The Sea Came in at Midnight (15 page)

D
URING SEVENTIES, WHEN MITCHELL
and Louise Blumenthal were making pornographic films, he had thought it quite witty and exceedingly subversive to employ the nom de cinema Mitch Christian. After all, he was a man ahead of his time, when cheap irony would come to be considered an artistic vision. Mitch “directed” the films and Louise “wrote” them; she called herself Lulu Blu.

Their most infamous collaboration was three movies known as the Virgin Trilogy:
Virgin White, Virgin Pink,
and
Virgin Black.
If they were remarkable at all, it was for two reasons. First, even in the annals of pornography they constituted some of the most spectacularly inept filmmaking anyone had ever seen. Second, in the last of the trilogy Mitch and Louise faked the murder of a young actress, thus gaining for
Virgin Black,
fakery or not, the distinction of being the first known “snuff” film. It was Louise’s idea. All of the ideas were Louise’s; she regarded herself in those days as an erotic terrorist, a one-woman sexual Baader-Meinhof doing whatever she could to create mass carnal confusion for the sheer chaos of it. As an intense young philosophy student of the Sixties attending college in New York City, she had never been sure whether she truly believed that the protests of the time missed some larger point, or that the self-righteousness of it all just bored the shit out of her. The notion of utopia held no allure. Whichever the case, she had been waiting twenty-two years for the One Big Defining Idea of her life when, at exactly 10:02 on the night of 6 May 1968, on the verge of what she anticipated would be her first orgasm, she heard something.

It came from outside, through the open window of her West Village apartment, from somewhere far away, so distant it was impossible to say for sure what it was, so ominous her pending climax was stillborn. “Did you hear something?” she said.

In his brilliantly uncomplicated way, Mitch continued fucking her, paying the question no mind whatsoever.

“Did you hear that?” she said again, propping herself up on her elbows, listening. “Oh, man,” Mitch moaned in disbelief as Louise pushed him away. She got up and went to the window, leaning naked out into the night; Mitch sat in bed holding his head in his hands. “It sounded like a gunshot,” Louise said. If there was anything in her life she hated, it was surprises, and the sound of that shot was a surprise in the night; but more than that, because she was an intense twenty-two-year-old philosophy student, she was inclined to think a gunshot in the night at the moment of her first orgasm was an epiphany of some sort. It was a season of gunshots: there had been a momentous one the month before in Memphis and there would be another a month later in Los Angeles; she drew herself back into her apartment and paced the room, considering the matter from all angles. Anxious, she lit a cigarette when she realized she wasn’t figuring anything out. “Can we finish now?” said Mitch on the bed.

“Finish yourself,” Louise answered.

“Christ,” Mitch said, “I don’t need this. I can do better than this somewhere else.”

“So go do better somewhere else.” Of course, at that particular time in his life he couldn’t have done even remotely better anywhere else. He was unattractive and unpleasant, and he and Louise hadn’t been together four months before she began wondering how she got mixed up with him in the first place. Even then, in the spring of 1968, she would have been astounded at the notion she could spend another year with him, let alone ten, let alone marrying him; his appeal, she decided sometime later, was his preposterous gall. Some part of her admired the way he offended everyone, even if it included her. She was attracted to how, with so little, he could somehow make himself larger than life; the sheer bravado of his lack of talent was mesmerizing. And the fact was, she would realize only much later, that if she knew he couldn’t have done better than her, some self-loathing had convinced her she couldn’t do better than him. Naked in a chair and smoking her cigarette, trying to think about the sound she had heard and realizing there wasn’t any serious thinking to be done with Mitch around, she poured herself some wine and put on a record; like a gored animal, he bellowed at the first notes.
Strange days have found us
—“No,” he cried, “no no no no no”—
strange days have tracked us down.
“You cannot possibly be listening to this record again. You’ve listened to nothing but this record for six months.”

“We haven’t known each other six months,” Louise replied. “You have no idea what I was listening to six months ago.”

“Tell me,” Mitch said, “you weren’t listening to this record six months ago.”

