by Jim Carrey
As he tore down Hummingbird an inner voice assured him that two of the Wendy’s breakfast biscuits would set him right.
But at the drive-through window another inner voice rose up from somewhere altogether more dangerous and desperate—
“Give me five of the Honey Butter Chicken Biscuits.”
It wasn’t comfort he was seeking here. It was stupor, a complete if fleeting escape from thought and emotion. He devoured two of the sandwiches, slathered in Zesty Barbecue, while slow-cruising down Sunset, and another pair in the Saharan motel parking lot, heavy with Honey Mustard. Then he shuffled past the pool, entered Kaufman’s room, and plopped down on the bed to eat his final biscuit. He had one tub of each dipping sauce remaining and, as he peeled off their foil covers, was drawn into the ancient tug-of-war between sweet and savory. Wanting to extract all possible pleasure from this last hunk of heaven, he dipped it between the sauces, enjoying both taste experiences and (initially) a dramatically enhanced sense of personal freedom. Would the next bite be Zesty Barbecue or Honey Mustard? Across all wild creation, only he knew. And what smug assurance that brought him until the instant when, in his very hand, the biscuit changed course to Zesty Barbecue while, only a second before, with all certainty, he’d chosen Honey Mustard. What force separated a person’s actions from their will? What caused Jim Carrey at 10:03:28 in the morning to usurp the biscuit-dipping plans he’d made a mere half second before?
Was it fate? Chaos? If so—what, or who, was he?
He chose to choose the sauce he didn’t want, just to prove that he was real.
“Eat it, assclown…,” he muttered, lowering the biscuit down toward the Honey Mustard with slow stealth, like a cat about to pounce on prey.
“Everything okay, Jim?” said Kaufman, watching.
And Carrey gave him eyes that said nothing could ever be promised.
“We’re nearly there,” said Hopkins. “Mao’s task, you will recall, was to demolish the past. To remake China as a dignified global power, no opium den of colonial exploitation. This goal was gruesomely pursued, but at length, as we see every day, it was achieved.”
With a click of the remote he began the day’s viewing.
A slick state propaganda film on color stock garished across the flatscreen, footage of Chinese military and party officials gathering in the Gobi Desert, wearing special glasses like midcentury teens at a 3-D drive-in. Carrey lay in a lipid daze, a person watching reels of people watching, their anticipation fueling his own as a Mandarin voice began a countdown, “Shi, jiu, ba…” At zero came a burning flash, then a gnarled junior mushroom cloud.
“China’s first nuclear explosion,” whispered Hopkins. “Mao’s seat, finally, at the table of nuclear powers. The equal of Truman, of Stalin. Feel his triumph as your own, Jim.”
Then came the obligatory nuclear wreckage reel. Carrey was enthralled, a toddler at a monster truck rally. Makeshift huts vaporized. Shock waves snapping telegraph poles. A cage of baby goats, fur so soft he wanted to adopt them all. He connected, cozily, to their latching, infant eyes—until they were carbonized. Then soldiers charged into the detonation site, a thousand sacrificial extras striking poses for the cameras, heroically oblivious to the poisoning radiation. Carrey’s mind flashed images of their eventual flesh-bubbling ends. He lost all Maoist indifference; he mourned these men who, like him, had once been fresh and new, had picked up feathers fallen from the sky. Then all his chakras curdled with the grand finale: a scene inspired by Hollywood Westerns, a thousand riders and horses wearing gas masks and UV visors, tragic cavalry galloping into ghostdom. He felt a horrific peril. At what point did the portrayal of evil become evil itself?
“Turn it off!” he howled. “I don’t want to exploit this. I don’t want to even try to understand it.”
“It’s the birth of modern China,” said Kaufman. “And, with it, modern capitalism.”
“It’s a crying slaughter.”
“Wussy,” spat Hopkins. “Buck up!”
“I’m not a wussy.”
“Then play on!”
“I mean it, Tony. I’m gonna puke.”
“It’s that gross breakfast you ate.”
“It’s not the Wendy’s…,” said Kaufman. “It’s the actor. Stuck on his own trite moral vanity. We should have gone to Johnny Depp. Or Bale. Bale’s not afraid of anything.”
