Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 125
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
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 finest 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going on at the neck of this garment, but such are the vagaries of my memory that what may have been silk ruffles have been replaced by the small squares of opacity used to obscure the faces of covertly filmed criminal suspects.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 spotted 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?’
‘No, I don’t think so – I mean, not that I’ve done it yet, I’ll find out this evening.’
‘And the genre of the piece?’
‘Genre?’
‘Yes – I think film noir is difficult to resist, yet …’
‘Should be?’
‘Absolutely, I’d go for almost anything else, rom-com, frat boy or screwball comedy – horror, perhaps. Just don’t do anything arty or obscure, there’s a good chap, remember the Kunstschadenfreude – remember me, when you find yourself in a chain hotel room, staring fixedly at the bulbous prongs of a video-games controller, and wondering where it all went wrong.’
I squeezed out through the half-open door, then squeezed halfway back in again to wiggle my fingers, ‘Ta-ra.’
‘Ta-ra,’ Welles replied – he was fiddling with the Riddle tiles again.
I had never found Busner in the least bit pitiable before – this was Welles’s genius entirely.
2
KerPlunk!
Hal, still fiercely red of lens, although now too old and hackneyed to be able to pick up much save for swivel-on bit parts – such as security cameras – gazed down on me from the corner of the Foyles travel section. I had spread out so many maps – checking for pliability, legibility, extent and area covered – that my miniature lebensraum was interfering with the shoppers. A bookseller came over to me; he was tall, raw-boned and wearing a T-shirt printed with the poster for Godard’s Breathless. His blue-black hair was cropped close at the sides of his slab head, and if he’d been better-looking the young Daniel Day-Lewis might have been playing him – or perhaps Lewis, a slave to the uglifying method, was playing him?
‘I’m sorry …’ he said, ‘but people are complaining.’
I told him what I was looking for and how difficult it was proving.
‘There’s a street map that Rand McNally do,’ he explained. ‘It covers the entire LA basin, if it’s not on display we might have one out back – I’ll go and look.’
While Day-Lewis was gone I tidied up the other Los Angeleses, then upon his return we spread this new one out on top of a plan chest. It would do – it showed every street, although so small I had difficulty reading the names, even with glasses; it was also a single, easily folded sheet. However, it stopped at the Hollywood Hills, so there and then I scotched the next leg of my provisional plan, which had been to leave Hollywood via the cervical ‘O’ on the Hollywood sign, sleep newborn in the sierra, then slither on, via Universal City, down into the Valley, where I might be taken on as a porn star, or a third husband.
Of course, the bookseller wasn’t only a bookseller – they seldom are. I wasn’t about to tell him the reason for my trip, although I did say something about walking and how antithetical it was to film, which gave him his opening: ‘Actually, I’m doing my doctoral thesis on slow motion—’
I stifled a sarcastic yelp: nothing could’ve been more antithetical to slow motion that the coiled power of this thespian cat-bear who leant, his coccyx stabbed by the corner of the plan chest. ‘I see,’ I said, ‘you mean Muybridge’s photographs, the variable speeds of old-fashioned hand-cranked projectors, Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho,6 that kinda thing?’
‘Well’ – his eyes were beautiful, his tone contemptuous – ‘none of your examples are slow motion properly understood. Slow motion can only exist relative to full motion, and full motion itself has to be defined by a further correlate – say, a soundtrack. The Gordon piece – which I’m familiar with – is an example of extended play.’
Hal screwed me out from the corner, the other bookstore browsers free-floated among the shelves, their minds revving up to choose – then stalling. I remembered lurking beside a wall at the Hayward Gallery as Norman Bates’s knife deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeescended. I barely looked at it, so absorbed was I by the grain, rough against my cheek – it was an effect I knew had been achieved by pressing planks into concrete before it set. Might it be possible to date the building by counting the rings in its walls? And what of my own predicament: my mind, frozen in my body, which, cells apoptosizing, careered towards entropy? As for this punk, I paid him for his map, but – I hoped, pointedly – neglected to thank him. It was Hal I waved goodbye to.
There was one further errand to do before I could head home to pack. I left Foyles and walked up Tottenham Court Road to the Scientology Centre by Goodge Street tube. I had been dropping in at the centre for years and must have completed hundreds of their questionnaires. The so-called Standard Oxford Capacity Analysis was a simplistic personality test devised by L. Ron Hubbard himself, and I’d always scored well on it: I was unstable, depressed, anxious, sluggish, inhibited, feckless, compliant and antagonistic. The test confirmed that on those rare occasions that I found myself in groups (for the most part I was chronically withdrawn), it was impossible for me to successfully integrate. You would’ve thought that such corrosive traits, especially when combined with a sheep-like suggestibility, made me a perfect recruit – but the Scientologists stubbornly refused to let me join.
In the late 1980s I had managed to inveigle myself on to an introductory weekend course at their British headquarters, Saint Hill Manor, near East Grinstead. This cultists’ house party was everything I could’ve hoped for, from the diluted orange juice concentrate to the strip-lit repression of the single-sex dorms. I thought I was doing well: I joined in the discussions enthusiastically, and whenever we had a free moment I devoured the master’s works in an exhibitionistic fashion.
All went well until the Sunday morning, when, as a special treat we wannabes were given a test audit. The auditing procedure is the ritual that lies at the core of Dianetics; it’s nothing more than an extended lie-detector test, during which you’re wired up to a polygraph and asked a series of questions that range from the innocuous – ‘What is your favourite colour?’ – to the revealing – ‘Have you ever been sexually attracted to a member of the same sex?’ As long as you answer them truthfully you are awarded a ‘clear’, and your so-called ‘negative engrams’ are held to have been pulverized by the power of probity. In due course you ascend to the next level.
Except that I never got to the first one. It didn’t help that the auditor – his hair an extravagant bouffant – was played by the Who front man Roger Daltrey (who, following the success of Tommy, and the biopic of John McVicar in which he played the lead role, was trying to consolidate his acting career). Nor did it help that I was attracted to members of my own sex – albeit not Daltrey. The needles jerked on the meter, the pens danced on the graph paper readout, my auditor announced that I was exhibiting deep resistance. I was in a cleft stick: to admit to any homosexual inclinations would have ruled me out entirely, for the Church of Scientology was as bigoted in this regard as any fundamentalist sect.
Although sent packing from Saint Hill, I was still not to be deterred and over the coming years I went on pitching up at Tottenham Court Road, in disguises and under assumed names, armed with strategies for ‘fooling’ the Capacity Analysis. It was all to no avail: the smiling Scientologists would let me take the test again, then send me on my way, with the advice that I see a doctor, a therapist, a priest – do anything, in short, but submit myself to their own mind control.