She thought about it for a moment while smoking her cigarette. “You’re right,” she finally agreed, “I was listening to this record six months ago.” Her brother, Billy Pagel, had met Mitch the year before in L.A., where the two were enrolled in film classes they never passed. At twenty-seven Billy was already three years older than the next oldest undergraduate in the university; not particularly interested in movies or an education or a degree, he had come to Los Angeles confident that the hippie girls he’d heard about wandering up and down the Sunset Strip were putting out at a pace so mind-boggling his only real concern, in those contemplative moments of deep doubt every man faces sooner or later, was whether he could keep up with them. For his part Mitch, having recently transferred from a college in the San Francisco area, chafed at the repressive notion that filmmaking might entail a certain discipline, perhaps even craft. He had seen all those French movies and knew better, and he hadn’t come four hundred miles to sully brilliance with elitist aspirations of competence.

That was a time. But then Mitch and Billy got kicked out of the university and were running out of money, and the rainy season swept them off the green knolls of the campus sculpture garden—where they spent afternoons lying in the sun smoking dope and laughing at everyone—and right out onto Sunset Boulevard; and with the few funds they had left, they bought two tickets cross-country back to New York, where Louise lived. For seven days Mitch shot miles of film of everyone on the bus. The other passengers would wake in the dark to find his camera whirring in their faces: “Ignore me,” Mitch would command, “I’m not here, act natural,” while insulting them for their lack of screen presence, a motivational technique he would apply to various “actresses” over the years. By Philadelphia the driver kicked Mitch and Billy off the bus, and they hitched the rest of the way to Manhattan.

Mitch didn’t have any particular aesthetic or prurient interest in filming people having sex, it was just the only interesting human activity readily available to someone who otherwise had nothing to say and cared nothing about anyone but himself and was unable or unwilling to interact with any other human being in any other fashion. Also in Mitch’s favor were the times themselves, when the mere fact of actors penetrating one another explicitly on-screen was still enough of a novelty that any attempt at innovation would have just been a distraction. Get a bunch of people together in a cheap motel room and strap a poor-man’s Bardot to a table and violate her with several male members at the same time for eighty minutes and everyone was happy. For Mitch and Louise it simply began one afternoon after they had been together for the better part of a year, when he began filming her in the middle of sex not because it excited him but because it was another direction in which to point his camera. The problem was getting himself into the scene; to do that he would have had to relinquish control of the camera to a third party, which was out of the question, so he began lining up other men to fuck Louise, including Billy. Louise, her identity as erotic terrorist already gestating at this point, wasn’t sure which put her off more, that Billy was her brother or that Billy was Billy. She also suspected she was becoming a pawn in Mitch’s ideas, and if there was anything more discouraging than being a pawn in someone else’s ideas, it was being a pawn in the ideas of someone who didn’t have any ideas.

So Louise began to write the scripts for Mitch’s movies. Hearing in her ears the echo of a distant gunshot fired at the very moment of the only orgasm she ever came close to having, she extrapolated the French notion of the “little death” into something bigger, populating her screenplays with people who always expired just at the moment of climax. Sometimes the manner of demise was mundane, sometimes it was mysterious. Sometimes a lover would be seized by an unforeseen heart attack or abruptly choke to death, or succumb to some remarkably exotic ailment. Sometimes the end was murderous: one lover would ritualistically do in the other, or they would both do in each other at the same time; one would shoot the other or pull a knife out of nowhere, or slip the other poison. Sometimes some completely unknown and unidentified character would suddenly run into the scene and bash one or both of them over the head, sometimes the roof would fall in and sometimes the floor would collapse and sometimes something would come flying off the wall for no reason at all and fatally bean them. Sometimes it was almost mystical—though Louise would have been loath to consider herself a mystical person—the force of the moment’s revelation in conjunction with the physiological explosion of the orgasm itself too much for a normal human being to survive.

