Mature Themes Read online

  MATURE THEMES

  Andrew Durbin

  Nightboat Books

  New York

  © 2014 by Andrew Durbin

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States

  ISBN: 978-1-937658-23-6

  eISBN: 978-1-937658-29-8

  INTERIOR AND COVER DESIGN: Familiar

  COVER ART: Body Without Organs, by Alex Da Corte, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

  Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress

  Distributed by the University Press of New England

  One Court Street

  Lenanon, NH 03766

  www.upne.com

  Nightboat Books

  New York

  www.nightboat.org

  CONTENTS

  THE CANYONS

  SMILE ON A JET

  NEXT-LEVEL SPLEEN

  LANDSCAPES WITHOUT END

  SIGHING FROM ABOVE

  PRISM

  SIR DRONE

  WARM LEATHERETTE

  TRACK STAR

  RE: “SMILE ON A JET”

  MONICA MAJOLI

  I WENT DOWN TO THE BEACH

  YOU ARE MY DUCATI

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Even if the words, the fantasies, and the desire are all there, there s this awful policeman who is also there, alive

  @Horse_ebooks

  THE CANYONS

  I once met a television producer who asked me if I had any ideas for a movie. We connected on the cramped set of a new reality-style sitcom he was producing for ABC called Modern Family. The director of the pilot introduced us as “two people who should really get to know one another” and praised us both for our work with him in the past. Modern Family is about the short-range social economy of a “non-traditional” family in southern California that remains close despite a variety of cultural interventions. Its politics are asymmetrical: the emphasis placed on the non-traditional in the family unit describes a program of normalization disguised as difference, making the show’s central focus the slapstick of a self-subverting desire in queerness to replicate that structure more perfectly. Difference is translated into the reenforcing dogma of “family values,” renewed (and concealed) by a “progressive” inclusion of gays and immigrants into its image of itself. It is always sunny and the comedy fairly tame, though occasionally the show touches on complex issues like gender roles, aging, and sex politics. This is how the producer described the sitcom to me. He never stopped smiling.

  After the director returned to the shoot, the producer put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed it, and said, “Let’s talk.” He took me to a backroom, where production stored an outdoor table and deck chairs next to a grill, on top of which a rack of plastic ribs glistened under the halogen lights. He took a seat in a lawn chair opposite me and called for his assistant, who brought him a cappuccino but didn’t ask me if I wanted anything. The cappuccino’s foam swelled to the edge of the porcelain cup, nearly spilling over onto the little blue serving dish. The fluffed milk looked like the big clouds I saw drifting over the middle of the country as I flew to California the day before. The producer brought the cappuccino to his lips, paused a moment, then set it down after taking a sip.

  “A writer like you,” he said, “must have some great ideas for the movies, right?” I nodded. “Let me tell you the kind of thing we’re looking for. It’s simple. We want something fresh. Young. But not necessarily something for teens. It can appeal to teens, of course. We actually want that. Just not ... explicitly? It has to be,” he paused to finally take a sip of his coffee, “it has to be something dark. Not too dark, right. No vampires, but still in the Twilight market, if you follow me.” I thought about the Twilight market. He looked at me and flattened his tight smile into something like a frown.

  “So do you have anything for me?”

  I tried to put together my ideas in my head. Movies are immortal, I thought, but I’d never been sure whether or not Hollywood was right for me. Film was once our window into the present, “public consciousness” and probably the future, too. Now it seems television is the only worthwhile platform for the communication of real ideas. Could movies be that again? The clouds in the movies have always seemed more real to me than those on TV. There would be no clouds on Modern Family, that was certain, and I was not sure I could work in a world without clouds.

  I looked at the producer. “I have an idea,” I said, “for a film titled The Canyons.”

  The producer smiled. “OK. Shoot.”

