61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
Annabel Duffy calls her boss Minivan, because her boss is that large. The size of a minivan. In the interiors of her consciousness, Annabel begins or ends all business-related exchanges thus, "Minivan, can I get you some coffee?" She thinks, "Gosh, that designer suit looks fetching on you, Minivan." She thinks, Minivan, Minivan, Minivan. Because it's the one effective rejoinder to the oppressions that Vanessa Meandro visits upon her. Like the day Annabel came to interview at 610 Fifth Avenue. Minivan had apparently decided to break down Annabel until she was a quivering protoplasmic blob. Minivan indicated, in this preliminary interview, that she'd interviewed no one but "anal-compulsive gay men" for three days, and Minivan made it clear that she could not work with these men, because they were "prima donnas." What Minivan needed — and as she made her need clear, she rose up, swelling and posturing — was someone who would submit, someone who could sleep on a bed of nails, someone who could take an hour on the rack and demand more, someone who would be an untouchable, in the Hindu sense, without complaint, who would even be grateful for it. Did Annabel think she was this person? Bullshit. Annabel had no idea what submission meant! Annabel did not yet know what was required, because she had not yet been forged in the underworld furnace of Minivan. It was clear to Annabel that Minivan was appraising Annabel's presentability as she made this observation, that she was checking out Annabel's skin tone, which was a much darker skin tone than that of any other employee in the office. But there was something carnivorous about the gaze, too. She was checking out Annabel's breasts and ass, and because of this, Annabel made her first subversive assumption about Minivan: big dyke.
Still, no informed hypothesis about Minivan's personal life has ever been borne out by cold, hard facts. Minivan has never appeared to have a personal life. No men, no women, no pets. And Annabel, as the ass't, has dealt with every aspect of Minivan's character. Annabel makes Minivan's appointments at that spa in Arizona that specializes in overeaters. Annabel fires
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Minivan's therapists every few months and gets new referrals. Annabel has learned about Klonopin, Ambien, Paxil, Wellbutrin, and Halcion; she has learned about cocktails of mood stabilizers, antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications; she has substituted lithium for Depakote, Serzonne for Lamictal or Lexapro or Zoloft, which she substituted for Prozac, has held out anti-anxiety medication in her palm because Minivan, with remarkable insight into her own character, has noted that she isn't to be trusted to keep the prescription in her own desk. Since Annabel has been doing all of these things for Minivan, Annabel believes she would have known about a girlfriend, if a girlfriend in fact existed.
The name of the company shall be Means of Production, referring here to a meanness of character, paucity of compassion. Minivan will not commit to this interpretation, because she will not commit to any interpretation. Minivan is about pragmatism, realpolitik. Every complaint about Annabel Duffy's on-the-job performance also contains discussion of Annabel's weight, as Annabel is willowy, svelte, twiggy. "You know you're not supposed to see all the bones in your elbow. If you can see them, there is a problem. Think about it." Or: "Is this a political thing with you? Not eating? You're expressing solidarity with subsistence farmers of developing nations? Or: "You're making me look bad, Duffy. I didn't hire you to look like a model. You're in here in a mini-skirt in order to make me look like a whale. Am I right? Wear a garbage bag or something. Wear a warm-up suit. Go down to Old Navy and buy a fucking warm-up suit that's four sizes too big and wrap yourself in Ace bandages or something. This is not an environment that I can work in. Go eat a sundae. Get two sundaes, in fact. Bring one back for me."
Traditional Hollywood fare. Like all those mailroom stories, some of which Minivan is fond of telling herself. The producer, for example, who used to walk around in the parking lot, first thing in the morning, checking the hoods of his employees' cars to see how warm they were. The guy with the warmest hood was insufficiently ambitious. Gluttony, selfishness, megalomania, chocolate addiction, pathological lying, promiscuity, obsessive-compulsive disorder. The world of cinema. And yet there are two reasons why Annabel continues to work for Vanessa Meandro. The first reason is a steadfast if misguided belief in the possibility of tenderness. As Annabel conceives of it, the moment of tenderness is not a theory, but a genuine eventuality, like democracy in China
Offenders had that incredibly moving passage where the teacher and her thirteen-year-old lover go skydiving together, just before neighbors inform on them.
or a Middle East peace accord. Minivan, one day, will have to express this kindness, if only by accident. There is no other way to think about the world. The longer Annabel works, the more likely is the moment of tenderness, the more Annabel wants to be present when the inconceivable happens, when the world of light opens in Minivan like a flower. Greatness in the film world happens in inconceivable moments. When the predictable torrents of horror films for teenagers have overspilled the drains and sewers and engulfed the corners of all the sidewalks, then the rain will stop, and the sun will rise, and only Annabel will continue to believe in it, a moment of tenderness.
