by Will Self
‘I see.’ He was looking at me vacantly, but I blanked him right back and continued:
‘If I want to discover who – or what – did for film I’ll be better off walking. Walking is so much slower than film – especially contemporary Hollywood movies, with their stuttering film grammar of split-second shots – and it isn’t framed, when you walk you’re floating in a fishbowl view of the world. There can’t possibly be any editing: no dissolves, no cuts, no fades, no split-screens – and, best of all, no special effects, no computer-cheated facsimiles of the world. You see, if I walk to Hollywood I’ll be creeping along outside the ambit of the filmic – like a Vietcong insurgent tunnelling through the jungle – and they won’t be able to see me coming!’
Despite myself I had become overexcited, singing out the last line as if it were an affirmation of faith. Busner ignored this. He had retrieved yet another Riddle set from his desk drawer and was bridging the lumpy summits of his coprolites with the brightly coloured little planks. THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO SEE ME COMING! still hung between us, the air around it puckered up as if by heat convection. I rose from my chair and walked across to the title: when I poked it the letters had the slippery resistance of inflated plastic, while my own words continued to resound in the catacombs of my mind: ‘... they won’t be able to see me coming!’
It dawned on me, as I stood looking down at Busner fiddling with his toy, that I had already exited sideways into a discarded scene, the chopped-up frames of which lay curling on the cutting-room floor. It had been bothering me that although there had been establishing shots and even flashbacks, the main narrative had begun without a credit sequence: no slow-revolving globe pierced by photons, no torch-bearing Grecian goddess, no searchlights playing over monumental 3-D type, and – most of all – no Dolby histrionics, the orchestra of thousands chuntering away: ‘Chun-chunn! Chun-chunn! Churrrurrrl-chun-chunn! Ta-tatta-taa! Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tatta-taaa!’ With Hollywood, I thought, the climax always came at the beginning – all the rest was an insensate nuzzling, as the camera roved over the silvery skin.
Another title materialized in the stuffy office, replacing my graphic paranoia: ONE YEAR EARLIER. I walked round it. From Busner’s side the plain white capitals were reversed: – not that he was paying them any mind, as he’d dropped a Riddle tile and was now getting down awkwardly on his hands and knees to search for it in the kneehole of the desk.
I admired the title, which was positioned just so: in stark counterpoint to the cluttered shelves, the half-open door revealing a wedge of stock corridor, the dimply dullness of Beuys’s topographies. The title both moved things forwards – and backwards – while filing the current scene away. Not that it had been exactly a year previously – it was more like thirteen months, but the imprecision was forgivable dramatic licence.
ONE YEAR EARLIER
I was in a bistro in the Place Wilson in Toulouse. My POV was not from behind my eyes but disembodied, looking down at a 45-degree angle from somewhere near the ceiling at a table of diners. There was me, the writer Jonathan Coe, the journalist Simon Tiffin and his wife Alexa, Marianne Faithfull and François Ravard, and Yann Perreau, the organizer of Le Marathon des mots, the literary festival that had brought us all to town. It was a well-lit and wide shot, sharply focused so that all the detail of the scene – white napery, grey meat, red wine – was instantly caught. I could almost feel the snag of the diners’ teeth, taste the grease on their lips, and smell the foody vapours funnelling up their noses. Moreover, as it was an episode from my own life, I experienced an immodest thrill at the work expended by the production designers, lighting cameramen and all the other techies Busner was so dismissive of, in order to re-create it for the screen.
As for the casting – it was excellent. The man portraying Jonathan Coe had a strong likeness to the writer – the same symmetrical mop of greying hair, the same half-handsome features. François Ravard’s role had been nabbed by a swarthy little fellow, on whose broken nose the trademark heavy-black-frame spectacles appeared drawn on as if by a bored child. But perhaps because of this discord, François’s Gallic rolled r’s, his exasperated clucks and wheedles of annoyance as he dealt with Marianne – who, très fatiguée, was demanding to be taken back to the hotel – seemed all the more authentic. Marianne was played by a dyed-blonde at least a decade younger than the real thing – but she husked to perfection.
