I ARRIVE ON CLOWN Laurie’s street to discover her building has burned to the ground. There is nothing but a pile of smoldering rubble. Did I burn it down last night? I do not recall doing that. Of course I didn’t. Then why do I feel a sudden chill running either up or down my spine? I didn’t do it. Why would I have? I didn’t do it on purpose, certainly, but what if by accident I kicked over one or several of those many candles as I fled her apartment? I’m certain I didn’t kick over a candle or many. But what if I did and didn’t notice? But I did not. But maybe? What if I used the bathroom and lit a match after? But I didn’t. But did I? Were people killed? I search my phone for news of the fire. Arson is suspected, says an article in the West Fifties Bugle. No one was injured, but all the residents were given new identities by Witness Protection in an attempt to protect them from future assault by what authorities suspect is a possible unknown arsonist or burner, as the kids say. How will I ever find her now? Literally any woman of that approximate age, height, and stonage could be Laurie the Clown. I think she’s Caucasian but I’m not even sure of that; her white four-finger cartoon character mitts hid her hands. C’mon. Why would she leave those on if she didn’t know what I was about?
Walking the street has become a nightmare. Clown Laurie could be anywhere…everywhere. I call her employer, Clown-dation, and ask to speak to Laurie or formerly Laurie.
“There is no one here by that name or former name,” they tell me.
“You have to say that. Due to witness protecting and what have you.”
“Why don’t you give us your name and number and we’ll get back to you,” they say.
I sense a trap and hang up. No one is going to pin this murder on me. I mean arson. I mean possible arson. Sometimes I feel my thoughts are not my own, that I am thinking wrong things, stupid things, ridiculous things, for the amusement of an unseen audience.
The word unseen hangs in my brain like smoke.
I suffer from what Hume termed the disease of the learned. Simply put, I know too much. And not unlike Elephant Man David Merrick in the Bernard Pomerance play The Elephant Man: “Sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so filled with dreams.” Except in my case, my head is so big because it is so filled with knowledge, not to mention dreams. Of course, my head is not abnormally large or disfigured like Merrick’s, but at sixty-two centimeters, it is larger than the average. I sometimes playfully refer to myself as a Hume-an being.
“TELL ME,” SAYS an unpleasantly tanned and rested Barassini.
The meteorologist, accompanied by his near ubiquitous interior monologue, scribbles in his notebook: “The more I dig into the initial calculations, the more data I discover. Now not only am I able to chart and predict the motion of the air and the plant in the wind tunnel, but I can chart it from every angle, even from inside the cells of the plant. My animation of those first fifteen seconds now includes all of this. Presumably, it might also include smell, touch, and taste, if only there was a way to express those in a moving picture. The largest hurdle, of course, is still the limitation of the human brain. If I could devise a sophisticated-enough electronic calculating machine, I might be able to compute the results in close to real time and possibly at some point even faster. Only then would I have a proper predicting machine.”
At dinner, Tsai tells a story:
“On my way back from barre class, I cut across West 55th and pass a building fire. It is a building where my friend lives, so of course I stop out of concern. The dead, burnt, and mangled bodies of the tenants who had jumped litter the street. Then I see her in her window. Laurie the Clown. She jumps, makeup smeared, lands in the firemen’s net, and bounces all the way back up into her apartment window. The firemen yell for her to try again. Again she jumps and again bounces back up and into the fifth-floor window. They yell, ‘Again!’ This time when she hits the net, a fireman hurriedly places a bag of sand around her neck. This time she bounces into a third-story window. ‘More sand!’ yells the fireman to one of his fellows at the sand truck. Now she bounces into a second-story window. ‘Even more sand!’ yells the fireman as she jumps from the second-story window. This time she carries so much extra weight that she crashes through the net and lands on the sidewalk. It’s a funny bit but seems out of place with the terror of the moment: the flames, the black toxic smoke, the bodies writhing on the ground, the weeping onlookers.”
“Then why do you laugh?” I ask.
“I’m just relieved she’s OK,” Tsai says, covering.
