The Possibility of an Island (5 page)

That show also marked the beginning of my brief—but lucrative—movie career. I had inserted a short film into the performance; my initial project, entitled
Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine!,
already had that tone of light Islamophobic burlesque which was later going to contribute so much to my renown; but, on Isabelle’s advice, I had had the idea of introducing a touch of anti-Semitism, aimed at counterbalancing the rather anti-Arab nature of the show; it was a wise route to take. I therefore finally opted for a porn film, or rather a parody of a porn film—a genre that, it’s true, is easy to parody—entitled
Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler).
The actresses were authentic Arab immigrant girls, guaranteed to originate from the hardest Parisian suburbs—sluts but veiled, just the right type; we had filmed the outside shots at the Sea of Sand, in Ermenonville. It was comical—a rather elevated form of comedy, that’s true. People had laughed; or at least most people. In an interview with Jamel Debbouze, he described me as a “super-cool dude”; you couldn’t have asked for more. In fact, Jamel had told me just before the program: “I can’t wind you up, dude. We’ve got the same audience.” The TV presenter Marc Fogiel, who had organized the meeting, quickly realized our complicity, and began to shit his pants; I have to admit that for a long time I had been wanting to eviscerate that little prick. But I contained myself: I was very good
—super-cool,
in fact.

The producers of the show had asked me to cut a part of my short film—a part that, in fact, was not very funny; it had been filmed in a block of flats being demolished in Franconville, but was supposed to take place in East Jerusalem. It involved a dialogue between a terrorist from Hamas and a German tourist that took the form of, at one moment, Pascalian dialectics on the foundations of human identity, and, at another, a meditation on economics—a bit à la Schumpeter. The Palestinian terrorist began by establishing that, on the metaphysical level, the value of the hostage was nil—because he was an infidel; it wasn’t, however, negative, as would have been the case, for example, of a Jew; his destruction was therefore not desirable, it merited simply indifference. On the economic level, however, the value of the hostage was considerable—as he belonged to a rich nation known for showing solidarity with its citizens. Having made these introductory remarks, the Palestinian terrorist carried out a series of experiments. First, he tore out one of the hostages’ teeth—with his bare hands—before observing that his negotiable value had remained unchanged. Then he proceeded to do the same operation on a fingernail—with the help, this time, of pincers. A second terrorist intervened, and a brief discussion took place between the two Palestinians, on a more or less Darwinian basis. In conclusion, they tore off the hostage’s testicles, without omitting to carefully sew up the wound to avoid a premature death. By mutual agreement, they concluded that the biological value of the hostage was the only value to emerge modified from the operation; his metaphysical value remained nil, and his negotiable value very high. In short, it became more and more Pascalian—and, visually, more and more unbearable; incidentally, it was a surprise to me to realize how inexpensive the special effects used in gore movies really were.

The uncut version of my short film was screened a few months later at the Festival of Strangeness, and it was then that the movie proposals began to flood in. Curiously, I was contacted once again by Jamel Debbouze, who wanted to break out of his usual character type to play a bad boy, a real villain. His agent quickly made him see that it would be an error, and finally nothing was done, but the anecdote seems significant to me.

To contextualize it better, you must remember that in those years—the last years of an economically viable French cinema industry—the only attestable successes of French production, the only ones that could pretend to, if not rival American productions, then at least more or less cover their costs, belonged to the
comedy
genre—subtle or vulgar, they all managed to work. On the other hand, artistic recognition, which enabled both access to the last remaining public subsidies and decent coverage in the respectable media, went first of all, in cinema as in the other arts, to productions that praised evil—or, at least, that challenged moral values conventionally described as “traditional,” in a sort of institutionalized anarchy perpetuating itself through mini-pantomimes whose repetitive nature did not blunt their charms in the eyes of the critics, all the more so as they facilitated the writing of reviews that were predictable and clichéd, yet in which they were still able to present themselves as groundbreaking. The putting to death of morality had, on the whole, become a sort of ritual sacrifice necessary for the reassertion of the dominant values of the group—centered for some decades now on competition, innovation, and energy, more than on fidelity and duty. If the fluidification of forms of behavior required by a developed economy was incompatible with a normative catalog of restrained conduct, it was, however, perfectly suited to a perpetual celebration of the will and the
ego.
Any form of cruelty, cynical selfishness, or violence was therefore welcome—certain subjects, like parricide or cannibalism, in particular. The fact that a comedian, who was known as a comedian, was able to move easily into the domains of cruelty and evil, was therefore necessarily going to constitute, for the profession as a whole, an electric shock. My agent greeted what can truly be described as a
stampede
to his door—in less than two months, I received forty different script proposals—with qualified enthusiasm. I was certainly going to earn a lot of money, he said, and he was going to as well; but, in terms of notoriety, I was going to lose. The scriptwriter may well be an essential element in the making of a film, but he remains, first of all, absolutely unknown to the general public; and anyway, second of all, writing scripts represented a lot of work, which risked distracting me from my career as a showman.

