Ain't It Just Like the Night...

Motorpsycho Nightmare on Betty Elms Street

'The best of luck to you, Betty.' Irene

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet? | We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it | And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it...

Okay, I'm out of here... I'm leaving the movie industry. It's been good to me, but I've had it. I've made my money, said my piece and now I'm off to Florida for a well-earned rest. Call me Midnight Cowboy; I don't care. Hollywood's a tough town and we all have our breaking point. It's not that I've seen too many films; Wendy and I last went to the movies to see Withnail and I and, before that, Apocalypse Now. Actually, we saw Full Metal Jacket as well, somewhere between the two. And Heartbeat, but that was a long time ago.

I'm not selective about what I see and have no taste (yeah... I know, it shows in the company one keeps); it's just that when you have three kids it makes a lot of sense to watch them on TV (the movies that is, not the kids). Nor do I watch much TV. I'll grab the obvious, like an English movie. Otherwise... they're all pretty much the same. Christ, the shit that comes out of Hollywood blows my mind... I started watching A.I. the other day. Spielberg unseats Lucas to become the new Disney by desecrating Kubrick. Or maybe Kubrick was going gaga... I don't know. That place will do things to you. They spray evil into the air-conditioning ducts at night. Marek told me. It's their Father's Matrix.

I'll watch The Simpsons and South Park but, at the moment, Cartman, Stan and the boys are about all we have going for us here. I've been bereft of a good 'brain-wash-soak-and-rinse' series since Andre Braugher walked out of Homicide: Life on the Street. Before that...

Actually, before, during and after that which I have watched, David Lynch's Twin Peaks has served as my benchmark. Watching Twin Peaks was a ritual. I'd plant myself in front of the TV and suck it in. There was this one scene... Nah, hell; they could show the whole thing again. I mean, I've seen episodes of things like Northern Exposure and other long-term shit but really... After Twin Peaks, the TV died. Since then, it's been like sniffing ether. Not that I know what ether does to you, but I've heard its effects are similar to glue and I've done that. They say glue-sniffing kills your brain cells, but I dunno... "Exactly," the shrink exclaimed. "You don't know. But it's not that you don't know; it's that you no longer know what you used to know."

Well, sometimes I thank God for that. Besides, he sounds like Donald Rumsfeld. Which, for some strange reason, reminds me... Mel Gibson's movie made it across the Atlantic. Wood floats. After washing up on our shores, I'm afraid the beating continued. Although the Jesus Freaks battle it out to cram theatres around the country, most South Africans either don't care ("So what if the Jews did it? Someone had to.") or take perverse pleasure in knocking the shit out of it. I suspect it has something to do with Gibson being Australian. We haven't beaten the Australians at anything for decades, so I reckon Mad Mel might be what one could call a Godsend. Some people don't like it because it's a crap movie but when they point that out, there's a stunned silence. "What's that have to do with anything?" they're asked. "The Lord of the Rings comprised three crap movies and look how well that did."

Heh... After watching the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre, former Zambian president Frederick Chiluba, up on corruption charges, likened his 'suffering' to that of Christ's. "I have suffered after stepping down from the presidency but not like Jesus did. I have just suffered a quarter of that," he said. There's a market for everything these days.

So anyway, the TV died. Until last week.

Our local pay channel offered a free antidote to Gibson-induced swamp fever. I posted The Anniversary Party entry before completing it so that I could take the cure. M-Net screened Mulholland Drive and I wanted in. Yeah, so I watched it. Now I need watch no more. It scared the shit out of me. Lynch is to film what Dylan is to music. Mind you, more people probably appreciate Lynch; these days you can count the Hibbing Bandsaw Diehards on one hand. I think he cuts too close to the bone.

Alright, so A Beautiful Mind and Iris came out the same year as Mulholland Drive. I've seen both on the box and they're essentially 'mockumentaries', costume dramas for those who'd rather not read and aren't too interested in factual accuracy. Mulholland Drive, on the other hand is, like all good theatre, slightly surreal, an example of what cinema can, and to my glue-clogged brain, should be.

As far as I'm concerned, it should have swept the Oscars. But, there again, we run into the goblin trilogy. What is it these people have with goblins and Jesus? Christ, don't real people like Diane Selwyn matter any more? Show moviegoers the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre and they all know what's going on. Show them a human being lost on Mulholland Drive and they haven't a clue. I think they call that irony. Perhaps sniffing glue isn't such a bad thing after all. At least one doesn't suffer delusions of reality.

Besides making movies that mess with Jesus Freaks' and the media's heads, Lynch gets it, and then translates it to layers of sound and imagery that meld to a single statement open to myriad interpretations. He's a cinematographic (is there such a word?) blogger. Mulholland Drive is, simply, a paean to women and losers in general. Actually, I don't mean it like that, but you know what they say... "Never retract. It's bad form." As such, it's profoundly disturbing. It also, fittingly and in retrospect, recognizes one woman, former Lynch assistant and sometime actor Jennifer Symes, a 29-year old coke-head killed 2001 in early-morning LA after driving her car into several others.

I once knew a girl, but I'm still trying to write that particular story, so I won't say anything right now...

In painting this memorial to all that women have endured since the City of Angels sold its soul to the silver screen and the over-moneyed lecherous fucks financing it, Lynch finds in Naomi Watts (Betty / Diane), Laura Elena Harring (Rita / Camilla) and Ann Miller (Coco), women able to bring his vision to life... and he uses the likes of Justin Thoreaux (Adam Kesher) and Michael J. Anderson (Mr. Roque) to fill the complementary male leads and roles.

The mummified faces of Lynch's male villains track the decades to Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers (Layfeyette) and the power merchants whose evil traces now seep through the cracks of time and cloud the air with rancid dreams. Mind you, these people live in every time. They are the body, soul and psyche snatchers David "Lizards Ate My Flesh" Icke warned me about; they're aggressive mind zombies on steroids, enemies of thought, passion, and feeling. They're creative anti-matter and feed on anything spontaneous... in fact, they've become so fat and lazy living in Hollywood, they'll eat anything resembling human life. If you're half an actor and can still twitch, stay away from that place.


'It is no longer your film.' Vincenzo Castigliane

Lights flicker from the opposite loft | In this room the heat pipes just cough | The country music station plays soft | But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off | Just Louise and her lover so entwined | And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.

Yeah, it's in this world of shifting vices and dubious virtues that women from Doris Day and Rita Hayworth to Naomi Watts and Laura Harring have had to ply their trade in ways that chew lost souls to a spiritual and mental cud. I decide to discuss Hollywood with Father Christopher.

"Fuck off. I'm working."

I give him a savage smack across the back of his head, grip his skull like a hard-boiled egg, and bounce it across his desktop.

"I need to talk."

Holding his forehead with one hand, he pulls a handkerchief from his cassock with the other and dabs at the blood.

"Why? These people are businessmen. That's all there is to it."

"Yeah, I know, but what about art?"

He looks at me, amazed. "What about it?"

"Well, shouldn't it count for something? The way Lynch writes it, most of the art's in the movie. Hollywood sucks."

"Fuck art. Decadence and depravity rule at the Hollywood Bowl."

"Eh?"

"Hollywood is hell. It's the end of the line. I should know. Ratzinger made me Archbishop of Hollywood for a time after that sorry affair at the girls' convent. Yeah, it's the boulevard of broken dreams, the days of our lives. It's the most unromantic place on Earth. Forget the glitz and glamour. Lynch does. It's demonic and these women are Hollywood bottom feeders. Worse, in this movie, the main character dies. Those that succeed in that murky shark tank do so financially. Hollywood has nothing whatsoever to do with art. Look, it's been inhabited by the scum of the earth since the Twenties and Thirties. These people have nothing going for them but money. They're sick fucks on a power trip. How'd you think they built their empires?"

"On acting ability? On sheer guts and loads of talent?"

Father Christopher's eyes flash. "Don't fuck with me, you little shit. Give me some Aspirin. You'll do double duty on the guard towers tonight. Guts and talent may draw the dumb, but acting ability doesn't count for much. D'ya think the movies foisted on us represent the best acting talent we have?"

"Heh..."

"Exactly. It's all about bucks. People like Lynch's women haven't a clue when they arrive. They're eaten alive, their kitchen-sink dreams reflected in their short-lived bath-grime lives."

"And the glamour?"

"It's as illusory as anything else. Hollywood and its surrounds are riddled with lowlifes; no talent, class, style or brains, a New Age Paradise. They need nothing because they have what matters; connections. That's what these girls are sucked into; they try to play the game and set up networks. They pay the price."

"This girl musta done somebody some pretty tasteless favors to come up with that Camilla bitch."

"Right. Ya' think any of the 50s stars had taste? Why should they have any today? Look at their houses, for God's sake."

"Heh... yeah, they all look like Indian wedding cakes. If these people don't have their heads stuck up the backside of industrial-strength kitsch, they do the John Wayne thing, perpetuating the myth of the right-wing, white American cowboy. Jesus, dude ranches in L.A. And people tour these places."

"Okay, so you get the point. Hollywood is base. It has no brains. It has no life. It is death. It's not called the 'dream factory' for nothing."

"And they have no conscience."

"None. There's a whole lot of money and a whole lot more involved here. Not for nothing did the Bush team trek out here to learn spin. For every David Lynch, there are a thousand Jessica Lynches who need their stories told. They infect everything."

"Sick."

"Yeah... and I haven't started yet. To think they call it the underbelly of Hollywood... It is Hollywood. Look at the way Lynch writes the moguls. They're a bunch of murderous goombahs. But, like it or not, they control the show. They are the MC at the Silencio Club."

"And Mulholland Drive encircles them."

"A deadly snake created and traced by unused minds."

"And they never go out there."

"Unless it's to dump bodies."

"...build walls..."

"...machine-gun posts..."

"...wedding cakes..."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

We sit and glare at each other. I give him an Aspirin.


'It's more beautiful than I ever dreamed ...' Betty

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously | He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously | And when bringing her name up | He speaks of a farewell kiss to me | He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all | Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall | How can I explain? | Oh, it's so hard to get on | And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn.

So what's the story?

Fuck the story... there is none, for Chrissakes. It's not real. Or, if it is, this is Lynch's reflection of one and all women, a personal ode... an expression of love, a lament at the death of beauty, and a trashing of Tinsel Town... it's the best (and worst) thing that's happened to Hollywood in decades. But again... there is no story, only fear, hatred, love, lust, loneliness, repression, humor, ache, pain, creativity, hurt, projection, laughter, irony, bitterness, skepticism, and all that other shit one can dig out of dictionary.com's thesaurus facility.

Watch the film for yourself. Watts and Harring traverse boundaries of personality, time, realism, and sexuality without apparent effort. Mulholland Drive is naked Kombinat! Any plotline is arbitrary... a line circumscribing a complex, condensed concatenation of experiences forming a mind-blasting emotional whole; the film is a single event, expression or experience.