Maybe if it were only the moment of tenderness, Annabel would not have stuck it out for almost three years, having taken the position fresh from the college in western Massachusetts with the experimental curriculum. The other reason to stay is her screenplay. During the workday, Annabel acts out the ingénue roles of Juliette or Justine, while at night she has begun working on a screenplay about the wife of the Marquis de Sade, called Fire Eater. Despite the lack of easy financing inherent in the kinds of projects Minivan favors, she has continued to make great movies. And Annabel knows, eventually, that even if she must be subjected to the very kind of torture that the Marquis visited upon his wife, which includes, in Annabel's screenplay, experimenting with erotic asphyxiation, penetrating his wife with devices, encouraging others to do so, fucking teenage boys in front of his wife, demanding that teenage boys fuck him in front of his wife, sexually abusing neighborhood kids, forcing his wife to sodomize him, Annabel knows eventually that Minivan will see the light about Fire Eater, and Annabel's project will fit right into a means of Means of Production release schedule that includes an entire film made about Charles Manson's final remarks before sentencing; a film about the last years of the life of Mark Rothko; a film about the arrest of the Weather Underground; a George Jones biopic; and the celebrated Means of Production love story, Offenders, about the middle-school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, who romanced her student. Offenders had that incredibly moving passage where the teacher and her thirteen-year-old lover go skydiving together, just before neighbors inform on them. Here's the moment that critics, at least at the alternative weeklies, liked so much, that moment in the trailers, when Mary Kay's thirteen-year-old lover gets ready to leap out of the plane at the behest of their instructor. He has no fear, and the blue sky outside the plane looks almost colorized, a tissue paper cloud here and there. He's attached to the cable that ensures that the parachute opens properly, and he looks back at Mary Kay, a goofy grin on his face, because he is afraid of nothing. He thinks that the whole world is a professional wrestling episode. Mary Kay, however, knows what this dive means. Suddenly she's reaching out to him, but he's gone, their hands failing to meet, causing her to jump, too, and the plane banks left, and their chutes open, and the sere flatlands of the Northwest are below them, and a married woman has just thrown away her life for a profane love. Never has the sound of the wind sounded so desolate. The absence of music makes the film more persuasive. Lili Taylor's finest moment, really.
Annabel knows that a certain rarified segment of the filmgoing public has exited at the conclusion of every film produced by Minivan determined to overthrow a despot or to work for the legal aid society or maybe just to make a film. Everyone at her school in western Massachusetts, the one with the free-form curriculum, felt this way. Half of them had trooped through the Means of Production office, it seemed , trying to get Minivan to back their documentary on the making of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. No? How about a film about the new East Village orgy scene?
On her day off, Election Day, which had not really been a day off, Annabel had chased down a new wristwatch for Minivan and fired another intern, she had worked on her script at the office, and only then had she gone to stand in the line to vote on Seventh Street, where the elderly Hispanic ladies manning the booths
It was during this sequence that Thaddeus, with great concentration, uttered the words, "Jesus wept, motherfucker," displaying a conviction rarely seen in modern cinema.
were showering the voters with abuse. When she finished voting, it was after nine. Which was when Thaddeus came over. His wife, the commercial actress, had gone to San Diego to work on something, so Thaddeus was waiting on Annabel's stoop when she got home. He complained the whole way up the four flights, as usual, "Haven't you ever heard of elevators? Everywhere else they have elevators. They comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I have a tobacco-related disability. I'd prefer to have a ground-floor liaison, if you please."
Thaddeus Griffin. She's seen him holding a gun so many times that it seems like he should always be carrying one, an Armalite or a Kalashnikov. Thaddeus Griffin, starring with a token African-American pal, in Single Bullet II. Thaddeus Griffin, starring in Full Magazine, about a heartbroken editor for a mercenary periodical who gets involved in a conspiracy to shoot the president, here starring alongside another token African-American pal. Thaddeus, in fact, has never made a good film, despite having been brought up in New York City, and despite having attended Union College in Schenectady, where he nearly graduated with a degree in marine biology. Thaddeus Griffin, the guy who comes to her house and weeps about his marriage, and then with almost bloodless suddenness launches into a forced jocularity that would pass for charm on the networks. Everything is a joke! He can imitate anyone! He imitates his agent! He imitates studio heads and television personalities! He does his ongoing impression of Minivan! He'll get an entire sushi roll in each side of his mouth, like when they were at that place on Ninth Street, and he starts talking about Michel Foucault, and how knowledge is power, with sushi rolls in his mouth. Despite renting an office with Minivan for a year and a half, she has yet to cast him in anything, even though he has given her free script advice and taken Minivan out to Balthazar for dinner with one of the principals of DreamWorks, even pitched a script about the death of Trotsky to the studios for her. The favor bank has worked in one direction only.
