Walking to Hollywood

by Will Self

  He turned to greet us. ‘David, good to see you – and this is?’

  Phew! I was Thewlis – to have been Postlethwaite would’ve been humiliating.

  ‘Dan, this is Rex, old mate of mine – I understand you’ll be shooting him later.’

  Craig laughed. ‘I love dogs,’ he said, and shook Scooby’s paw. ‘So,’ he continued, as the three of us sat down at a circular glass table beside an ornamental pit full of multicoloured stone balls, ‘why’d you want to come on set?’

  The PR was a few yards off talking to an ex-public schoolboy in a sleeveless anorak (or gilet), so I took a deep breath and explained how cinema had been found – neck snapped, throat slashed, eyes gouged out – in a back alley behind a cinema in a small town that no one had ever heard of.

  Craig laughed again. ‘I suppose you’re gonna tell me I bear some responsibility for that – but let’s get real here, I’m not the guy who did Dinotopia.’*

  Whatever chagrin I felt, I hastened to reassure him that there was nothing personal: ‘It’s just, given your own career trajectory, from playing tortured and sensitive types, to torturing sensitive types, presumably you have a view?’

  Craig was looking at me with mounting scepticism. When I’d picked up Scooby’s camos from wardrobe I’d also selected a costume of my own: black dress trousers, black leather windcheater, white shirt and product-placement sunglasses – and this outfit seemed to be bothering the Bond star.

  ‘Why’re you dressed like me?’ he snarled.

  Then it hit me, and I snarled back: ‘Why’re you dressed like Daniel Craig when he’s meant to be dressed like James Bond?’

  How could I have been so naive? Quite suddenly the stunt double’s stuffing an empty Evian bottle in my mouth as I lie back in a pile of snapping, crackling and popping empties. Scooby leaps at the PR’s throat – I try to shout, but all that emerges is a pre-orgasmic ‘Gnnnn!’ and now the Craig doppelgänger’s pummelling me in the face with blows of a chronometric precision: ‘Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff!’ So hard that these bones are pulverized in this order: 1. glabella 2. nasal bone 3. supraorbital margin 4. superior orbital fissure 5. lacrimal bone 6. zygomatic bone 7. inferior orbital fissure.

  I have to act fast, and jerk my knee up into his crotch so hard his testes are mashed into his pelvic bone, which in turn ruptures his bladder. The assassinalike barely flinches, merely shifts the locus of his blows lower, so that ‘Paff! Paff! Paff!’ The maxilla, mandible and mental protuberance are all shattered. My face is a blood-filled sponge of traumatized tissue and bone fragments, but scrabbling among the Evian bottles my hand discovers a hammer left there by a careless chippie; I swing this again and again at my attacker’s spine, popping his atlas, his axis and his cervical vertebrae (1–7 inclusive) like ... popcorn.

  Instant paralysis should rightfully ensue, not this marvellous bit of choreography: the two of us leaping away from one another, so that upright we circle the pit, searching for secure purchase in the slag heap of plastic, then ‘Whack!’ as a steelcapped leather shoe lashes out, breaking my sternum so cleanly that a shard spears my superior vena cava. Despite the plume of blood jetting from my ruptured chest, I drop back on to one leg and whip my own foot round at shoulder height in an expert taekwondo that propels his humerus – like a battering ram – into his scapula, a blow so devastating that the tendons snap with the resonant ‘pings’ of piano wires breaking.

  Still, as he closes in to deliver a chop certain to crush my trachea, I realize this can’t continue indefinitely; for a start, it’s getting boring, so I pull the automatic from the stunt double’s shoulder holster and wildly discharge three or four rounds. I know they’ll only be blanks – but I’ve remembered the fuel cells.

  J. M. W. Turner and Vincent van Gogh aren’t names you see on movie credits that often – but you should. The masterful brushwork of exploding petrol caught by the lens at 24 frames per second owes a lot to their impressionism – red, orange, yellow deliquescing in an expanding volume of white phosphorescence analogous to the primed canvas: these painterly effects were well hung in the salon of the Atacama desert resort beneath a shower of tinkling glass and the hiss of the sprinklers.