Okay, enough of that. So there seems to be this need for a plot. Why is it that people always need a plot, a site map? Ack! It doesn't matter...

The short story is that Diane Selwyn (whom we meet towards the end of the movie) is every wannabe movie star who's ever gambled on Hollywood. She's also one of its desperate losers. Having fought and fucked her way into a couple of small roles and bit parts, she's losing her mind. It's not surprising; most of her acting has taken place in her head. Although she started out with a clear idea of herself, she's started to confuse light and dark, her self and her shadow (and the man in the shadows tips his cap to the guy in the white coat before garroting the director who's snoring in his chair).

To keep her dream of stardom alive while waitressing at the local Twinkies, whoring on Sunset Boulevard and living in a dark hole, she concocts a sultry persona to whom she attributes her small successes. Of course, she knows Rita's just a conniving slut, so she later reinvents her as Camilla Rhodes, a star who feeds her bit parts. Balancing Camilla, or Educating Rita if you will, she builds on the faded myth of her early dreams to recast herself as Betty, a naive, wholesome, and altogether too-sexy country girl from Canada unable to play the Hollywood game.

Sheez... that Betty.

When the addiction to that line "She's the girl" kicks in and Diane begins to do what is needed to get a role, she increasingly attributes her two-bit success to Camilla who, as she blurs with Rita, becomes ever uglier. The reliance of one over-stretched persona on another becomes too much and shreds Diane's mind. Her fatal error is in accepting herself as a multi-faceted abstraction bearing no responsibility for her choices. In the end, following a breakdown we see as a car smash on Mulholland Drive, that dark neural pathway linking fractured regions of Hollywood and our own minds, she shoots herself.

Okay, that's enough. So much for the story.


'I'm here to audition for... Mr. Brown.' Betty

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial | Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while | But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues | You can tell by the way she smiles | See the primitive wallflower freeze | When the jelly-faced women all sneeze | Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze | I can't find my knees"...

Lynch's genius is that we enter Diane's world through her subconscious, her alter-egos, defense mechanisms, projections, fears and scrambled realities. We do so by riding in on Mulholland Drive, that road belonging to one and all cities, and to each of us. The roads traversing Cape Town's Table Mountain chain ring the inner city and southern suburbs. After sunset, the Signal Hill, Table Mountain, and Rhodes Memorial roads are no-go zones. In the mornings, what's left of the police force sweep them for bodies and the city's cleansing department hoses down the semen. They're night-time cesspits, dark chains binding the psyche of the city over which they ride.

We used to go up there when we were kids, taking the wine, the music, the girls, and the dope. It was grand. A night sky and the occasional buck coming down to watch Pink Floyd join the stars. Nowadays, only people like RageBoy go up there. He blogs a trip along Mulholland Drive, a straight pedal-to-the-metal hell run along Route 36. He rips an out-of-town CD store with Selina and does the downhill racer thing back to Boulder. The one-man Lynch mob of the Web hears the raven call and we get Love Minus Zero/No Limit along the psychic highway linking us to our hearts of darkness.

It's a road we need all travel; as often as possible if we're to stay in touch with ourselves. As former Hells Angels in America, Father Christopher and all Jesus Bunker Disciples and EGR Irregulars might abstain, but we've never kicked the habit. This still troubles me deeply. On Friday last week, I went to speak about the movie and Mulholland Drive with my therapist, Waking Slow, a native-American of Irish extraction.

"It's Betty that stays with me. Or rather, I wish she did. Shit, that girl... sorry."

"It's okay... what were you saying?"

"I never did like Rita. Besides her not being blonde, I mean... She's too obviously 'the shadow' and it's in our nature to dislike her. The terror comes in when we need to flip between light and dark but find ourselves forever traveling Mulholland Drive; without respite. We start forgetting or losing touch with ourselves. It's a scary feeling... complete alienation or personality fragmentation. I use those terms as a layman, eh?"

"Yeah, don't worry; I only pretend to be a professional myself."

"Oh. Okay, that's cool."

"But you were saying, 'We all travel Mulholland Drive.'?"

"Yes, but we don't all have Diane's problems. She's living in a state of celluloid psychosis and it's eaten her mind. I mean, fuck, Hollywood. To survive it, she has to turn her life into dramatic farce, which is what Lynch reflects. I mean, look at the projection."

"And the goons. Mr. Roque..."

"Yeah..."

"Sort of like living with PorridgeBoy?"

"No, far from it. PorridgeBoy set me off. He grew out of Gary Turner and I'll always be grateful to Gary for that, but PorridgeBoy was always a bit one-sided, you know?"

"Mm... not sufficiently bent?"

"No. To flesh him out and give him a truly mean and vicious streak, I needed Chris Kovacs and Frank Paynter's assistance. Ultimately, even they couldn't help me. I eventually came up against Sanders and all those warblogging freaks and I was in it alone with Shelley and Jeneane. Those girls may be twisted, but they're not bent. We needed additional firepower, but Frank had Fang to tend to and Chris doesn't write without Bearman at his shoulder so... Well, I couldn't take Gary in there. He's too nice a guy. Besides, Cameron was on the way."

"Mm..."

"We did have some amazing wars though, with PorridgeBoy. There was that flight over Cuba where PorridgeBoy started eating the CIA guy's face..."

"I remember... so what happened?"

"Well, at the time, Sanders, Denton, Reynolds, Owens and some other twisted freaks were attending side-briefings given by Big Dick at warblogging conventions held in the ante-room of the secret chamber beneath the Lincoln Memorial. They'd take the donkey, pile into the car, and head on down to these things... Horrible, but I managed to get a press pass from some right-wing neo-Nazi outfit... I forget which one... and I used to travel down to DC with them."

"But what..."

"Well, that's where synchronicity comes into it. At about that time, Father Christopher sent Locke, his apprentice and scribe, over to Europe to nick the Bayeux Tapestry. He wanted to hang it over the fireplace at the Jesus Bunker..."

"Just stick to the basics..."

"Okay, so because RageBoy's a known suicide bomber, Father Christopher (who took over as my Spiritual Guide and Mentor) had Locke meet up with PorridgeBoy."

"The Chukka Bar Incident?"

"Yeah, a horrible scene... right out of the Inferno. Apparently PorridgeBoy wanted a cut out of the Tapestry and Locke wasn't having any of it. You don't fail Father Christopher... he's a Jesuit, you know..."

"Mm... I do, so?"

"Well, that's about it. I had to help PorridgeBoy out so that he could return as Gary to Fiona and Cameron. And Locke signed me up as one of Father Christopher's Irregulars. Y'see, I knew all about RageBoy. During one of the Cheney briefings, he'd fingered RageBoy as a suicide bomber... um, he said he was one, plying his trade at New Age Expos in the Boulder area. He'd go in and waste the fuckers. No mercy whatsoever. Father Christopher was rebuilding the Jesus Bunker at the time and had a particular dislike of Oprah and Dr. Phil..."

"How's that connected?"

[Giggle] "It's not."

"Oh."

So anyway, the warbloggers knew RageBoy did the Mulholland Drive run on a regular basis... I don't know where Cheney gets his intelligence, but it's obviously not the sort of stuff that gets into the media or commissions of obfuscation. I've been investigating Eric Norlin and I'll let you know what I come up with... They're bent, those people. Bush, Bush I, Blair, Baker III... all of them... including the Queen of England, a somewhat forgetful Ronnie Reagan and the sponsors from The Carlyle Group..."

"The Carlyle Group?"

"Yeah, they bankroll these things. They always send along one of the Bin Laden family. He sits at the head table with David Icke and the Skull and Bones guys. He's tight with them, but scorns the warbloggers... Anyway, after the main banquet, there'd always be this huge orgy during which Sanders and his buddies would roger the donkey..."

"Serious."

"See-ree-us?"

"See-hee-ree-us! Yeah, really. The head honchos did disgusting things to each other as well... you should see what Dick and W. get up to with QEII... uh, well yes, and when all was said, done and wiped off, W. and those at the head table performed."

"Performed?"

"Party tricks. You know... they'd all turn into giant lizards and fly away. It's in David Icke's new book... You read it yet?"

"Uh, no, actually I haven't..."

"Never mind, it's not relevant. The thing is, I knew if I could RageBoy into one of these things with a semtex vest..."

"Mm..."

"That's why I signed up with the Irregulars and moved into the Jesus Bunker. Besides, Gretchen and Halley were there at the time."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Well, anyway, that's how I got into the Jesus Bunker... the real as opposed to the fake one..."

"Huh... sorry, you're losing me..."

"Don't worry... there's a difference... I'll explain it sometime. The bottom line is that RageBoy was the only blogger doing the Mulholland Road route on a regular basis. Gary, Chris, and Frank were, to be quite candid, nice guys. They just didn't have the necessary... evil, if you will. Not that Father Christopher or RageBoy or Locke..."

"Of course not... I didn't think..."

"Yeah. Besides, I'd proposed marriage to the other guys and was in a bit of a quandary. If any one of them had accepted..."

"Huh!"

"Yeah, but luckily they're all married and Wendy wouldn't hear of it... so that's basically why Father Christopher became my Spiritual Guide and Mentor. A good Catholic and all."

"Mm..."

"So that's it."

"Huh? But what has any of this to do with Mulholland Drive? What about Diane Selwyn?"

"What? Oh, yeah... jeez, that Betty is something, eh? Diane Selwyn doesn't exist. She's Jennifer Symes, the girl to whom Lynch dedicates the movie. It's her story. Sort of..."

"Oh, yes. The dedication at the end. You mention it above."

"Yeah, she died. A bad scene. An ugly end."

"Good grief. So do you think..."

"No. Lynch had this thing on the boil as a mini-series a long time before that. But it doesn't matter. It's all about her. And us."


'Look ... where's this going? What do you want me to do?' Adam

Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule | But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel.

Lynch, who might be taken for Justin Thoreaux's Adam Kesher, paints himself subject to the power of big money (the film's genesis attests to how the TV networks screwed him over). Nevertheless, for all the black humor, sinister undertones, and uncanny insight, he is a deft painter wielding a light brush. Take the sex scenes. Where extra-marital infidelity is portrayed, it's ho-hum farce. I mean, there are only so many things you can do to lighten the mundane. Besides, this movie is about women making it in a world of gun-dumb males who see them as good fucks and, perhaps, actors.

By giving the love scenes to two women, Lynch entrusts the universe to them rather than a bunch of lamebrain assholes constitutionally incapable of singing the body electric. In many ways, the eroticism of lesbian love is its own cinematic payback. But what of it? It enhances a message and that message is already clear. For decades, women have fought and sustained each other in a world where men treat them as less than human.

"Yeah, that masturbation scene. Brutal stuff."

"Brutal lives. Diane loses herself to her delusions."

