Читать книгу Antkind: A Novel - Charlie Kaufman - Страница 24

WITH LITTLE ENTHUSIASM, I resume my teaching duties (the school had hired the pathologically wrongheaded film critic David Manning to fill in for me during my absence). The students remain characteristically uninterested. Cinema Studies is deemed a gut course in zookeeper school. You get to watch movies, is what they think. I attempt to disabuse them of that notion. I screen movies with zero entertainment value. I show Synecdoche, New York for the simple reason that it is an irredeemable, torturous, tortuous yawn. But I would be remiss if I didn’t also screen challenging movies that are tedious but important. If you hope to have any chance of following a film such as Tobleg’s masterful Thyestes/Obliviate, the film I am screening today, you need to pay attention. Six students out of fifteen have shown up. I will schedule a test next class to punish the truants. T/O is a difficult film to watch, not only due to its graphic and unrelenting depiction of human cannibalism, including a detailed (and educational!) description of the proper field dressing for human meat as well as several tantalizing recipes, but also because of Tobleg’s use of horizontal space on a vertical plane. That is, the film is shot entirely from beneath glass-floored rooms. This calculated ploy to frustrate the audience is off-putting to some of the less adventurous cinemagoers among us, but the truth is, if you give yourself over to it (and you must!), a strange exhilaration unlike anything else in one’s audiencial experience comes to pass. And it raises questions about the limitations of conventional points of view. The movie is seen from the bottom of characters’ shoes, which prove to be invigoratingly emotive. Tony Scott of The New York Times wrote a somewhat derisive review (why is the proudly anti-intellectual Times even reviewing a Tobleg film?) mockingly entitled “Acting from the Sole.” I think Tony is a nice enough fellow and I’m sure a very smart guy for a hack, but Tobleg deserves better than quippiness. The truth is, the acting from below (Tobleg trained the shoe actors for months in the technique before principal photography began) is startlingly poignant. I have been brought to tears on every viewing of the film. And each time, I see something new, a new show, a new shoe show. But of course my students are having none of it, this room full of zookeeping Tony Scotts. And the truth is my heart is no longer in this type of education. For the new me, it is either barefooted hayseed children from the South or the whole world as my students. This is why I spend my off times scouring junk stores, yard sale bins, and garbage cans, searching for the films of the next Ingo Cutbirth. It’s not a scientific process, but mine is not a scientific field. One would not expect Joyce to write utilizing the statistical method.

Over time I do accrue boxes and boxes of film: 8 mm, Super 8, 16 mm, Super 16, and one Super 37, for which the only projector exists in Qaanaaq. It takes three months to project them all (minus the Super 37, which I unspool, thumbtack to the wall of the Sylvia Plath Memorial Indoor Running Track in the third subbasement of New York’s famed Barbizon Hotel for Women and run past with a magnifying glass seven times). In the end, sadly, there is nothing of note. Many, many birthday parties and travelogues. The cinematography is not particularly noteworthy. The acting, such as it is, is atrocious and wooden. One short, apparently made by a group of middle school boys, seems to be some sort of homemade vampire movie. It is derivative, and, to be frank, the boy playing the university vampirologist was not the least bit convincing, either in his Eastern European accent or his simulated old man shaking hands. When I arrive at the very last film, 10th Birthday Party for Bobby, I find myself depressed; Bobby is not an interesting boy.

The immensity of the loss of Ingo’s film hits me perhaps for the first time.

The world is not lousy with lost masterpieces, as I had, in my naïveté, believed. I sit on the floor and watch Balthazar’s urn dance, then march, then hang its head, then supplicate. Olivier programmed the donkey to do a somber and tasteful dance. I believe he said it was a mourning dance from Ghana. The funeral march, slow and lugubrious, plays out to “Funeral March of a Marionette” by the brilliant and undersung Charles Gounod (I relate, Charles!). The head hanging is to The Kingston Trio’s version of “Tom Dooley” and is profoundly moving. I would weep if I had any tears left, but alas. The supplication is to “Camptown Races,” for reasons that remain unclear to me.