“Call him! I don’t need this evil inside of me.”
“But, it’s already there,” said Hopkins. “Shrieking out from ancestral memory. Two million years of rape and murder coded into your every cell.”
“I’m feeling unwell right now.”
“That’s Mao making himself at home.”
“Oh Christ, Tony, I’m so afraid.”
“Have courage,” said Hopkins. “One more push.”
So began the final rite: footage from Mao’s greatest caper, The Cultural Revolution.
* * *
—
For three hours they watched Chinese youth rising up by the million, riding trains across the countryside, marching through cities. Students burning books, toppling statues, even razing buildings whose aesthetics dared to evoke any time before Mao’s. Filling up city squares, inflicting abuse and brutal struggle sessions on perceived inheritors of privilege, believing, madly, that crimes in the present could cure wrongs in the past. Half the population, it seemed to Carrey, was lost in a cultish fervor, the rest cowering in fear.
“Anyone can rejigger an atom bomb,” said Hopkins. “But to possess the minds of millions? To make them your willing zombies across a whole decade? That’s real magic. By 1966 Mao was old and paranoid, fearing plots against his rule. His wife, Madame Mao, was once a famous Shanghai actress. Now she became his partner in conquering Chinese culture. They ordered every film released in China to feature him as its mighty hero.”
“Really?” said Carrey.
“Even more. They had every printing press churning out his image, deep into the billions. Crowds hailing him in every town, chanting his teachings and waving his picture.”
“Isn’t that appealing?” asked Kaufman.
“It’s how it was for me after The Mask,” said Carrey, wistfully. “I had my own action figures. Millions of them, hauled around the world by speed-popping truckers. My face—my face!—it was gigantic, pasted on endless billboards. Even the Maasai knew me, I’m not sure how. I was on safari in Kenya with my daughter. They gave me a tiny bow and arrow and invited me to shoot up termite mounds.”
“That movie stayed in theaters forever,” said Kaufman. “I saw it three times.”
“So did I,” said Hopkins. “And so did Kenneth Branagh.”
Carrey wanted back there. He wanted it so badly, to reclaim that adulation. That power, that industrial heat, and a reprieve—however long or brief—from stardom’s gray afterlife, the dim-flickering realm of John Barrymore and Bela Lugosi.
He hung on Hopkins’s words like keys to salvation.
“Only the young, Mao said, could save China. And only by destroying his enemies. He became, for them, greater than the Beatles and the Stones and the Hula-Hoop combined. They joined him en masse, heeding his edict to eradicate, crushing all opposition. Imagine that kinda power, Jimmy?”
“Any studio head who gives me shit gets sent to an Orange County labor camp,” said Carrey, eyes suddenly gleaming. “Flog all the lawyers in the town square. Bring every critic to heel. Hang the paparazzi from their own camera straps; I shall admire their lifeless bodies as my parade moves past, see them dangling from every palm tree in the Palisades.”
“Yes! Now make it Mao!” commanded Hopkins. “Say it: ‘I, Mao Zedong, command the world!’ Give me a rural Chinese accent while you’re at it.”
“I, Mao Zedong, will the…”
“That’s you impersonating a Chinese person! A cop-out! I want Mao’s spi
rit speaking through you!”
“I, Mao Zedong…”
“Deeper!” Hopkins grabbed Carrey’s groin. “Yes, feel it in your nutsack!”
“I, Mao Zedong,” boomed Carrey, “can will the end of all things!”
Carrey rose and strode to the window, peered through the slatted blinds out onto the courtyard swimming pool. He recalled, it seemed at random, his first stab at fame, decades before, aged eighteen, standing in line with his father, Percy, outside Toronto’s NIB, the National Institute of Broadcasting, a hustle promising to make a network anchor of anyone with eight hundred dollars and a free afternoon. They saved up their cash, drove seven hours to wait forever with three hundred other suckers: cross-eyed stutterers, would-be weathermen with facial tics, souls devoid of charisma, sadder than a scene from Lourdes. Years later, when he got famous, the NIB took out full-page ads in the Hollywood Reporter, sending congratulations, claiming to have given him his first break by suckering him and his dad out of their cash. He remembered how they had laughed at their own conning, broke on the cold city sidewalk.
