by Roy Scranton
“It’s a question of method and intent. First of all, I’m not remediating the old myths into new myths. I’m not trying to solve the problems the myths have created, or the problems the myths were created to solve. I want to explode the myths from inside. By reinhabiting the foam-space of the mytheme through the Verfremdungseffekt of digital images warped, broken, and melted beyond even post-avant sensibilities, I mean to reterritorialize the American dream as a body without organs, then burn it on the altar of negation. The problem isn’t specific content: the problem is the dialectic itself.”
“Sure,” she said. “And you think breaking down narrative will have some kind of political effect?”
“It’s not hashtag fucking Occupy MoMA,” he said, snarling. “The point is total resistance at every level.”
“So what . . . Godard by way of Trecartin?”
Jim slammed his fist on the table, loud enough that people looked. “She’s great,” he said to Remy. “Isn’t she great?”
“She’s pretty great,” Remy said, smiling gently.
His grin was earnest, but his gray-green eyes seemed to empty the room. Suzie felt the urge to take his head against her chest and slowly unweave every Bantu knot in his hair. “You like cars?” she asked him.
Remy’s smile shifted, the planes of his face realigning into an ambiguous, guarded half state. “Sure. Tech’s cool. I suppose I don’t often think about cars as such. Driverless cars, perhaps, as a form of artificial intelligence, but not as physical machines. They seem a bit old school.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, turning back to Jim. “That’s my other question, Gene, is who the fuck cares? You and me, we’re the last generation that maybe gives a shit about cars, and I don’t even think we care that much. Him,” she said, pointing at Remy, “and all them,” she said, gesturing at the neodigitals slowly filling the room, their faces lit by handheld screens, “and anybody born after Back to the Future Three, their idea of freedom is whether they can change their gender pronouns on Yik Yak. Their whole idea of freedom is online, and even that’s compromised by the internalized security state they’ve lived with basically their entire lives. So this whole mythic headspace you’re talking about is really something only people even older than us have any solid connection with, and even for them it’s a fucking ghost world. So this is what, an elegy? Some kind of MAGA nostalgia bullshit? I mean it just doesn’t seem especially relevant.”
“Yik Yak shut down like five years ago,” Remy said.
Suzie glared at him. “Not the fucking point.”
“Granted,” Jim said. “That’s what it looks like inside the bubble. We have our Uber-rats and TaskRabbit and Grubhub, meatspace never more than five miles from a Momofuku, unless you’re roughing it someplace like Taos. But is the same thing true for kids growing up in, I don’t know, Alabama? Ohio? Any of the other states that start with vowels? Yes, we think we come from the future, but they’re all sliding into something else. You know what it’s like to be a teenager in Missouri? You know what freedom is to them? Can you honestly tell me it’s not a car?”
A knot began to form inside her, thinking back. “I don’t know,” she said, remembering saying goodbye to Oklahoma. “But they don’t buy art.”
“Fuck that,” he said. “There’s a place in America where space still matters. There’s a place in this country where a gun and a car mean as much as the flag, where the idea of freedom has to do with bodies, not just tweets and apps. A place where they watch the The Fast and the Furious and mean it. But I’m not from there. I’m from Connecticut. So I want to go there, wherever ‘there’ is, deep in the heart of it all, and make it make sense to me. I want to go where people believe the future means going back. I want to go where people believe in starting over. That’s the point. I don’t care who buys it. I have plenty of money. The only fucking thing I care about is the truth.”
She laughed. “Okay,” she said. “But I get to drive.”
“I was planning on it.”
“I also get to pick, when I’m driving, which road. Left or right.”
“Of course. We’ll discuss the route as we go.”
“No, no, no, Gene, you’re not hearing me. You say the trip is us, we’re partners, fellow conspirators in total resistance or whatever, so let’s be clear so we can put it on paper. If I get a wild hair up my ass we need to visit an old friend of mine in Cedar City and I’m driving, then we go to Cedar City.”
“You know someone in Cedar City?”
“I got people all over.”
“Sure. Sure. Yeah. If it’s problematic, we’ll discuss, but it’s our trip, together, of course.”