If he was right on the first point—my participation, as scriptwriter, co-scriptwriter, or simply consultant on the credits of around thirty films, was not going to add one iota to my notoriety—he made a wild overestimate on the second. Filmmakers, I quickly realized, are not very intelligent: you need only bring them an idea, a situation, a fragment of story line, all the things they would be incapable of thinking up themselves; you add a bit of dialogue, three or four silly witticisms—I was capable of producing about forty pages of script per day—you present the product, and they are thrilled. Then they change their minds all the time, on everything—them, the production, the actors, anyone. You need only go to the meetings, tell them they are completely right, that you will rewrite according to their instructions, and Bob’s your uncle; never had I known such easy money.

My biggest success as a principal scriptwriter was certainly
Diogenes the Cynic;
contrary to what the title might suggest, it was not a costume drama. The cynics—and it is a generally forgotten point of their doctrine—instructed children to kill and devour their own parents as soon as the latter, becoming unsuitable for work, represented useless mouths to feed; a contemporary adaptation about the problems posed by the development of the fourth age was scarcely difficult to imagine. At one point I had the idea of offering the lead role to the philosopher Michel Onfray, who, naturally, was enthusiastic; but the indigent graphomaniac, so at ease in front of television presenters, or before reasonably amicable students, completely collapsed when faced with a camera, and it was impossible to get anything out of him. The producers returned, wisely, to more tried-and-tested formulas, and Jean-Pierre Marielle was, as usual, masterly.

At about the same time, I bought a second home, in Andalusia, in a zone that was then very wild, a little north of Almería, called the Cabo de Gata Nature Reserve. The architect’s plan was sumptuous, with palm trees, orange trees, Jacuzzis, and cascades—which, given the climate (it was the driest region in Europe), could be interpreted as slightly mad. I didn’t know it at all, but this region was the only one on the Spanish coast up until then to have been spared by tourism; five years later, the land prices had tripled. In short, in those years, I was a bit like King Midas.

It was then that I decided to marry Isabelle; we had known each other for three years, which placed us precisely in the average of premarital association. The ceremony was discreet, and a little sad; she had just turned forty. It seems obvious to me today that the two events were linked; that I wanted, as a proof of affection, to minimize her shock at turning forty. Not that it manifested itself in complaints, or a visible anguish, or anything clearly definable; it was both more fleeting and more poignant. Occasionally—especially in Spain, when we were preparing to go to the beach, and she was putting on her swimsuit—I could feel her, at the moment when I glanced at her, wincing slightly, as if she had felt a punch between the shoulder blades. A quickly stifled grimace of pain distorted her magnificent features—the beauty of her fine, sensitive face was of the kind that resists time; but her body, despite the swimming, despite the classical dance, was beginning to suffer the first blows of age—blows which, she knew all too well, were going to multiply rapidly, leading to total degradation. I didn’t fully know what it was that happened to my facial expression in those moments that made her suffer so much; I would have given a great deal to avoid it, for, I repeat, I loved her; but manifestly that wasn’t possible. Nor could I reiterate that she was still as desirable, still as beautiful; I never felt, in the slightest way, capable of lying to her. I recognized the look she wore afterward: it was that humble, sad look of the sick animal that steps away from the pack, puts its head on its paws, and sighs softly, because it feels itself wounded and knows that it can expect no pity from its fellow creatures.