  I pulled out my notebook and read from it: “In The Canyons, the post-Fordist mode of production has collapsed and its constituent parts have broken down under the strain of the resolve of those who oppose it and those who have worked to create new, virtualized alternatives exploding in the street. Nevertheless, their mechanics, and therefore the engineering requisite to dismantle them, remain permanently invisible to those it controls. Your beautiful, holographic face shimmers at the horizon with every totality that underlies my suspicion of your resurgent unity, despite what you do to contradict the burgeoning technologies that grapple with you. I’ve always had this feeling, almost always had this sense of the facts, that the importance of resolution over craft is one of the most important shifts in art making besides the creation of Photoshop and the invention of the death of painting. There is no plot in The Canyons, only its process and a description of the potential of this process as it scales the medium that subsumes you. While the network of these realities is limited, it is singular in its reinforcement of the so-called norm, under which lie the halogen lights that give every tile on the kitchen floor the ambience of a mansion in the Hills. Beneath those lights, there are only more lights. In The Canyons, everything is self-erasing and its only goal is to force its viewers to stare into its prismatic light until they lose focus in the digital assemblage that unfurls there, a total work in which Lindsay Lohan, the star of the film, is purged in flames and emerges as pure fantasy set to the dimensions of the tyranny of her infinite replication across all screens, on all devices. It is not the future. It is the present. It is a lovely, nostalgic music for a Hollywood we have dreamt of but never known. The process disassembles and returns to hazardous life as always, bringing you with it through its impossible survival. Eventually Lindsay dissolves or moves her hand to her face to pull it away and reveal her true self, the flat complex of appearances that manifests on the surface as a system of revelations that remain true even when proven false.”

  I bought popcorn for the usual price but snuck in my own soda. I went into theater 7 on the left and quickly found a seat before the film started. After a number of trailers for all the movies I couldn’t wait to see, Lindsay Lohan’s distraught face appeared on the screen, tucked into the wide light of the desert and the smoky wreckage of her Porsche. Her face was smudged with dirt and makeup as she crawled out from a roadside ditch, where her car had crashed after one of its tires hit a spike on the road in one of the desert’s numerous obstacles that spares a starlet but kills everyone else. A few stray clouds gathered above her. The camera panned to reveal the empty expanse of earth while the light swelled around her and she summed up her future on the highway. She wondered whether or not she would die there, stalled halfway to Los Angeles. I thought about her famous quote: “Hopefully people will remember me for my work, not my car accidents.” The screen went dark and the words

  THE CANYONS

  appeared.

  I had read the film’s synopsis on Fandango earlier in the afternoon when I purchased my ticket: Paul Schrader’s new film, The Canyons, written by novelist Bret Easton Ellis, is a contemporary noir about the dangers of sexual obsession and the knots ambition produces in the lives of two characters, played by Lindsay Loha
n and James Deen, a famous straight porn star whose substitution of an e for an a produces an uncanny transformation when you watch him “pound the shit” out of some blonde costar, erasing, by the audacity of his enthusiasm for fucking, any memory of the James Dean whose body exploded with equal enthusiasm in a car accident much like Lindsay’s car exploded in the desert in The Canyons. She lives and he died. I thought: This is the film I have been waiting for, and ordered my ticket.

  The Canyons is about a group of young people in their mid- to late twenties and how one chance meeting in the past unravels their lives, resulting in deceit, paranoia, and the cruel mind games that lead to ultimate violence, ultimate in that the slashing of Lindsay Lohan’s throat closes the film. After the first scene, the film cut to the opening credits, then flashed back in time. Lindsay lounged in a blue tub, canopied by houseplants lingering off the edge of the bathroom windowsill. She ran her manicured hand over the edge of the tub, a gesture the camera zoomed in on. She moved her hand slowly, back and forth, letting water drip off her fingers to the tile floor below.

  Producer Braxton Pope approached Lindsay Lohan’s manager about the possibility of her playing a cameo in a new film by Paul Schrader, but during a meeting with Pope and Schrader, Lindsay said she wanted to play the lead. Two weeks later she screen-tested in the radiance of her very public decline and was cast as Tara in The Canyons.

