Nick Charles has been directed to review these concerns on the studio’s behalf.
Yours truly,
Porter Cherry
Internal Memo
April 7, 1950
To: Porter Cherry
CC: Leo Krug
From: John Marsh and Desmond Frank
Porter, you great flaming ass –
Rose Zapatero is a fiction within the world of the film. She is later shown to be nothing but an invention, and therefore everything she says is false, that is to say a fiction within the fiction, so what does it matter whether she criticizes the military widows’ pension plan since she is a character of the underworld who cannot be trusted and is inherently immoral (thus not someone with whom the audience would naturally sympathize)? Her threats of violence against the child are intended to demonstrate her unsavory character, nothing more, and it’s perfectly clear from the reactions of the two other characters in the scene how despicable they find her. Moreover, we later discover that the woman presenting herself as Rose is nothing but an actress, and therefore no real threat could have been made, if you see what we mean (though we don’t trust, sadly, that you see anything about this picture clearly). Besides, you should trust that Helen Fairdale will play the part with her usual nuance and care, so that these meanings are understood by the audience.
As for issues of modesty, we can only assert that all costumes are, as ever, well within the bounds of taste – achingly within them as a matter of fact, to the point that no virile man could ever hope to be aroused to action or perversion or even mild onanistic pleasure by anything he sees in our castrated little picture. It will be the erotic equivalent of watching Harry Truman speak, which is to say a most powerful discourager to acts sexual.
Yours with only the greatest respect, admiration, and consternation,
Marsh and Frank
6
Sunk in fatigue from last night’s party, in the haze of another cold morning, I ask Alessio to bring me a glass of blood orange juice, a strong coffee, a piece of pear cake, a breakfast that should stop my ancient heart, but I eat and drink as if I have consumed nothing for days. He offers to sit and read to me, but I remind him I am not yet blind nor too tired to read on my own, and to prove it I pick up a book from my library table and open to a random page. So often it happens that such openings present felicitous passages, sentences that speak uncannily out of the past to a present conundrum. So it was this morning.
In the sixth of his theses On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin writes that trying to describe ‘the past historically’ is not the same as ‘recognizing it “the way it really was”’, which would, of course, be impossible. Instead, Benjamin says, ‘it means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’. What is a moment of danger? Does he mean simply a moment in the present when we are trying to recount the past while also feeling ourselves imperiled by the conditions through which we are living in the midst of such retrospection? Benjamin knew what real physical danger was: he wrote this thesis while trying to escape the Nazis, and months later, certain he would not escape, committed suicide. Danger for him appeared inescapable. Is this a moment of danger for me now, living through an uncertain leaderless spring in Italy when a comedian presents himself from the sideshow of media as a populist voice of the people and a mass of those people in their foolishness decide that an entertainer rather than a technocrat pulling the strings of the economy is precisely what they need? Is that what it means, a moment of danger?
Not quite, I don’t think.
For Benjamin, the moment of danger is that instant in which we risk – as we are struggling to describe the past – ‘becoming a tool of the ruling classes’, turning ourselves into instruments of the oppressors. We risk presenting the past as an unbroken narrative of reality, a recoverable time of greatness and glory, to which the oppressors of the present can point as their regressive goal, so often couched, ironically, in terms of progress: Italy used to be great like this, say for instance in the 1930s when the trains ran on time, and that is how we should be again, or America was great like this, say in the 1950s when everyone ‘knew their place’, and that should be the image of the country to which we aspire. This is what the oppressor would say, never mind that those images of the glorious past are always partial, or that there are other images of other pasts, counter-histories recounting a different story, one that the oppressors never want to see recovered, never even want to admit existed.
My own flashes of memory I recognize as sporadic, fragmentary. They emerge from darkness only half developed, out of focus, eccentrically framed. I order copies of every film John Marsh and I worked on, every film you and Helen appeared in together, and put them on the television, playing in the background as I write this to you, hoping the passing images will act as prostheses, that some detail, a cigarette tapped on the back of a chased silver case by a gloved hand or a line of hardboiled dialogue or a polka dot scarf flying out the side of a convertible might trigger a flash that would bring forth an image more complete, detailed, than what I seem able to summon on my own. The desk in this apartment of mine, though different from my desk in Los Angeles, made out of a different wood, crafted in a different shape, according to a separate tradition of design, nonetheless recalls to my mind that other desk I had to leave behind when I fled my house in Brentwood never to return, abandoning all but that which was most essential, and my perception of this desk before me is thick with a thousand memories of sitting at that other desk, but also at the table in your living room in Pacific Palisades, at any number of desks and tables where I have worked in countless offices and bedrooms and classrooms spread across the long span of my life, and the recollections of those earlier desks bounce up from the surface of this desk, hovering in my perception, a parade of memory mirages that sparkle in my vision only so long as I do not try to reach out and grasp them, for in the instant I do, to hold fast to those memories as they appear, they inevitably disintegrate, dissolving into silvery ether.
