Amnesiascope: A Novel (7 page)

At first it was simple. There was only one rule you had to know about being a critic, which was that everything that isn’t underrated is overrated. You can plug into this equation any movie or director or actor and stake out a position accordingly, taking into account of course that something is underrated right up to the moment it becomes overrated, which it remains until the inevitable backlash and it becomes underrated again. The point where the culture’s adoration or contempt is finely balanced, suspended in a place of perfect proportion, does not exist; some years back I myself was both underrated and overrated at the same time. Beyond this simple algebra I admit there was a brief period when, secretly, naively, I held out hope for something more. I hoped that in the city of no politics, no identity, no moment and no rationale, a new cinema would present itself, which I called the Cinema of Hysteria. I was convinced that throughout the Twentieth Century this clandestine cinema was already forming though no one noticed, since by its very nature it was scattered and entropic and found only in outposts represented by such movies as
In a Lonely Place, The Shanghai Gesture, Bride of Frankenstein, A Place in the Sun, Gilda, Gun Crazy, Vertigo, One-Eyed Jacks, Splendor in the Grass, The Fountainhead, The Manchurian Candidate
and
Pinocchio
. These are movies that make no sense at all—and we understand them completely. These are the movies that would be left when the bottom fell out of America altogether, the cinema that would rip itself loose of its moorings and stutter across an American screen that remembers nothing. In an age riddled with uncertainty by technological acceleration, financial upheaval and the plague of exchanged bodily fluids, when we’re panicked enough to root ourselves in anything we can still pretend to recognize—a job, a girlfriend, a heavily annotated calendar or Rolodex updated with correct area codes—the undercurrent of the age pulls us to an irrational truth, for which only an irrational cinema is sufficient. In the end this cinema resides at either the bottom of the psyche or the very top, the final shrill expression of a truth beyond words and thought, addressing the concerns of obsession and redemption that are beyond the rational calculations of technology or the rational price of finance or even the rational ravishment of plague.

It was only later that I realized there would be no such cinema for the very reason that made me a movie critic in the first place. As time and passion dwindle to a pinpoint, the audience has come to understand that it no longer need subject itself to the actual experience of art but can subsume and synthesize faster and more efficiently art that is already processed by critical interpretation. Even better and more efficient when, as the second critic responds to the first, the art is twice removed; even better, as the third critic responds to the second, three times removed. When it became clear to me that reviewers, commentators and professional observers of all stripe were the true wise men of the new epoch, I could also see that with each new exponential twist of the ongoing cultural logarithm, the artist was approaching that ideal Utopian moment when he or she would vanish altogether. Well I’m no dummy. As a novelist I felt myself getting less corporeal with every passing moment. Except that … except that after a while the tedium of reviewing movies that could neither be overrated nor underrated, that were not worth rating at all, started driving me crazy. So I couldn’t get it out of my head, my Cinema of Hysteria, when I sat down last week to review the revival and restoration of the long lost hysterical silent masterpiece
The Death of Marat
, by the legendary director Adolphe Sarre, who made the picture when he was twenty-five years old and never made another film. It was one of my best pieces. In fact, it may have been the best review I’ve ever written. Brilliantly analyzing the construction and montage, eloquently conveying the power of the lead actress’s performance, I surmised in breathtaking terms how the entire history of film might have been affected if
The Death of Marat
had gotten its due when it was first released; I even quoted an interview with D. W. Griffith in which he acknowledged the impact of
The Death of Marat
on his own work. All in all, watching this picture was one of the highlights of my career as a critic, I assured the readers—“an unforgettable movie experience”—and at the end of the piece I posed the haunting question as to what had become of Sarre, who must now surely be dead. I could only hope, I concluded, that he lived long enough to see his vision vindicated. Reading over this final coda practically brought tears to my own eyes.