Louise’s scripts were filled with these characters who—at the moment of truth, rapt with the sort of vision Louise herself had come to believe she had at 10:02 on the evening of 6 May 1968—would cry out with their final breath some insight invoking Nietzsche or Camus or the street politics of the time. Grunting and moaning and heaving and thrashing, on the verge of ecstasy with grimaces frozen and eyes fixed, they would suddenly shout, “Life is a meaningless experience and thus the greatest heroism is to overcome absurdity!” or “Humanity will not be happy until the last capitalist is hung by the entrails of the last bureaucrat!” or, as declaimed to a skeptical female by some male aryan sort, the ever-popular “That which does not kill me makes me stronger!” at which point she usually killed him. The problem with Louise’s scripts as far as Mitch was concerned was that scripts tended to have lots of scenes and narrative and dialogue and directions, and Mitch wasn’t all that accomplished at dialogue and directions, they weren’t his strengths as an artist. Directions and dialogue confined the natural ebb and flow of his creative vision. So Mitch devised a new way to make movies: he would shoot the film before the script was written. Every scene was filmed from the viewpoint of whoever might be speaking at the moment, which is to say that no one was ever actually seen saying anything in one of Mitch’s films, rather the film was completely composed of shots of people listening to what was supposedly being said by other people, who usually had their backs to the camera or were out of the shot altogether. Or maybe Mitch didn’t bother filming the people at all, instead he would linger for a while on a table or a window or a bowl of cereal, with the dialogue dubbed in afterward. Since these movies consisted of relatively few tables and windows and bowls of cereal but rather lots of people fucking and dying, the question of how to shoot the dialogue wasn’t especially important anyway, compared to the incalculable advantage of being able to film an entire movie without having to worry about the tiresome business of a story until later.

This method of filmmaking struck Mitch as so obviously ingenious that it amused him no one else had thought of it. It was a wonder all movies weren’t made this way, and as time went by he became more and more convinced he had inaugurated a new breakthrough in the art of the motion picture, along the lines of montage and moving the camera and Cinerama, like Godard and Peter Fonda and that guy in Russia with the baby carriage. For their part, audiences were inclined to view these quantum leaps in film art with distress. The crowds that went to grungy little theaters to see Mitch and Louise’s movies were made up largely of lonely middle-aged men who as a rule were less enthusiastic about existential orgasms; they would come out of the theaters casting hurt looks of baffled betrayal at the box office, and the exhibitors began to notice they never came back, even when the marquee changed. A whole generation of pathetic masturbating creeps was being lost. A kind of panic hit the business. Distributors began refusing to handle any Mitch Christian/Lulu Blu movies, and so Mitch and Louise set up their own distribution company, Blue Christian Productions, and over the course of the early Seventies drove up and down and across the country personally plying their wares from out of a used van that Billy had bought. Up and down stairs from one theater to the next, from one town to the next, the three trekked with film cans under their arms hoping their reputations hadn’t preceded them, making sudden judgment calls according to the vibes of the town or the time of day or the situation in general as to who would do the talking, assuming they got in the front door or, more precisely, the back door. Though Louise was the brains of the operation—or perhaps because of it—she always wound up in endless confrontations with exhibitors over the fine points of the metaphysics of pornography. “Let me do the talking from now on,” Mitch finally said, heatedly, one very cold night outside Cincinnati.

They were sitting in Billy’s van just west of town on the Indiana side of the state line, Louise in the backseat staring south in the direction of Kentucky, Billy gazing northwest at Indiana, and Mitch mulling the black pockets of Ohio east of them. “Let me explain to you,” Louise said slowly, licking her lips, “the principle of subversion.”

“Please do,” Mitch said.

The fog of their breaths filled the van. “The principle of subversion,” said Louise, “involves a particularly invisible kind of strategy, an unseen campaign of ruin, that one doesn’t notice until it’s too fucking late. It’s different from an out-and-out invasion—you don’t announce, Excuse me, if it’s all the same to you, we’re taking over your souls now. Kindly take note of the fact that we’re armed and dangerous and coming to your town.”

“I don’t see your point.”

“Ever look in a mirror, Mitch?”