  Doubled over, the stunt double ducks beneath the Wagnerian curtain of roaring flame – only the sleeveless anorak (or gilet) keeps his nerve, summoning a camera that comes nosing in further to capture Scooby and me, trapped in the pit, the Evian bottles melting all Dalí about us. Scooby, mute and suppliant, yet not reproachful: he trusted me, I had liberated him from the set of The Wolfman, we danced on blue screen and now it’s ended up like this! I cock the automatic and above the roar of the flames we hear the round slide into the breach. I lay the barrel along his foamy muzzle; he ducks his head acquiescing to the inevitable.

  Which was never going to happen – for moments earlier I’d noticed a fuel cell still intact on the far side of the salon; when I expertly shot and hit it the ejaculation of flame that propelled us through the wall of the burning hotel, then through the wall of the 007 sound stage, was one of those ... those sleights-of-mind without which not only action movies but the entire mystery of life itself would be unsustainable. As we wandered dazedly across Broccoli Road and turned into Bond Drive, I noticed first that Scooby was naked once more and I back in my kidult walking garb of shorts and T-shirt, then that we had returned to a simpler past. I looked back to see the sound stage peeled open, blackened and belching inky smoke – a tin can on a homeless person’s fire.

  Karen caught up with us as we reached the security barriers; she was waving a clipboard. ‘I hope you enjoyed your visit,’ she said.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied laconically.

  ‘I’m sorry Dan wasn’t, um, chattier – but there’s only two more days’ shooting and he has a lot on his mind.’

  ‘Sure,’ I reiterated.

  ‘D’you mind signing this release form?’ She thrust the clipboard at me. ‘I’m afraid you can’t write anything about what you’ve seen without the producers’ approval.’

  ‘Sure.’ I whistled for Scooby, and when he came lolloping over I took his paw in mine, thrust it in the soft mud edging a puddle and then pressed it on to the form. Karen didn’t seem to mind – if she noticed at all.

  We wandered off down the road, crossed a field and worked our way through Iver via drowsy paths and somnolent streets. As we were passing a bungalow with a sign outside advertising KOI FOR SALE, Scooby veered off. I like to think that he hung on to his liberty, but I doubt it: even in this age of unfettered personal freedom there are still the small-minded mobs of Transylvanian peasants who object to hell hounds on the loose.

  As for me, what was I? A passer by Skoda showrooms whose middle-aged face bore nothing but the impress of a lifetime’s affluent typing. A contemplator of the way the blades of grass fringed the lettering of a discarded crisp packet, FLAME-GRILLED STEAK FLAVOUR. A stopper on footbridges across dual carriageways, taken by the way the railings formed a cage for a shabby pony cropping a balding pasture. And then transfixed by the lilyfringed banks of the Grand Union Canal, above which dragonflies hung in a pattern that held all beauty – and then abandoned in a lost landscape of pylons and alders beside the Colne; and then squatting beneath the concrete caissons of the M4 to leave a spiral offering close to where flies spiralled over a dead rabbit. And then slipping into Sipson, past the picture postcard of church, village green and Five Bells pub, soon to be buried beneath the global tarmacslide of another runway. And then following the distrail across a field as wide as the sky to where the Marriotts and Hiltons stood in line along the Peripheral Road.

  The cab driver who took me the short distance from the Renaissance Hotel through the tunnel and into the terminal was palpably disturbed; his wide red neck radiated waves of psychosis through the glass partition. He twisted his hands on the steering wheel while muttering obscenities that, if I chose to hear them, had a disconcertingly gynaecological specificity. Pubic symphysis ... External urinary meatus . . .
Cunt! He wouldn’t look me in the eye when I paid the fare.

  And then I was aboard a taxiing Air France jet, grumbling past the old shell of a plane used for fire brigade practice, while the man in the seat beside me yattered on about the air traffic controllers who had been brought over to Pinewood to play the parts of the air traffic controllers in United 93 (2006). I thought of the air traffic controllers who had ensured those air traffic controllers landed safely, so that they could pretend to be witnessing the feigned destruction of real bodies.

  As we banked and turned to the north-west over the Thames Valley, I saw the film studios laid out far below. Had I been hoping for circling helicopters, the sparkle of emergency services’ lights, a tumescent smokestack and all the other set dressing of civil disaster? ‘Are you on your way to Los Angeles to do some filming, Pete?’ asked my neighbour, and while the clouds tore ragged chunks out of England I made it clear that such familiarity was less than welcome.

