123.
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.”
122.
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.?”
121.
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.
120.
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.
119.
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.
118.
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.”
117.
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.