The other card, unfolded at last, read: I want to see you. I miss you. It’s suffocating on the road out in the world. PS I left the hospital and am heading east. All manner of dire request for your company on this expedition. Do not tarry. Do not pass go. Do not ignore me or you may not exist. Do not call or write. Just come here. Will be at Mom’s in New York by September.
Fidei Defensor, Michael
* * *VIDEO # 3
TITLE: MORE
GIRL on bed, legs crossed. Black-and-white, wobble-trembly, handheld.
MAX (O.S.)
You just talk about it.
GIRL puts her finger to her lips. She rubs her nail along the fleshy part of her lower lip, back and forth.
MAX (O.S.)
Stop that.
She looks at him, absent, continuing with her lip rubbing.
MAX (O.S.)
With the lip, stop. Get your fingers away from your mouth.
She stops, pulls her fingers away, and bites her lip in embarrassment, then she shrugs and sheepishly half-smiles.
MINA
Are you directing me? That’s exciting. (Pause.) It’s a habit. Do you ever wonder how it is that near-absentminded “nervous” habits offer so much comfort, but the comfort is only realized or thought of or appreciated after someoneorders you to stop? People flat out bark at you to stop as if they were saving you from some horrible mutilation, some regressive slide into nervous adolescence or an inadvertent pronouncement of neurosis. As if they were helping you. But it just gets on people’s nerves. It irks them. It grates.
MAX (O.S.)
You’re too self-conscious. Relax.
MINA
I can’t relax. I’m too self-conscious.
Abrupt cut to a close-up of GIRL’s hand. She massages the palm of one of her hands while staring at her thumb, wrinkling her flesh. Then the camera pans slowly up her body back to her face.
MINA
Can you really massage yourself? Does the pleasure of it derive from being acted upon by another body? Or is it like masturbation, where the fact that you know exactly what feels good almost makes up for the fact you have to do it yourself?
MAX (O.S.)
You don’t have to speak.
Abruptly stops rubbing.
MINA
No, it’s not like masturbation. It really isn’t satisfying to give yourself a massage.
GIRL just sits there. She yawns.
MAX (O.S.)
Mina, tell me. What’s in your head, this second?
MINA
Nothing, truly, there is nothing, just embarrassment, and beyond that a wish to please you, and beyond that, some real anger and hostility.
MAX (O.S.)
Just stop talking about your feelings, and tell me your thoughts, your random thoughts.
MINA
Hostility at you, at your trapping me here like this.
MAX (O.S.)
You just say the sentences in your head, the phrases, whatever. You don’t sum, don’t make it analytical.
MINA
I would say the hostility is paramount, it’s really the main thing at this point. I mean over thedesire to please and the embarrassment and the anger. If one wanted to construct a sort of hierarchy of emotion.
MAX (O.S.)
Mina.
MINA
I mean, to think that my vanity would allow me to accept the horrendous terms of being on the wrong end of a camera. To think I might enjoy the attention, your amplified attention. To be literally objectified and directed and exposed. Willingly manipulated only to discover later I really am ugly, really chew my lip like a ward case, really lose my chin when I laugh.
The camera moves into extreme close-up of her mouth, distorting her face, then abruptly cuts to her hands again, then back to her face. She seems animated, hyped up, excited by the noises coming out of her mouth.
MINA
There are a thousand little things one has no idea of, I mean in terms of how we come across. A gaze in the mirror is nothing. A gaze in the mirror is like a glance. A controlled moment of self-regard, a necessarily fixed thing. You only see yourself looking. But to be seen animated, looking down, looking away, talking, moving, is another world. All the thousand details of howyou move through any gesture, the true horror of your own exposed humanness, the thousand ways you give yourself away, off guard. And of the thousand, nine hundred are ugly. At least nine hundred or so are easily unattractive, if not repulsive. And the sad thing—
MAX (O.S.)
It’s about letting go of camera awareness. It’s about telling the truth. The truth is interesting.
MINA
The sad thing is you realize it has to be sort of petty vanity that got you here in the first place, in this disgusting position. And you can’t resist it. Disgust, hostility still, but mostly disgust.
The camera wobbles a little. Then it is a static shot from a tripod. She looks off to the left, where the cameraman has moved, still off screen, but apparently away from the camera.
MAX (O.S.)
The only thing that doesn’t work, Mina, the only thing that fails on camera is to be uninteresting. Boring people. The easiest way to be interesting is to tell the truth. The harder, deeper, more vicious the truth, the more fascinating. That is it, fascination, that’s what the camera loves.
GIRL pulls out a cigarette. Max throws her a lighter from off camera.
MAX (O.S.)
Abstracted pontificating about the nature of the camera’s gaze is not fascinating. Much, much more difficult to fascinate if you try something fancy. Much easier to bore.
She shakes her head, smiling.
MINA
Hostility, Max, huge mountains of nonabstract anger and hostility.
MAX (O.S.)
Hmm. You might shut up. Or you might not. This is the suspense, the narrative drive of this video. Will she ever shut the fuck up?
MINA
Max?