You must consider filmmaking. It is the dominant mode of artistic production in our time. You know more about filmmaking than most of what you were taught in school. You are the camera’s eye. You are in control of everything we see. Hear. How things are framed. What the shot-reverse-shot relationships are, what every cut is, you are shooting. You are, after all, American. Eternal superpower, the camera’s eye.
For the opening, you decide to move in slow motion and black-and-white. An excruciatingly beautiful girl gone to woman, walking. A girl who has toppled over into woman, her lips already in a pout between yes and no, her torso and ass breaking faith. Moving down a tree-lined city sidewalk. Fall. Her coat pulled up to the flush of her cheeks. Her hands stuffed down into pockets. Her hair making art in the wind.
Her eyes . . .
Her eyes.
Think of actresses who could fill the screen with them.
It is a remarkable passage, a symphony of aesthetics, when a girl stops walking like a girl and begins to walk like a woman.
I’m not sure anyone has ever captured that before. Perhaps we are afraid to name it, that coming of age, that passage. We’ve one great story, I suppose: Lolita. Several painters come to mind. Perhaps a few photographers. And of course film stars. In any case, none of it, nothing in the history of art, is quite right for this particular moment, is it? For this simple reason: she is not the object of desire now in the ways we are used to, is she? I mean, from the point of view of the American male artist she is, and from the point of view of the photographer, and maybe all the artists, but from the point of view we’re inhabiting she’s new. A man desires her more than he can stand, to be sure, and everyone who peoples her life just now desires her in one way or another, but that is not what is propelling the action or creating this plot, is what I’m saying.
It is her and you.
This has not been narrated in a previous scene, and yet, you know that blood is what’s driving her.
Blood driving her down the tree-lined sidewalk.
Blood driving her to the door of the warehouse building where the artist’s studio sits wombed among other artists’ spaces.
Blood driving her sexualized body.
You wish I would stop speaking of all this blood, but I’m afraid it’s the point.
Stop wishing it wasn’t.
Just once, the story will keep its allegiance to the body of a single woman.
Not the object of her body, but her experience of her body.
With all of history deeply up and in her.
So then. You have kept the entire scene of her walking to the door of the building in black and white. As she approaches the door to the warehouse, you give color. You give the door and her lips Alizarin crimson. And as she enters the throat of the building, more things go to color, but you filter it with a kind of midnight blue bruise tone.
You can do that kind of thing.
You can manipulate everything.
You can make meaning no matter what the reality.
American.
As she enters the cargo elevator, floor by floor, you return from slow motion to regular time.
By the time she reaches his floor, lurchingly, the speed of things is how we think we experience it in reality (forgetting everything we know).
You know, you’ve so many choices here. A letch of a middle-aged man, about to meet the image of his dreams. A familiar story.
But that’s not this story, is it?
His desire has not driven, well, anything. It’s downright impotent.
It is her desire that has begun to set the entire building on fire.
It is her action.
It is her subjectivity that is taking its fullest form—and she is not doing what we’d hoped or wanted.
She has come there in a premeditated way from the belly of history itself.
She has come to make an image take form, to complete an image of a self.
She placed herself between violence and desire.
She has come from an atomized family.
From the slobbering violence of men.
From the lost youth of a girl.
From the foreign hopes born between women.
His door is ajar. He is of course there, drinking, not painting. He is thinking of painting, but the only thing he wants to paint is the girl from the photo. And so he goes to the studio every day and drinks himself into oblivion and either sleeps in his own excess or stumble-fucks his way back home. I don’t know how these people stay alive, but they do. They do. And then they don’t.
How you frame it is all in her hands.
She takes her right hand out of her coat pocket and you move to slow motion again. Her hand then takes up the entire shot, larger than life. Her hand (with blood-red traces) pushes the door open as if she is moving gender itself.
He turns and looks at her, but the camera’s point of view is hers, not his, and so he looks small and puzzled, like a circus midget, at first. Then he looks like a tiny symbol of a man whose prayers have been answered, and he lowers his head, and no I am not kidding, he cries. Huge heaves like a kid. He cries and cries.
You will think there are pages missing, whole scenes.
But there are no pages or scenes missing.
This is the room of art.
Your life rules do not apply here.
Hold still.
I have related this earlier, but I will remind you: the first thing he says, the first words out of his mouth are, I have been painting you.
There is no conversation about this.
There is nothing that . . . confuses her or hoodwinks her or overpowers her.
She simply removes her clothes—and how you film this is mostly through color and odd angled blur, a little abstract and almost underwater looking—until she is nude there before him, except that again it is not his point of view, so it is not really before him, and to the audience it looks like some mythic woman god taking up nearly the entire frame except for the almost-cowering man in the lower-right-hand corner.
A miniature man of a man. Twitchy and nervous and simian.
Her body is enormous and milk-blue-aqua.
It almost glows.
You fill the screen with her out-of-focus back and ass and oceans of blond hair. And you take a further risk: you let the camera linger there, with the little monkey of a man frantically painting in the small right-lower corner, for an enormously long time.
It isn’t very dramatic how they come to each other. It’s actually rather simple: His erratic monkey-man gestures finally overtake him and he lunges at her and she absorbs him, like energy disappearing into its opposite.
She laughs, but the sound is loving, not mocking.
For four days, they wrestle-fuck—what is making love—what has it ever been—what is it in this moment—violent “making”—on the floor in the paint and the sweat and the secretions of a male body and a female body. They eat and drink minimally, mostly alcohol and water and pretzels and oranges.
A word about mouths and hands.
You will have to work hard to figure out a way to do credit to this on film. Because the fact is, their devouring mouths and their uncontrollable hands are much more important than their genitals. This has never been filmed before, nor captured in writing, but it is the truth beneath the lie of what usually passes for the “sex scene,” and all I am doing is naming it.
This may not be true for everyone, but it is true for them: that their mouths and their hands are the center. The absolute fulcrum from which all energy emerges. And every other organ or opening is simply an extension or metaphor.
It goes without saying that they both bleed, numerous times.
Biting, scratching, tearing, cutting.
It goes without saying that they paint together with blood.
Four days.
A bloody, messy lovemaking.
That’s it. That’s the scene.