  Braxton later told a reporter for the Hollywood Insider: “She’s very charismatic and she has a lot of acting skills ... So for this part, we felt that she was really the right actor for a host of different reasons.” Other actresses considered for Tara’s role were Monica Gambee, Amalia Culp, Amanda Booth, Julissa Lopez, Fleur Saville, Lamorae Octavia, Houda Shretah, Larissa Vereza, Jamie Vandyke, Leigha Kingsley, and Ksenia Lauren. The casting director also expressed interest in French actress Leslie Couterrand, whom she felt had the look of someone who could “die gorgeously” in the desert outside Los Angeles. But when they brought Coutterand out to the Antelope Valley to screen test on site, she looked at the sand and refused to get out of the car.

  Early on, the filmmakers considered casting Sean Brosnan as Christian, but when Monica Gambee fell through, they wanted to cast somebody more edgy and unexpected. Ellis, who in recent years has developed a strong interest in straight porn, had mentioned several times that he had Deen in mind for Christian’s role. Schrader was reluctant at first to cast Deen out of fear that a curse might befall the set should they attempt to spiritually erase the ultrastar of the original James Dean in the course of the production of The Canyons. In the hope of assuaging the murky guilt that surrounded the set, Pope purchased Dean’s infamous Porsche, dreamiest coffin of the last century, and hid it in a shed at an undisclosed location in Imperial County until the film’s release. Deen went on record to say he did not share Schrader’s concern, but that did not stop him from privately encouraging Pope to purchase the vehicle. Other actors who had been considered for Christian’s role were Zane Holtz, Alex Meraz, and Daren Kagasoff.

  When Gina’s character was cast, the primary concern was whether or not the actress could work against Lindsay Lohan onscreen. The point was not to be ravishing but to ravish the camera in redress against its intrusion on their youth, Schrader said, and so they needed someone who could resist Lohan. A villain, more or less. After many auditions, Brooks was cast because she was overheard snickering at Lohan when she arrived on set the morning of her audition, visibly intoxicated. Other actresses that had been considered were Jenni Melear, Elizabeth Guest, Eline Van Der Velden, Spencer Grammer, Emma Dubery, and Jessica Morris.

  When asked about casting The Canyons during an E! Entertainment interview, Bret Easton Ellis said: “Dealing with the casting of The Canyons was a great, liberating process—for both the production team and for the actors in general. We saw some amazing people that we will definitely keep in mind for future projects. The way the entire cast came together so quickly was a thrill and everyone who landed their roles deserved them. Using social media,” referring to the Let It Cast method of finding talent online, “as a way to help build a film is really like riding the wave into the future.”

  Pope said to the same interviewer: “Nothing about this film was orchestrated in a traditional way. We wanted to actively embrace all the digital and social media tools at our disposal and give the film real cinematic value. The Canyons is the result of a forward thinking experiment with a terrific cast.”

  Schrader said: “Bret Easton Ellis’s characters are beautiful people doing bad things in nice rooms. Lindsay Lohan and James Deen not only have the acting talent they also have that screen quality that keeps you watching their every move.”

  Youth is boundless. In this it resembles everything else. The future has erased the need for us to consider our bodies in terms of their need. I live in a chamber in the canyons surrounded by the screens that drift over me, broadcasting the faces of friends lost in whatever poor connection remains to bring us close, friends whose voices tend to my every whim, whatever they may be. I spend my days lying in the bath, though I cannot say who draws it for me. When I consider leaving this place I shudder and remember my happiness by pinching myself. Since I no longer feel pain, I feel nothing, which in things-as-they-are is exactly as I want them to be. I think about idols and the Venus who fell to the earth and was, for some time, rumored to live among us. Did you know her when she was alive? Do you recall seeing her across the pool in summer or has even that time relapsed and expunged from your memory the moment you later made eye contact at the hotel bar? Her smudged makeup cannot be restored; it too has receded into channels of a televised past, glittery in static, a face from which you cannot remove your gaze. The light is deep, every toilet seat pink. The weather distends any sense of time. It is only ever the best of summers, warm but cool. When it was hot, as it so often was, I used to lie on my kitchen floor, wondering when it would end. Now that it has ended, the present is soft and replete with pillows that surround you. I love my home, where everything appears on TV. And though you wouldn’t have known it at the time, by the end of the nineties, this future was more or less ensured.