"That's my point. People insist this is a love story and, to a degree, I agree with them. But it's not the love of two women for each other; it's Lynch's love of all the women who've ever worked that town. It's his tribute to them. Look at landlady Coco, nutter Louise, and Betty's Aunt Ruth. They're phenomenal. Steeled to take on anything Hollywood can dish out to them, they show their mettle on Mulholland Drive and call the tune. They've been where Diane's been and they've lived to fight another day. The thing that gets me is the way Lynch surrenders the movie to them. He allows them to make it theirs and he becomes a bit player in the movie of his life."

"Along a short stretch of Mulholland Drive."

"Yeah. He rides that road."

"Sort of 'RageBoy Does the Movies'"

"In a sense. I don't know what some hold against RageBoy. He balances Locke's chastity and channels Father Christopher's frustrations. It's all good stuff, really. He rubs some women up the wrong way, I know, but I've often wondered why."

"Eh?"

"Read a couple of hundred blogs written by males and see how many bring women into their writing. Naturally, as an essential part of experiencing themselves and the world. Generally, when it comes to women, men are constitutionally incapable of honesty, much less acknowledging or trying to come to terms with the roles women play in their lives. Again, repression. RageBoy represses little. Mind you, that's what led to his downfall."

"Mm... I heard about that. Has he found a job yet?"

"Yeah, but that's not what I mean. He volunteered for Father Christopher's suicide-bombing squad only after hearing of the 72 vestal virgins. But it's a minor point..."

"RageBoy's?"

"I really wouldn't know..."


'It'll be just like in the movies. We'll pretend to be someone else.' Betty

The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him | Sayin', "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him" | But like Louise always says | "Ya can't look at much, can ya man?" | As she, herself, prepares for him...

Lynch blends sound, music, time, and imagery into his well-mixed paint. His style doesn't change, but it's malleable and he lays it on thick (so thick in fact that his use of stark sets, unobtrusively weird angles and ugly people serve as anchors to whatever one may construe as real). Each scene offers new expression of his bizarre talent. How's about those clicking stiletto heels, the dumb cops faces, the clink of the keys, and that song...

Betty and Rita are down at the Silencio. Shades of Dali does Cabaret dance across the screen. Rebekah Del Rio sings Llorando (Orbison's Crying done a capella in Spanish) and you just know you've just died and landed in the middle of Betty's audition.

Betty goes to this audition... Ah, Naomi Watts is fucking great. "She's from Idaho," I tell Wendy when she first appears, in the company of an evil old couple representing every bent and twisted human instinct squeezed into frozen smiles pasted to ugly visages (mom, dad and everyone in between). I'm a sucker for girls like Betty, even though I know the perennial smile complementing her blonde-haired, blue-eyed sparkle will soon turn to a grinning death's head.

Well, her eyes aren't blue but they sure as hell could be. She's from everywhere and nowhere in particular. So... after hiding Rita (who looks like she stepped out of La Dolce Vita) in her aunt's apartment (a cinematographic museum without any overt evidence of it being so), she goes off to an audition she's rehearsed with her unlikely mirror, Rita. Performance art is one thing; acting another. Lynch gives Betty room to deliver a transcendental performance creating something new form that given her. It's a great piece of theatre and one of the most powerful scenes I've seen on film...

Sucked into it, one realizes the artist's obligation to paint truth with simple materials. Paradoxically, it is also the scene in which Diane begins to lose herself... As she slips from Betty Blue Eyes form Ontario into a sex goddess and slag, she starts blurring the distinction between herself and Rita. Her success becomes her loneliness and she finds herself starring in a movie of her own making, Nightmare on Betty Elms Street. Y'know, "They got some hungry women there | And they really make a mess outa you." Diane has too many personas, slights and hurts to repress, and she does not have Lynch's authority to control them.

"You still there?"

"Yeah, sorry. I was thinking of something Tom Matrullo said."

"What?"

"Things change, y'know, whether in Diane's head or ours. Tom was questioning blogging... as we all do... occasionally. He writes:

What beckoned once was the promise of complexity. What has arrived seems suspiciously like the fulfillment of an order of standard-issue self-celebritizing rectilinear white USian fetishes.

Who ordered that?

The hope of blogs was that it would show us how, when we address issues, we miss them, because we forever have them in our sights. Discourse is not transparent, communication occurs somewhat obliquely, if at all, sliding between the trackbars and RSS feeds. After all, if communication actually were taking place, wouldn't we have it all figured out by now?

"Mm..."

"I dunno. What's he saying? He points to an aggregator, but aggregation is always pretty sordid. From a blogging perspective, it's lowest-common denominator stuff. It aggregates the aggregators, the two-line link-farm bloggers. It doesn't preclude widespread communication though; it aids it. These sites widen the spread of a coarse base. Look at Diane as an aggregation of all we perceive Hollywood to be. She's the norm... but even then, she's not."

"How'd you figure that?"

"Well, there are thousands like her but, do to the individual what you will, you cannot touch the identity that rides Mulholland Drive. She does so figuratively, through Lynch. Her thoughts and dreams are and remain her own. Aggregated bloggers reckon they have it all figured out, but they don't. They're dumb and don't have a clue. They end up on BlogRunner, enlightening nobody; they're media whores trolling for traffic. Real bloggers ask questions, like Tom. They have to, because they don't know what the fuck is going on. They ride Mulholland Drive and find answers. It makes them interesting."

"Well, that's true but..."

"Look, we're all media whores to a degree and it's best we stay that way. We don't want all the answers. Otherwise we get stuck on Mulholland Drive. But we're safe if we communicate. Communication is all about not knowing what's going on. Tom illustrates that in his follow up post. He locates the question differently, as a signpost for journalism (casting bloggers in the role of Other as "...the nightworld, the bad dream, the chaotic seething mass") and it works."

"Umm..."

"Answers prompt questions. I mean, if I knew all the answers, I'd probably shoot myself too. Think of Kurtz. Getting trapped in the answers is death. As soon as Diane figured it all out, she committed suicide."

"You ride Mulholland Drive too often, you get to find all the answers?"

"Yeah. Everything gets blurry and ends up coming together."

"I can see why it attracts RageBoy then. But isn't he playing with fire spending so much time up there?"

"No. Not as long as he keeps asking the questions... It'll keep him off the aggregators for sure; I mean, look at traffic to his site compared to Dave Winer, Doc Searls, or the quiet, informed opinion of David Weinberger. He's nowhere. Why? He asks questions. He's honest and he's out of control. Nobody is able to rein him in. Most people don't like that. They'd rather he joined them in the cesspit city, writing letters to the editor demanding that the local authorities clean up Mulholland Drive."

"If you say so."

"I do. It's all about the questions, not the answers. Questions add complexity, complexity distinction, distinction clarity. Ironic, eh?"

"So how does that translate to the blogs?"

"Because, although 'standard-issue self-celebritizing rectilinear white USian fetishes' dominate blogging, we still find the complexities, including those Tom offers so frequently. It's a matter of discernment, of taste if you will."

"Philosophical, all of a sudden, aren't we?"

"Well, it's Matrullo, you know. You have to pick your words carefully around that guy. I once had a teacher who used to beat me with a dictionary, but that's another story... But, okay, there's another aspect of Tom's question that intrigues me. Blogs do show us how, when we address issues, we miss them. What blogs can't do, and that's where blogs will always rise to new lows, is show us how to fix that. Ultimately, it's up to us. In other words, he and RageBoy can pose the questions, but only we can try answering them. And every answer's going to be different. That's communication. It's very much an individual thing. What rubs off, rubs off."

"Mm... Want an Aspirin?"

"No... Yeah.. be more enthusiastic. Blog the dark side. Either we all start sniffing Boulder air or we're going to end up watching our brains atrophy and our roads wash away on Mulholland Drive. It's a ghastly thought... I wrote Father Christopher about it the other day. 'How does one go insane?' I asked. 'Fuck you,' he replied. I'd like to try an easier, more acceptable way. I think a truckload of acid and an all-nighter on route 36 might do the trick."

"Sounds dodgy."

"I'll let you know what happens."

One last aside on the movie. In sharing his passion for those who give their all to their profession and will do anything to live it—from the privileged to the poor, the waitresses, extras, heiresses, models, hookers, and natural-born killers to those who don't make it, despite giving it their best shot, David Lynch tells us a lot about himself and what we do. But he also raises many questions. Not all of them need answers. One thing's for sure. The sunset boulevard of the inner city bears little resemblance to the dark, twisting drive snaking its way through the hills and ravines of our psyches.

I don't know how Jennifer Symes's Jeep Cherokee came to plough into several parked cars in L.A. at 06:20 on April 2, 2001. It doesn't matter. Perhaps it did to David Lynch, but that doesn't matter either. What matters; to me, and perhaps to nobody else, is what came before and afterwards.

Yes, we each have our Mulholland Drive as much as we each have our own story and that's why I'm moving to Florida (it's better than filming in Canada). We have no need of Hollywood or those who run it. We are free to make our own movies however and whenever we choose to do so, for our own or for other reasons. We can traverse our minds at will, responding to or ignoring that which we see, as long as we're prepared to hang in there for the duration; as long as we're prepared to do the long, sometimes scary run along Mulholland Drive, and as long as we're prepared to take the consequences.

In the end, there is no turning back.

To hell with Iris and A Beautiful Mind. Mulholland Drive is a beautiful film and a simple story. Given Lynch's outside-in, direct approach to traveling the long road of our psyches (the whole wide universe blown open to the stars and the infinite possibilities and realities of ourselves and nobody; ending, unfortunately but only in this instance, with a gunshot), I have no need of any others.

And yup, it's just struck me that the graphic I've used at the head of this blog for the past couple of months is no accident. It is to Table Mountain what Mulholland Drive is to the Hollywood hills. And a couple of nights ago, our free-to-air station ran Apocalypse Now. Anybody who knows me knows how that movie and the novel on which it was based, Joe Conrad's Heart of Darkness, affected me. Strange people from my past have been phoning me out of the blue, and others have flown in from foreign lands. In the distance, I hear the Doors doing The End.

There's danger on the edge of town | Ride the King's highway, baby | Weird scenes inside the gold mine | Ride the highway west, baby | Ride the snake, ride the snake | To the lake, the ancient lake, baby | The snake is long, seven miles | Ride the snake...

Okay, I'm out of here...

And Madonna, she still has not showed | We see this empty cage now corrode | Where her cape of the stage once had flowed | The fiddler, he now steps to the road | He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed | On the back of the fish truck that loads | While my conscience explodes | The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain | And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

Bob Dylan | Visions of Johanna

"Ain’t that Betty something, though?"

"...

The Anniversary Party

Finding America

Blundering to the Heart of the American Dream


"Yeah, well, it's just us a few hundred of our closest friends"

Yeah, everybody's going to the movies. I've also been to the movies (as is evident from my posts of late). Now, after reflecting on Charlie Kaufman's adaptation of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, a brave venture for mainstream film makers and moviegoers, I find myself shaded by the looming shadow of events following late March 2003, that time last year the United States, having bombed, starved and stripped Iraq through one of modern history's most vicious sanctions campaigns, illegally invaded that country, overthrew its government and, using proxy armies (including 1,500 South African mercenaries who constituted a force larger than ally Spain) began—through its 4,000-strong "embassy", to build its Middle East springboard to dominance over Asia and initiate linkage with its hundreds of military bases forming a necklace of death around China.