Thaddeus's campaign to know Annabel more perfectly is coincident with his fading prospects around the office of Means of Production. The campaign went like this. First, of course, he proposed to read the draft of Fire Eater, which he claimed to like. Then he invited Annabel out for drinks to discuss the script, at the history-laden Cedar Tavern. Three times people stopped him to say, "Hey, you're the guy who killed that terrorist with a crossbow," which was, of course, the climax of the original Single Bullet Theory. It was during this sequence that Thaddeus, with great concentration, uttered the words, "Jesus wept, motherfucker," displaying a conviction rarely seen in modern cinema. You had to see it in context, really. And this was how he signed the table napkin, for a fan, in the middle of the ring left by his neat scotch: Single Malt Theory, Thad Griffin 2000.
"The script is really good," Thad offered, when they were alone. "Really out there. I like it. I admire what you know." Saying it in such a way that it was clear the opposite was the case. This seemed like the problem of celebrity, that the celeb could not uncouple him- or her- self from the burdens and privileges of fame. The safe, uncontroversial remark that the celebrity was trained to deliver became his only refuge. With Thaddeus, she could not walk the street unperturbed. He would say, "We have to keep moving." Maybe Thaddeus selected his profession for this reason, so he would always have an excuse to move. At the same time, maybe he was not as famous as he thought, maybe nobody gave a shit about his films, which were generally acknowledged as all but worthless. Annabel believed that action films were inherently conservative anyhow, that they existed solely to support libertarian positions on the Second Amendment. When you thought about it that way, you found pity for Thaddeus and his occasional attempts to be one of the people. You could see that Thaddeus had long since lost something, some set of skills that other people had; the ability to look up at the smoggy night sky, and to know that it existed without any input from him at all and without the cooperation of tabloids.
"The thing about reading the Marquis," he said, "the thing is that the Marquis really changes the way you think. I mean, you could just be going about your business, and then you open up, uh, what's that one called? You open up Philosophy in the Bedroom, and you hear what's his name, the philosopher character,
"Let me guess," she said. "You were thinking you'd never fucked a black girl before."
you hear him say 'Thrice Fuck of God, I discharge,' or whatever, and you know you are really being taken to a place where you don't ordinarily go, a place in your body, a place in your emotional life. All the women with the strap-ons, the innocent girls. You're in a lower part of nature, you know? You're in one of those videotapes that record lions out on the Serengeti taking down the gazelles and ripping into them. You're there, and now you know about bloodlust and power and the inner lives of men."
Low lighting and bar noise. He was trying hard.
"So tell me why you want to work with this material, anyhow? I mean, why not write a screenplay about a blond girl who wants to give etiquette lessons to disadvantaged classmates and who in the process becomes president of the United States?"
"The Marquise's life was like the lives of contemporary black women."
"How do you figure? Ten words or less."
"Her life was about intellectual and sexual slavery."
"Why not write about slavery then?"
"I might."
Theaddeus polished off the last of a second scotch, attacked a third. A cop show, sound off, performed its rote dance on the monitor above the bar. He stared at it, absently, while formulating his comeback. "Thing is, while I was reading the script, I did have that sensation that I could start eating steak tartare out of a dog bowl and it would be liberating somehow. I had to think. I mean, I couldn't help myself from thinking this one thing — "
"Let me guess," she'd said.
Thaddeus manufactured a facsimile of surprise. "Okay, go ahead. Guess."
"You were thinking you'd never fucked a black girl before."
"I can't believe you talk like that, Annabel," he said with mock horror. "It's making me perspire. Wait. Let me collect my thoughts. Actually, believe it or not, I have had relations with a black woman before, because I wasn't born yesterday. And I did have that black secretary character working with me in Oath of Citizens. On the novelty scale, the skin color thing just isn't that high up. The novelty scale, in fact, is not that big a deal. Although it is true that I've never fucked a black girl in the ass before."
