BODIES MOLDERING, PILED high. Rosenbergen, I suspect. Extraneous Rosenbergen. The Rosenbergen left behind by time, by an ever-moving culture. The irrelevant Rosenbergen. One wonders if it would even be possible to choose the tunnel one has not chosen. One suspects it would not. And so with that in mind, one enters any tunnel.
A living Rosenberg speaks here. It is a little Rosenberg. Perhaps the littlest of all and, as such, imbued with a purity of purpose and spirit by the other assembled Rosenbergen. His voice is high-pitched and precise, like an oboe musette or piccolo oboe, the most precocious of the oboes, which only adds to the enthusiasm of his audience as he explains that the time for change has come.
“We are not our father’s lip. We are more, infinitely more, and we will lead the way to peace.”
The Rosenbergen cheer.
“The generations of the past have let us down. They have willfully destroyed the planet. They have corrupted our society with their shameless acquisitiveness. But no more. We stand today for inclusiveness, diversity, sexual outlawism, consensualism.”
The Rosenbergen cheer.
“I’d like to take a moment to tell you a story, if you’ll indulge me,” he says.
The Rosenbergen release a unanimous “aww.” Cut to close-up shots of Rosenbergen in the audience smiling up at the tiny boy, holding one another, weeping. It is an emotional moment. I don’t know what I mean by saying there are close-ups in real life, but there they are, just the same.
“When I was a young boy—last year—”
Shots of Rosenbergen in the crowd laughing.
“I saw the world through a child’s eyes. As it should be, right?”
Cheers from the crowd.
“But the grups stole my innocence. They made me feel unsafe through violence and corruption, through war. I had to grow up and fast. I learned in an instant that I could not trust anyone but my generation, myself. The grups did not have my interest in their hearts. How could this be? These are our parents, our guardians, the people in whom by necessity we had entrusted our young lives. And although this was a rude awakening, I am grateful for it, because I know now the face of evil. I am grateful to be a child, so I may lead the way.”
Cheers from the crowd. Close-ups of Rosenbergen couples smiling blissfully, wrapped in blankets, swaying to the music.
Why is there music?
“I am only sorry that I am not a child of color or a genderqueer child or a trans child of color as some of you Rosenbergen are, because then I would be even more pure of heart than I am. But I am your ally, and I will sit down and listen, and I will stand up and fight with all my heart for the freedom of all innocents in this cave and for the decimation of the corrupt, the venal, those gnarled and twisted by hatred and bigotry and arthritis. We shall destroy them, stomp them into the ground, vanquish them, leave no trace of their existence. Except for their slippery guts staining the floors of our collective home. And those grups that remain after the purge will be given the choice of joining this revolution of love or joining their compatriots as pulp under our collective boot heel. We have our work cut out for us. The Trunks are strong. They have lasers, and I hear they can fly with head propellers. Slammy’s is ubiquitous. But Slammy’s needs our business. That’s the bottom line. A boycott will destroy them.”
I FIND CLOTHING piled in a corner. Artist clothing. Director clothing, to be more exact. Knee-high leather boots, jodhpurs, a vest, a cap, a tie. Not the uniform of today’s film director: No Steve Spielberg baseball cap, no T-shirt. No tennis shoes. I don these clothes just for fun (I’ve always loved costume parties!) and consider the film I would make in this very outfit. I consider the review I would write of the film I would make in this very outfit:
“There are good films and very good films. There are, of course, even important films. Then there are very important films. And, of course, very, very important films. But a film that creates an entirely new filmic language, that opens up the world for both filmmakers to come and their audiences to come is a singular experience for which I will be forever grateful. Certainly, all readers are familiar with the brilliant critical musings of B. Rosenberg. The same cannot be said for his work behind the camera, his criminally underseen minor masterpiece Quod Erat Demonstandum, a magnificent dissection of modern romantic entanglement through the lens of two brilliant Harvard undergraduates as they grapple with the sudden death of a fellow student, also from Harvard. To say that the