A year down the line and with a long struggle ahead, I have no wish to revisit the ongoing carnage, mayhem, and despair inflicted by the United States and its vicious ideologues on Iraq and other countries it has destroyed in the recent past, e.g. Argentina, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Haiti, Columbia, etc. I'd rather stick to the movies.

Several months ago, our local pay channel screened Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming’s The Anniversary Party, featuring thirty-something Hollywood Hills couple Sally and Joe Therrian who, reconciled after a lengthy, inter-continental separation, decide to do the done thing and flaunt six years of make believe in front of friends with whom they share, all too frequently, that which they should share with each other. Sally is an intelligent, fast-fading movie star tarnished by a desire to live life to the full, i.e. act, save her marriage and have kids. Her prepubescent British novelist-turned first-time director husband, the ACDC Joe, proves a major drug-addled obstacle to achieving any of her three goals. They are as unlikely a couple as anyone's ever likely to meet but, hey, having met them, I thought I'd share their story with you. It is, after all, their anniversary party.

At least, in these end days of March and early days of faded empire, the movie's title and its characters’ aberrant behaviour are apposite. I do not remember much graphic detail of the film, but one short scene struck me most forcibly. Encapsulating the protagonists' inability to see the absurdity of their fast-deteriorating situation, it lent it great value as a reflection of U.S. values today. I tried to track down mention of what amounted to a single, defining shot and scoured the Web for a review noting it. The Web does not lack movie sites where, supposedly, one can find out anything and everything about one's movie or star of the moment (movies and fame being such fleeting or transitory commodities these days). However, and in keeping with our age of information-clogged ignorance, I found no mention of the scene that so impressed me. We'll get to it later.


"The clock is ticking!"

The Anniversary Party, scripted and filmed on the run in 19 days using digi-cams, exemplifies the potential of our new media and highlights the talent of today's actors and actresses. Jason Leigh and Cummins' coup and part of what amounts to a stunning achievement lay in their decision to cut out the ubiquitous middlemen, the costly directors and producers who, their profits made, end up dictating what audiences see. Throwing together an ensemble of their close friends and scripting the film as they shot it, the two long-time actors produce and direct a film of enormous insight that did not receive its share of deserved acclaim. Why? Put it down to self-hating Americans for all I care... it doesn't matter, the film's great.

The movie equates to the unravelling of a lie as great as that now lived by the United States. Tolerated by a globe envious of its obvious wealth, the U.S. has grown to an adolescence based on falsehoods carrying with them the heartbreak of unpalatable truths. Like the political charade playing itself out on a global stage, Sally and Joe's marriage is an act wherein the players try to outplay each other. There is no trust in this relationship, only a partnership balancing need and enmity, dedicated to the acquisition of selfish resources guaranteeing more of the same. Like Joe and Sally, the United States and the globe are locked in a destructive dance of unhealthy codependence. As Sally tolerates Joe's drug dependence for the sake of a wanted child, we all now suffer Israel's unholy grip on the U.S. body politic.

Okay, that's not really fair. From the outset, it's clear Sally is the one who will carry the day once loosed of Joe. Cumming immediately comes across as a self-absorbed child, far more in need of his wife than she is of him. He is the adolescent. Also, it's clear as the movie gets under way that we're not dealing with ordinary acting talents here. The bond shared by all those participating in The Anniversary Party is evident, electrifies the set, and illuminates a tight, fast-paced script. Against this backdrop of excellence, Cumming and Jason Leigh still manage to shine. As far as seasoned movie reviewers—embedded in the mainstream news media to replicate the publicity given them—are concerned, The Anniversary Party, though good, comes across as a self-indulgent exercise in navel gazing by the idle rich.

Hey, they're not that far off but, in not giving the movie the kudos it deserves, they short-change viewers and those who make the movie work, its writers and actors. Mind you, the writers and actors (or is it just their publicity machine) don't do a bad job of short-changing themselves in the publicity department. The official movie site is a case in point. I find no mention made on it of two actors who, to me, play pivotal roles, Clara Demedrano and Norizzela Monterroso. They portray the Therrians' Spanish-speaking Mexican servants, Rosa and America.

Look, I'm no North American, so I wouldn't know if half the Mexicans in the U.S. are named America, Jesus, or Rosa. The defining character's name is America and that's all there is to it... and then some. To both the people who made the movie and those publicizing it, Rosa and America don't seem to matter. They are airbrushed out of existence. Perhaps, as is the case with most foreigners in America, their presence is accidental or purely utilitarian, not deserving of mention.

I mean, someone has to cook the dinner.

It doesn't matter. Well, it does, but it doesn't, if you know what I mean. Nothing about the U.S. surprises me any more and besides, it has its up side. The Anniversary Party is much like life, a good film in which—much like current international events—the lies, duplicity, denial, self-absorption, greed, selfishness, immaturity and irony on which it is built combine, in the end, to set free an underlying truth evident to all but the characters to whom it should be evident.

We meet Sally and Joe Therrian on the veranda of their spacious, made-to-order glass-and-chrome Hollywood home on the morning of their anniversary celebration under the instruction of their personal yoga teacher, Steven. "Great," I think. "Yoga, the ultimate East meets West For Dummies DIY activity." Yoga, in the West, represents a form of spiritual jogging for mentally obese practitioners who need not leave their yoga mats to do any work. That is, after all, what they pay their personal trainers for. Much as the U.S.' derisive scorn of global opprobrium sets it beyond a capability to understand itself, the Therrians’ facile appreciation of an ancient art is born of a lifestyle distinctly at odds with their ability to appreciate what this slice of culture has to offer them. Their love of it is as empty as their addiction to each other. The movie is off to a good start.

Enter servants Rosa and America, who we see through the open sliding doors separating them from the earnestly re-united couple and their rent-a-guru contortionist. They start setting up the dining-room table for the evening's celebration of a union made in all the world's free capitals and that bastion of entrepreneurial spirituality, Hollywood. Muttering quietly in their alien tongue, Rosa and America upset Joe's fragile equilibrium and he asks them to make themselves scarce. They close the glass door and their muttering fades to the peace of the garden and the selective silence of its New Age mystics.

Rosa and America are servants who, like children in the America of old, are to be seen (when needed) and heard (if necessary or to say "Yes"). With their mistress, they form the bedrock on which this movie is built but, as said earlier, I find no mention of this in the reviews. That, I guess, is to be expected. Just as the pass-for-glass house on the hill floats above the fantasy of Hollywood, the toxic cloud of American media shrouds our globe, shaping and influencing our lives with its naive pass-for-thought emissions. Just as the child-bride and her infantile husband cannot commit to reality and each other, our neonatal baby power, convinced of an unending and unconditional supply of global goodwill, cannot commit to realities facing everyday people living everyday lives.

Am I being somewhat overzealous in highlighting Rosa and America's roles? Perhaps. I tend to do that with most things, i.e. read into them that which might not be there. But, in this instance, I think I have a pretty good case, not least the script itself and the fact that in most stories, major characters are introduced at the outset. This film introduces us at the outset to Joe's suicide-junkie sister Lucy and Sally's gynaecologist by way of phone calls, as well as to their dog Otis who, unlike Rosa and America, features prominently throughout the film. He is to the Therrians what the average moggie is to the single blogger, a repository of misplaced emotion usually reserved for real-world things like kids. In many ways, and much like the blogger's cat, the Therrians both misuse and abuse Otis. He is the catch-fence of every projected or misplaced emotion that slips from behind tightly controlled facades.


"It's married and it's the neighbor."

But let's forget the psychology and follow the story. Finishing their yoga session, Joe (the master of the house if not the East) gives it over to Rosa and America in a manner befitting domestic relationships. "It's yours," he says casually. Yes, well, it is, but only insofar as the two middle-aged Mexican servants are there to take care of Joe and Sally's needs, support their whims and follow their dictates. And only insofar, as is the case with mainstream politics, social discourse and the media, as every phrase means the opposite to people whose lives are dominated by a wealth referred to in throwaway terms. The lie of money's meaninglessness becomes evident in artistic output measured in quotas and Sally's reference to her cherished, self-styled designer house as "a big white thing on the left." In a sense, it may be the White House, although we could hardly interpret that as being left of anything. Implicit in Joe's statement, "It's yours" is that which says, "It's ours. Clean it."

A prelude to pre-party love-making is interrupted by a phone call from the Skye Davidson (Gwyneth Paltrow), the young actress portraying Sally in Joe's book and directorial debut. Sally is furious at Joe's invitation of Skye to their anniversary do and the cracks in her overstretched psyche immediately become chasms of jealousy, anger, and uncertainty. That Joe has hired and makes little secret of his desire to bed the 27-year old chosen to portray her opens gaping holes of self-doubt for Sally. Her star, like Europe's and an acquiescent world, is apparently on the wane. Nevertheless, at least this woman has the insight to doubt her worth. It will stand her in good stead as the movie progresses. Part of the script's allure is that, as we become aware of the character's obvious flaws, we grow to like them for having them. In contrast to the reviewers, my sense is that we're watching real people here, dysfunctional people twisted by forces we are able to see on-screen only because of their off-screen friendships. The Anniversary Party admits us to the inner sanctum of an extremely close circle of friends.

In the face of Skye's imminent arrival but comforted by Joe's facile pledges of undying love, any thoughts of Joe and Sally rumpling the bed are shelved as the guests start to arrive, welcomed into a foyer filled with flowers by Rosa (the rose symbolising fealty) and America. The flowers, we soon realise, are set to remain among the most neutral natural entities in this house. The cell-phone, Palm Pilot-toting Jerry Adams (John Benjamin Hickey) is the couple's business manager and it's important to note that, not only are he and his wife Judy (Parker Posey) the first to arrive; he bears the Therrians’ completed tax returns, ready for signing. Jerry is to the Therrians what Rumsfeld is to Bush and Cheney; a threat and an opportunity to further ambition by artifice and numerical cunning. As Sally and Jerry discuss pressing business matters, Judy notices the flowers and mentions them, but nobody hears her or sees them.

A rose by any name? The neighbours Ryan (Denis O'Hare) and Monica Rose (Mina Badie) are guests invited under sufferance owing to a dispute involving their dog and Otis. Ryan Rose is to Joe Therrian what John Kerry is to George W. Bush, a po-faced loser and fellow author with a chip on his shoulder. With the flowers, the servants and the dogs, the Roses form natural (awkward) but unwanted perturbations in a house where every pre-packaged, stylised item, utterance or emotion is either formally arranged for effect or frozen forever in the countless tastefully muted professional photographs covering the walls of the Therrian home). All that is natural is commoditised, be it flowers, dogs or neighbours. Cut flowers are arranged, the dogs groomed and gated, and the neighbours' tamed and cowed with threats of litigation. It is the stuff of politics and of life.