I WANDER THE film criticism district, formulating theories, grinding axes; it keeps me sane in these insane times to return to my roots, to praise those films and filmmakers worthy of an audience’s attention, to destroy those filmmakers who loose self-satisfied garbage onto the world. Consider Stranger Than Fiction, I say to my imagined lecture hall full of cinephiles: a wonderfully quirky film starring William Ferrell and the always adorkable Zooey Deschanel. The work done here by director Marc Forster (who directed the unfortunately misguided, misogynistic, and racistic Monster’s Ball) and screenwriter Zachary H. Elms is stellar in that all the metacinematic techniques work, its construction analogous to that of a fine Swiss watch (no accident that a wristwatch figures so prominently into the story!). Compare this to any mess written by Charlie Kaufman. Stranger Than Fiction is the film Kaufman would’ve written if he were able to plan and structure his work, rather than making it up as he goes along, throwing in half-baked concepts willy-nilly, using no criterion other than a hippy-dippy “that’d be cool, man.” Such a criterion might work if the person making that assessment had even a shred of humanism within his soul. Kaufman does not, and so he puts his characters through hellscapes with no hope of them achieving understanding or redemption. Will Ferrell learns to live fully in the course of Stranger Than Fiction. Dame Emily Thomson, who plays his “author,” learns her own lessons about compassion and the value and function of art. Had Kaufman written this film, it would have been a laundry list of “clever” ideas culminating in some unearned emotional brutality and a chain reaction of recursional activity wherein it is revealed that the author has an author who has an author who has an author who has an author, et chetera, thus leaving the audience depleted, depressed, and, most egregiously, cheated. What Kaufman does not understand is that such “high concepts” are not an end in themselves but an opportunity to explore actual mundane human issues. Kaufman is a monster, plain and simple, but a monster unaware of his staggering ineptitude (Dunning and Kruger could write a book about him!). Kaufman is Godzilla with dentures, Halloween’s Mike Myers with a rubber knife, Pennywise the Clown with contact dermatitis from living in a sewer. He is a pathetic—

Something goopy and wet plops onto my forehead. I wipe it off and discover my hand is covered in bird feces. This, I am sad to say, is no longer an atypical experience in this horrible city. The pigeons—flying rats, I’ve humorously dubbed them—have taken over, and we humans are at their mercy. We are their toilets. The stuff is sliding down my face and into my mouth. My fellow urbanites snicker cruelly. I duck into a CVS and purchase a small pack of baby wipes. The cashier won’t look at me, won’t take the cash from my hand, leaves my change on the counter. It takes the entire package of wipes to clean my face and another entire package of Johnson & Johnson Mouth Tissues to clean out the inside of my mouth. I have lost my previous train of thought. I believe I was compiling my “Best of” list for 2016. I continue:

10—La Ciénaga Entre el Mar y la Tierra (Castillo y Cruz)

9—Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis (Diaz)

8—Hymyilevä Mies (Kuosmanen)

7—Smrt u Sarajevu (Tanovic)

6—Fuchi Ni Tatsu (Fukada)

5—Kollektivet (Vinterberg)

4—It’s Tough Being a Teen Comedian in the Eighties! (Apatow)

3—En Man Som Heter Ove (Holm)

2—Kimi No Na Wa (Shinkai)

1—Under Sandet (Zandvliet)

It’s a list of which I am proud. It is a list that under normal circumstances would set the world of cinema on fire. But today the world of cinema is abuzz with other news. H. Hackstrom Babor, professor adjunto in the filmic studies department at the Mr. Jam Centro Moderno de Música in Bilbao, Spain, has stumbled upon a heretofore undiscovered film in the back of the basement of an abandoned bordello in the Basque Country. This so-called “orphan” film by an unknown outsider artist has been dubbed by some “scholars” as the creative link between the Spanish Rectangulists of the sixties and the Barcelonan Rapturists (Los Realizadores de Rapto de Barcelona) of the early to mid-seventies. Be still my heart. Not only are the Rapturists a movimiento falso in all but the most naïve academic circles, but EVERYONE acknowledges that Soy un Chimpancé is the film that brought Rectangulism into the postmodern age. Far be it from me to rain on Babor’s filthy, despicable parade. It is, however, galling to have to abide this collective orgasm with clenched jaw as I sit on the ashes of the truly monumental cinematic discovery of the age. Tonight I will attend a screening of and Babor’s lecture on this “film” at the 92nd Street Y Overflow Auditorium at the intersection of Gregory Hines and Maurice Hines Boulevards in Harlem. Babor and the film will appear on closed-circuit television at this venue. Questions from the overflow crowd can be asked of Babor through a series of relays by typing them into one of the three electronic keyboards on a desk in the corner, and I intend to ask many questions. For now, I must busy myself in preparation.

I WAIT MY turn, impatient, imperiously crowding the fawning dimwit ahead of me at the keyboard. I have long admired your work … he is hunting and pecking at the lightning speed of a word a minute.

“C’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon,” I chant into the back of his head.

… and am curious as to your take on the films of Fra—

“All right, that’s enough,” I say, pushing him aside. His keister-kissing is doing nothing to further this discussion.