  He wasn’t to be dissuaded, this plump, white haired, Rolex-wrist-watched, beige-linen-trousered, twenty-seven-years-in-senior-management-once-drunkenly-fucked-a-whore-on-the-Reeperbahn-then-went-on-Seroxat-while-he-waited-for-the-AIDS-test-result man. But when the seatbelt light was extinguished I forced him to withdraw the LCD screen from his armrest, manipulate it into his eye line and begin to watch a Harry Potter film, while I filled my mind with Balyk salmon cooked in crème fraiche with chives and watercress salad, the confit de canard enhanced in honey sauce accompanied by sautéed potatoes and French green beans.

  Eleven hours later the pilot pointed out to us the nuages maritimes creeping across the darkling plain. The Sierra zigmauved along the horizon, Huxley’s graph of civilization’s boom and bust. Not long after that we touched down at LAX.

  * Dinotopia (2002), a TV miniseries in which David Thewlis played the part of Cyrus Crabb, one of the people shipwrecked on an island where dinosaurs and humans have coevolved and founded a society somewhere between Periclean Athens and Disneyland. It need hardly be remarked here that this conceit is far more imaginative than anything conceived of by Ian Fleming, and that, while the screen adaptation involved a certain bowdlerization of the original illustrated books by James Gurney, I had no reason to feel any shame for having portrayed Crabb.

  4

  Among the Chocodiles

  ‘Next victim!’

  Can he seriously mean me? This fat and fatiloquent young man, his cheeks dimpled by silver studs, his black dungarees wide as an army tent, his moobs silicone-stiff beneath the Gothic fluting of his Tarp-shirt.

  ‘I said: next goddamn victim!’

  I’m among the Chocodiles and the Donettes, athwart the Sno Balls and the Cherry Slices, all tangled up in the Gummy Worms and the Sour Neon Worms – I’m a paedo cruising the Sour Patch Kids with a Gummi Bear on my arm—

  ‘I can’t make change for this.’ He snaps my twenty in front of his miserable face like a small green clapperboard, yet here – at the counter, in the gas station a couple of miles along Century Boulevard from the airport – it isn’t the beginning of this scene at all.

  ‘Oh boy, you’re gonna regret that.’ I deliver my line with edible insouciance, the calm before Kali comes, four arms whirling, double jaws snapping, skull necklace clacking.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I now have both Rivet-Cheek’s attention and that of his colleague, a blameless Hispanic kid, whose slick hair is teased and trimmed into all manner of points. Before answering I take a bottle of Powerade from a cooler, crack the screw cap, ostentatiously down the entire twenty fluid ounces, then burp:

  ‘Urrrrp! I say, you’re gonna regret being impolite to me, because now I will be compelled to shove all those Starlight Mints, Candy Corns, Baseballs, Twinkies, Peach Slices, Ding Dongs and especially’ – I turn to point to the bottom of the display rack – ‘Dunkin’ Stix, right up your fuckin’ asshole, before employing your friend’s greasy head as a plunger with which to pump up the resulting sugary muck into an arterybusting froth.’

  Reflecting on the incident later, as I lay across my bed in the Uqbar Inn, I realized it was the ‘greasy’ that’d cost me the sympathy of the other customers in the gas station, who, hitherto merely restless nobodies, now asserted themselves as dangerously individualist frontiersmen and women. With five months still to go until polling day, the wind of change was starting to blow away the nuages maritimes of the Bush administration, so that any racial tokenism that may have been lingering in the body politic was also purged. But at the time I responded purely to the filmic grammar – not, I hasten to add, that CGI can possess syntactic clarity, uttering as it does only the same proposition again and again: we cannot, dull clay that we are, ever fully suspend disbelief in the physics of mass, and so, fingers coated in slip, we spin the wheel.