Given life by the presence of Joe's Leica-carrying former wife or lover, Gina (Jennifer Beals), who presents the Therrians yet another image of their freeze-dried love as an act of soft vengeance and an anniversary gift, the photographs carpeting the Therrians’ walls scream—like divorce-court witnesses—the couple's futile repression of issues tearing their lives apart. Gina is the Cherie Blair of Tinsel Town on the Hill, at once the artistic interloper and at all times the shrewd barrister and conniving judge of character and opportunity who frames the desperation of the Therrians’ still life in shades of black and white. Objects are vital to this movie and Sally's character fights them. Realising the frigidity of her marriage, she cannot decide where to hang the latest monument to their union, sterile but for the baby in her womb (in a sense, her neonatal personality set to bloom). Expressing their undying love and appreciation of the non-existent beauty surrounding them, Gina and Joe, still flirting after all these years, up the tempo of empty platitudes. Every exchange is reduced to "I love you..." or "I love this...," accompanied by a peck on the cheek.

Each arriving guest carries items bearing testimony to the Therrian marriage's stillborn nature and each couple carries a wholeness they lack. Sally's dissatisfied, Shakespeare-quoting co-star in her current movie, Cal (Kevin Kline), epitomises lively success as he arrives laden with gifts, kids, diaper changes and his self-declared wife, Sophia (Phoebe Cates). Like the servants, flowers, and neighbours, other people's kids are relegated to seeming irrelevance. Dispatched to the guest room, they offer telling signifiers unseen by self-important major players lacking the wisdom of childhood. Sally's creative but neurotic director and professional anchor, Mac (John C. Reilly), arrives with his delightfully self-destructive, anorexic wife Clair (Jane Adams), three video cameras, a firm grip on the dog and a tenuous hold on reality. He obviously lives for his movies. Mac and Cal make up the Hollywood neo-cons, think-tankers, and campaign managers, the makers and breakers of careers, trends, and insiders. They dictate who is to bless and who is to blame, out the unwary and exact revenge on those who fail them.

And ultimately, Sally's soul mate and friend, the single, violin-playing Peter Sellers look-alike and mimic Levi Panes (Michael Panes), pitches up. Panes turns out to be more a self-serving facade than a confidante of substance. He is a neat reminder that the Therrians’ anniversary party can be juxtaposed with The Party so well trashed by the late, great Peter Sellers. Panes is the Karl Rove of Sally's life and a constant reminder that, as the Therrians gather a slice of white America to itself to watch its edges curl, The Party and Hrundi V. Bakshi will always belong to 1968, Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards. The Anniversary Party is unquestionably now. Whereas in The Party Sellers, with impeccable timing and ineffable grace, plays an awkward outsider wreaking histrionic havoc, the characters filling the Therrians’ designer lives play intimate insiders bringing down, through deliciously uncomfortable silences, mistimed outbursts and ringing irony, a chaos of perfection's making. Through all this, Sally and Joe play host to different manifestations of their own fractured selves, slipping and sliding in the vacillation of their indecision.

At times, the obvious skill needed to pull off this seamless integration of ruptured lives, emotional schisms, and broken dreams puts even Sellers's comic genius in the shade. To juxtapose the two movies so obviously and so unselfconsciously calls for supreme confidence, a confidence Jason Leigh and Cumming obviously have in each other and the friends they direct. Besides shredding the paternalistic master-slave relationship and notions of success, The Anniversary Party dissects marriage with a scything but gentle mirth. Despite finding most relationships wanting, it leaves one wanting more relationships. The more unreal these people get, the more real they become.


"So how much do you hate her?" "Big time."

As the guests arrive, America dispenses wine to each, ensuring (like all good Mexicans, Koreans, Filipinos, A-rabs, nigras and the like) she gets a bit on the side each time. Funny thing about America; she's always close to the action. She certainly is when Skye Davidson, who drops into this mix of identities as transparent as the large windows framing the house, embarrasses Sally by gushing her adoration and Sally's status as a fading star in front of the mute servants in the kitchen. The nubile Skye carries all the physical attributes Sally has seen fade to skeletal angularity and none of the intelligence evident in the self-doubter's thoughts and actions. Skye is much like the Charlize Therons of today, an intelligent woman you'd want to fuck as a prelude to intelligent conversation. Skye is the ultimate commodity; unthinking pleasure on a stick, the wet bed of the American Dream. Her feigned naivety fools no-one, but her shrewd intelligence makes her conquest the more desirable. Who does not want the U.S. spread out before them, offering them eternal sensual bliss?

Sally, on the other hand, epitomises the Streeps and Fosters of yesteryear, people I'd choose to have a damned good conversation with before getting down to more fundamental pleasures. In her insecurity, which is strangely devoid of any panic-stricken neurosis, she retains an air of "the strong woman", the one person others can count on to pull it all together. Joe? He's a likeable but effeminate tosser, a complete hoser, a six-year old wastrel in a 'Boy' sweatshirt incapable of commitment to anything but his selfish desires. Having nothing to give, he takes, constantly raising the question, "How the hell did these two end up together?" A professional relationship carried too far, obviously. But it doesn't matter. Life generally throws us into the weirdest relationships, leaving us to wonder at what might have happened had we any say in the matter.

Joe's intellectual and personal nemesis and antithesis is Ryan Rose, his next-door neighbour, the uptight, bitter dry-drunk and prolific author who, in choosing to remain an observer throughout the movie, sets himself beyond the pale and offers a counterpoint to the hedonism on which Joe thrives. Ryan, who abhors others' self-indulgence with the passion of a convert, straitjackets himself in sterility. Yet, in his selfishness, there is a certain, deliberate logic. If he is to survive, he cannot revert to a lifestyle he has obviously enjoyed or been sucked into in the past.

I must say, I sympathise with this guy's anger and frustration. An absolute asshole of his own creation, he's doomed to watch others indulge themselves. As a husband and father, I understand his apoplexy absolutely. It just ain't fair, Bubba, but if you want what you've got, you'd better learn to live with it or you'll explode. If Ryan offers a counterweight carefully crafted to balance or highlight other's deficiencies, he does so brilliantly and brings essential foibles to the mix. His wife Monica, however, suffers the brunt of his coat-hanger rectitude and self-righteous inflexibility and, when the movie takes off, cannot resist falling into experiencing the upside of a lifestyle lived on the downside.


"Isn't Skye amazing?" "She's got great tits."

This film might have been shot in under three weeks and its script written on the run, but nobody will convince me the original screenplay had not been lying around a long time. The balance, structure, and craftsmanship evident in the story line is too good for an off-the-cuff, impromptu performance by a dozen or so talented individuals. The dialogue is sharp, witty and pointedly ironic throughout. "I've been watching your films since I was a little girl ... I've seen all your movies. When I was in rehab, the second time, they wouldn't even let us see your drug addict movie. They said you were too real. I worship you. And I couldn't be more flattered, because I know the part I'm playing in Joe's movie is based on you as a young woman," gushes bimbo Skye, darkening Sally's kitchen-sink mood. It is up to America to break the ugliness of the moment by wheeling in the cake marking the moment; a cake topped by three separate and edible photographs of the Therrians and their dog.

Much like Adaptation, this movie takes off only once the scene has been well and truly set. And perhaps, also like Adaptation, this is where most so-called reviewers part company with its promised excellence, missing the exposure of the rot corrupting those involved. Skye, having arrived and conquered, and after shaming Sally to silence and a passive-aggressive counter-attack, is the thoughtless but sensual point around which the film revolves. She proffers—after an embarrassing-but-clever-yet-uncomfortable set of necessary party games (Charades, naturally), her gift, a supply of Ecstasy to a communion party trimmed down to those prepared to bare their minds, bodies and souls.

Ecstasy becomes a misnomer as every suppressed passion explodes with the delicacy of a thousand volcanoes. With the onset of its effects, clothes come off, the swimming pool becomes a centrepiece, and personas peel like old paint. Sally's director Mac bewails his female lead's inability to act; friend Sophia aligns herself with Sally's pregnancy, distrust of Gina and assessment of Joe as "...narcissistic, irresponsible and unreliable"; Ryan becomes ever more awkward; Joe admires the studiously unselfconscious Skye's breasts, Clair glides nakedly from neurosis to neurosis, and Sally, out looking for her dog (missing because Monica has left open more than a subliminal gate), catches her giving herself unreservedly to Joe. Sally’s handling of the situation hints at the movie's brilliance. Her deepseated anger, evident only through her refusal to react, promises violence.

The script moves swiftly from passion to crucifixion as Joe, Sally, Panes and Skye head in pairs up the canyon above the city of dreams to look for the dog. Again, as with everything in the script, the left foot does not move unless the right follows. Panes and Skye, essential foils to the phobias of Sally and Joe respectively, form a possible alternative or complementary relationship and follow their upward path separately to the Therrians. Sally and Joe, left together for the first time, use their hilltop hike to thrash out their differences and vent their frustrations. They tear into each other like drug-crazed rats.

In keeping with the dark, bleak, but often excruciatingly funny humour pervading the film, we cut away from the two lovebirds unleashing their anger and enmity on each other. Back at the house, the camera focuses on Ryan who remains as oblivious to the Therrian's difficulties as he does to his wife's attempt at rebellious infidelity. Uncompromisingly and without feeling, Ryan is in the kitchen grilling America and Rosa (always present when the film takes a twist) about building permits. Like their owners, the slaves are taking heat. In their alien-tongued obduracy however, they tell the dry drunk to piss off just as Monica rushes in and, filled with a zest for life fuelled by her newly unbridled passion, tells him to get off his ass to look for that which he hates most in life, the Therrian's dog.

Back up on the hill, Sally and Joe's conversation spirals through a detailed litany of each character's real or perceived failings, all of which we have seen on-screen. The sense of a building acrimony is palpable and it's topped by Sally's sudden realisation that she must end her marriage and end it immediately if she is to save herself. She bluntly states that she has had an abortion, a saving lie that puts her cards irrevocably on the table. She is finished with her self-indulgent, self-pitying toy-boy husband. In Sally, one of few characters with any spine, we see a woman fighting her subservient self-image, the House & Garden woman who should, because she has it all, be ever mindful of her place. Fortunately, Sally has heart and passion and, in keeping with the emerging theme of La Rosa Mystica, uses her beauty and thorns to see off those who leech off her soul. It is she, of all the film's protagonists, who will flower most obviously when the storm fades away.

As with Sally and Joe's hillside confrontation, the glass walls cocooning The Anniversary Party and our public world seal the unspoken truths of decades. Today, they crack to breaking. And just as Joe's every childish whim has been catered to at unspeakable cost, the United States' jackbooted march across the globe has imbued in those of us living outside it a silent but lethal enmity. Perhaps, to Americans, we are all Spanish, Arab, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Filipino, Asian, Korean, Chinese—inscrutable aliens-cum-servants of the Greater American Good, to be taken at face value and ignored once used. The United States forgets to whom it owes its dues, the world at large. And it is a world tired of much ado about nothing and the perennial passion play amounting to a meagre pretence at foreign aid.

