Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (34 page)
Later that night, bunked into a north London hostel, Matt and Zane compared notes. Zane confessed to a weird tingly sensation, a sort of buzz over his scalp and down his back. Matt reported feeling—for pretty much the first time since they’d crossed the ocean—homesick. Sistersick, really, it was Erin he missed. Standing at the centre of that outlandish scar he’d found it intolerable, all of a sudden, not to be where she was. What would become of her? What would become of them?
Come Again
by kritik@themovies
Look carefully. Before she climbs the plank onto the
Titanic,
Rose’s beauty mark (that most erotic of end stops) is on her left cheek. Once she’s on board it’s on her right. There’s a puzzler for you.
Here, look again. As she prepares to jump off the
Titanic
(bloody iceberg) Rose is in lace-up shoes. But then she’s in slip-ons, then she’s in lace-ups …
Continuity is an illusion, and it’s incredibly hard to maintain. Just ask the folks who made
Titanic.
They spent two hundred million bucks and they still screwed up. Everybody does, even the greats. Dorothy’s pigtails change length from one shot to the next in the Scarecrow-rescuing scene …
In the case of
Purple Jesus,
though, there seems to be something quite other going on. In Zane Levin’s very first film (circa
1979),
Jesus Christ (played with youthful zeal by Levin himself) launches his Second Coming at a college hockey game. When we first glimpse him he’s purple all right, but in subsequent shots he’s green, then orange, then purple again, then green, then orange … In a film that comes in at just under six minutes (two rolls of Ektachrome Super 8, my informant tells me), it seems unlikely that such violent shifts are unintentional.
So what’s Levin driving at here? Presumably he expects us to take note of the colours themselves, which are all secondary, all hybrids: red-blue, blue-yellow, yellow-red, round and round the colour wheel. Jesus was, to many, the prophet of impurity. He confounded the rigid dichotomy of clean and unclean, refuted the brutal class system of first-century Palestine. He championed compassion over righteousness. Is this a theology to which Levin hopes we’ll hearken? Or were those just the cheapest colours of stage paint he could come by?
Hard to know. What we can state with reasonable certainty, given the self-reflective theme which crops up so often in Levin’s subsequent work, is that he hopes we’ll attend to the deceptive nature of the medium itself. Film establishes its effect through a semblance of continuity, a series of stills dragged across a lens at twenty-four frames per second. And life? Yes, we’re performing the same trick here in the “real world,” concocting a continuous narrative from myriad discrete moments—twenty-four hours blurred together to make a day, seven days to make a week … In that context what might “salvation” signify? A freeze-frame? A tear, an actual rift in the celluloid?
These are just a couple of the virtual infinity of questions
Purple Jesus
fails to address. As Levin himself has been heard to lament, “You were expecting what, a work of genius? We were pissed out of our gourds for pete’s sake. Anyway, we couldn’t get Charlton Heston.”
The Heston issue aside,
Purple Jesus
’s primary virtue may well be the refreshing spontaneity of its performances, which give the impression of being completely unscripted and unrehearsed. For its time the film’s camera work, too, must be considered an act of bravado. Kudos to the cinematographer (identified only as McEye) whose hand-held shots supply almost more
vérité
than a person can tolerate without Gravol.
In terms of plot,
Purple Jesus
is what we might construe (in a charitable mood,
à la
Christ) as minimalist. The Son of God shows up at the rink and gets the bejeezuz beaten out of him (during an on-ice donnybrook) by the fans of not one hockey team but both. He suffers a particularly vicious knock on the noodle and is last glimpsed in “heaven”—that is to say, he’s last glimpsed getting a free ride on the Zamboni after the game. Zane Levin made, let’s face it, a silly start here.
Hallelujah.
They’re alone this time, just the two of them. Others have come and gone—here’s an empty twenty-sixer of rye. Is this what hippies get altered on these days? Whatever happened to Mary Jane, whatever happened to mescalito? At least there’s still sex—somebody’s tossed aside a condom as they might a candy wrapper.
Zane squats a moment to compose himself. He digs out his video camera—a robotic-looking armload with flared lens and phallic microphone—and sets about collecting his footage. He hands-and-knees it to get close-ups of the felled corn, swished flat in a spiral pattern as though it’s circling a drain. Then he does a walking tour of the human detritus: dead soldier, deflated rubber, crumpled “Keep Out” sign. After a brief break for a coughing fit he moves on to some deer’s-eye shots across the bowed heads of the corn—to the road, to the surrounding woods, to the quaint huddle of farm buildings. Fun to watch the guy work, it’s been a while.