“No, Gene, you’re still not listening. If it’s our trip, it’s my trip. I understand ‘us.’ I understand ‘our.’ I understand ‘we.’ I understand collectivity. But I need to know right now up front that this equitable shit isn’t just talk. It’s your money, it’s your muscle car, it’s your Final Cut Pro, so if you’re really serious about it being our project, then I need fifty percent driving and total freedom to change course when I’m behind the wheel. In writing. I know for a fact you’d have not the slightest goddamn qualm about taking us on a two-day diarrhea tour through some Mexican narco transfer point if it so tantalized your rhizomatic muse, and this is a fact I accept about this whole ridiculous project. But we need to be clear”—she leaned in—“absolutely motherfucking clear, that the same rules apply for me. If I decide to drive to New Orleans, I drive to New Orleans. If we’re equals, antagonists, whatever this bullshit is you’re spouting, it’s not some feminist-friendly palliative co-optation, all right? It’s real.”
“I’m extremely happy you’re coming with us, Suzie,” Jim said. “We’ll get all that in writing for you.”
Suzie shook her head. “I don’t like you, Gene, and I don’t trust you. I think you’re a spoiled brat who never had to grow up, a thousand percent narcissist, jerk to the core, and whatever Damascene conversion you thought you had that turned you from just another Wall Street douche into a quote unquote so-called fucking video artist might have made you believe you had a soul to be saved, but you don’t. You’re just another shit with too much money, and this, all this, is just a long nervous breakdown. I’m happy to come along for the ride so long as I get paid, but we’re not family.”
“Fair enough,” he said, grinning. His teeth and sunglasses shone in the darkness, a death’s head in photonegative.
“Well, I feel tremendous spontaneous affection for you both,” Remy said. “I think it’s a dope project.”
“Anything else?” Suzie asked.
“You tell me, pardner,” said Jim.
“I think we’re good,” she said, checking her phone. “I need to go anyway. I’m meeting a friend to see Father John Misty. Email me the new contract and I’ll get it back to you tomorrow.” She belted the last of her rye and stood.
Jim rose and offered her his hand across the table. They shook, looking each other in the eye, then she was gone, leaving the trace of her scent, lemongrass spiked with the faint stain of burnt tobacco. Jim sat back and started folding the map.
“Shut off the camera.”
They’d cut across lower Manhattan and come through the submarine-gray tunnel, lights overhead like smudged GloFish, thinking but only barely in the repressed hum how do they hold all that water up and what happens if something happens, smoke rolling into the tunnel, UberATs frozen, zombie swarm—escaping the city? taking it? the city itself boiling up around them?—slow but flowing out and up into the light of the mainland, the New World, American soil, blood and steel. A peeling billboard read jersey strong. On the radio, Terry Gross interviewed the author of Truly, Madly, Virtually, a memoir about falling in love with a DP. Remy filmed the tip of Manhattan just like Jim wanted, One World Trade, the Battery Park seawalls. A gull hooked and wheeled over Jersey City cranes.
“Brand
on,” Terry asked, “did you know she was digital when you started dating?”
“We were having such a great time,” Brandon said, “it didn’t seem to matter. The way I think about it, all of us are just collections of algorithms. We all have our patterns and programming and distributed cognition. We’re all digital now. Beyond a certain level of complexity, who can say what’s freedom and what’s just a great app?”
The rhythm of high speed after the constriction of the tunnel lulled them into something almost Zen. I’ve made a gigantic mistake, Suzie thought, watching the signs for the turnpike.
“Should we start?” she asked, turning down the radio.
“Yeah, sure,” Jim said.
“Okay. Let’s do it, then. You start.”
“Start what?”
“Say your line.”
Jim angled his chin back toward his shoulder but kept his eyes on the road. “Remy,” he said, “hand me my script?”
“You didn’t memorize your lines,” Suzie said.
Jim made a face.
“Okay, fine.” Suzie said. “Your line’s ‘Was that our sign?’”
“All right,” he said. “Was that our sign.”
“It’s your fucking movie, Gene.”
“That’s not what you say,” Remy said. “Your line is ‘What sign.’”
“I know my fucking lines, Remy, thank you.”
“So say ‘What sign,’” Jim said.
