Zeroville (29 page)
“Stop.”
“—great is its
comfort
level. There is no comfort level in
A Place in the Sun
. No movie worth hating or loving has a comfort level.”
“Well,” Viking Man says, “you’ve wrecked it, Zulu.” He actually sounds annoyed. “You’ve gone and fucking wrecked Howard Hawks’
Rio Bravo
. When did you turn into Pauline Fucking Kael? Remind me not to see
Red River
with you.”
“Is it Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculine values and rituals?” says Zazi.
“Montgomery Clift is in
Red River
,” says Vikar.
“Then I might actually want to see it,” says Zazi.
“Not with me,” says Viking Man, and storms out of the house.
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” Zazi calls after him.
Out at the car with the ever present surfboard, Viking Man says, “Ah, hell, she’s just a smart-ass teenager, vicar. I know that.”
“She used to not like movies at all,” Vikar says. “Because of her mother.”
Opening the door, Viking Man pauses for a moment before he says, “You’ve sort of dropped out of the world.”
“Yes.”
“I guess your Joan of Arc project is dead, huh?”
“It wasn’t actually about Joan of Arc.” Vikar says, “Perhaps they’ve given it to another director.”
“How’s that?”
“I believed,” Vikar says, “perhaps they had given it to you.”
“What are you talking about?” Viking Man says, shocked. “First of all, I don’t want to direct a movie about Joan of Arc—”
“It wasn’t actually about—”
“—and second of all, Mitch Rondell hates me.”
“He always called you the ‘madman.’”
“But third, haven’t you heard? Aren’t you even reading the trades?”
“No.”
“UA’s gone under. Or been sold to someone, or something. Mirron is dead, Rondell is going over to CAA to be an agent. The movie business has bigger problems than you these days, vicar. That hermaphrodite cowboy up in Montana ran it all into the ground with his cowboy
Gone With the Wind
. Most expensive movie of all time and it was pulled after one screening in New York—just a colossal stink bomb in terms of money and press. Of course it’s one of those things where everyone talks about what a shame it is when secretly they’re in the throes of joy. In principle I’m all for whatever anarchy can be wrought upon the studios, but the truth is UA was the best of them, Rondell notwithstanding, and in the long run something like this, well, it’s just not that great for movies in general. The hell of it? The hermaphrodite’s movie is really not bad. It’s rather good. Not forty-million-dollars-and-a-hundred-miles-of-film good—a hundred miles, vicar!—but good as a thing unto itself. No one can see that now, of course—all they see is all that money and a director who thought he was Erich Fucking von Stroheim. In twenty-five years, when Vincent Canby is an asterisk in film history, they’ll see the movie as a thing unto itself.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Fantasy heroes, vicar! Comic-book characters! That’s the movies now in a scrotum sac—glorified afternoon-serials and cute little robots. Who’s to say it’s right or wrong? Maybe this is the age we need new myths. I don’t know,” resignation creeping into his voice after the futile effort to hold it back, “once we all thought we were going to make grand movies. Me and Francis and Marty and Paul and Hal and Brian and the others, even George and Steven. But then George and Steven fucked it up, and it’s not that they’ve made bad movies, you could almost wrap your mind around that. It’s that they’ve made really good versions of bad movies, while the hermaphrodite cowboy went and made what everyone figures is a really bad version of a good movie, though what he
really
made is a pretty good version of a grand movie, which is the sort of ambiguity that confuses the fuck out of everyone, including me. Anyway this thing I’m doing now is my
Alexander Turgenev
, vicar, with a little Genghis Khan tossed in—we’ve got Max Von Sydow and James Earl Jones and a whole Nietzschean slant, and the main character is this barbarian-type in animal furs with horns on his head as played by this preposterous Austrian body-builder so muscle-bound he literally can’t hold the sword, but he
is
getting blown on a semi-regular basis by one of the Kennedy women, rumor has it.”
“
Bárbaro
,” Vikar says, more to himself.
“Are you getting blown on a semi-regular basis by one of the Kennedy women, vicar?”
“No.”
“Me neither. So what do we know. By the new millennium I’m sure Hollywood will be done with comic-book characters and we’ll be making real movies again. Right?”
Vikar doesn’t answer.