I couldn’t assess the Tiffins’ performance, because they were mostly silent, absorbed in the spectacle of François and Marianne’s pantomimic co-dependency. As for Yann Perreau, I couldn’t remember what he’d looked like at all, and, true to my agnosia, the filmmakers equipped his actor with a mask of featureless flesh.
The sound was as good as the camerawork, so that as I zoomed in the clatter of cutlery and the kvetching of François and Marianne became muffled, while Jonathan’s gently emphatic voice increased in clarity; he was saying to the man sitting beside him: ‘Yes, I know what you mean. I sat on the jury at last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, and of the ten films we shortlisted for the Best British category not one got a theatrical release; they all went – if they went anywhere at all – straight to video.’
‘Mm, mm,’ affirmed the man playing me – he was chewing some bread. ‘It just goes to prove my point: film is dead, its century-long reign as king of narrative has ended, and we are in an interregnum, and, as Gramsci observed of such periods between political hegemonies – now the strangest freaks and sports will arise.’
I was disappointed, obviously, that my part hadn’t attracted a leading man, although there are worse fates than to be played by a classy British character actor. I couldn’t fault me on my mannerisms: the deep-sea waggle of the hammerhead, the lazy flap of the cartilaginous hands; the voice, too, was spot-on: nasally posh, whiningly mockney. But was this David Thewlis (too young, too good-looking) or Pete Postlethwaite (too old, too ugly), whose head, together with that of the Coe-alike, filled the screen as I closed on them?
No matter, because just as it seemed my POV was going to perform a laparoscopy on the mystery thespian, it reared back with the suddenness of a striking rattlesnake, swivelled right round, then tracked through the bistro and out the door. It paused for three seconds to capture a statue of Goudouli: the celebrated Occitan poet sat foppishly atop a rockery planted with swooning nudes, a pigeon perching on his wrist – was he was hawking for bread?
SIX MONTHS LATER annulled Goudouli’s stonily good-humoured features, and then this establishing shot – that ought, by rights, to have preceded the bistro scene – dissolved into smoky limbo. During this interlude I envisioned the opening of John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952), wherein Toulouse-Lautrec climbs down from his Montmartre bar stool, and, as he stumps towards the door, le patron peers over the zinc rampart and says, ‘So long, Toulouse.’ But of course in my version the painter of restricted height wasn’t played by José Ferrer but Sherman Oaks, and as he came on he winked at me, horribly, a crack in a face crusted with coagulated blood.
SIX MONTHS LATER
Exterior, night: the terrace of the Café Pinot beside the Los Angeles Public Library, a blowy evening in October 2007. The wind rattles the sunshades and the aurora urbanis streams in plumes of orangey light from the glassy cliffs of the surrounding skyscrapers. As my severed head is bowled through the double doors and past the giant rotisserie that’s the café’s selling point, it’s difficult to accept that this was a scene completely excised from my memory of the time I had spent in Los Angeles – for I know what’s coming: a long dining room of Bauhausian rationality, the windows outlined in black like Mondrian rectangles, below them a continuous banquette, in front of this white-clothed tables for two, mostly empty, but at one sits Ellen DeGeneres, playing the part of Stevie Rosenbloom, my Hollywood agent, while opposite her is ... yes, David Thewlis.
His behaviour in Toronto now makes sense. At the time I’d assumed he was simply cutting me, sensing that I – like, no doubt, others he met – believed he gave his fine
st performance in Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), and that since then, like so many actors who have been hollowed out by the director’s compulsive improvisatory method, he had been coasting. Actors, humph! They’re like that – even the best of them are passive, receptive ... can I get away with feminized? Waiting for the back of a hand to prink their rouged nipples, waiting for it to slide down into the dry cleft of their pride, moisten it – so that it swells.
From the bar between two rusty lamp-posts hangs the carcass of a newly slaughtered ox. Standing in a cloud of flies, a man with a knife is cleaning out the entrails. Huxley stands tripping in Schwab’s on La Cienega – and then again on the beach at Santa Monica with Thomas Mann. Partially sighted as he is, Huxley still notes that their leather-shod feet are dabbling in the slurry of used condoms expelled from a sewer outfall.
