FSF, July-August 2010

by Spilogale Authors

  I'd only seen Reynolds Strand putting on a show in his wife's office. Now his face was flushed, his eyes glistened. He had his arm around a very beautiful, very young woman, my age maybe. She looked European, slightly glazed, slightly remote. I watched the Bug Boy's hand go into and out of Strand's pocket, deposit a pack of powder, and extract a bill.

  Then Frankie moved my way and we made a connection. Mags, Geoff, and I snorted in the women's room and buzzed in the infrared glow of the light sculpture in the back room.

  A couple of weeks later we three were floating on junk. Geoff stood naked before the front windows of the apartment. Sunlight framed his head of shoulder-length curls like he was a nicely endowed angel come with a message from heaven.

  He looked toward Mags who lay nude on the bed and she smiled at me. Even with my high it angered me that they were just amusing themselves. At different times I believe each of us secretly thought he or she was the only one holding us together. It came up in the screaming fights we had. Once a week or so one or another of us went out the door for good and came back the next day.

  Doctor Lovell told me around then, “I believe that your involvement with this boy and this woman with all its trauma and quarrels is your effort to knit some kind of coherence in your life. You are going about it in absolutely the wrong way."

  I'd thought the same thing. But I just shrugged and said, “It's fun."

  She replied, “Young man, ‘fun’ is an American word. I never heard anyone in Europe say anything like it."

  That winter on the walk down the blank, cold morning streets to Astor Place, the change for my subway fare was often the only money I had on me. The madman I worked for fired me dozens of times and rehired me ten minutes later.

  Then one morning I was falling out at my desk when he told me to get my coat, handed me two weeks’ pay in cash, and said, “Go in the hospital or something. Don't ever come back here."

  My situation didn't twist my gut until a bit later when the hit of junk that had gotten me to work wore off. For a moment on the cold, crowded street, I saw two figures in diaphanous gowns. No one else noticed them and the Witch Girls were gone without even a glance in my direction.

  Since I couldn't find a job, Doctor Lovell stopped charging me for my visits. When she said my personal life lacked any reality, I saw in my mind her husband at Max's Kansas City kissing a girl much less than half his age.

  * * * *

  Geoffrey stopped going to school. Mags got handouts from her family. I peddled drugs in places the Bug Boy didn't want to go.

  One day that winter there was no heat in our building and we were all so jumpy and strung out with our three full-grown joneses that we couldn't even stay together in the big bed for warmth. I stood in the doorway and screamed at Mags because she had accused me of taking five dollars she'd intended to use to buy food. “You owed it to me. It was mine. I turned you on last night and all this week."

  And when Geoff said, “She's the only one who wants you here, asshole,” I slammed him against a wall once and did it again for good measure. Then I stormed out and didn't return that night.

  When I stumbled back there, the heat was on again and I was so high that I had even saved enough junk to get both of them off too.

  "If you will not stop doing drugs, I can no longer treat you,” Doctor Lovell told me. “They are not my patients, but I can't imagine that your Geoff and Mags are in any better condition than you. If you love them, you all must stop living together and get treatment."

  And I said, “I think you're living in a three-way just like I am. I saw your husband with his girlfriend. Does Reynolds Strand ever bring her by here?"

  She was silent, looking at me. I couldn't tell what she was thinking. “Yes, I know my husband has a mistress and I have seen her. He is very careless and I'm sorry you saw that. I regret that I have done you so little good. Obviously we cannot continue. But when you are ready to seek drug treatment, I will give you the referrals that you need."

  She stood then and escorted me out of the office and through the waiting room. I was in a kind of shock over what had happened. I don't tower over many people but I did with her. She looked up at me. “And you WILL become ready and you WILL be back."

  * * * *

  She was right, but it took me a bit more than a year and a day. Geoff had killed himself after he was caught in a drug bust and Mags went into the hospital. Friends found me crouched in the shadow of the Cooper Union building.

  People held me, talked to me, made me drink coffee. In a bathroom mirror I saw again the wild eyes and scraggly beard I'd once seen or dreamed about. I needed help shaving because my hands shook. Every nerve in my body twisted. My legs and arms jerked. Painkillers from various people's medicine chests cut a bit off the edge of that.