Is there a dormant anarchic urge in all of us, a violent child waiting to be born?
Now the monster overtook him.
Carrey stepped onto the terrace and imagined, gathered down below, a sea of Mao’s youth brigades cheering his name, calling him down onto Sunset Boulevard, clogged with thousands more of their kind, freshly bleached minds. Scenes from Cleopatra infect the fantasy as they hoist him onto a jewel-encrusted litter where his two lesbian female selves kneel by his throne, dressed like Egyptian slaves in leather collars and gold chains. They coo in semi-orgasm as Carrey gives his minions an adequate if hackneyed command—“To glory!”—that sets off the frenzy.
His youth brigades rampage across the city, a giant human fist, all actions willable by his whims. He dreams them out to Burbank, surging through the gates of Walt Disney Studios, ransacking the office suites, burning every last trace of the Play-Doh Fun Factory project before (in a stirring close-up shot) ripping Walt Disney’s head from its cryogenic freezer and tossing it among them like a beach ball. Carrey preens and claps, his only concern whether to watch Disney’s head decompose in the sun or toss gold coins to the acrobats who soar and tumble for his delight.
Then his acolytes topple the statues of the Seven Dwarfs, finding beneath them a secret underground laboratory filled with mutant Mouseketeers, a colony of lab-rat Funicellos and pharma-chimp Cubbies. There’s a fine line between a mouse and a rat, a finer line still between a rat and a bat. Through abominations of genetics these children ran the whole spectrum, looking up from aluminum feed troughs of Pez and raw chicken to hiss at the sunlight, their fangs bared, their skin translucent from years belowground, faces caked with filth. Once liberated (but are they really free?), they join the Carrey brigades as a spear-tipping horror, gnawing off the faces of the LAPD riot troops, clearing the way for the rest to come charging up Rodeo Drive, toppling all the luxury cars, firebombing the fancy boutiques, news choppers hovering above, the well-coiffed reporters all weeping for their own crashing housing values as the horde turns down the Avenue of the Stars, toward CAA’s headquarters. There they pause, all eyes fixed on the master. Carrey raises a powerful hand, gestures grandly, slowly, toward the building, then, with a nod, says, “Spare no one.” His faithful bear down on the Armani-suited agents who scurry like vermin to the roof, where, surrounded, Gerry Carcharias pleads, “I’m so sorry about the Play-Doh Fun Factory. I should never have tried to package a great artist like Jim Carrey into that gross headcheese. Forgive me!”
“Nuh-uh,” says Carrey.
“Please!”
“Afraid not.”
Carcharias grovels, but Carrey plugs his ears with his fingers and begins making gibberish sounds against which his minions toss poor Gerry Carcharias from the roof, then unfurl a gigantic silk banner into the wind, a field of deep Chinese red printed with an image of Jim Carrey’s face so perfectly morphed with Mao Zedong’s that there is no telling where the one man ends and the other begins.
CHAPTER 8
Charlie Kaufman hopped a flight east, believing that a Taiwanese billionaire, still “miffed” about Mao, was eager to finance his project.
Before departing, he encouraged Jim to immerse himself in radical Marxist message boards, to perfect Mao’s accent with coaching from his friend Cary Elwes, a master of dialects whose great-grandmother, the noted linguist and reputed SIS triple agent Lady Winefride Mary Elizabeth Elwes (wife of Gervase Henry Elwes), would scold him in Cantonese when he was a small boy. Further, he asked the star to gain at least thirty pounds, to arrive as close as he could to Mao’s emphysema by chain-smoking. And, perhaps most injuriously, to visualize and refine the death scene from Kaufman’s film treatment.
So it was that each morning, in place of healing mantras, Carrey would lie in bed, clear his mind, and, with all of his actorly prowess, fuse his being with that of the dying Mao. Acutely aware of his breathing, eyes closed in dark prayer, he soon could feel the embalming tubes plugged into his veins, could hear the teams of physicians whispering around him. Some days, tears of self-pity would stream down his cheeks as he imagined the final shot from Kaufman’s pages, Mao’s eyes dissolving into his own, joining tyranny and celebrity. Then, more or less satisfied, he’d move into his favorite part of character preparation: the weight gain.