“Because God loves the Movies, like He loves the Bomb.”
“God doesn’t love the Movies.”
“Sure He does. Or He wouldn’t have shown us how to make them.”
“He didn’t show us how to make them.”
“Well, if He didn’t, who did?”
“No one showed us how to make them,” says Vikar. “The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He’s done.”
“O.K., vicar,” Viking Man says wearily, “I just got my ass kicked by a preternaturally worldly fifteen-year-old, or however old she is, so I don’t need to get into it with you too. Listen, when you decide to re-enter the world of the marginally sane, let me know. Come edit my comic-book movie for me.”
Often Vikar hears Zazi up all night watching television. “You should go to bed sometimes,” he tells her.
“I don’t sleep anyway,” she says. “I’ve been having these dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Hey, Vik, you can keep your dreams to yourself and I’ll keep mine to myself. O.K.?”
Vikar goes to see a movie by a Polish director, starring the woman who was Victor Hugo’s daughter in the movie where she follows her soldier-love to Nova Scotia. In this movie Victor Hugo’s daughter is in modern-day Berlin giving birth to a monstrous creature who then becomes her lover, and whom she’ll protect against any other lover, husband, soldier or god. As in Nova Scotia, everything she is or has been, everything she believes or has believed, has collapsed for her into the form of her demonlover and child; since Vikar came to Los Angeles, all the children in all the movies are born monsters, born elephants, possessed by the Devil,
are
the Devil.
Vikar hears on the radio that Natalie Wood, for whom the beautiful woman tattooed on his head has so often been mistaken, and whom he saw in a movie where she was in a bathtub possessed, has drowned, as though God reached down to her in her bath and grabbed her by her wet hair, and pushed her under the water and held her there.
Zazi’s band gets a semi-regular gig at the Whisky as a kind of unofficial house band, so sometimes Vikar descends from his house, disappearing down into the inky cloud that swathes the hills, and finds himself back in the realm of hours and days and years where he used to live. When the band comes on, Vikar launches himself into the slam dancing with a ferocity that clears the floor, until he finds himself sprawling at the foot of the stage just below where Zazi plays. He’s removed from the premises in a chrysalis of spit and blood. Wandering up the Strip toward where George Stevens used to live in the Sunset Tower, he feels like a tourist; he no longer lives here: there are no fireworks above the trees, and it’s no one’s city and never will be.
He wakes in the morning to Zazi standing in the doorway of his bedroom, watching him. “The band, Vik,” she says, “is supposed to cause the commotion, not you.” She’s been edgy lately from the lack of sleep; Vikar doesn’t answer. “As I remember it, you were this notorious in New York, too.”
“Something comes over me,” he says, “the Sound comes over me.”
“We’ve talked to the club about letting you in again. So if you decide you want to come hear us again, maybe you can let the Sound come over you a little less.” She says, “In the meantime, we’re not playing tonight, and there’s this movie at Royce Hall I thought I’d check out.”
On the UCLA campus at Royce Hall, the printed announcement says that the silent film is to be accompanied on the Wurlitzer organ by the same man who Vikar heard play years before at the silent-movie theater on Fairfax. Before the screening begins, someone announces to the crowd that the accompanist will not be playing after all, adding that in fact the film’s director always had intended the film to be shown and watched in silence. “This is the first movie I ever saw in Los Angeles,” Vikar tells Zazi. Composed almost entirely in close-ups, the inquisition and execution of Joan as played by Maria Falconetti is all the more unbearable for the quiet; the audience can barely bring itself to applaud afterwards.
Shaken, Zazi finally says on the bus home, “That wasn’t even a movie. I don’t know what it was. It was a …
sighting
or something.”
“No wonder it drove her mad,” says Vikar. “No wonder she never made anything else.”
“You know what’s strange? This is going to sound strange, O.K.?”
“All right.”
“I mean crazy-strange. Like, you-won’t-believe-it strange.”
“All right.”
“But not that long ago, I dreamed this movie.”
“You did?”
“I mean, this same movie. How can that be?”
Vikar doesn’t answer.
“Of course I didn’t know it was a movie. When I dreamed it, I didn’t even know the woman was Joan of Arc. I mean, I’m not even sure I understand who Joan of Arc was. But I dreamed it, just like I saw it tonight, you know? scene for scene, I mean … is that like the weirdest thing? It was so vivid I even wrote it down when I woke up. Have you ever had a dream and then seen a movie of it?”