  SMILE

  ON A JET

  going west, I look down from my Delta flight to California below, territory of the imaginary in which clouds ring out utopias of the golden earth, rivers of milk, rivers of excess that flow to Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” ringleader of the virgins encased in his remote adulthood, he wears chastity like a veil to reinforce tween sex appeal, which of course would be violated were you to touch him, oh oh oh I cannot die I cannot be killed I can only fly across the surface of the continent below, landscapes of undying splendor and adoring peoples who shuffle en masse to see me, everywhere, at once, hemorrhaging category of the straight male, starstruck by the excess of disruptive totalities, bodies in a gym or smiling on a jet, out of which, oof, their structuring comes in a wave, or as Paul Virilio writes in The Information Bomb, “the smaller the world becomes as a result of the relativistic effect of telecommunications,” meaning Justin Bieber’s Instagram, “the more violently situations are concertinaed, with the risk of economic and social crash that would merely be the extension of the visual crash of this ‘market of the visible,’ in which the virtual bubble of the (interconnected) financial markets is never anything other than the inevitable consequence of the visual bubble of a politics that has become panoptical and cybernetic,” i.e., in bringing it all together, the net of disarrayed particulars finally bucks the subjective field in which a holographic Bieber moves, ensconced in his private jet, or more to the point, the murder plot unravels but ends to reverse expectation and defers death across the event horizon, into evening, where the oldest man with a Justin Bieber tattoo meets co-conspirator to finalize his plan to castrate and murder the pop star, in a bunker where we regroup to arrange powers of attorney, flowers climbing up the walls, my fingers close around the rail as I deplane at SFO, which is not difficult though with an eye on the long view it might become im
possible, submerged in fog, going about for days, until I reach my advanced age, in and out of feeling and deciding that, truly, the most beautiful place-name in the United States is Embarcadero, Spanish for wharf, a place of departure, I remember renting a van and driving around San Francisco at night, powerful force of country music registering within its coordinates the activity of memory, the split second at which I enjoyed seeing the word Divisadaro on a sign, wondering what exactly Justin Bieber will remember of his travels, his name which I almost wrote here as Justine, like the character in the famous porno fantasy of the Marquis de Sade, prisoner of unsplit will, masculinity reinscribed in the supple dictator’s body around which non-male-assigned bodies cavort until twisted into the chain-link fence that surrounds him, the Marquis, writing on toilet paper, Justine Bieber writing on his iPhone, a hundred wonders that ought to be forgotten but not the alleged nude photos that prevail online and his balls at the tip of a knife, such a different implosion of particulars that makes up a night in San Francisco vs. a night at the Kids’ Choice Awards, onstage, splashed by slime as is Nickelodeon’s custom, and to think, even green goo, the texture of semen, became a corporate signifier, Justine, Justine, I want to call out as I watch him drenched in neon DNA, the purple sky above me untouched by the fog of the bay, so atypical I suppose, but everything is not misfortune and with enough drive the speed to escape this vantage point of the unholy world is enough to propel you beyond, into the nonspace of air travel, globalized bodies of pop stardom, Thérèse beset by misfortune, brought to the mud to make it holy again, the Madame de Lorsagne clearing Thérèse of any crime until she is struck, not by lightning but by the moralistic literary device of a culture about to be wiped off the map, I’m not criticizing de Sade I’m only suggesting this might be his critique, so I head up north to the Redwoods, where, by the end of the twentieth century, 95% of the forest was sawed down to furnish us with a forest of the dead, a ghost wood, the encompassing home of the lost brought together by the crisp air of another day, my feet placed firmly on the spongy earth, I walk with a friend to a tree where many people photograph themselves, likely the most photographed tree in the park, into which I carve Justine, name of our roseate exegesis and a totem, worthy of violation of the law to be written into one of the members of the 5% as permanent fixture, the lonely forest, the place I wish I knew best, which I cannot pass through with the speed necessary to forget it was ever such a roaming territory, endless once, a world of giants in which the living prevailed alone among the branches