Which indicated that it was now time for Annabel to leave. With a pig there was always time to leave. A decisive moment. Many had walked out of the Cedar Tavern. Over the century of its existence as a local tavern, many had walked out on provocateurs, drunkards, decadents, on hidden drug problems, on voluminous anxieties, on unquenchable insecurities, unnamed wives. What did these men offer? They offered to take you to your room, and then they offered to leave you in a bad, abrupt way. They were there, they were not there, hard to tell which was which, and then they came crawling back.
"Wait, I'm trying to talk about the script, I swear."
"You're twelve years older than I am. I've met your wife. She gave us those . . . those maple thingies at Christmas last year."
"Annabel! Sit!"
So he settled down. He told her that the Marquise needed to show her devotion and her desire to leave by page sixteen, that the church needed to be hunting down de Sade, with intent to kill, by the beginning of act two, that the Marquise needed to be helplessly in love with a priest, that Annabel needed to see that film with Glenda Jackson about Marat, and that she needed to get rid of the voiceover sections, because development people don't understand large blocks of voiceover. He had two more drinks while he was doing this, and next thing she knew they were in Tompkins Square Park, and Thaddeus Griffin, action film hero, dyed blond hair swept back
As it wore on, and wore was a good word for what it did, it became all about Thaddeus's cock.
perfectly as though it had been spray-painted on, was sitting on a bench sobbing, saying his work was worthless and he was a joke, he was a fucking joke. He said it was the worst thing imaginable, being a joke, and then he was saying, "Take me home with you. Just take me home with you, I'm too drunk to do anything, and anyway that's the stupidest thing in the world to do about loneliness, a drunken fuck. Just take me home with you, let me see your hair care products, let me know if your bathrobe is a tartan, or white, or one of those Japanese kimonos. I can't think about our stories going off in separate directions, like if I go back to my house, it's just going to be like a split-screen thing, and I can't take that."
She asked about his wife. His wife was in San Diego shooting a commercial, like she always was. She was always shooting a commercial. She had some kind of repeating character. Her residuals were excellent. The product had to do with feminine itch or bloating or medicated pads. "Did I say that my wife has an artificial eye, Annabel? My wife has an artificial eye. When you look into her eyes, you can see that the left one is artificial because the light is reflected from it in some weird way. Did I say that my wife only buys clothes online, or clothes given to her by designers, because she has a phobia about being seen shopping with me? Did I say that my wife and I had a photographer take a series of pictures of us strolling which we periodically release to the tabloids, just to make sure we control our public image? Take me home with you, Duffy. Recite to me the cantos of your life."
She did. And he passed out immediately.
After that, even though she was dating a few other guys, an assistant at the Michael Cohen Agency and a dean from the experimental college in western Mass., Thaddeus would turn up without notice, because things had to be flexible, and he would call from his car, coming down the west side, and he would ask if now was a good time, never asking if someone were there, but asking nonetheless, because he never expected that they were involved in anything but some amusing film world dalliance. As it wore on, and wore was a good word for what it did, it became all about Thaddeus's cock, which, against all her education and intellectual training, she somehow came to love. Why could women be smart, decisive, and brilliant, and then somehow irresolute at the sight of a cock? It was one of the depressing secrets of adult life. She loved his cock, because she was the Marquise, because she became the Marquise, because that was how it had to go, because by being the Marquise she overcame her, knew her, could write about her, because the Marquise had the skin of an Algerian, the Marquise was a Moor, and she was the Marquise, and she put the cock of film star Thaddeus Griffin in her mouth, and she put the cock of film star Thaddeus Griffin in her vagina, and she let the cock of Thaddeus Griffin erupt onto her dark skin, because he was film star Thaddeus Griffin and he wanted to do it that way. And he brought her a nose ring, and he paid for the tattoo on her lower back, just above her behind, and he had the best guys in the East Village do it, and he attended this assignation, and he begged her to pierce her nipples, and when he said "I want more," she felt stronger, which was what the business always wanted, it wanted more, so she gave more. She was the assistant who gave more, because she was the black assistant, and she felt stronger when she shouldered burdens ever more impossible. They wanted her to give more, just to stay in the game, and she laid up dreams in the attic of her consciousness, hoping, like a remedial hoper, for the moment of tenderness. But she never did that one thing he wanted, she never let him be the guy who fucked a black girl in the ass, because he had to be desperate for something.
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