The freshly slaughtered beef forms a ridge of erect slices on my flat white plate; to one side there’s a rick of grated carrot and celeriac; to the other there’s a boulder of potato mashed with sage. Thewlis looks balefully at this, then away to where a waiter, wound into his apron as tightly as a plague victim into a shroud, stands forlorn beside a pillar.
‘We hear a lot about tortured genius,’ says Thewlis-as-me, ‘but what about tortured mediocrity?’
The waiter takes this personally and huffs off towards the giant rotisserie.
‘Now you’ve offended him,’ says DeGeneres-as-Stevie. I zoom in on her: she’s eating fish – a newly landed rainbow trout that arches on her plate, flipping beads of water across her brownish dress. There’s something going on at the neck of this garment, but such are the vagaries of my memory that what may have been silk ruffles have been replaced by the small squares of opacity used to obscure the faces of covertly filmed criminal suspects.
‘I don’t give a shit,’ Thewlis/Self comes back. ‘If he’s exercised about his craft he should go out on strike with the rest of ’em.’
‘What about you?’ DeGeneres I thought a casting against type, but she’s got Stevie’s gentle Angeleno rasp down pat. ‘I mean, doncha think you should come out in support of the screenwriters; after all you’re in an allied trade?’
‘Right! But what would my picket line be like? I mean, am I gonna stop myself getting to my own typewriter, or will I show up once a year to prevent myself mailing a manuscript to the publisher?’
‘I getcha – and y’know, there’s gonna be no real solution to this: the generals on both sides are fighting the last war, the dispute back in the eighties when the writers lost out on the revenue from video rentals. No one really knows what’s at stake now – if anything at all: these guys are going head to head over what they think the internet residuals from Dharma & Greg might be worth.’
Thewlis has felled one of the beef slices and managed a few bites, together with a scrape of potato, but he’s obviously not interested and lets his cutlery clatter into the shattered food, ruining something that had the compositional integrity of a seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas painting. He takes a swig of Powerade from a handy bottle. He looks DeGeneres in the eye: ‘It’s significant, isn’t it, that you talk of TV rather than the movies.’
‘Well, that’s where the money is – such as it is. I mean, there’s an avalanche of product now – most of the WGA people are network TV writers who’ll never work again.’
Thewlis doesn’t seem to hear this, but presses on: ‘And it can’t’ve escaped your notice that this is the first year ever that video-game sales are set to surpass movie receipts?’
‘No, no, it hasn’t escaped my notice.’ DeGeneres casts her blue eyes (a blooper, Stevie’s are hazel) down to her plate: the trout is dead.
‘Has it occurred to you, Stevie, that this is it?’ Such sententiousness! Can that really be what I’m like? ‘This is the death of the movies – the shattering of the century-old mirror within which humanity has regarded its own plug-ugly features—’ Thewlis is interrupted by the waiter, who has sidled back to remove DeGeneres’s dead fish, and is raising a brow at my mad cow platter. ‘I haven’t finished yet!’ Thewlis cries, attacking the mash with his fork so that white worms writhe through its tines.
DeGeneres sighs. ‘You’re right. Y’know, I kinda hope that the movies will end up like theatre – a secondary medium, sure, but still a revered one in which original work’s done; but now ... I dunno.’
‘The question is, Stevie, if film is dead, who murdered it?’ She sighs again. ‘Could’ve been Mike Ovitz and his clients’ cancerous egos – or maybe it was CGI zapping them with an alien blaster; then again, it could’ve been something less dramatic: the steady downward pressure of marketing on the movies’ lifeblood, as they were used to sell more and more crap to younger and younger kids. But what I want to know is, Will, what’re you gonna do about it?’
‘Do? I’m gonna track down the killer, of course. Literally. I’m going to walk to Hollywood, my eyes fixed on the sidewalk, checking out the spoor. I’m gonna sidle up on the fucker—’
‘Or fuckers.’
‘Or fuckers – that way they won’t know I’m coming, and listen, you can help me here ...’