“What we really need’s a chopper, eh?” says Matt. The human sound stands out starkly against the scraping of the crickets, that wall of white noise. “Alien’s-eye view.”
“Maybe they’ll come back, give us a lift.”
“Yeah, you never know. Hey, is that … I think there’s another circle.” It’s forty or fifty feet off—the other half of a dumbbell, maybe, missing the connection. But no, it’s much smaller. A moon circling a planet, a planet circling a star.
Matt swishes his way on over. Dead centre of the circle there’s a little bald patch, a wee disk of soil, pale and tender. Matt bends, puts a palm to it. “Gaia,” he says. “Gaia?” When he gets up he discovers himself the object of Zane’s digital gaze. He waves histrionically at the sky. “Down here, fellas!”
Nothing.
“Yooohooo. Anybody up there?”
Nope.
“Sorry,” says Zane.
“Me too,” says Matt. He plods his way back towards the big circle. Corn plants thwack him with their ripening cobs. Nature’s got him in its gauntlet, hazing him, having at him with its many paddles.
“Here, let’s switch for a bit,” says Zane. “Remember how to handle one of these things?”
“Not really.”
“So I’ll show you,” and he does. There’s a wallet-sized screen that swivels out from the side. There’s an intricate console of buttons that Zane advises him to leave alone for the moment. All he really needs is the little rocker on top for zooming in and out.
“And … action,” says Matt, and he thumbs the red button. This feeling, with the camera in his hands.
Penetrating? What does that even mean when applied to eyes? One blue, one brown, both of them biggish. Zane’s cheeks (which fill the screen when Matt goes all the way in) are sheened with sweat. They really have lost their bulge, and are betraying the bone structure that’s supposed to be so beautiful.
“Hey, it’s weird over here,” says Zane. “On the other side of the lens.”
Matt crazy-zooms in and out, bobs and weaves rock-video style. Zane obliges with a standard aren’t-we-wacky face. Then, “Day one seventy-two since I refused the antiretrovirals.” No beat, no break. “My viral load is up, my T cell count is down. Well under two hundred now, that threshold. And there’s this.”
Matt zooms out as Zane bunches the sleeve of his T-shirt and tugs it up to reveal his shoulder. It’s still a meaty thing but detectably leaner, and graced now with a mini-bruise or tattoo. The size of a bottle cap, not even. Mandala? “Mother”? Matt zooms back in. It’s an elongated circle, a lozenge. It’s a galaxy, a thousand billion stars circling the bowl, the black hole at its heart. Reddish purple, purplish red.
“My first cancerous lesion,” says Zane. “My first definitive sign.”
A flash of sky, a zig-zag across Zane’s body and then Matt’s back on target. He keeps shooting, keeps watching through his tiny window.
“I have to assume further opportunistic infections will soon follow,” says Zane. “Unless, of course … Lots of people have been cured by crop circles, after all. Arthritis, insomnia, impotence …” He spreads his arms, performs a little dance, a sombre, solo version of the one he did all those years ago with Brad. You could believe he’s waiting for something.
“Right,” says Matt. “I get it.” He’s breaking the rules here, inserting himself into the scene. Edgy stuff. He finds himself searching for a better angle. Watch the glare, mix up the framing, close-up, medium, full. “This is the real movie, right? You doing this, you dying?” He starts to circle his subject, some ancient film-school instinct kicking in. He orbits, Zane his still centre, his sun. “The whole crop circle thing was a hoax.”
“Wrong,” says Zane.
“A cute way to get your cameraman out here.” Don’t forget frame balance. Resist the facile symmetry.
“Wrong. The crop circle thing’s for real, I want to do it. I want us to do it together.” He turns as he speaks, in sync with Matt—a plastic bridegroom on a wedding cake. “But yeah, I want this recorded, I want this to count. That’s why I’m shooting Nico too.”
“Because he’s on the cocktail. You’re Shanumi, he’s …”
“Ola. Olatunji.”
“One lives, one dies.”
“But I can’t shoot
myself.”