We too want out.


"You have to sign your taxes anyway."

Back at the movies and following the Biblical theme, we are taken back to the baptismal fount, the swimming pool where Mac, Sally's director, choreographs naked nymphs in an underwater ballet. Mac is a wonderfully complex and paradoxically warm-hearted Machiavelli, one of the few sane weirdoes present. Under the influence of the E, he swallows water, drowns, and is brought back to consciousness by Jerry, the accountant, who knows how to balance the books. Mac realises Sally's acting failure is his and his alone and he is left to face his demons in tears. Compounding the rain of disaster (while newborn hero Jerry and his wife get it on), girlfriend Gina takes a call from Joe's father who tells her Joe's sister Lucy has taken an overdose.

Joe, Sally, Skye and Panes return dog-less to the house and the news of Lucy's OD; Sally takes charge and Joe falls apart. She allows him to crash and sees off her co-star Cal, his wife Sophia, and their kids before walking in on Skye and Panes screwing each other's brains out (or consummating Sally and Joe's relationship, if you will). Just as the movie started with Sally and Joe's interrupted lovemaking being evident in an untrammeled bed, Pane and Skye's passion is obvious in the tangled covers at its close. Once the dust settles on the carnage remaining at the credits, the dumb blonde, unaware of her role in exposing fraudulent lives she is set to emulate, starts clearing the debris from the tables. "You don't need to do that," says Sally. "I don't mind," smiles the cluster-bomb Madonna. "Relax. You've done enough," stresses the more mature woman with determination and a full and healthy appreciation of Skye.

The movie, a mélange of shifting scenes, can’t be spoiled by any description of it. The timing, dialogue and 'balancing' themes are too good. The walls adorned with dead photographs are replaced, in the guest room, with walls covered by children's pictures.

Ultimately, with Joe set to head off alone to London and his sister's sickbed, we are left with the couple and their unsigned tax returns. This is the scene that prompted my attempt to dissect the film. Lacking a graphic memory, I do not remember it clearly but I do know that I saw it. It is a Kodak moment that allows us a simultaneous glimpse of the American dream and its reality. Joe and Sally sign off their tax returns and each other under a sign or plaque imploring "God Bless America." God does indeed bless America but, in life as in The Anniversary Party, it is we outsiders who take the role of America. As dysfunctional adolescents in a world of jaded cynics who tolerate their kids without sanction, it is to 'America the world' that the United States, if it is to eat, will ultimately have to answer.

As Joe and Sally make love for the last time, America and Rosa sweep up the mess. It is their job and their lot. The party is over. Joe leaves, Sally sweeps their wedding rings into a drawer, puts the house on the market, and the dog returns. Shot of her husband, Sally is free to discover her life and herself. The people who filled this movie with cut-glass egos and paper-thin personas have gone. And yet, out here in the so-called real world, they are still with us. Be they movie stars or politicians, they are the mass-market personalities created by the media that give us FOXNews, CNN, CBS, and USA Today. They are, and are of, the media. Is it any wonder they believe their own lies? It is they, after all, who script the fictions that pass as truths for all occupying the cocoon of cosseted privilege.

It is difficult for me to believe that reviewers can, in seriousness, tout this film as a reflection of Jason Leigh and Cumming's movie-star realities. Seeing it as clearly as they do, why would they ever want to live it? Set against Blake Edwards' 1968 movie, The Anniversary Party is as cuttingly funny as Sellers' is slapstick adept. The script, acting and use of digi-cams show how rapidly scriptwriting and film-making have matured in thirty years and, as a whole, it shows that movies have a future even, if like their country of origin, most opt for a mediocrity that highlights its finely crafted brilliance.

Would that Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alan Cumming and friends be charged with scripting our global future. They'd do a damned side better job of it than the boys in the Jesus Bunker.

Sharon 'Opens the Gates of Hell'

We wish to speedily advance implementation of the Roadmap towards quiet and a genuine peace. We hope that the Palestinian Authority will carry out its part. However, if in a few months the Palestinians still continue to disregard their part in implementing the Roadmap - then Israel will initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians.

Ariel Sharon December 2003

Many who analysed the Butcher of Shatila's December 2003 Herzliya commitment to his so-called Disengagement Plan, unveiled after his trashing of the Washington-sponsored Roadmap, speculated he might, in the light of the U.S. presidential elections and the ongoing Iraqi Occupation, attempt Yasir Arafat's murder around February of this year. They were close. The Governor of Israel's murder earlier today of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin endangers all living in Israel and Palestine and destroys any medium-term prospect of a negotiated truce or long-term peaceful settlement. Israel has unilaterally made it impossible to implement an apartheid two-state solution to the crisis in Palestine. It must now accept that a greater, democratic Palestine in which Israel is brought together with the millions of dispossessed refugees incarcerated in the Gaza and West Bank concentration camps, is the only viable alternative to Sharon's ongoing genocide; and is inevitable. Given the climate of terror fostered by Sharon, it is not unlikely that Hamas which, under Sheik Yassin, has shunned cooperation with other Islamic resistance movements, might look to cooperating with the rest of the Arab world in seeking an end to Israel's reign of terror in the Occupied Territories. Hamas’s Qassam Brigade and Palestine's Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades have not yet delivered a like response to Yassin's assassination.

Note Gordon Coale offers some good links, from Helena Cobban of Just World News to Uri Avnery at Counterpunch.

Adaptation

Of Passions, Kings and Orchid Thieves

Where time is a memory...



Maybe the ghost orchid only blooms in the minds of people who've walked too long in the swamp. Susan Orlean

'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood | When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud | I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

I'm lugging several books around with me. Having revisited Conrad and Eliot in January, I moved on (or should that be "back") to Camus and Sartre. Sometimes, it's necessary to retrace your steps if you're to see where you're headed. I've trawled The Rebel, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom, enjoying all three—even though I recognise them as old friends; mirrors on a wall. Afterwards, I felt something to be missing. Y'know the feeling... heh. So I moved across to Sartre's Words (I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it...), distancing myself from any association with the horrible little man's subtitle... of course.

On the Powell's site, Words is accompanied by an extract from Paul de Man's 1964 review of it, published in The New York Review of Books. The review is open to only those prepared to pay for it. Who said irony is dead? Anyway, I read the Sartre because he and Camus will forever be linked. I do not (as mentioned in a post below) pretend to understand or empathise with the philosophers, but I find the meaning in statements such as Sartre's "Hell is other people" in stories like Camus's The Guest (the other telling story in that particular anthology being the first, The Adulterous Woman).


"Boy, I'd love to find a portal into your brain." Valerie

And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured | I'll always do my best for her, on that I give my word | In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Still I was restless...

...and so took Milan Kundera's The Joke from the shelf. I think I've found what I'm looking for. I'm feeling more settled than I have in a long time. This edition has a foreword by the author in which he mentions the book's first publication in Paris with a foreword by Louis Aragon. I do not know the surrealists but have clung, since finding it last year, to the beauty of Aragon's short explanation of their form, A Wave of Dreams:

Dreams, dreams, dreams, the domain of dreams extends further at each step. Dreams, dreams, dreams, the blue sun of dreams at last drives the steel-eyed beasts back to their lairs. Dreams, dreams, dreams on the lips of love, on the figures of happiness, on the sobs of attention, on the signals of hope, in the yards where a people resign themselves to serving pickaxes. Dreams, dreams, dreams, nothing but dreams where the wind wanders and the barking dogs go out into the road. O great Dream, in the pale morning of buildings, don't be led off again by the first sophisms of dawn, those chalk cornices where, leaning over, you mingle your pure, weak strokes with the miraculous immobility of the Statues! Scatter these intolerable clarities, these bleedings of heaven that for too long have bespattered my eyes. Your bedroom slipper is in my hair, genie with the smoky face, stunning shadow coiled up in my breath. Take over the rest of my life, take over all lives, tide rising with a foam of flowers. Omens above the houses, visions at the bottom of pools of ink and in the coffee-grounds, migrations of birds on the laterality of soothsayers, hearts consulted by bloody fingers, announce-the times unwrap themselves from their draperies-your reign and your cyclone, adorable siren, incomparable clown of the caverns, o vision leaning back on the coral, color of falls, odor of the wind! more...

Yeah... rest easy, Allen Ginsberg, great voice of the darkling night.

I guess life is more about memory and forgetting than anything else. If memory serves me at all, Kundera wrote about this best in Immortality, wherein a poolside gesture by a woman named Agnes drives his reflections on passion and desire. But for me, now, most things have to do with Ludvic's insight while walking along the banks of the Ostrava:

"I was well aware that the nightmarish phantasmagoria of the landscape was merely a metaphor for everything I had tried not to recall after my encounter with Lucie; I seemed to be projecting suppressed memories onto everything I saw around me; the desolation of the fields and courtyards and warehouses, the murk of the river, and the pervasive chill that gave the landscape its unity. But I understood there was no escaping those memories; they were all around me."

Ever had that feeling? That realisation of your projection? It's decidedly weird, almost hallucinogenic. I project a great deal, but then I get Meryl Streep to act things out for me.


"You are what you love, not what loves you." Donald Kaufman R.I.P.

Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved | Everything up to that point had been left unresolved. | Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Last week, Wendy and I watched Adaptation on the box. Based on Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, which I have not read, I found it fascinating. Orlean developed the book from her 1995 article in The New Yorker, Orchid Fever, a piece that hints at far more than orchid-collector John Laroche's eccentric obsessions. A film is what you make of it and perhaps I make too much of this one. Be that as it may, I reckon David Denby's New Yorker review is a bucket of shite. He ends his critique thus:

But the distraught Charlie, to our amazement, is impressed by McKee's platitudes, and abruptly turns the orchid story into a violent melodrama after all. What then envelops Orlean and Laroche and Charlie (who writes himself into the story) is awful nonsense. Drugs, guns, car crashes, alligators—the movie becomes a complete shambles, and far more desperate than anything conventional filmmakers would fall into. It's hard to know how to read this mess of an ending. Is it a way of throwing in the towel after a long struggle and "adapting" to Hollywood? Or is it meant to be taken as a savage parody of selling out? The first possibility is sad, the second condescending to the audience. The trouble with experimental comedies is that it's often impossible to figure out how to end them. But at least this one is intricate fun before it blows itself up.

Crap. It's one of the best movies I've seen in a long time and, as time goes on, it gets even better. As I've said, I've not read Orlean's book and had not read Orchid Fever until starting this blog entry.

I came to the movie cold, expecting that which the blurb gave me, insight into the fucked-up lives of orchid collectors, a demented species of horticulturists, adventurers, crooks, smugglers, deviants and seed gatherers of an exotic type. I also expected to learn something of the plants. Orlean doesn't tell us much about orchids, epitomised by the elusive Ghost Orchid (polyrrhiza lindenii). The Ghost Orchid, in its role as the Holy Grail, is both the star and the villain of the piece.