Vikar says nothing.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe it.”
That night Vikar’s dream returns more powerfully than it ever has. He’s so close he can almost touch the rock, and can almost see the face of the altar’s designated sacrifice. The white of the script glows so hot it almost burns him, and he reads it rather than just knows it:
Faith before love, blood before tears
.
After not reading a newspaper for months, Vikar scours the obituaries every day until it appears, and there’s even a picture of Chauncey from younger days, and a mention of his last scheduled engagement at a UCLA screening which he missed, as though the director of the film reached from the grave to silence the musician and protect his movie’s ministerial hush.
He arrives at the Whisky early to catch Zazi’s band, beating the rest of the crowd. The doorman eyes him warily, and as Vikar enters the club, another security man taps him on the shoulder. “Be cool,” he says. Vikar suppresses a compulsion to take the man’s finger and snap it back; he envisions the man falling to his knees in shock. Vikar positions himself at the edge of the Whisky’s stage and waits, until finally the lights dim slightly and the crowd behind him cheers, and Zazi’s band walks out.
Zazi’s band walks out—and stops in place. Not a chord has been strummed nor a cymbal tapped. The band stands onstage staring at the crowd; and Vikar turns to look.
There behind him is a sea of shaved heads, every one tattooed. There are no other Elizabeth Taylors or Montgomery Clifts from
A Place in the Sun
. But there are three or four Nosferatus, one or two Anita Ekbergs frolicking in the Trevi Fountain from
La Dolce Vita
, half a dozen Bogarts from
Casablanca
or
The Maltese Falcon
or
The Big Sleep
and another half dozen Belmondos doing his impression of Bogart in
Breathless
, surprisingly more Louise Brookses from
Pandora’s Box
than the one or two obligatory Marilyns from
Seven Year Itch
and Brandos from
The Wild One
and James Deans from
Rebel Without a Cause
, and many Alexes from
A Clockwork Orange
and even more Travis Bickles from
Taxi Driver
. If Max and Travis Bickle themselves were there, each would have a tattoo of the other. They’re all behind Vikar watching him, as though he’s the general of an army, leading the children in revolt against gods and fathers.
One night when Zazi is recording with her band at a studio in Hollywood on Cherokee, Vikar goes to the Nuart to see a “Forbidden Films” double bill. The first film is a Japanese movie about a young model who arrives one day at an art gallery showing an exhibition of bondage photos for which she’s posed. There she sees a man running his hands over a sculpture of her; feeling as though his hands are on her own body, she flees the gallery. Later she makes an appointment with a blind masseur, whose touch the woman is startled to find she recognizes: “I have eyes in my fingers,” he announces; and before he chloroforms her into unconsciousness, she rips the dark glasses from his face to recognize him as the man from the gallery. When she comes to, she’s in a strange warehouse, cavernous as a cathedral. On the walls are the sculptures of eyes, noses, mouths, torsos, arms and legs, and as she scurries among the shadows to elude her abductor, she scrambles over monumental replications of reclining female bodies, lurking in the valley of monumental breasts, darting in the ravine of monumental thighs. Imprisoned in the blind man’s studio where he sculpts a statue of her, eventually she becomes blinded herself by the endless darkness; seducing her captor, she becomes not just the model of his art but the art itself, the blind sculptor lopping off real arms, real limbs. Over and over he says,
I have eyes in my fingers
.
The second movie on the double bill is a porn film. It’s not like any porn film Vikar has seen, or like any other kind of film: a woman in a psychiatric ward is having sexual hallucinations and surreal sexual experiences; in one scene she has sex with two jacks-in-the-box, in another she’s in the Arabian desert at night being taken by two men, one at each end of her, while a low muttering continues unabated as the only soundtrack. In another scene she’s a slave of the Devil in a Hell of smoke and burning coals. Another female slave chained to the rocks exhorts the Devil on as he violates the star of the movie in a number of ways. He has a two-pronged pitchfork, one prong larger than the other, which he can insert in two orifices at the same time. As the Devil has her, in the background is the endless clashing and surging of machinery and people crying out.