So, Babor, I begin, we meet again. So to speak. I trust Bilbao’s finest guitar emporium/after-school education center is treating your filmic research with the seriousness it deserves. My question for you tonight is this: How do you square (no pun intended!) your woeful misapprehension of the work of the Rectangulists with your arrogant proclamations about the cinematic value of this newly found “work,” and I put work in quotations because to characterize this as a work, as in a work of art, diminishes both the concept of work and the concept of art. This “film,” and I put film in quotes as well, because to characterize it thusly diminishes the concept of film, is a travesty at best and deserves no place in the canon of essential Spanish films of the mid-twentieth century. Yo Soy Chimpancé, a movie that you, in your reckless pursuit of personal aggrandizement, shamelessly attempt to relegate to the ash heap of film history, is the undisputed link between the Rectangulists and all else of any remote import that comes after. Gomes himself has said as much. Are you prepared to wage war with me over this? With Gomes? Keep in mind (if you’ve even seen the film) that the final sequence in Chimpancé is Manuel cinematographed from every conceivable angle, both from outside and inside his body. As I’m certain, since you are a scholar of film, you realize that the Rectangulists did for cinema what the Cubists did for painting, namely utilizing a single frame of reference to explore multiple frames of reference. Keep in mind the producer of Chimpancé, Guillermo Castillo, was so concerned about potential mental anguish among the film’s spectators that he hired actresses dressed as nurses to stand in the back of the theaters showing the movie to attend to those who might have heart attacks. Its pyrotechnic display of photography and editing illustrates the reach but also the ultimate limitations of the Rectangulist manifesto of Frame/Reframe (see my footnote at the bottom of this question). I’ll take my response off the air.

Then I wait through the interminable glad-handing and self-congratulations that pass these days as conversation, but the moderator never asks Babor my question. Quelle surprise. It was a powder keg. I collect my gift bag and leave.

Lurching through the streets, blinded by rage and disappointment, I stumble upon an unadvertised orphan film festival at the 65th Street Borkheim Palace. Perhaps this is the very medicine I need to cure my current state of violent melancholy. I flash my press credentials to the box office attendant.

“Fifteen dollars,” she says.

The world I view inside is enframed in a rectangle. I can see only to the edges of this frame; beyond it is darkness. It exists only as this: light, absence of light, and combinations thereof. The various meanings found within are no more than tricks of the brain. This play of light and dark is predetermined and therefore unalterable. It simply plays out. Then it plays out again. It can be observed. It can be processed, judged. It can elicit emotional responses in an observer. It can be criticized, but it cannot be hurt. For it does not have wants or desires. You can literally stop this world in its tracks and it will melt, but it does not care. Only you care.

The world outside, I decide, is also a rectangle of light surrounded by darkness. It has no mass. It exists outside of me, but not truly as I see it, not as I understand it.

The unattributed, untitled film begins: The lights are off. In the room depicted onscreen, the heavy drapes have been drawn. He knows they are drawn, this man in the room, but he cannot see that they are drawn, for there is no light at all in the room. But he knows they are drawn because he drew them himself only minutes ago. Similarly, he knows well enough the placement of furniture in the room, where the desk is, the bookcase, the bed in which he now reclines. He needs it to be as dark as possible if he is to get any sleep. This much he has learned after a lifetime of sleep problems. He has tried all the remedies over the years: the drinking of warm milk, the drinking of whiskey, the counting of sheep, the reading of books, this very dark room.

And as in a dream, I find myself in this room, too. When did that happen? I can’t say, so slippery was the shift of consciousness from the constant jabbering noise in my head into the silent black rectangle before me. I know this rectangle depicts a room in absolute darkness and I know the objects in this room as well as the man who I know is in the bed in this room knows these things. I know the dresser is over there to the right, that it is squat and wide and of a highly polished wood. The cherry desk is against the window. I know the funny story about its purchase almost five years ago. I know how the story has changed slightly in the telling over the years. I know his clothes are piled on the gray rug at the foot of the bed: black slacks, white dress shirt, white boxer shorts, two black socks. I know he leaves his clothing there every night. I know he is ashamed of not being neater. And just as the man knows what’s outside the bedroom door without looking, so do I: the boxy second-floor landing dimly lit by a Popeye-faced night-light, four closed doors, including his own. The wife behind one, the son behind another, the bathroom behind the third. The bathroom door is closed because the faucet has a drip that keeps the son awake. I know the town in which the man lives, which streets to take to get to the supermarket, the house two doors down with that little dog that incessantly barks. And I know what’s inside the man in bed, too, his feelings, the constant slight ringing in his left ear, how he needs it this dark if he is to have any hope of sleep. And I know he is not sleeping now; the organized quality of his thoughts tells me that. Organized but ephemeral. Ideas appear and disappear, snippets of conversations without sound, images that are not images at all but ideas of images. It’s staggering, I think, as my inexhaustible jealousy of all things I admire rears its head. How is this achieved? How, cinematically? Technically, what exactly is the trick? There is a trick, certainly. This dark and silent rectangle communicating so much about the room it portrays, about its occupant, about his life. Who is the filmmaker? I wonder. Why are there no credits, no title? And I decide it is the very lack of this information that buries the film so deeply in my brain, the part of my brain relegated to dreams and fleeting thoughts. It is an orphan film by choice, not by accident. The anonymity of the film worries me. It makes this film somehow dangerous. Even as I watch it, it integrates and vanishes, someone else’s glass of water poured into my own only partially full glass of water. This is not a movie I will remember properly. It lives only in the irrational, as does a dream. My rational mind, the bully, will strong-arm it away from me and fill in the blanks, add explanations, because it cannot let it be. This bully contaminates the dream, changes it into something smaller, manageable, tellable. The dream as it is cannot be told. So it is with this film. In the remembering or telling, it becomes something else, and so the truth of it is destroyed. And I go on with my life, with my anemic attempts to portray the world in its fullness.