Georgie blessed this whole enterprise, half hoping a lauded Mao turn would fill his inner chasms, half just for the amusement. At breakfast she’d watch as Carrey ate grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches, slabs of French toast soaked in maple syrup. Many nights he’d dine at the Little Door in West Hollywood, guzzling vintage wines, pleasing himself with escargot and foie gras as a warm-up for bacon-wrapped filet mignon with sides of truffle fries and gratin dauphinois. Some days, with Maoist gut-greed, he’d eat five, six, seven Wendy’s chicken biscuit sandwiches, no concerns for body mass now, unquestioned commander of his dimpling fingers. Gone was the Honey Mustard Conundrum, and with it the old, uncertain Jim Carrey. Now he was himself, yes, but also Mao, realizing, more and more each day, that raw appetite had always been the link between celebrity and tyranny. Then he’d waddle down to the pool, both Jophiel scampering at his sides, licking traces of sugar and grease from his face and fingers as he sat by the water’s edge, gladly taking their hunger for love.
Heart and belly full, he’d paddle out lazy laps, imagining his swimming pool as the Yellow River, recordings of great Communist speeches playing from all the outdoor and underwater speakers. America’s brutality made slightly more sense as he heard the words of Trotsky—
“Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism.”
Sometimes he’d let the pool jets massage his back, pondering Marx.
“In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”
One day, his whole abdomen cramped after a lunch of Frito pies. Struggling toward the side of the pool, fearing for his life, he wondered what his legacy would be if he expired then and there. And in this moment of crisis Carrey joined so many millions in having Mao’s thoughts transform his view of the self and the world.
“The overthrown bourgeoisie tries by hook or by crook to use literature and arts to corrupt the masses.”
What, he wondered, desperately climbing from the water, was Play-Doh as a toy but a corrupt and failing capitalist-imperialist society fetishizing its own excrement? Dumbing its children down from birth, taunting them with what they could expect in place of real dreams, real lives, in exchange for any chance at real souls: crap. What, then, was the “Play-Doh Fun Factory” but a foul celebration of exploited labor? He knew factories. No one had
fun in factories. They sweltered and slaved, hunched and harried, people reduced to things, manufacturing so much meaningless plastic shit that made no one happy, poisoned the oceans, corrupted the food chain.
The modern world was a burning bus speeding toward a cliff with a maniac at the wheel. And he was not apart, but complicit, a hyperactive child making yuk-yuks in his seat, keeping everyone laughing, distracting them from certain doom.
Faster, faster, no more room to brake—
Suddenly Disney’s untitled Play-Doh Fun Factory project was the devil’s work, and it offended him now as a matter of revolutionary principle. Wink Mingus, Al Spielman, and Gerry Carcharias, suddenly they were all class criminals, deserving whatever they might get. Suddenly he knew that Mao could not live in him without destroying Hollywood, and that this campaign must begin with Disney’s Play-Doh project.
More and more, his representatives were calling, pestering him to join the toy-based abomination against Kaufman’s assurances that funding for Mao was just “one card game” away. As if stepping into the role of Madame Mao, Georgie suggested they use her fortieth birthday as a trap. Together they planned a Chinese-themed party in the Hummingbird backyard, the grand estate become a stage on which Carrey’s Mao Zedong would deal Disney’s Play-Doh Fun Factory project a mortal blow.
* * *
—
On the night of the party Carrey’s maple trees, planted to evoke his Canadian home, were all festooned with Hunanese cherry blossoms that had been FedExed overnight. His swimming pool was stocked with a higher class of surface-feeding carp, gold and amber bodies sparkling in the sunlight while a Chinese string quartet played harvest songs. Greeted by tumbling acrobats upon arrival, the guests simply believed themselves the lucky recipients of a generous star’s love for his partner; a man who had, for his own reasons, on a pricey whim, decided to transform his Brentwood estate into a regal Shanghai villa.
The Disney executives floated about the lawn of bantering A-list guests, bathing in overheard conversation.