My only real concern about the review was that there is no such movie as
The Death of Marat
and there is no such director as Adolphe Sarre. I made them up. Borrowing here and there from the French Revolution, I made up the movie’s plot, though only in bits and pieces, of course, since the critic never wants to give too much away; I made up the actors, I made up the sets, I made up camera angles. I made up cinemascope. The one thing in my review that was real was that there was indeed a filmmaker named D. W. Griffith, though the interview referred to I made up as well. By the time I got home from the newspaper after turning the piece in, I was already beginning to wonder what I was going to say when I was confronted with the fraud, as I would be in short order, if not momentarily. My best hope was that Dr. Billy O’Forte was the assigned editor on the piece; he would get the joke right away and maybe a good laugh out of it too, and then the two of us would have time to figure out what to do about my jape. We could just tell Shale I’d reviewed something else and gotten hopelessly bollixed on the job, and dump it altogether. Shale wouldn’t be happy about it but, all in all, not reviewing any movie was probably preferable to reviewing one that didn’t exist. A quick call to Dr. Billy, however, determined that he was not the editor on the piece, but that in fact Shale himself was editing. Shale wasn’t so likely to laugh about it. It would be like the time I wrote about that strip joint as the spiritual center of L.A. and had it thrown back in my face, with the difference being that there actually was a strip joint.

Any minute now Shale was going to call. I kept turning the telephone off and back on, figuring I might as well get it over with. This is the last straw, he would say, except—being Shale—he wouldn’t say it like that; he’d be tactful about it, sensitive to the deeper personal despair that had led me to this moment, his heart heavy with journalistic responsibility. Finally the phone rang. It was an odd conversation. He talked about trimming the second paragraph and rewriting the first sentence of the third; he argued that the middle section of the last graph was unnecessary. “Good piece,” he concluded.

“Uhm. …”

“Coming into the office tomorrow?”

“No, I. … Shale?”

What? he said; and Nothing, I said; and we hung up. For a while I sat there trying to figure out what was going on, and then it hit me: of course he was going to shame me into confessing. He was going to see how far I would let things go before I stopped them myself. Or. … Or it was a joke, I thought. He was turning the whole thing back on me, and there was no way it would get that far anyway, once it went to copy editors and fact-checkers and the art department. Was there a chance in hell that one of those anal-retentive twenty-year-olds in fact-checking would let this get by? So for the next forty-eight hours I jumped at the phone every time someone called, half mortified and half relieved I’d been discovered. When I didn’t hear from the copy editors at all, I actually relaxed, because that
had
to mean Shale killed the piece; the copy editors always had some complaint. But then one of the fact-checkers phoned, a particularly constipated kid who was constantly trying to argue with me over things he knew nothing about: “I want to ask you about your film review,” he mumbled, timorously since I’ve always made it a rule to take an especially nasty tone with fact-checkers. “Our reference book says he was twenty-four.”

“Who?”

“Adolphe Sarre.”

“Reference book. …”

“He was twenty-four when he made
The Death of Marat
.”

At first I went blank. Then suddenly I understood: “Sure,” I answered, laughing, “twenty-four, huh? I don’t know how I missed that one. Anything else?”

“Uh, no, everything else checks out. …”

“Oh good. That’s fine. I like it when everything checks out,” I went on, congratulating the hell out of him.

“OK,” he hung up, baffled. For half an hour I laughed about it, and then an hour later the art department called to ask if I had a still shot from the film they could run with the piece, and now I knew it was a joke; Shale even had the fact-checker and art director in on it. “Twenty-four in the reference book”—very funny. “A still shot to run with the piece”—hilarious. But after I was through laughing I started steeling myself again for the inevitable; sooner or later, once I had my fun and he had his fun, Shale would insist on a serious life-questioning discussion about whatever corroding inner rot was driving me to write about spiritual strip joints and non-existent movies. It wasn’t that he’d fire me, of course; like I’ve said before, Shale’s the kind of boss who gives you every chance before it comes to that. And in a way that made me feel all the more sheepish, because I’d taken advantage of his reasonableness, the way I always thought other people took advantage of it. I had indulged my boredom at his expense and the newspaper’s, and felt infantile about it; and over the next few days I kept meaning to telephone him and beg forgiveness, like a school kid whose teacher is waiting for him to own up to his transgression. For a week I dialed his number and hung up before he answered, increasingly tortured right up to the morning I picked up the new issue of the paper on the street and there it was on page thirteen, no photo but otherwise big as life: ADOLPHE SARRE’S HEROIC RESURRECTION was the headline.

