Worse than Demons

Scott R Jones

[ New Heretic Magazine

[ Asha Satyamurthy interview with Gregory Martens

[ excerpt running time 00:23:17

[ burstcast to noönet 20430215

New Heretic Magazine: A large part of your appeal as an auteur has been attributed to what some have called an obsession with the infantile. I’m not sure that’s an entirely fair descriptor, but there is a marvelous sense of wonder in your films that could be called childlike. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Gregory Martens: Yeah, infantile, there’s a rather obvious sneer in there, hey? Well, if it makes them feel clever, why not? Sure, I’ve never been afraid to explore the pre-verbal states in my work. I think, and I believe this, I really do, I think that we don’t know what we are, as a species, because it’s been so long since we were authentically ourselves. I mean, we were talking about memetic colonization the other day, Colleen Davros and I, this was up at Esalen for, what, Tusk’s little think tank, and I said well sure it’s an epidemic now but that’s only because our ontological immune systems have become so fucking compromised by language in the first place, right?

NHM: That’s nothing new, though, surely? Language as a virus? Burroughs and company made excellent hay of that idea seventy years ago.

GM: Absolutely, and it continues to agitate the infected to this day! More so, even. The uproar at Esalen, well. There’s video, I encourage you to pull it up for shits and giggles. Before Tusk gets it pulled. Which, y’know, it’s funny, it is, because I can recall years past when the idea would barely elicit a nervous cough or two from the audience. Colleen and I had to be escorted out for safety reasons. Now, why do you suppose that is?

NHM: It’s a sensitive issue for a lot of people. The plague.

GM: Yes. And there’s that fine old word, again. Fairly drips with associations. Sticky. Yes, plague tends to divide folks, historically. I’m going to correct you, though: It’s a sensitive issue to the virus . But you wanted to talk about the films. I think it all comes down to, I don’t want to say a return to Eden or anything like that, but certainly a reassessment of a childlike worldview, a pre-verbal worldview. I’m interested in seeing things as they are, or at least going as far as possible towards that. I don’t think I succeed. I doubt I ever will.

NHM: Can you talk about projects where you’ve come close?

GM: That really depends on the mood I’m in? Mood factors quite heavily, because, again, pre-verbal knowledge, or awareness. And my mood today, well…open? Not exactly nostalgic, but there’s a breeze from the past I’ve been feeling since I, since I woke up, really. Odd. But there again, trying to English it makes for the crumbling of the awareness. Ah, it’s gone. Hey hey! Poof.

NHM: Sorry? Didn’t want to throw you off.

GM: Oh, how can you be? I mean that sincerely. Proust had to swallow that cookie eventually! Don’t worry about it. But sure, the films, the close ones. I’d say, today, Headless, that’s definitely in the top five for me. Right this minute.

NHM: From your All Along the Watchtower trilogy.

GM: That’s right. Well, by now most people know the ugly facts about my upbringing. No need to dirty ourselves up in the muck of that.

NHM: You were raised in a Jehovah’s Witness church, yes.

GM: I was, I was, but god, don’t let them hear you call it a church . You want to talk about groups with control language! Ah, but I’m being unfair, they all have it, to a greater or lesser degree.

NHM: They?

GM: Humans. In general. Religious groups, specifically. Cults, especially . So, with the J-Dubs, you had The Kingdom, and the Little Flock. The New System. The Thousand Year Reign . And of course, Jehovah, which they run into the ground, because God’s gotta have a name. “We’re the only ones who use it!” they shout, and I’m like, yeah, about that. It’s lost on them, though. Shit, there’s others, deeper, weirder. Gog and Magog . I find it odd and also comforting that I can’t recall most of them, just now. But then, it’s been a long inoculation process for me. Decades. I’ve been out of the Tower longer than I was in, really.

NHM: Not so out that they don’t feature in your films, though?

GM: Never that far out! Headless perhaps being the best example. I wanted to explore themes of identity loss, fluidity, fragility, and the formative power of meaning, and the JW urban legend of the headless man kept suggesting itself to me as a framework for that.

NHM: Maybe I’m too much the unregenerate pagan to really understand this, but it surprises me that they’d have anything like that in their faith culture. Ghost stories?