  The last time I saw Doctor Maria Lovell was the next morning, a Sunday that carried a hint of spring. Desperate, I'd called her at dawn and left the number of the place I was staying with the phone service.

  An hour later the phone rang. “Are you able to travel?” she asked. When I said I was, she told me, “I will see you at nine o'clock."

  My spine vibrated. I got off the couch where I was crashing, tried to get myself cleaned up, borrowed money for the subway.

  I got to the office early. The doorman was a big German who didn't like the looks of me. “The doctor is walking her dog and says you are to wait."

  I had a pain in my guts. After a few minutes Maria Lovell came into the lobby with her little dog.

  It hadn't been a year and a half since I'd last seen her, but she suddenly looked very old.

  She gave me the once over and gestured toward her office. I saw her give a little nod to the doorman as if to say this was okay. Inside, she turned on the lights and indicated I should sit on the waiting room couch.

  "How much heroin a day are you doing?"

  "Twenty dollars."

  She looked at me appraisingly and asked, “Thirty, perhaps?"

  "Maybe."

  She went into the office and came back with a glass of water.

  "Take these,” she said and opened her other hand. It held two large pills. As I washed them down she said, “In a few minutes these will have an effect."

  The dog came over to me trailing its leash. “I assure you Kublai is not this friendly to everyone.” Kublai jumped into my lap and I held him. Whatever she'd given me came on strong. My aching bones became something going on out in the hall.

  "What has happened to you?” Doctor Lovell asked.

  I tried to tell her but all I could say was, “When I looked in the mirror the face was that guy I told you I saw begging outside the Cooper Union.” I began crying and couldn't stop.

  "I'm sorry your growing up has to be this hard,” she said. Then she went back into the office and made a phone call. I heard her talking as I patted Kublai.

  As she came back, Doctor Lovell turned off the office lights and I knew her time with me was almost over. She had a couple of prescription slips with names and addresses on them. “Beth Israel is near the East Village. They will admit you today. You will speak to the doctor whose name is written here. I will call him tomorrow to make sure all is well. Do you have money for the subway?"

  She went toward the door. The dog leaped up and I followed. In the lobby she turned to face me. “This will be the last time I see you. I did you a great disservice as your doctor when I grew too fond of you.” She reached up and I bent down. She kissed me on the forehead. “It is my belief that you will recover. Do not disappoint me."

  She turned and went down the hall to the elevators. Only Kublai was watching me when I paused at the door and looked back. Outside the bright day hurt my eyes.

  What I'd done to Geoff and Mags seemed worse than anything that had been done to me. I thought it would have been cleaner if I'd gone to Vietnam and gotten killed.

  * * * *

  That night in the hospital someone screamed until the nurses shut him up. On the ragged border b
etween methadone and agony I wondered if the Subway Man had spared my life because he saw himself in me.

  For a moment I dozed and woke in a wooded park where the trees were tall as cathedral pillars. It was dawn or dusk and I was alone. Then, gliding in and out of the shadows of the leaves, were the Witch Girls.

  But this time they stopped and looked right at me. Curious and a bit amused, they approached, knelt down where I lay. Their hands were cool on my forehead. They straightened my bedclothes, dried my tears, smiled as they sang the pining song I'd heard when I was four.

  And we all understood that what I'd done and what had happened to me were the misfortunes that come to a Witch Boy trying in all the wrong ways to be human.

  * * * *

  "Spoiler alert."

  * * * *

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Department: FILMS: ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE by Lucius Shepard

  In Mel Brooks's classic comedy The Producers, an accountant and a Broadway producer concoct a scheme whereby they can produce a play guaranteed to close on opening night and make a fortune—they have solicited investments far in excess of the show's costs and a flop will guarantee the investors will not seek to recover their money. Having found the ideal play, Springtime for Hitler, a “gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden,” their search for the perfect director leads them to Roger De Bris, a man whose penchant for bombastic showpieces complete with high-kicking chorus lines has made him an industry joke. Sad to say, Tim Burton appears to have become such a director, although he remains commercial and substitutes a quirky visual style for chorus lines.