I just stood there on the sidewalk staring at it in horror and disbelief. Shale would never have taken it this far; his editorial integrity was such that he might make a joke out of me or himself, but not the newspaper. That stupid “fact-checker” obviously looked up the wrong entry. He got my made-up movie completely mixed up with some other movie, and now the thing was in black-and-white in a hundred thousand newspapers. Before the day was out studios and theaters would be screaming, maybe threatening lawsuits; now it was entirely possible I
could
lose my job or, worse, Freud N. Johnson would demand it and Shale would once again throw his body in front of me like he’s done for half the other people at the newspaper, knowing it could lose him his job. I had precipitated a spectacularly foolish crisis, and I rushed back to the Hamblin and down the hall to Ventura’s apartment where I rapped desperately on the door. But he wasn’t there, so I went back to my suite and called Dr. Billy, but he didn’t answer either.

The hours passed. The phone didn’t ring, Dr. Billy didn’t answer, Ventura wasn’t home. Evening came, darkness fell, and still nothing happened; and then the night passed and the dawn came and the day passed again, and still nothing. And then the weekend passed and the beginning of the new week arrived and there was still only silence, except that at one point I could hear Ventura back in his apartment playing bebop on his stereo. But now I didn’t know what to say to him, since four days had passed without a word from anyone; I felt too stupid about the whole thing to even tell Viv. So I said nothing. …

But that first night after the
Marat
review hit the streets, as I was still waiting for the angry telephone to ring and my fraud to catch up with me, I had a thought I hadn’t had in years. For some reason or another, perhaps for no more reason than the fact that if I lost my job I wouldn’t have anything better to do, I began to think about actually writing another book, one last book I had reconciled myself long ago to never writing. Up out of the sea of my psyche ripped the glacier of my conscience, beneath the sky of memory; and in my mind I began to record the story of that traveler who is always trying to get across that glacier, scale its walls one more time as I had tried to do so many times before, before the exhaustion of passion, faith, energy and courage led me to give up. Lying on my bed in the dark I followed the traveler’s journey in my mind’s eye until he was out of sight. I followed him into my sleep, to the horizon where the white of the ice becomes the white of the sky and he disappears from view: “He disappears from view,” I think I muttered to myself before drifting off. But that doesn’t mean, a dream answered, he isn’t still there.

Woke up a few days ago with one of my headaches, the first I’ve had in a long time. At first it isn’t so bad but then it comes over my brain like a swarm, for two days, then three, then a week. … I went to see my acupuncturist in Little Tokyo; in a tiny dark room with the shades pulled I lie on a table and she sticks me with pins from the top of my skull to the toes on my feet. Since I always keep my eyes closed I can’t be sure what it is she uses to tap the needles in, but tap them she does, in my legs and my arms, in my shoulders and my face. I picture her with a tiny little hammer pounding the needle into my forehead: tap tap tap. Then she sets all the needles on fire. I hear her lighting them and I feel the heat. She leaves the room and I lie anxiously awaiting her return, my eyes closed tightly, twenty little torches blazing from my body, like an albino porcupine on fire.

As I anticipated, Abdul has been sacked. Rather, the jihad for whom Abdul works, the other Palestinian terrorists, have been sacked, by whatever bank or lending institution holds the mortgage on the building. Everything is thrown into chaos, which alarms the other tenants. I just go on like a man blithely walking through a battle, bodies and bullets flying all around him. My guess is that financially Abdul ran the Hamblin into the ground with his grand designs. He had big plans for redecorating the hotel entry-way, putting hardwood floors in all the apartments, garbage disposals in all the kitchen sinks. Given enough time he would have installed a swimming pool on the roof, with a tennis court. Of course it also took him six months to get the elevator and the plumbing fixed—but Abdul isn’t the kind of man to waste time on plumbing. What’s plumbing next to hardwood floors? Abdul is a landlord of vision, he can’t be bothered with mere repairs. He actually did lay a new hardwood floor in my old single apartment I just moved out of, which he then rented to a pretty girl from Indiana. Or, more likely, he laid the floor after he rented it to her, just so she wouldn’t have any doubts as to what a smooth character he is. Now Abdul is out as manager, figuratively if not literally out of his palatial apartment where he schemes his inevitable comeback, waiting for the financial and legal problems to be resolved and control of the building once again to be within his grasp. “It’s all bullshit,” he says with a sniff, contemptuously waving away the recent events. “
Tactics
.”