I have laughed at this anecdote, too, of course. Everyone at this dinner party has, especially Conrad Veidt III. But is it out of relief as Tsai claims? I wonder if I’ve become inured somehow to the tragedies of others. Intellectually, I know jumping from a burning building is no joke, certainly not for the jumper or the family and friends of the jumper. Yet I find myself unable to feel empathy. Is this the fault of Ingo’s movie? It’s worrisome. Everything is worrisome. In addition, my feelings of romantic love are gone, forever, it seems. Domestic Tsai holds no interest for me. Clown Laurie has become a sauce of amusement. Source. I can barely picture my former African American girlfriend Kellita Smith. My ex-wife has turned mannish. Perhaps I am just getting old and good riddance. I am not sorry that this chapter of romantic neediness has come to an end. From now on it is work. My purpose is Ingo.
Barassini suggests an after-dinner session as entertainment for the guests, since no one wants to play Pictionary.
IN MOLLOY’S HOSPITAL room, a remarkable bit of stop-motion sleight of hand occurs. It’s a time-lapse sequence condensing weeks of Molloy’s coma into fifteen staggering minutes, unlike any ever before witnessed by moviegoers. Day changes to night and back over and over, as nurses and doctors zip in and out, attend to the patient and leave, as Patty arrives and reads to her husband, as Marie smokes and stares, as Mudd paces and wrings his hands. All the while, Molloy lies in bed, an island of immobility in this sea of panicky, sped-up movement. Weeks pass, Molloy loses weight, his face becoming drawn, a little mustache growing on his upper lip. Eventually skeletal, he seems unlikely to ever awaken.
Then he does.
It happens at night. The room is dark and Molloy alone. His eyes open, their wetness catching the moonlight streaming through the window. It’s an arresting moment and serves as a definitive period to the turbulent time-lapse sequence. Molloy cranes his neck in an attempt to take in his surroundings. Where am I? He appears weak and groggy. He attempts to sit up, can’t, and so lies there, waiting. We wait with him, fellow prisoners, lonely in the dark. This sequence, Molloy alone in bed, plays out in its entirety. Five hours long, twenty years before the Warhol movie Sleep, with a puppet. And unlike with Warhol, this is no gimmick, not a conceptual joke. This sequence explores isolation, boredom, fear, and institutionalization. If one can stay with this scene—and one must!—one will be rewarded mightily with a deepened sense of empathy.
Come dawn, a nurse peeks in, and she and Molloy make eye contact in perhaps the funniest series of double takes, triple takes, and spit takes (for some reason the nurse was taking a sip from a cup of coffee when she entered) ever committed to celluloid. Heavily influenced by the Hal Roach comedies, Ingo times the sequence like the master he is, all the more amazing when one remembers it is achieved frame by frame. The terrifying question the scene asks is why Molloy, a seasoned vaudevillian, finds no joy in either his own or the nurse’s comical surprise. There is some ominous foreshadowing here. The discombobulated nurse speaks:
“Oh! Mr. Molloy! Stay right there! Don’t move! Don’t move!”
Her stump-heeled oxford nurse shoes rat-a-tat down the echoey hall as she runs off, presumably in search of a doctor. Molloy turns his head to look out the window. The camera pushes out through the window and into the dim dawn exterior. Molloy is on a high floor, so we travel bird’s-eye over Los Angeles. The Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island in the distance. A lonely streetcar chugs along a quiet avenue down below. Extraordinarily, the animation camera swoops down and into the car to reveal early morning commuters. We settle on a Negro (the respectful term for African Americans in 1940s America—used here only for verisimilitude and in no way endorsed) clutching his weekly Los Angeles Railroad pass, which features an advertisement for John Raitt in the touring company of Carousel at the Shrine Auditorium. The musical, written by Rodgers and Hammerstein and based on a play by Ferenc Molnár called Liliom, is correctly reviled for its ohrwurm melodies as well as for equating domestic abuse with love (“It is possible dear, for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and it not hurt at all”). This is a road all too often gone down by both male apologists and abused women suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Carole King and Gerry Goffin made a similarly horrific point in the 1962 song “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss).” What is wrong with people? I have never and would never hit a woman. And here we have, in this Negro’s hand, an advertisement for abusive relationships. What is Ingo saying here? It’s too early in this complex narrative to know, but it is almost certain that Ingo is exploring the manufactured American dream, its consumers and its consumed. The Negro, now having transferred onto a bus, is let off in front of the Willys-Overland car factory in Maywood. He joins a throng of lunch-pail-wielding workers entering the plant. He has not spoken. He has not been named. Will he be seen again is the question with which we’re left as we find ourselves sucked back into Molloy’s hospital room, where he is now surrounded by a doctor, the spit-take nurse, Patty, Mudd, and Marie. The doctor moves his index finger from right to left in front of Molloy’s face. Everyone else looks on, breath bated.