Below, in the piazza, two carabinieri in their black uniforms, broad red stripes on their trousers, billowing black capes, their immaculate costume recalling to me a terrible past I was fortunate not to have lived through myself because I was, then, a boy in America, secure in my privilege, trot on horseback, their white horses snorting, ears back, as if the animals sense the proximity of their own moment of danger. How long has it been since I was on horseback, since I felt the flanks of an animal between my legs, since I even touched a horse’s back or fed it a lump of sugar? Surely it has not been as long as I think it must have been. Surely it cannot have been since that April morning so many decades past. And yet, watching those horses in their black leather tack, I can locate no other moment in all the intervening years when I have touched a horse, and this realization comes at me with such force that my eyes fill with tears and I ask Alessio, quickly, shouting to him in the kitchen where he is helping the young woman who comes each day to cook and clean, if he could not help me downstairs to see the horses before they pass the door of our building. When he sees that it will take us too long, that my progress will be too stately down the flights of stairs, he in turn shouts out the open window, cordially, in a register of Italian that suggests deference but also authority – even, I think, superiority over those carabinieri. My employer, he says, although I am nothing of the kind, I pay him no salary, I give him whatever he needs, my employer, the grand old man of the district, wishes to say hello to the horses. I hobble to the window, raise my hand, wave as the Queen of England might wave, fingers erect, wrist rotating. The carabinieri look at each other, say something we cannot hear, and one of them calls up to Alessio to bring me down. Would I care so much to touch a horse if I did not feel certain I was nearing the end of my life? Would it matter if I felt decades were still before me when I might encounter any number of white horses on any number of bright spring mornings?
The carabinieri wait outside and when I approach them the horses sta
nd still, breath expanding their nostrils. Whatever might have been alarming them has receded from perception and they appear calm, docile. They and their riders allow me to touch their heads, the flat planes of nose, to coo to them insensibly, as if they could understand me. One of them bats its eyes, almost coquettishly, and that is enough. I have had my fill. Time is short. I must return to my greater endeavor.
Even that morning more than half a century ago I felt the urgency of time. On my stolen horse, I gripped the reins tightly, anxious that the animal might bolt and send me flying backwards to my death. I was not like John Marsh, who rode almost carelessly. An experienced horseman, he claimed to have ridden before he could walk, so assured in a saddle that after dropping out of college he performed in an equestrian show that toured the state, which led to him finding work as a trick rider at MGM. Intoxicated though he was that morning, he sat with a lightness in the saddle that suggested a man half his weight and age, and for a moment I let myself believe he might be leading us to some momentary success if not actual victory – even that we would find Mary and manage, by the combined force of our persuasive arguments, to convince her the costs of cooperating with this national witch hunt were too great. We rode hard with our backs to the sun, trotting through alleys of scaffolding on the other side of which shootouts echoed around the timber façades of an Old West town. A barrage of rifle shots would be followed by silence, another volley, more silence, over and over, as if outlaw and sheriff were trapped in a standoff without end, a purgatory of repetition and waiting, making incremental progress that would only be apparent in retrospect. But as our surroundings shifted and the dust rose, collecting on our suits and dirtying our shoes, the realization that I was wasting my hours on a man who had already drifted off into his own story and appeared scarcely conscious of my presence struck me again.
We’re chasing shadows, I called after him. We should go back to the set.
John shouted a reply over his shoulder but his words were lost in a barrage of cannon fire that announced our arrival at the edge of an open field where armies of extras in blue and gray were attacking each other. It was a poorly choreographed battle, done so cheaply that no sooner had a man dropped dead he was up again, shunting his rifle and jogging in place to give the illusion of forward movement. In the distance the director shouted through a megaphone over the thunder of those blank-firing cannons whose smoke drifted up to join a soup of pollution shadowing the sky all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains.
An explosion close at hand spooked our horses, who broke into a gallop, rushing around the back of the Union Army before turning sharply at the sound of another blast so that we soon found ourselves on the front lines of the battle. John leaned forward in his saddle as he reached out to seize a saber from one of the extras in blue. Blade slicing the air, he charged at the vanguard of Confederate soldiers who looked up at him in his dusty wool suit as if faced with the devil himself.
That’s not in the script! one of the extras howled.
Get out of there, John, I shouted, but a shimmer of blonde hair in the open window of a stagecoach had caught his eye and he spurred his horse to ride in its direction, saber flying above his head. I turned my horse to follow but another blast startled the animal and it carried me past John towards a riverboat docked at a pier on the far side of the field. That’s not Mary, I called to him, but John had already pulled the reins of his horse so that it circled around. At the sight of John, the team of horses pulling the stagecoach reared back on their hind legs, batting the air with their hooves, before coming to a sudden lurching halt.
What the hell do you think you’re doing? the stuntman driving the coach yelled. We have to get to the river in the next thirty seconds or the shot’s ruined.
John charged up to the driver’s box and pulled the man from his seat, throwing him to the ground. The actress inside was shouting in a deep voice, Help! Some psycho’s attacking us!
In the distance behind us the director yelled cut and goddammit but John was lost in his own story. He dismounted and ran forward, thrusting the tip of his saber into the gut of the fallen man. The blade went in slow and jagged and then stopped all at once as feathers spilled out and littered the ground.