Was it that Thewlis’s imitation of my voice had dropped into a conspiratorial undertone? No, it was my POV’s measured backtracking, first along the length of the dining room, then deftly through the vestibule, before, eyes-rear, madly stepping down from the kerb and into the traffic scooting along Fifth Street. The SUV that grazed my nose with its metallic-blue paintjob made the cut.
I had found Busner’s Riddle tile – it had fallen down the cable tracking slot, together with three others. I got unsteadily to my feet and handed them over. He grunted his thanks, then asked, ‘Have you solved it?’
‘Um, yeah, in a way – it’s this technique Mukti taught me: not just running the tape forward, so that I can reveal the consequences of my own negative thought patterns, but making little film clips out of them that I can play over and over again.’
‘Really.’ Busner was underwhelmed. ‘That Mukti seems more of a cineaste than a psychiatrist – but, still, if it works for you, Will, and I suppose you’ll need such, um, strategies on your ... trip.’
‘Which you don’t approve of?’
‘Approve? No, I’m not in favour of your “quest”; to me it reeks of Kunstschadenfreude.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning the art that indulges its creator’s sorrow until it completely takes him over. Besides’ – he had left off his Riddle fiddling and now fixed me with his watery grey eyes – ‘there’s the film script you say you wrote – it was never completed, was it?’
‘No, that’s true – you’ve got me there.’ I retreated to my chair. Flinging a handful of summer rain against the window Nature called us to come out and play. ‘I – I ... I couldn’t bear the thought of having to discuss the creative whys and wherefores with the producer – he wore a sleeveless anorak!’
‘A gilet.’
‘What?’
‘I believe they’re called gilets – sleeveless anoraks.’
‘That wasn’t all,’ I continued. ‘I also had this mounting inability to suspend disbelief.’
‘Explain?’ Busner rapped, and in that moment I realized who had been playing him throughout the entire scene: Orson Welles. Of course! Although master of stagecraft that Welles was – the dates were still all wrong.
‘I’d had difficulties with theatre since my late teens – all those RADA Imogens pretending to be Renaissance virgins; then, when I began writing myself, narrative fiction was the next victim – hauling on the strings of my own puppets meant I couldn’t help seeing everyone else doing the same tricks. Film and TV remained plausible – it was the spirit of the age, and no matter how jaded I might’ve felt, I could still immure myself in the wobbly flats of a daytime soap. But then – it must’ve been ten years ago or so – I began to be insistently aware of the sound recordist hovering out of shot, his furry boom mike dangling above the frame. So I started looking for it all the time – then I spo
tted other things.’
‘Other things?’
‘Well, continuity errors, anachronisms – anything that marred the accuracy of the representation: the wrong furniture for the period, the characters’ inappropriately modish dialogue – y’know what I mean.’
I stopped and looked at him. It was so much more than impersonation: Welles, a far bigger man, had somehow contrived to shrink himself inside Busner. The cheeks had been padded and prosthetics used on the nose. If the art of screen acting consists in stillness rather than movement, how much stiller did this performance have to be? And yet he’d pulled it off, managing to convince an audience of one who was sitting within feet of him. Then there was the voice, as familiar to me as my own, with its wheezy aspiration suggestive of a high wind in the upper branches of a mighty brainstem – how many hours had he taken to perfect this?
‘I don’t want to upset you,’ Welles said carefully. ‘But, if I hear you right, you take no pleasure in entertainment at all any more.’
‘Pleasure? It’s a torment to me.’
‘And you believe that by undertaking this quest, you’ll cure your depression?’
‘Depression – is that what it is?’
‘Mos’ def’.’
We sat and looked at one another for a while. I had no idea what he saw in me – but I knew what I saw in him: a suspension of disbelief that had endured my entire adult life. So I stolidly accepted the substitution, for to speculate as to why a long-dead Hollywood star had been directed to play my long-term therapeutic mentor, well, that way lay madness, and, as I’ve said, I knew better than to exhibit any stereotypy – let alone become strident.
I got up to depart – Busner tried to detain me: ‘No problems with packing?’