The people tracking these elusive plants in Governor Jeb Bush's state of oppressive heat and tropical dis-ease are decidedly twisted but, just as Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had little to do with desert-bike races, high-octane drugs and crew-cut police conventions and everything to do with Dr. Johnson's quote prefacing it, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man," Adaptation has little to say of the plant and its latter-day hunter gatherers and much to say of the greater collector, i.e. people—whoever and wherever they may be. It is not only the John Laroches (Chris Cooper) who get to inherit the Earth. We too are "other people".


"Cut it down, Russell." John Laroche

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, | Poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail, | Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Adaptation is a love story. What else? What else works? Nothing. It had to be a love story, but it's an intelligent love story, where self-absorption, passion and obsession dominate a love relegated to fleeting moments of unseen beauty deep in the Fakahatchee swamps and its characters' strangled hearts. It's intelligent because, through the shambles of its evolution, it retains the strength and thrust of its frequently misguided human intensity.

It's not the usual love story because it has to do with one person, the viewer. No, not the stars nor even the abiding presence of that elusive state of delicate completion, the Ghost Orchid. Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), the scriptwriter from hell who eventually gets it and the girl, Laroche the toothless swamp-monkey, orchid devourer and main love interest, and Orlean, the fucked-up, repressed writer whose inability to express herself blows the movie to its conclusion are bit players, scrambling for their scattered lives.

In Adaptation, Orlean tells the story of her love-lost life. Okay, what the hell is passion? What is obsession? What is lust? I don't know, but I do know they're linked. We need all three and it's sometimes bloody difficult to tell them apart. To do so takes an insight and self-awareness that cannot descend into any of them. Lacking passion, Orlean certainly can't help herself falling into it. Bored and over-privileged (working for The New Yorker helps), she heads off—without a suitcase full of drugs and bats outside of Barstow—to find fulfilment in her character's opposite (Laroche), a cranked orchid collector with a bad case of life. As portrayed, Orlean (awareness) and Laroche (passion) are one-dimensional characters in dire need of each other if they are to realise themselves. "There you go. We're twins" says Orlean. Once plugged into the toothless obsessive, she definitely wants more and sets about rearranging everybody's psyches.

Laroche is a compulsive dilettante who flits—much like the insects that pollinate his flowers—from one interest to another. His saving grace is that, unlike Orlean, he's been whacked by tragedy to an acceptance of life as it presents itself to him. He therefore moves comfortably from one passion fest to another. But he lacks awareness or a sense of his quests. Orlean, aware of her sterility but as oblivious to others' needs or shortcomings as Laroche, is fascinated by the serial loser determined to crack the big time (cloning the rare Ghost Orchid) and life in general. But she tries, as he observes, to ride his passion to her fulfilment.

A normal person stuck in a rut where passion is another country and her husband has become a drag, she is desperate to claim a thoughtless zest for life similar to Laroche's. Her chief flaw is to see more in the flower hunter (he reminds me of John Fowles's The Collector) than a low-rent horticulturist or pointing finger. Before looking at herself, Orlean takes Laroche for the real deal, a toothless flower guru capable of cloning a million Nirvanas, and sets herself up to take a fall as hard as any Laroche has experienced. Orlean's redemptive potential lies in her intuitive grasp of Laroche's dumb acceptance of our need to seek a coming into being as magnificent as that of the Ghost Orchid, which flowers once in a blue moon.


"Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind?" Robert Mckee

Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there | With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair. | She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

That's where the story might have ended. However, movie rights to Orlean's book result in the obsessively neurotic Charlie 'Being John Malkovitch' Kaufman being assigned to script it. Kaufman, charged with translating a passion for flowers to the screen, tries to mirror Orlean's written reflection of an indeterminate inner reality. With a writer's integrity, naked authenticity and indomitable will (and without contacting Orlean and Laroche), Kaufman immediately spends half the film screwing his anxieties into a box with his brash but generally likeable alter ego, his lame-brain twin brother Donald. "Julius and Philip Epstein, who wrote Casablanca were twins," writing lecturer Peter Mckee tells Charlie, who is torn between himself and himself.

They weren't twins, of course. But then, neither are Charlie and Donald.

Kaufman's insertion of himself into the movie as a third, composite character—containing attributes common to both Orlean and Laroche—is a twist of genius. It doesn't show immediately. He gets nothing done fast and grows desperate just as quickly. His quest, seemingly altogether different from Orlean's or Laroche's, is no different to theirs. All three seek the Holy Grail, the fleeting purity of the Ghost Orchid. At least Charlie is honest. His desperation is obvious and, dragging his shadow behind him, he's as selfish as all hell.

To break the impasse—his inability to script Orlean's story (a fiction), Kaufman throws the three characters together for the second half of the movie and all hell breaks lose. This is a funny film, and Streep is a funny lady. "We'll have to kill him," she says, speaking to Laroche of Charlie when the latter discovers the lady and the tramp deciding to settle for lust.

Yeah, well, once Charlie, his brother Donald, Orlean and Laroche finish with each other, two characters are history and the other two indulge in some serious soul-searching. Cineplex idiots (for example, The New Yorker's David Denby) might find the going difficult when the movie takes off as it appears to descend into farce. It does not. Instead, it becomes a black-humoured journey to the heart of darkness and "the way things are around here", the end of the road for Laroche and, for Orlean, disillusionment and a return to the beat at The New Yorker. For a newly integrated, invigorated Charlie Kaufman, there is a brief flowering of the Ghost Orchid in a promise of some reciprocal sex and, who knows... perhaps love.


"I'm probably the smartest person I know." John Laroche

Now there's a wall between us, somethin' there's been lost | I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed. | Just to think that it all began on a long-forgotten morn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Laroche loved orchids but I came to believe he loved the difficulty and fatality of getting them almost as much as he loved the orchids themselves. Susan Orlean

The Ghost Orchid (Holy Grail, choices not taken, possible futures left unmade, or that for which we invariably long) retains its form throughout the film—even as it morphs during the second half in and out of the characters and they in and out of it. In having arrived at a level of adaptation balancing a swift flowering and reproduction with a seductive memory of its beauty, it has reached the taunting stasis of perfection. Hence our desire to possess it and, given our vile natures, kill it. Herein lies a delicious irony. The movie's characters, fictions of real people we take as being true, contrast sharply with the Ghost Orchid, a flower of which little is said but which we immediately endow with as much myth and mysticism as we have in us. Why? Because its perceived beauty and sexual significance mock our messy humanity.

It's only through neurotics, frauds and failures like Charlie Kaufman and ourselves and through realising the ultimate sterility and lifelessness of the Ghost Orchid itself that we come to understand that there is no redemption in perfection. Like our gods, we either adapt or we die. Ultimately, with death always answering life's immutability, both come together.

What's the message? I dunno... Can you realise yourself without other people? I guess… if you realise yourself in them. I guess too, the thing is to maintain the tension between our competing selves, between passion and obsession, ecstasy and boredom, fantasy and reality, being and nothingness. Yeah... in so many ways, this film is about the boundaries or limits we either do or do not set for ourselves. Charlie is all about boundaries and confining himself to them, so much so that, twisted with angst, he explodes into his doppelganger before finding himself a mix of the two. Laroche knows no boundaries and pays the price through social and legal boundaries imposed on him.

Orlean is the writer, the boundary rider. Knowing they're out there, but not having set hers appropriately, she explores the unknown and, in doing so, takes a fall but lives to tell the tale and mend fences.


"We have to kill him." Susan Orlean

Well, the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount | But nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts | And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

We all have our desired Ghost Orchids and, damn it, we need them. I'm all for orchids. But the stronger our passions, the more we project them and the larger our shopping baskets become. Sometimes, we're given opportunity to fill them. But I sometimes find myself hoping that, if confronted by one of my Ghost Orchids, I'd duck and run. Well, maybe not run; I'll just play things cool... thinking things through, you understand. Either way, there was no way Orlean should've opted for an affair with Laroche. She dropped her husband like a sack of shit and without explanation.

Orchids, perhaps of different species and types, can be grown, but they demand care and nurturing. A potential for love, fuelled by passion, is always unlikely to amount to much more than sex. Should it in fact be love, a love laid bare can tear the stars from the sky and render our and other loves meaningless. Common sense and a modicum of intelligence should tell one that messing with passion is a dangerous thing. It's the force that through the green fuse drives the flower and is sacred. Orlean and Laroche mess too easily with its power. We're not speaking self-castration here either. Restraint has become an altogether too uncommon word.

Nowhere is this more evident in the movie than in the mixing of Orlean's and Laroche's chemistries. He becomes her Ghost Orchid, she his collector. By plucking him from his natural habitat, she destroys him and a part of herself. And the scriptwriter gets the girl. An infinitely better alternative. Yup... were I given the chance to find that orchid, I'd probably step back... for all the right reasons, of course. Left untouched, unblemished and forever unreal, it remains out there and, in memory, always in bloom. Were I to change that (no matter the reality—even if dormant or dead, it lives), it'd surely die in me and, for the flower or myself, what would remain? It's a bastard, but I prefer the quiet life.

Passion is not a choice; it is a curse. I'd rather die on the road to Jerusalem or Camelot, or live forever at the edge of the lake than watch an orchid wilt.


"I'm sorry I have to do this, dude." John Laroche

I've heard newborn babies wailin' like a mournin' dove | And old men with broken teeth stranded without love. | Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn? | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Passions? Having ridden them to ground, we are all crucified on our passions. I'd rather have Susan Orlean and Meryl Streep tell me that than an asshole like Mel Gibson. Given their chosen subjects and their treatment of them, I reckon Orlean has, for better or worse, a far greater appreciation of religion and humanity than does Gibson. The God from Down Under is a fucking bore, another God killer. After reading several good articles on his film, I took the matter to Father Christopher.

For those who know me, this will come as no surprise. Father Christopher, my mentor and spiritual advisor, is well acquainted with orchids, gods, and sins of the flesh. He sees angels too, but we won't go into that now. The last time I brought it up, he beat me about the head with a stolen mitre and sprayed mace into my eyes. "You fucking amoeba," he screamed, "What the hell do you know of angels?"

Nothing, I suppose, so I left it at that. On gods, orchids and sins of the flesh, though, he is more forthcoming.

"Some think I'm a fucking misogynist," he giggled.

"I wonder why," I sneered.

"You little shit," he retorted. "They don't understand me."

"For once," I agreed, "You may have a point."

They say a prophet remains unrecognized in his own country. Well, somebody said it... But I'm no Boulder-ite and can recognize a prophet at thirty paces. And I can state, with a straight face and without equivocation, that I reckon Father Christopher has nothing but the utmost respect for people, whatever their sex, gender or proclivity. Why? Because he has known and overcome evil. More than that, he continues—despite insuperable odds (himself)—his quest to hunt down his Ghost Orchid.