“I know what I say, Gene, I fucking wrote it. My point is it’s a question. ‘Was that our sign?’ Like a question. You hear that? Our siiiii-iign. Rising intonation on the final iiiiiign. You were like, plop, ‘sign,’ I’m a robot. So, whatever. It’s your movie. Proceed.”
“I think they actually prefer the term ‘digital person,’” Remy said.
“Robot, robot, robot,” Suzie chanted.
“Look, Susan, my name’s not fucking Gene and the cutesy bitchy act is already getting old, but fine. Fucking P. T. Anderson here has direction, she wants a read, okay: Was that our si-ign?”
“What sign?”
“What the fuck do you mean what fucking sign?”
“That’s my line. ‘What sign?’”
“Fine. Okay. We’ll do it again. Remy, the script.”
“Here you go.”
“All right. Mi-mi-mi. Hmmmmmmm. Tip of the tongue, roof of the mouth, lips and the teeth.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Suzie said.
Jim pursed his lips, then pronounced: “To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock, in a pestilential prison with a lifelong lock, awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock, from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block. Big black block. Short sharp shock. From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block.”
“You done?” she asked.
“Was that our sign?” he said.
“What sign?”
“What the sign said? Was that us?”
“Not yet. These signs are just to get us ready. They’re not the real signs yet.”
“I was thinking about what she did.”
“There’s a pause there.”
“What?”
“It says ‘pause.’ That means pause. You wait a beat, maybe longer. Pause.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Jim said, slowing behind an unmarked black van.
“It’s a flow, Gene,” Suzie said. “It’s the rhythm of language. Back and forth. I know you do your rhythm in the editing room, but this is my stuff and the pace is important. Ta ta ti-ti ta. It’s like Shakespeare. Listen to the rhythms.”
“Shakespeare? Was that our sign?”
“I mean there’s a rhythm to human speech. There’s rhythms to the script, which I indicate with punctuation, ellipses, em dashes, commas, and directions. If it says ‘pause,’ pause. Let the silence fill up the space. Let us hear the hum, the low growl of the engine, the radio. Let the moment be itself as itself, framed time, let the environment play its appointed role. Otherwise it’s all just fucking chatter.”
“Got it,” Jim said. He tapped the steering wheel. “My bad. Let’s start over.” He cleared his throat. “Ahem. WAS thaaaaat ooouuur SIIIIII-heen?”
“Now you’re just being a dick.”
Jim picked up the script and looked at it. “Ah, I believe your line is ‘What sign?’”
“Fuck you.”
“Well, let’s take it again from the top. Was that our sign?”
“Fuck this. I should have known better. I knew you’d be like this.”
“Like what?”
“For one, you don’t memorize your lines; for two, you don’t even read it; for three . . . for three, this is all about your fucking images, so I don’t even know why I’m here. You don’t care about words, about which words I’m using, how they go together in sentences and paragraphs, so what’s the fucking point? Why not get a fucking robot to write it?”
“Digital person,” Remy said from the back, insistent.
“Look,” Jim said. “I’m not an actor. I do concepts. I’m the guy behind the guy behind the camera. So I’m sorry that my line-reading skills are not up to whatever standard they’re used to down at City College or wherever it is you take your master classes in rhythm and dialogue—”
“The New School.”
“The New School. Whatever. The point is that I have neither the skills nor the interest for performing these lines in an actorly way. The text is the text and I respect that. I want your words. They matter to me. The rhythm. The punctuation. The semicolons and fucking subordinate clauses. Maybe part of the story can be me getting used to reading the lines, right, me learning to perform—adaptation, adjustment, chimpanzee piano. Blam! But we’re not gonna get anywhere if you’re expecting me to deliver, de novo, exquisite mimesis. I can’t give you a fake real, Suzie, only the real fake.” He snapped his fingers. “Shit, Remy, you getting this?”
“Audio’s good. The ceiling cam’s on the road, and I’m tracking the southern tip of the island with the handheld.”
“So, shit,” Jim said, smacking the wheel. “You see?”
The road surface changed and the ambient noise dropped an octave. Lady Liberty stood in the harbor, small and green, dwarfed by infrastructure.
“You were there,” Suzie said.
“What? Where?”
“You were there. I just got it.”
“I was where? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“When it happened. Your Damascene conversion.”