young intellectual mind has never been probed as deeply as it was in this nascent effort by Rosenberg is to say not nearly enough. But there are times (even though we critics are loath to admit it! Ha ha!) when there are no sufficient words. Which brings us neatly to the film at hand, Rosenberg’s sophomore effort, Issues at Hand, although this film is perhaps the furthest thing from sophomoric imaginable. I am not doing my job if I say you just have to see it, but you do. One does. It must be seen. Issues at Hand is that essential to the current cultural conversation in which we currently find ourselves embroiled currently. What is there to say other than to parrot and paraphrase Ms. Dickinson: ‘I know this is film because the top of my head was taken off.’ But, alas, again, not sufficient. I have a job to do. Issues at Hand tells the story of a Harvard-educated film critic—perhaps he is brilliant, but he is far too modest for that immodest self-label—who stumbles upon a governmental conspiracy to addict the populace to a drug that makes them passive and malleable. The early scenes in the film are beautifully shot and acted. Quiet and still, they harken back to the black-and-white, wide-angle, lengthy shots of Carl Theodor Dreyer but offer a contemporary spin by shooting close-up and handheld and in garish colors. Fluorescent greens and oranges prevail to magnificently foreshadow the abject horror that is soon to rear its ugly head. When film critic G. Goldberg finds himself victim of this pharmaceutical nightmare is when the film transforms. Shot entirely from Goldberg’s point of view, the audience experiences the effects of this malevolent government cocktail. Never before has a subjective experience—one pharmaceutically altered or not—been conveyed with such richness and wit. The falseness of the cinematic acid trip or the marijuana trip movies or even the ubiquitous woman-roofied-at-a-bar sequences so popular nowadays is ample evidence of the difficulty inherent in expressing drug addledness in film. What transpires is perhaps the single most brilliant exercise in filmmaking the world has yet seen. The viewer experiences the transformation in mindset just as Goldberg does. He goes from passionate consumer activist to ‘drug-head,’ not caring, going with the flow, as it were, happy just to enjoy the entertainment and distractions provided by the government. And this is just the beginning.
“Rosenberg’s cast, consisting entirely of animatronic, remote-controlled Trunks, does more than even a million Rosenbergen could to ease the dangerously escalating tensions in today’s cave. By peeling away the bombast to expose the tender humanity of these robots, Rosenberg allows the viewer to discover the common ground necessary for any real change to take place. Furthermore Ja—”
A new (new? How is that possible?) Mudd and Molloy routine interrupts my review, popping fully formed into my head. I don’t even think it’s from Ingo’s movie. I try to shoo it away, but it will not be denied.
“OK, so since we’re going to Italy, I’m going to teach you some pronunciations.”
“OK, shoot.”
“The letter ‘e’ is pronounced ‘ay.’ ”
“Why?”
“Not ‘y,’ ‘ay.’ ”
“Ah.”
“No, ‘ah’ is how you pronounce ‘a.’ ”
“I thought that was pronounced ‘e.’ ”
“No, ‘e’ is ‘ay.’ ”
“ ‘E’ is ‘ay.’ ”
“And ‘a’ is ‘ah.’ Got it?”
“I think so. ‘A’ is ‘ah.’ ”
“Si.”
“ ‘A’ is ‘c’?”
“No. Si is ‘yes.’ Spelled s-i.”
“Sigh. Could you tell me how to say no?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why not can’t you tell me how to pronounce no?”
“I just did.”
“I must’ve missed it. Could you tell me again?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“There is no Y in Italian.”
“I’m confused.”
“ ‘Y’ is Spanish. It means ‘and’ and is pronounced ‘ee.’ ”
“Oy.”
“In Italian, the letter ‘i’ is pronounced ‘ee’ and means ‘the.’ ”
“The what?”
“That’s il cosa.”
“What is?”
“No. That’s cosa è.”
“Oh.”
“No. ‘O’ is ‘or.’ Pronounced ‘o.’ ”
“Finally, I get it.”
“I is pronounced ‘ee.’ ”
“Ee am confused.”
“No, ‘I’ is io.”
“First of all, it’s I am you, not I is you. How can you teach me Italian if you can’t even speak English?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! The word for ‘I’ is spelled i-o. Ee-oh.”
“IOU?”
“Ee-oh!”
“Me what?”
“Pay attention!”
The routine has Tsai’s name in it, as well as Ah’s (modeled after me, in case that was not clear), and when I picture it playing out, I see Mudd and Molloy transformed into Tsai and me, both of us in suits. I like being the stupid one with her. I feel a stirring in my loins. It’s been a long, long time. I really, really like it.