You could have killed me! the stuntman screamed. You’re lucky that’s only a prop!
The actress stepped from the carriage and her blonde wig caught on the door, exposing the shaved head of a man.
You’re not Mary! John flinched.
Sure as hell not, buddy.
John, I called out to him again, let’s go.
I had already dismounted and John ran towards me, scrambling to board the paddleboat just as it was pulling away from the pier. Another production – or perhaps only a different unit of the same one – was being filmed on the boat, its cast assembled on the upper deck while most of the crew, dressed in waders, stood in the shallow river around the vessel. Somewhere beneath us the paddlewheel was powered by an engine chugging away, pushing the boat along steel tracks that gleamed in the concrete riverbed while a dinghy carrying the director and camera crew, huddled around the glinting black eye of a camera, swept alongside.
The director called action and musicians on the deck above us began playing a dirge.
I think we should stay out of sight, I said, pulling John to the floor between two benches.
Out of sight out of mind. I don’t feel so well, Desmond. Everyone’s out to get me. What’s society but a great conspiracy to destroy the individual? Sometimes I wonder if you haven’t been orchestrating everything that’s happened from the moment I woke this morning.
Jesus, John, you’re delirious.
Where are my friends? Who’s left?
Maybe friends are only enemies in disguise, I said, scheming to use all you’ve ever said against you, so at the hour of reckoning your innocent words will be brought forth, perverted, and enlisted to condemn you.
Tell me the truth, Desmond. Are you working for them? The way you’re sticking to me I have to wonder. Maybe you’re the tail I’ve been wagging all these months.
Believe me, I work for no one but myself. The FBI would never have me. I’m not sufficiently crippled by self-loathing.
John glowered at me. I know how they turn your kind. You make it easy for them. Blackmail. Leverage. They find out things about you and then use that knowledge. I know things and I’m just a chump.
Goddamn this country. All it takes is a little panic and friends who have been friends for years wonder if they can trust each other. You know what the real problem is?
John shook his head.
Property. We’re both rich and don’t want to stop being rich and that’s why we’re being so cowardly about this whole situation.
I’m not a coward! They wouldn’t let me serve!
I’m not talking about the war. If we weren’t cowards we would hold our ground and when they come calling refuse to attend their unconstitutional hearings. And if they force us to attend we should refuse to speak, and if they throw us in jail we should be uncooperative. We should shout out the Bill of Rights and shit on the floors and throw their food back in their faces and go naked in the streets and tell everyone who will listen that we really do believe capitalism cannot be the only way, that there might be other, better ways, even if we haven’t found them yet. Just because the alternatives we have at our disposal are imperfect doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to achieve a better government of the people. We’re fighting against the forces of ossification and repression! The whole motion picture industry should be a model of resistance and look what we do! Hollywood is leading this country straight into a civil war! That’s the end point of this kind of witch hunt! The ranging of two sides against each other that will never be able to unite again in common purpose because each will be convinced the other is composed of demons and perverts or fascists and fanatics. Who knows, maybe you and I are nothing but demons and perverts, but I’d rather be a demon and pervert than a fascist or fanatic. Before the
religious nuts got hold of the idea a demon was halfway between a mortal and a god, a hero who becomes godlike in death, a spirit of genius. Thy Dæmon, that thy spirit which keeps thee, is Noble, Courageous, high unmatchable!
Scripture?
Better than that! Shakespeare! So call me demon and pervert but let me decide what those words mean. Demon for trying to transcend, pervert for refusing to be what they’d make me. It’s all the fault of property in the end. Without property no defenses, no protection or offense to claim more than we have for all would be held in the common good. Without property or defenses no war. Without war eternal peace and what our enemies say they want most: a kingdom of God upon the earth. In fact, they don’t want a godly kingdom because in a kingdom of God no one gets rich! It’s right there in the Bible! No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. Jesus, my dear friend, was a Marxist of the first order. He might not have been a Communist, but a Marxist he most assuredly was. You only have to read the accounts of what he was supposed to have said. You don’t even have to believe he was divine. You hardly have to believe he was an historical man. He can exist as a brilliant fiction created by a cult of lefty scribes. One of the most convincing protagonists in the history of the human race! Do you realize how like a movie the Bible is? It had too many writers on the script and the story doesn’t make sense in the end and everyone who worked hardest gets no credit! Those scribes must have been as Red as the Revolution and probably most of them as queer as me because they were so patently in love with that carpenter philosopher! The entire edifice of western civilization is founded on a Red queer, John!
Sweat poured from my temples. My throat was sore and I nearly burst into tears. John put a hand against my brow. You have a Christ complex, Desmond.
I told you to stop seeing your analyst.
Dr. Werth is very sensible. He could help a man like you.
I’ve told you time and time again that psychoanalysis is counterrevolutionary. The real problems are class and economics – the horrendous flaming tomb of a base burning up the whole superstructure. We’re all of us burning but we’re too packed in ice cream and air conditioning to feel it!
Night for Day Page 16