“Sure,” Jim said, reazling what she was looking at. “The greatest work of art possible in the history of the cosmos.”
Pause.
“I was living off Washington Square,” Suzie said. “I’d just gotten up. My roommate had brought home—”
“Can we not do this?”
“I’m—”
“Can we not do this fucking where-were-you bullshit? Because whatever you got, I can beat it. Unless you’re actually a mangled corpse buried under a mound of slag heaped on Fresh Kills, unless you were physically inside the North Tower when the South Tower collapsed, unless you’re a fucking firefighter with lung cancer who dragged some poor fuck from his doom, I can beat it and you can feel holy and proud and sad and American, and I can feel the same way I feel about it every fucking time I remember. Okay? Because what it was, the whole thing, was art. Living, breathing, dying human art, and it’s more powerful than money and guns and feelings. That’s the real deal and let me add this: I don’t fucking care. None of it matters. It’s all just dice, every—moment—rolling,” Jim snapped his fingers once, twice, three times, “every moment totally random, accidental, it doesn’t mean a thing, it doesn’t mean a thing I’m breathing right now, today, this moment, fucking up your lines, nothing. Nothing! The only things that take on meaning, the only things that take on the weight of real fucki
ng solid rock-hard substantial truth, are the things we destroy and say why.”
“Jim, I’m sorry, I—”
“You know what, Suzie?” Jim turned to stare her down. “Nobody fucking asked you.”
“Jim, the road,” Remy said from the back.
Jim faced the road, swerved around a driverless semi. “I’ve just had it with the where-were-you bullshit, this obligatory performance of collective wounding—us and them, Christians and pagans, good and evil—it’s all such bullshit. It’s all random. All of it. Reality has no audience.”
“Well, fuck, I—”
“Christ shit. First the lines, now the towers. What next? You gonna ask me about my mother? My divorce?”
“I wasn’t—”
“You smoke, right? You got a smoke?”
Suzie dug in her Triple Canopy tote, pulled out her Parliaments, handed one to Jim, offered one to Remy, who declined, and took one herself. She lit Jim’s smoke first, then her own. They cracked their windows. Remy coughed quietly. The car filled with smoke.
“Look,” Suzie said, “if it’s a—”
Remy touched her shoulder.
“Let’s do the script,” Jim said.
“Start over?”
“Yeah, start over. That’s how we do.”
“Ready whenever you are.”
“Was that our sign?”
“What sign?”
“What the sign said. Was that us?”
“Not yet. These signs are just to get us ready. They’re not the real signs yet.”
Pause.
Freed from the city, something came loose, but she couldn’t tell yet if it was good or bad, blockage clearing or maybe fine gears coming apart. Movement felt wild and portentous, lacking the grid to constrain it, and the lights out here went on forever. Rural America? One giant strip mall, more like, and some clot jarred awry was floating in its bloodstream, only a matter of time to see what kind of seizure it might cause.
She would have liked a balcony to smoke on, but the DoubleTree by Hilton was one of those box jobs, an irruption of prefab, poured concrete, and glass pushing up from the ground by the highway, square and gray and sealed against the road like it was quarantined, immunized against identity, pure shining globalization, from the blurry-eyed uniformed staff with their hidden tattoos to the screen bleeding Fox in the lobby. It might as well have been an airport. The room was “nice” but dull and shabby, and off in several less-than-interesting ways. The plastic cups were wrapped in plastic, and the hotel offered four Q-tips in a cardboard envelope as part of the complimentary grooming kit, but the single-serve non-Keurig coffee maker reeked of burning plastic, the overhead lights popped alarmingly, and the toilet seat was loose on its hinges. The giant screen worked, including seven channels of HBO, but none of the outlets on the desk did, so she had to plug her Mac in by the bed. The worst thing was that the only window coverings were thin, gauzy curtains—what seemed to be drapes were only narrow treatments, hanging fast on each side. Her third-floor view looked over the hotel’s plant, a Howard Johnson, and a low-rising copse of Scotch pine; with the lights off, her room was flooded with yellow-pink illumination, as if she were sleeping inside an Easter egg. Were it not for the firm comfort of the mattress and the pleasure of clean sheets, she’d have preferred to deal with the mildew and bed hairs of the divey motor hotel down the way.