  Once perceived as a freshet of energy and creativity on the Hollywood scene, his reliance upon what were once signatures but now can be perceived as clichés (inclusive of a ghastly pale Johnny Depp and an appearance by Burton's wife of the moment) has rendered his approach to filmmaking tedious, superficial, and utterly predictable. He remains a visually innovative artist, but his use of CGI seems to have steered the course of his imagination into increasingly shallow depths, so that we can anticipate if not the precise form, then the general character of what we are about to see: a Gothic/surreal setting, atmospheric to a fault, in which a plethora of cartoonishly sinister figures plague an outsider who is, to one degree or another, a naïf.

  The latest text to undergo this Burtonization is Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (and Through the Looking Glass, for there are elements of both stories in the film). It has been billed as a re-imagining of Carroll's work, but comes across more as a remake of an old Tim Burton joint. Following a brief preamble as her six-year-old self, we meet Alice (a wooden Mia Wasikowska), now nineteen and something of a rebel by Victorian standards—at least she has been injected with a dose of Disney-brand you-go-girlism courtesy of scriptwriter Linda Woolverton, who sought, she says, to make of the character a strong role model for contemporary young women. Though this might have been handled with more subtlety out of respect for the story's classic status, it seems a laudable ambition, yet it comes across as somewhat hypocritical when we find that Alice appears without clothing for a large portion of the film (her clothes do not adapt to the shrinking and expanding of her body). While the movie's PG rating is maintained, the object is clearly to titillate and this undermines the allegory of female actualization that Woolverton has constructed.

  When a garden party proves to be a setup for a marriage proposal offered by a chinless dweeb named Hamish, Alice flees, falls down a rabbit hole and enters Wonderland...actually, it's Underland, she is told by the denizens of the place, thereby establishing that this is in reality Burton-Woolverton Land, and has very, very little to do with Carroll's story. Only the names are the same, and even these have been altered to evoke a sort of Tolkienesque air—the caterpillar is known as Absolem, the dormouse is Mallymkun, and so on.

  It turns out that Alice has fallen not into the world of her imagination, but rather into the midst of one of those decidedly non-sui generis struggles between good and evil that have inundated the high fantasy genre. In this instance, the conflict lies between the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the Red Queen (a bloated CGI version of Helena Bonham Carter, Burton's paramour du jour), and Lewis Carroll is soon left far behind, all the wonderful whimsy and allusiveness of his little book trampled underfoot in Burton's haste to trot out his corporate-sanctioned vision of Alice the Newly Liberated. Frame after frame of lavish psychedelic imagery slides by, fabulous creatures done in lime-greens and tangerines and Yellow Submarine yellows, yet the plot is so thin and mass-produced, the characters so unengaging, tedium sets in and you come to feel as though you're watching what may be the greatest screen-saver of all time; and when Alice dons her form-fitting suit of armor, takes the Vorpal Blade in hand and slays the Jabberwock (yep, that Jabberwock, the subject of a poem at the beginning of Carroll's book), thereby empowering a generation of contemporary young women to...I don't know, to buy into dreck like this, I guess...well, it's just another ho-hum moment in the history of commercial filmmaking.

  And then there's the Mad Hatter.

  I really wonder if Johnny Depp is capable of playing it straight anymore. If his performance as Dillinger in last summer's Public Enemy is an indicator, he seems unable to cope with a role that doesn't rely on the tics and twitches he has picked up during his association with Tim Burton. Whatever, all those twitches and then some are on full display in Alice. Given an inordinate amount of screen time for such a minor character; decked out in the Hatter uni and his customary pallid makeup; with red hair and sporting a variety of colored contact lenses; Depp transforms what was a lovable albeit somewhat pitiable eccentric into a bizarre androgynous figure, someone who appears equally capable of petting a lost kitty and doing unspeakable things with said kitty's intestines. He plays an endless game of winky-poo with the camera, blinking, making peculiar “ooks” and twitters, and, in the movie's penultimate scene, breakdances to technobeat music while his head spins around à la Linda Blair in The Exorcist. It's an image I will carry with me to the grave.