I hope he never finds it.

We were spraying plants in the orchid house while Brother Marek squeezed potatoes into bottles outside in the rain. "So what's his buzz?" I asked, nodding in the direction of Gibson, crucified to the main gate of the perimeter fence surrounding the Jesus Bunker.

Father Christopher's face grew dark. "I found him breaking into the orchid house. We had a little chat."

"Eh?"

"Eh... what?"

"About what?"

"About why he'd want to pinch my orchids."

"And?"

And what?" People grow decidedly testy when it comes to discussing God or orchids.

"And what was the result of your bloody conversation?"

"He crucified himself to the gate." Father Christopher snickered. "But I just ignore him. He thinks he can take everyone along for the ride, poor sap. But it's his trip and his trip alone."

"You sure about that?"

"Well, yes. Besides a small amount of psilocybin. But that was only to loosen his tongue."

"And?"

"Like everybody, he spoke a lot of crap. His is what one might call a futile passion."

We could see Brother Marek finishing his work. After slipping three bottles into his pocket, he called the dogs and headed for the perimeter gate, passing Gibson on the way out. He threw him a bone.

"Peekaboo, Mel. I'm going out to exercise my anguish."

Gibson groaned. Fake blood seeped from his mouth.

Brother Marek stopped. He turned slowly to stare at the figure crucified to the gate of the perimeter fence. He shivered. The sky grew dark and the rain turned to a scarlet mist. Marek's eyes narrowed angrily. Father Christopher and I could hear the strains of Lord Randall drift in on a quickening wind.

"What did you say, Mel?"

"I asked God to forgive you," mumbled the Australian millionaire.

We barely saw the bottle pass from the pocket of Brother Marek's cossack to his hand. It arced through the rain and exploded to a shower of fireworks against Gibson's head.

Marek was angry.

"You want me forgiven, Mel? Hey, fuck, who killed God, Mel? You killed God, Mel. And you're still doing it, you sick fuck. You're doing it over and over again in cinemas around the world. And you're doing so in a vile and disgusting manner, you crass boor. Hey, look, no blame, we understand that. The King is dead, Mel, long live the King... It was ever thus."

Marek gathered himself and turned as if to walk away. He paused, turned back, and then marched on Gibson's spread-eagled figure.

"But why choose God, Mel? Have you no fucking self-respect? No self-esteem?"

He stepped back. He was shaking with rage. He moved forward quickly, slapping Gibson across the face, one, two, three times. And once more for luck.

"And now that you're killing Him, Mel, can you stop doing it? Are you sure He's going to live forever now that you've laid your grubby hands on Him? Nah, you can't, can you, because to you God's a collector's item, a fucking Florida orchid you hope will survive. You have to carry on killing him, don't you, Mel? Why? Because to you there is nothing but the violence, the brutality, and the gore. Why's that Mel? Because you're an orchid collector, Mel, that's why. You come like a thief in the night."

Marek spat on the ground. "You can kill your God as often as you like, but even a dumb bastard like you knows that you haven't the power to raise Him from the dead."

Lightening flickered in the East, illuminating a crucifix against the sky. In the far distance, a wildcat growled. The drumbeat hooves of four approaching riders sounded against a wind that began to howl.

Brother Marek appeared tired but content. He turned from the figure on the fence. "For an orchid thief, Mel, you're a dumb sap. Now that you've killed your God, you have nothing left. And I have nothing to say to you."

I turned to Father Christopher and smiled. "He's okay, that Brother Marek. I always did like him. Is he going to fetch the girls now?"

"Yes," answered Father Christopher quietly, a particular flower on his mind. "It grows only in the Andes, you know." He walked to the window, tracing a shadow on its pane.


"I just wanted. That's all." Susan Orlean

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes | I bargained for salvation an' they gave me a lethal dose. | I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

In his preface to The Joke, Kundera writes:

If a man loses the paradise of the future, he still has the paradise of the past, paradise lost. From childhood I have been fascinated by the folk tradition called The Ride of the Kings: a singularly beautiful ceremony whose meaning has long been lost and which survives only as a string of obscure gestures. This rite frames the action of the novel; it is a frame of forgetting. Yesterday's action is obscured by today, and the strongest link binding us to a life constantly eaten away by forgetting is nostalgia. Remorseful nostalgia and remorseless skepticism are the two pans of the scales that give the novel its equilibrium.

It is in this equilibrium that we find our Ghost Orchid, not crucified but suspended. "Since the ghost orchid's roots blend so well with the tree bark, the striking white flower looks as if it is suspended in midair."

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera's character Mirek says: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." This observation became little more than a fashionable aphorism, but it has always stayed with me. My struggle is not so much against forgetting as it is against what, why, how and, perhaps, who I choose to remember. Just as it is easy to confuse passion, obsession and lust, it is all too easy to confuse remorseful nostalgia and remorseless skepticism with their cousins, remorseless nostalgia and remorseful skepticism.

Perhaps that's why, with Camus's haunting words and visions absorbed, I have orchids and fences on my mind... a level of adaptation balancing a swift flowering and reproduction with a seductive memory of beauty and the possible attainment of a static and perfect peace. Ah well, screw that... I gotta go. The Union Central's pullin' out and the orchids are in bloom. I've only got me one good shirt left and it smells of stale perfume.

And there be orchids out there...

We're all one thing, Lieutenant. That's what I've come to realize. Like cells in a body. 'Cept we can't see the body. The way fish can't see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell.

Cassie — The 3 | Screenplay by Donald Kaufman R.I.P.

Well, I'm livin' in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line | Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine. | If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Bob Dylan | Shelter from the Storm

Dedication

In retrospect, to the Orchid Lady of Blogaria. Sometimes, I really wonder why I do this stuff. Reading others who've been there and done that is so much easier. I've not scoured my blogroll for a while now but, in considering a post explaining the very real differences between the Jesus Bunker in Boulder and that in Washington D.C. (it is quite a story and is highlighted by juxtaposing a year-old and a current post), I started trawling my blogroll. I immediately stumbled on Shelley's stunning page of orchid posts, as well as her entry of March 14, Sometimes We Have to Shout.

Yeah, indeed, the orchids are in bloom. I'll not be seeing Gibson's movie for very much the same reasons, Shell, and can't for the life of me see why sane people are attracted to it. Mind you... perhaps I can. It is apparently a dull movie, poorly made. My gripe with Gibson stems from my own Catholicism which, as I understand it, espouses tolerance and a 'celebratory' life lived by example in the awareness of the value we give to each other. Because of this, I'm angered by Gibson's fundamentalist evangelism in an age of expedient death and relative absolutes. Like it or not, religion (which, properly used, can lead to faith) is essentially a private matter lived for all.

I doubt Mad Mel acknowledges Muslims, Jews, Hindis, Pagans or anybody else as having an equal hold on that which matters to us most. Yet, Christianity professes to give all, a priori, a shot at Nirvana. To loose his cheap Passion into a world at war with itself is divisive and contrary to any notion of collective suffering and reconciliation. Christ, whether one interprets His existence literally or spiritually, suffered as a human being (and, to do that, was probably no saint). As far as I know, He did not suffer a victim complex. At a deeper level, we cannot begin to understand the contradictory truths underlying His existence. All we know is that His story has been a part of us since long before the Old Testament was written. It is an ‘old story’ going back way further than Isis, Osiris and Horus.

A person cannot be God and God cannot be a person (bar Christ), yet we all have God in us. So His birth, life, death and resurrection remain what Father Christopher refers to as 'an Eternal Mystery'. "It's no mystery," argues Brother Marek. "It's good marketing." Well, whatever, I guess that's where faith and the Sacraments comes in.

Anyway, His taking on the suffering of all of us is the message of His Passion; not his crucifixion. For God's sake, capital punishment ensures that people are crucified every other day in the United States. U.S. foreign policy crucifies millions all the time. Given that such premeditated murders are supported by most (who take this movie literally, thereby reinforcing the contradiction), what's the big deal with one man's suffering? Unless, of course, we understand that we are murdering God in every instance.

Christianity differs from other religions currently in vogue in that it offers Resurrection, something Gibson fails to address. It would be bad for the box office and bad for his pocket. It might also cheer him up and unglue his pre-Vatican II mentality, but I don't think he wants that. Christ crucified tells us one thing: life is tough. Accept it and deal with it. I accept his sincerity, but Gibson is not dealing with it. Christ’s pain is his pain. One thing that people like Gibson (or those flocking to his movie) don’t seem to understand is that it works both ways. He shouldn’t, in my view, offload his anguish onto people who have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. There’s enough death and double-dealing around. Life doesn't get better, but it does get easier, if only in death. Heaven is, after all, full of orchids (and, of course, for some of us, vestal virgins to go).

More importantly, the Gibson’s of this world fail to live in the knowledge that they could be dead wrong. Religion is a crutch, but that does not detract from its value in a world of cripples. Used as a stick to beat others though, it’s reprehensible and yet another blot on the copybook of Catholicism as interpreted by people like Gibson. Many twisted people are good Catholics, but they remain twisted people and it’s on that mundane, in-the-world level that I judge (rather than condemn) them and their facile evangelism.

Implicit in the sanctity of life is an acknowledgement of death as that which we most fear, i.e. the end. That's where our frail faith steps in. And that’s why, as people of any belief, we abhor wilful death. As I understand it, Judaism has a far better grasp of this. It’s all about G_d. That reverence (not fear), unquestioning acceptance of our inability to comprehend that which is beyond us, and firm grasp of our place in the disorder of things is something I relate to and respect. People who reduce God (however they understand or do not care to understand Him or Her) to the idiot next door or the one inside their own skin piss me off. They make death and destruction so much easier to perpetrate and so much more difficult to bear.

My director has just phoned from Angola. She tells me she’s finished shooting the final scenes of my forthcoming movie and we can go into editing next month. Our working title is The Passion of Alphonso. Alphonso is a wealthy Luandan playboy and arms dealer living off his father’s money (he was a flunkey for pre-independence Portuguese colonialists). He is Africa’s largest exporter of sex-slaves and importer of hard drugs. He financed Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA for thirty years and oversaw (with the help of South African mercenaries who later fled to earn dollars in Iraq) the obliteration of Cuito, Huambo and several million Angolans. Responsible for withholding AIDS medicines from the poor to speed sales of Afghan heroin shipped by USAid, he has developed a conscience. Realising the magnitude of his crimes, he now sweats blood every night, uses industrial-strength coke to burn holes through his septum, and suffers from a terrible conscience.

Gunned down during a bar brawl with one of his capos at the movie's close (a bloody and explicit three-hour segment), he is a holy man indeed. I thought of blaming his death on the Portuguese, but the pre-publicity tells us the idea’s not taking off. Why? God knows. We therefore don’t expect the movie to make much money but, what the hell, we can always flog it to the Nigerians. They are good Christian folk. And Moslems too.