Daniel24, 3

THE CLIFFS TOWER
above the sea, in their vertical absurdity, and there will be no end to the suffering of man. In the foreground I see rocks, sharp and black. Further, pixelated slightly on the surface of the screen, is a muddy, indistinct area that we continue to call the sea, and which was once the Mediterranean. Creatures advance in the foreground, along the crest of the cliffs, like their ancestors did, several centuries before; they are less numerous and more dirty. They fight, try to regroup, form packs or hordes. Their faces are now just a surface of red flesh, bare and raw, attacked by worms. They shiver with pain at the slightest breath of wind, which sweeps up gravel and sand. Occasionally they throw themselves on each other, fight and wound each other with their blows or their words. One by one they detach themselves from the group, their pace slows, they fall on their backs. Elastic and white, their backs can withstand contact with the rock; they then resemble upturned turtles. Insects and birds land on bare flesh, peck at it and devour it; the creatures still suffer a little, then are still. The others, a few feet away, continue their struggles and little games. From time to time they come closer to watch the agony of their companions; in these moments their eyes express only an empty curiosity.

I quit the surveillance program; the image disappears, returns to the toolbar. There is a new message from Marie22:

The enumerated lump

Of the eye that closes

In the squashed space

Contains the last term.

247, 214327, 4166, 8275. Light appears, grows, and rises; I rush into a tunnel of light. I understand what man felt, when he penetrated woman. I understand woman.

Daniel1, 4

Since we are men, it is right, not to laugh at the misfortunes of mankind, but to lament them.

—Democritus of Abdera

ISABELLE WAS GROWING WEAKER.
Of course, it wasn’t easy, for a woman already wounded in the flesh, to work for a magazine like
Lolita,
where every month there arrived new tarts who were always younger, sexier, and more arrogant. I remember I was the first to touch on the question. We were walking along the top of the cliffs of Carbonera, which plunged, pitch black, into sparkling blue water. She didn’t seek any escape route, she didn’t evade the issue: indeed, indeed, in her line of work you had to maintain a certain atmosphere of conflict, of narcissistic competition, but of which she felt more incapable with every passing day. “Life debases,” Henri de Régnier once noted; life wears you out, above all—there doubtless remains in some people an unde-based core, a kernel of being; but what weight does this residue carry, in the face of the general decay of the body?

“I’ll have to negotiate my severance package,” she said. “I don’t see how I’m going to be able to do that. The magazine is doing better and better, as well; I don’t know what pretext to invoke for my departure.”

“Go and see Lajoinie, and explain to him. Simply tell him what you told me. He’s old already, I think he can understand. Of course, he’s a man of money, and power, and those are passions that die slowly; but, after all you’ve told me, I think he’s a man who can be sensitive to burnout.”

She did what I proposed, and her conditions were accepted in their entirety; of course, the magazine owed her almost everything. For my part, I couldn’t yet call a halt to my career—not completely. Bizarrely entitled
Forward Snowy! Onwards to Aden!,
my last show was subtitled “100% Hateful”—the inscription was emblazoned across the poster, in Eminem-style handwriting; it was in no way hyperbole. From the outset, I got onto the subject of the conflict in the Middle East—which had already brought me a few significant media successes—in a manner which, wrote the
Le Monde
journalist, was “singularly abrasive.” The first sketch, entitled “The Battle of the Tiny Ones,” portrayed Arabs—renamed “Allah’s vermin”—Jews—described as “circumcised fleas”—and even some Lebanese Christians, afflicted with the pleasing sobriquet of “Crabs from the Cunt of Mary.” In short, as the critic for
Le Point
noted, the religions of the Book were “played off against each other”—in this sketch at least; the rest of the show included a screamingly funny playlet entitled “The Palestinians Are Ridiculous,” into which I slipped a variety of burlesque and salacious allusions about sticks of dynamite that female militants of Hezbollah put around their waists in order to make mashed Jew. I then widened this to an attack on all forms of rebellion, of nationalist or revolutionary struggle, and in reality against political action itself. Of course, I was developing throughout the show a vein of
right-wing anarchy,
along the lines of “one dead combatant means one less cunt able to fight,” which, from Céline to Audiard, had already contributed to the finest hours of French comedy; but beyond that, updating St. Paul’s premise that all authority comes from God, I sometimes elevated myself to a somber meditation, not unlike that of Christian apologetics. I did it, of course, by evacuating any theological notion and developing a structural and essentially mathematical argument, based notably on the concept of “well-ordering.” All in all, this show was a classic, and was heralded as such overnight: it was, without a shadow of a doubt, my biggest critical success. According to the general view, my comedy had never attained such heights; or it had never plumbed such depths—that was another way of looking at it, but in the end it meant much the same thing. I found myself being frequently compared to Chamfort, or even La Rochefoucauld.