  If all you're after is hallucinated landscape, this might just work for you—if, however, you're expecting anything remotely redolent of the Carroll books, a recapitulation of the aimless and nonsensical realm of childhood where luck comes with a golden penny and fate appears in the form of a spindly critter with velveteen mauve fur and backward-hinged legs, it's impossible to describe how dreadful a production this seems.

  * * * *

  The Secret of Kells, Oscar-nominated for best animated feature, is the kind of film that once, prior to the advent of computer generated imagery, caused me to seek out animation. Directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, the movie tells the story of Brendan (voiced by Evan McGuire), a boy in training to be a monk, living in the tiny village of Kells during the darkest part of the Dark Ages, directly in the path of marauding bands of Vikings and surrounded by the darkly foreboding Forbidden Forest, a place rife with shapeshifters and even more inimical human menace. Brendan's curmudgeonly uncle, Abbot Cellach (Brendan Gleeson), is determined to build a wall that will protect the village from the Vikings; but when Brother Aidan (Mick Lally), an aging master illuminator with a more expansive and optimistic nature, comes to Kells, carrying tales of how the invaders slaughtered his people, and carrying also a magical book of illuminations, The Book of Iona, that he's in the process of finishing, Brendan becomes convinced that the book, not the wall, will be the article of their salvation. Having spotted Brendan's talent for the arts, Aidan makes him his apprentice and sends him into the forest to collect the berries needed to make inks. There Brendan meets and is befriended by the fairy, Aisling (Christen Mooney), who sometimes manifests as an amiable white wolf, but more often appears as a charming, long-haired elf-girl. Brendan's world grows increasingly focused on the magic of the forest and the book (it eventually falls to him to finish the illuminations), but as the Vikings draw closer and closer, the Abbot does his best to suppress Aidan's talent (though once an illuminator himself,
he views the book as a mere distraction) and direct him toward more practical matters.

  If there is any grounds for comparison between Alice and Kells, it is that both films seek to overcome narrative failings (Kells has a slow first act and is occasionally unclear) with visual pyrotechnics. Whereas Burton comes off like a frenzied child with a paintball gun, spattering the screen willy-nilly with grotesque imagery, Moore and Twomey utilize a variety of styles ranging from the cartoonish simplicity with which Aisling is rendered to the impressionistic menace of the Vikings, boulder-like masses of black with glowing red eyes, from sections that might have been drawn by children to lovely hand-drawn frames that conjure up illuminations from the Book of Kells, the Irish Christian artifact containing the four gospels that inspired the film. Kells compels with its art, its visual poetry, pulling the audience along over the few rough patches, illuminating its fundamental tale of a boy becoming a man...and it may do so well enough to earn its status as a children's classic.

  * * * *

  Repo Men, the latest in Logan's Run imitations, and in no way to be confused with Alex Cox's excellent Repo Man, is based on a poorly written screenplay-masquerading-as-a-novel about organ repossession, The Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia, and thoroughly rips off another movie, the awful Repo: The Genetic Opera. With bloodlines like these, it made perfect sense that in order to cast the movie the studio would reach into the bottom of its nearly bottomless vat and yank out an ensemble of second-raters and has-beens, with perhaps a crucial cameo by Lorenzo Lamas or Traci Lords.

  But no!

  In its infinite wisdom, the studio went A-list all the way, choosing Liev Schreiber, Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, and Alice Braga to head up the cast. Given this, one would think it would be natural to pair these heavyweights with a correspondingly prestigious director like, say...

  Miguel Sapochnik?

  Okay.

  Sapochnik, best known in the industry as a storyboard artist, must have worshipped at the Church of Robocop, because it's apparent that he was going after a Paul Verhoeven vibe (as well as something of a Bladerunner vibe for the set design—neon signs in Chinese, ads tracking to and fro on dirigibles, all the Bladerunner signatures that have now become clichés), mixing in gory action sequences with doses of satirical humor.