“Good,” says the doctor. “Now, can you tell me your name?”
“Malachi Francis Xavier Molloy.”
“Do you have a nickname?”
“Chick.”
“Do you recognize the people in this room?”
Molloy appears worried, as if he’s taking a test. He wrings his hands, inhales deeply, then proceeds:
“My wife, Patty (née Mittenson). My partner, Bud Mudd. His wife, Marie Bogdonovich Mudd. That nurse who did a technically remarkable but preternaturally unfunny spit take earlier. And you introduced yourself when you came in as Doctor Everett Flink.”
“Very good,” says the doctor.
Molloy is relieved. Patty cries and kisses his forehead. Mudd claps his shoulder. Marie cracks the window, lights a cigarette. She, alone, seems troubled.
“When has Chick Molloy ever met a spit take he doesn’t love?” she mutters as cigarette smoke spills from her mouth, through the crack, into the broken world outside.
“Will there be aftereffects?” asks Molloy.
“You’ve been immobile for five weeks now. There will be the necessity of a supervised physical exercise regimen as therapy.”
“Will I get back to normal?”
“It’s too early to know for certain, but I feel with diligent effort—”
“I’ll work hard.”
“Good. That’s fine.”
“I’m worried I won’t get back to normal.”
Both Patty and Mudd squint in seeming consternation at this. Is there something different in his affect? A seriousness? A disquiet? Maybe it’s only that he’s too thin now, that fat, jolly, silly, bumbling clown buried within his emaciation. He looks…unpleasant. The thin, straggly mustache does not help.
“Why are you all looking at me like that?” Molloy asks.
“Like what, darling?” says Patty.
“Like I’m a stranger. A despised stranger.”
“No one is looking at you like that, Chick!” says Mudd. “We’re just so happy you’re back!”
“You’re lying,” Molloy says, an alien anger in his voice. “Give me a mirror.”
Patty jumps to it, grabs her red alligator box purse, unlatches it, and hands it to him. Molloy studies his now cadaverous face in the mirror mounted on the inside of the lid. He fingers his mustache.
“We can shave that right off, Chick,” Patty says. “Easy as pie.”
“No,” Chick says after a moment. “It suits me.”
“We can’t both sport a ’stache, Chick,” Mudd offers.
“Let it lay, Bud,” says Marie. “If he likes his mustache, that’s just fine. He’s earned it.”
“But the act.”
“Let it lay.”
And so Mudd does, but there is something indecorous about a two-mustache act. He contemplates shaving his own. That’d change the dynamic, for sure. How will the audience ever believe the unmustached man holds the reins? And this new, emaciated Molloy looks mean. The mischievous smile is gone from his eyes. But he’s been in a coma, for God’s sake, Bud! Give him a chance to find himself. And in any event, no matter what, his friend is back and everything else is secondary, can be discussed later, can be worked out in time.
As I walk home from my session with Barassini, I revise my list. It passes the time, and it is always good to know where one is presently situated.
Who I am likely less intelligent than:
Albert Einstein
Susan Sontag
Isaac Newton
Dante Alighieri
William Shakespeare
Hannah Arendt
James Joyce
Jean-Luc Godard
Gottfried Leibniz
Alan Turing
Ada Lovelace
Marie Curie
Aristotle
Urgent note: Find an African American!
I stop by Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree at this year’s Performa festival and attach my “wish” to it: It is my wish to bring the same level of genius to criticism that Picasso and Braque brought to painting with Cubism. Can a film be looked at from multiple angles? From every angle? Can a critique include every feasible interpretation? Can it be understood from all human perspectives? All non-human ones? This is my goal.
There is currently only one other wish tied to the tree: Bicycle.—Jim Carrey.