I think all this as I drift in and out of the thoughts of the unseen man in the bed. He is old, not like me. He struggles with insomnia, which is very much like me. He is tormented by a lifetime of these sleepless nights, years wasted worrying, attempting, failing. Beads of sweat form along his hairline high on his forehead as he goes over and over his career fumbles, his diminishing creativity, his failures, his humiliations, the looming deadline he faces, both metaphorically and literally. He lusts after inspiration the way he once lusted after women, a spark of some sort. It is the year 2015, the future, far in the future. Not as he expected it when he was younger, when he was my age. Now there are computers in every home. There is world peace. There are portable telephones that can be carried everywhere in semiportable little wooden boxes. There is an awful lot of diaphanous clothing, but still it is—there is delicious food in pill form—but still there is … oh!—universal human fulfillment—but still there is something wrong. He is not fulfilled. Every day, the homeopapes spout the good news, but all this happiness doesn’t seem to be enough for him; a wrongheaded competitiveness still lurks in his psyche. He longs to be admired even though he lives in a time when everybody admires everybody. It is both mandated by law and accepted by medical professionals as therapeutic. Indeed, this point in history has been dubbed, somewhat joshingly (but not in a mean way), The Mutual Admiration Society. It follows closely on the heels of The Society of Mutually Assured Destruction, which followed a period no one alive remembers, something about flappers, perhaps.

The insomniacal thoughts of this man plague me as he struggles through the night. The alarm clock with the lighted dial is checked repeatedly, interspersed with tossing and turning and cursing and pillow pounding. I feel both the slowness of the passage of time and the relentless slogging toward morning light. How is this accomplished? Perhaps I am responding to ambiguous subliminal cues hidden in individual frames. Perhaps I am projecting all of this onto the scene and there is nothing of this there. I am put in mind of Dyrgenev’s experiments. He projected black, gray, and white onto a screen. People saw snowstorms in the white image. One man saw a snowstorm on a moonless night in the black screen. Just as I’ve concluded it’s my own psyche on this screen, a dim morning light peeks through a narrow opening in the drapes and I learn the room, exactly as I pictured it, is there before me: the dresser, the desk, the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed. The mundane horror of a night of wakefulness has been fully experienced, as well as the hopelessness attendant to an awareness that this is a nightly battle and has been since youth. The old man is exhausted. I am exhausted. I think, He could be me, if I were an old man, and I feel a sense of relief that I am not, that there is still time for me to figure this out, to not be conquered by a lifetime of sleeplessness.

The old man thinks “time to get up” and does, tossing the tangle of sheets aside. There is not much of an erection these days, but there is something. I feel his thoughts, the routine acknowledgment of the semi-erect penis, the need to urinate. I compare it to my own morning experience. I become conscious of my own need to urinate. As he makes his way to the bathroom, I consider whether I can wait or if I should run out myself. I think it might be safe to make a dash for it now. I decide not much is going to happen in the next two minutes. But I don’t want to chance it. The movie is dull but also unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and I can’t safely predict what might happen next. I check my watch and find that although I just watched him toss and turn in bed for six hours, only three minutes have passed. Maybe I don’t have to urinate. The old man flushes and leaves the bathroom. Oddly, my need to urinate is gone. In the upstairs hallway, he passes the door to his wife’s room. She is snoring behind it. I know that is why they sleep in separate bedrooms. I judge their marriage. This is not what marriage should be. I will never get this old. Even if I live to this age, I will never be old like that. It is a choice to become old like this. People can remain young at heart. The movie ends, no credits, no fade; it just stops. I leave.