as finely convoluted a bit of characterization as the movies have offered us in years.

  Addressing the gang gathered in this new circle, Mc-Knee claims to have hoaxed it. His son contradicts him, claims it’s real. All hell breaks loose. Contributing to the bedlam is the roar of a combine: it’s harvest time, and Farmer Jones wants to get on with it. If and when you get to see this film (distribution has been deplorably thin), look forward to this moment. Tiananmen Square’s got nothing on Farmer Jones’s Circle.

  Dinner’s done, but the evening can’t be over yet. The boys are still buzzed. Matt, for his part, can hardly breathe. His chest is tweaking him again but who cares. His kritikal work is blooming here, is what’s happening, it’s giving birth.

  It’s taken Kate a while to get the hang of the whole thing. “You mean you”—levelling a finger at Zane—“are making a movie based on a review that you”—jerking a thumb at Matt—“wrote about a movie that doesn’t exist?”

  “Yep,” say the boys in unison.

  They’ve already made progress on casting. Zane has it in mind to go Canadian. He’s ruled out anybody who’s already appeared in one of the Christopher Guest mockumentaries.

  “Best in Show, I peed myself,” says Kate.

  “So what are the crucial roles?” says Matt. “Well, me, obviously, the son. Martin Short?”

  “Yeah. Or Mike Myers.”

  “Wayne’s World, I peed myself,” says Kate.

  “And for my dad?” says Matt. “For Mr. McKnee? Donald Sutherland.”

  “Christopher Plummer.”

  “William Shatner. Or no, Shatner could be the guy with the gadget in his head.”

  And so on. They settle on Pamela Anderson for Trish.

  “Oh, and we’ll need psychics,” says Zane.

  “Sandra Oh.”

  “Mary Walsh.”

  “Graham Greene.”

  “And for the farmer? Leslie Nielsen?”

  “Naked Gun, I peed myself,” says Kate.

  Criticism and creation. Effect and cause. Future and past. The universe is flowing the other way now, the tide of entropy has turned. The world isn’t falling apart any longer but coming together, the shattered cup leaping whole back into your hand.

  You’re supposed to rush for the cinema, that’s part of the rush, part of the ritual. They take the Taurus. While Kate deals with the highway (supper hour, but it can’t technically be termed suicide, can it?) the boys work their way through the paper to pick a movie. On such a night, where else could they possibly go but to the cinema, to the source?

  It’s got to be a sequel, the echo of some film that’s come before—summertime being, in its essence, about memory, longing, regret. About other summers. On this the boys instantly agree. That narrows it down to thirteen.

  Or does it? There are a couple of iffy cases. Take Exorcist IV, for instance, with its subtitle The Beginning. Is this a legitimate sequel? It was made after the first three episodes, but plot-wise it predates them. Properly speaking it’s a prequel. Is a prequel a particular kind of sequel, or is it—in its inversion of chronology, its folding back of time—a genre unto itself?

  “I wonder what the most sequelled series of all time is?” says Matt during a lull in this debate. “Total Suckcess is up to fifteen.”

  “Total …?”

  “Hey, maybe that’s how reincarnation works. Zane Four: The Madness Continues.”

  “Matt Twelve: This Time the Joke’s on Him.”

  “Zane Thirty-Seven: Not This Fugging Weenie Again.”

  Kate lets this go another few rounds before interrupting to say, “Horror, blah.” Which scraps not only Exorcist IV but Freddy vs. Jason and Jeepers Creepers 2, too. Progress.

  There are a couple of comedies, but most of the remaining movies are action. None of them will be any good, but which will be most gratifyingly awful? This is the topic to which Matt and Zane turn all their cinematographic acumen. Until about six thirty, that is, when they realize that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is the only early show they can still make.

  “Hey,” says Matt, “that’s the one I was supposed to be doing when I got fired.”

  “Go back in time,” says Zane. “Do it now.”

  Twice, since his student days, Matt’s found himself in front of the camera rather than behind it, gazed at rather than gazing. Mariko hooked him up—this is back when they were living in Vancouver, the blissful big city—with a casting agent on the hunt for reliable extras.

  “It’ll be fun, honey,” she cajoled him. “Back on a set again? Who knows what might happen?”

  So along he went. The agent instantly pegged him as “a scrawny Nicolas Cage. Nicolas Cage if he worried more and never worked out.” A trifle harsh, but okay. Judging by Adaptation, Cage could certainly play Matt in the adaptation. Anyway, it got him a couple of parts.

  Kissed. Bordello of Blood. One Canadian, one American. One highbrow, one lowbrow. Talk about yer range.

  Extra-ing turned out to be a strange gig. You hung around the holding area for about fourteen hours a day, scarfing down free sushi, listening to the costume lady gossip about the stars. Who’s well hung, who isn’t, who’s in rehab, who’s out. Eventually some officious little prick with a walkie-talkie told you to go stand someplace and look natural.

  For Kissed, Matt had his heart set on playing a dead guy.
He saw himself stretched out on the gurney some night when Molly Parker crept into the morgue with strange love on her mind. Could he pull that off? Could he do dead when life incarnate was grinding up against him with its crotch? He never got to find out, since they cast him as a student instead, at the school where Molly went to learn embalming. Worse, his shot ended up on the cutting-room floor.

  To check out his work, then, people had to rent Bordello, and pay very close attention to the choose-me scene at the whorehouse. “That’s me gyrating in the background. That’s my arm. No, there …” What people wanted to hear about was supermodel Angie Everhart. Were they real? That scene where she sticks her tongue down the guy’s throat and shoves his heart out through his chest, how did they do that?

  Matt turned down the next two parts that came his way. Bystander-who-falls-during-chase-scene in Mr. Magoo. Bystander-who-gets-drenched-by-frolicking-whale in Free Willy 3: The Rescue. No sex, no death, what was the point? His agent cut him loose, and that was that. Mariko was disappointed of course, but you could hardly tell. What a woman.

  For Radius, Matt fancies himself in a speaking part. Nothing major, just a line or two, some cranky cynic or what have you. He’d love to be there at the crop circle when things go insane. “Yooohooo. Anybody up there?”

  He’ll have to have a word with the director.

  Yorkdale, Toronto’s Taj Mahal. What a fuss over it when Matt was a kid. One of the architectural wonders of the era, the first megamall. It was de rigueur to lose your car there the first time you went, somewhere in that bewilderness of slotted carpark, and ideally to lose one of your kids once you got inside. Mammoth corridors, conditioned air, the place had the feel of a weather-controlled bubble on Venus, on Jupiter. Matt took Charlotte there for a Woody Allen on their first date. Love and Death?

  A few things have changed. There are ten cinemas now, instead of the original two. Stepping into the lobby Matt feels as though he’s been miniaturized and tweezed into some high-tech device, cellphone or PalmPilot or BlackBerry. The LED lighting is all purply blue, blinking and scintillating; the requisite soundtrack of bleeps and bells and sirens is provided by the teeming arcade. An awful lot of other people have been miniaturized along with him, including many birthday parties’ worth of fizzy prepubescents. Pimply teens staff various counters, ready to sell you a coffee or a juice or a pizza or a burger. You can’t get a Fanta anymore, but you can get a keg of cola and a vat of popcorn, enough caffeine and sugar and salt to set your system humming before the Dolby kicks in.