  But first, in advance of the ass-stuffing, I run out on to Century Boulevard, straight into the traffic stream, and stand there arm outstretched, palm raised, daring the next vehicle – which happens to be a passenger bus, fully laden with newly landed Japanese tourists – to run me over. It does; or, rather, since I do not move, impales itself on my arm, with the crunch of punched steel and a hiss of escaping radiator steam. There I am, only slightly rocked on my rubber soles (and the juxtaposition, as ever with effective CGI, is between the utterly ordinary and the vanishingly probable), the rosette of peeled metal bunched at my shoulder, making of me what, a blushing debutante at the Crillon Ball? With a tortured groan from the ruptured chassis and the shrill cries of the Japanese – who, having fallen forward on impact, now roll down the aisle to pile, a jerking mass of flesh, leisurewear and baseball caps in the unbroken dish of the windshield – I raise my arm to the vertical, then flip the bus backwards over my head, so that it revolves, end-over-end, along the roadway, flailing into the oncoming traffic, knocking cars and trucks into the air so that they too resemble ninepins. The metaphor, although obvious, is not strained: because there’s no experience of phenomena on such a scale being cogently witnessed in the realm of the real, the animators – like all honest creators – needs must resort to what they know. So, a petrol tanker star-bursts in the Southern Californian night, while a squad car, siren whooping, crashes down on the crown of a palm, and as a milk truck cannonades through the wide revolving door of the airport Crowne Plaza its whacked crates shed cartons that also flip, end-over-end, a teasing visual synecdoche that serves – in the scant seconds the entire sequence lasts – to reintegrate the fantastical disaster with the homely anxiety of spilt milk.

  Not that anyone has time to dwell on this – or the fate of the scores of maimed and, presumably, outright dead – because I’m returning to the gas station. I still look exactly the same – gawky in my kidult gear, my long face gaunt and ineffectual – but of course, now we know I possess superhuman powers, so my appearance underscores the pathos of everyman – or woman – compelled to withstand without a murmur the humiliations imposed by boorish sales assistants. It is as a demigod that I loose still more the drawstrings of my bag o’ winds. Naturally, the very visceral mechanics of punishment must be decently veiled: so, there’s a pro-action shot of the assistant’s petrified sneer, another of his colleague whimpering exculpatory please-not-mes, then all is submerged in swirls of multicoloured motion-blur that the eye, rightly, reads as the grappling of many cellophane packets, their ripping; the stripping of the assistant’s heavyweight dungarees, the fisting and the stirring. When it’s over – but is it ever truly over? – teetering on top of the counter is an awful centaur, its front legs with denim bunched at the fetlocks, its hind legs clothed; its torso is writhing, its face is pulsing cherry-bomb-red as systole sucks up all that sugar, sugar that also – in variegated droplets and powdery smudges – is to be seen spattered on the disgusted faces of the customers I shoulder my way through, while dusting my hands off with that rapid, semi-automatic motion that suggests – as much to myself as the restive bystanders – job’s a good ’un.

  Indeed, it isn’t clear to me exactly when the scene did beg
in. Out from the terminal, under the planking of flyovers, the headlights of Infinitis and Escalades left glowtrails worming across my retinas, while the globalized skyline of Marriotts, Hiltons, palms and flagpoles seemed that much bigger – what with the streetlights smudged by the nuages maritimes.

  As instructed, my crew had met me by the departure gate, locked and loaded so they could start shooting right away. I dimly registered a middle-aged cameraman with a comfy belly lying in a hammock of red shirt – then I was past him, and I could only assume that he was hurrying along in my wake until he drew level, walking backwards at speed, the sound recordist guiding him by gripping on to his belt.

  So it continued, on past the XXX Sex Shops and across the intersections, the two men passing me, then stopping, panning as I went by to my departing back, then passing me once more. It reminded me of overtaking a truck with a shiny aluminium tank, then pulling in front of it, then dropping back behind, then passing it again – all this in ’94, on the Santa Ana freeway, with Polly Borland in the passenger seat, filming our reflection in the mirrored belIy of the grunting beast with a Super 8 camera. Rodney King was newly tenderized by the truncheons of the LAPD, and this was our anticipation of what became the signature CGI shot of urban destruction: the huge vehicle either laterally twisting, or – as above – turning end-over-end as it caroms along a city canyon. Why? Because, paradoxically, while the shot appears to be about the destruction of technology, it reinforces the notion that planes, trains and automobiles are like boulders tumbling down the hillside of civilization – natural and unstoppable.