Just over Zane’s shoulder a bird appears in the middle distance, some soaring bird—another of those hawks, presumably, riding the air without a flap. Matt widens his frame a touch, allows the bird to eerily hover there. “And once it’s done I won’t be around to shape it, make it matter.”
“Ah.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you, Matt. But you’re good, and you’re here.”
“I’m here, so what the hell.”
Zane grimaces. “I told you it was too much,” he says. “But these people, Shanu, Ola. You think anybody will actually
see
them?”
“And they’ll see you?”
“If you make them.”
How to end the shot? Extreme close-up—the lesion, the look in his eye? Or maybe swing off across the field, allow it all to be absorbed by the landscape? How do you decide?
Weird to see white up there after so much blue. Can these really be the first clouds Matt’s glimpsed all week? Cotton balls, like the little ones they tape to your arm when they’ve taken blood.
“John Belushi,” says Zane.
“John Barrymore,” says Matt. “Now that’s odd.” He’s creeping his way past a dead traffic light, the second one they’ve hit since making it back to Canada. There was a kerfuffle at the border, grumpy guards barking into cellphones. And now this.
“River Phoenix.”
“W. C. Fields.”
They’re doing movie stars who’ve OD’d. After an hour or so of dense silence between them, Matt offered up the idea he’s had for a review of the new movie,
his
new movie, the one in which Zane dwindles and dies. Can you be both kreator and kritik of the same kreation? Time’ll tell. Matt’s thought is to open with a list of movie-types who’ve killed themselves with meds, then segue to the story of a filmmaker who’s killed himself by
refusing
meds.
“Bela Lugosi.”
“Marilyn Monroe. Bloody hell, here’s another one.”
People are being good. They take turns, pretend it’s a four-way stop. Down deep maybe that’s what people really
are,
is good. How would you know?
“Judy Garland,” says Matt. And it occurs to him, man, if this were a movie, it sure would’ve picked up over these last couple of days. Chase scene, road trip, reams of startling revelations. The protagonist’s under a whole new kind of pressure, implicated in the crime he’s been trying to prevent. And now …
EXT. RURAL ROADSIDE—DAY
An aging sedan pulls up to a convenience store—we glimpse an unlit “E-Z Mart” sign. The car brakes in a dry CLATTER of gravel.
MATT and ZANE, two casually dressed men in early middle age, climb out into the torrid afternoon and, SLAM-SLAM, start towards the store’s entrance. Matt glances up.
MATT
Mart? What the hell’s a mart?
Zane smirks, but offers no reply. We form the impression of an easy intimacy between the two, a timeworn jocularity that’s under an unaccustomed strain. Both men are on alert.
As the pair approaches the store’s propped-open door an ELDERLY GENTLEMAN exits. He totes a crate of bottled water.
ELDERLY GENTLEMAN and MATT
(in unison, as they nearly collide)
Sorry.
(in unison)
That’s okay.
MATT
(chuckles)
Can I help you with that at all?
ELDERLY GENTLEMAN
No, I believe that’s the last of it.
Wearing puzzled expressions—and still busy trying to read one another—Matt and Zane step into the store. Through closeups we register further bemusement on their faces as they note, along with us, certain unexpected elements of the scene within. There’s a crepuscular silence, in stark contrast to the truck-
whoosh
ed brilliance outside. The place is humless, buzzless, tickless. Nothing works.
At the counter an Asian man—MR. E-Z, we presume—tinkers with a boombox surrounded, Christmas-tree fashion, with savaged wrappers. “Energizer,” we read. “Duracell.”
Mr. E-Z spins the dial. BLURTS OF WORD erupt, as though doors are being rapidly opened and shut on a dozen conversations. We catch snippets: “… transmission grid … cascading collapse … Toronto and Ottawa, as well as New York, Detroit … that terrorism may be …”
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE
(off-screen)
Goddam A-rabs. They can kiss my A-ass.
Matt glances up. Matt’s point of view: we witness the scene reflected in the convex surveillance mirror at the back of the store. Various customers patrol the dim aisles, hurriedly chucking provisions into their baskets and mini-carts.
MR. E-Z
They say fifty million people.
A burly, BUZZ-CUT young man approaches the till with a basket of canned goods. He’s the source of the unidentified voice we’ve already heard.
BUZZ CUT
How could anybody
not
see this coming? Where else are they going to hit us? Powerless people, right? So they knock out our power.