GM: Oh honey. Honey, there’s the letter of God’s Law, and then there’s the Spirit, and the Spirit gets around. Wants what it wants. Demonic Smurfs? Check. Angels guiding the good brothers or, more often, sisters away from houses where murderers, rapists, worse, wait behind the door? Check. Consider the risks they take, just walking up to random houses, knocking away with their clean white knuckles. Possessed garage sale items. Haunted macramé. Anyway. Wayne, which is what I called him in the film, because, y’know, Wayne. The headless man.

It’s got all the classic elements, present in every version, and there are a few. So, the run-down area; if there are tracks in town, this house is on the wrong side. The rusted-out hulks up on blocks in the overgrown yard. Sagging roof, boards missing on the steps, paint peeling, garbage piled up in the driveway. Maybe throw some sun-bleached plastic toys in the yard for extra pathos.

Our two brethren approach, all clean and spit-polished, smiles bright, cheap book bags stuffed with copies of Awake! and The Watchtower. This house is never occupied, they know, or if it is the knock is never answered. This morning, there’s music coming from inside, though. Something muted and heavy, so pick a metal band, something the audience will recognize as obviously Satanic but nothing too obscure. I mean, don’t go with prog or Norwegian doom or anything like that. The brothers knock.

In some versions, a kid opens the door. The more feral and haunted looking the better. In others, it just swings open on a single hinge. In all versions, they’re greeted with an interior that, to the average JW, fairly screams “Unclean! Unclean!” The music, obviously, now louder and more apparently Satan-friendly. The posters. Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia. Drug paraphernalia. Kinky sex paraphernalia. Say a word often enough and it starts to sound dirty, have you noticed?

NHM: Paraphernalia. Paraphernalia.

GM: Parapher nal ia. Pair a fur nail ya. Yeah. It’s less a house, more a museum to depravity. An object lesson.

NHM: Now, in Headless, when Wayne appears, it’s played for laughs. Is that the case in the legend?

GM: Laughs? No. But their reaction to a clearly headless person isn’t exactly natural. You or I, anybody, would tear out of there. Walking torso turns a corner and immediately begins begging for help, its voice coming from somewhere in the hazy air above its empty shoulders? Outta there. Right?

NHM: Of course.

GM: Not these two fine young Christian warriors. They know what they’re seeing, and it is the Devil’s handiwork, most assuredly. The demon which afflicts Wayne is mighty, it plays with his perception and the perception of others so that he only appears to be headless. Naturally, Wayne has lost his shipping clerk gig down at the pornography warehouse, his live-in girlfriend has left with the illegitimate kid or kids, he survives on rot-gut whiskey, Snickers bars and pot. He fears for his soul, his sanity and his life, in that order. And, y’know, hilarity ensues.

NHM: Did you have anyone else in mind for the role of Wayne? Or was it always going to be H. Jon Benjamin?

GM: He was top of my mind for the role, from the get-go. Only Benjamin could have given such personality to a faceless character. His early work is rough, but he really came into his own after the accident. Would that I could have worked with the original! A voice actor’s voice actor.

NHM: Well, technically, the Benjamin we have is still the original Benjamin…

GM: His consciousness, sure. Resident on the noönet, like most things. I wonder if that’s the same, though. As life. Living. I wonder about that all the time.

NHM: Speaking of dream projects…

GM: Ah.

NHM: Spirit Board.

GM: I’ve said it before. You know I’ve said it before. I say it every time that film gets brought up. Not a dream project, an abortion . From the start. And I could swear that was on the no-go list for this interview. I’m gonna kill my publicist…

NHM: OK. OK. I don’t want to talk so much about the actual film. I hope that’s all right, at least? Because that’s been done.

GM: Uh-huh. To death. “The worst boondoggle since Fitzcarraldo .” That bastard Simek’s piece in the New Yorker.

NHM: All the bad history and rumors of cursed sets aside, I’m more interested in the research you did in the year leading up to production on Spirit Board, which as everyone knows by now, was initially conceived as an autobiographical piece, a documentary. In particular, the trips you made to your hometown to interview certain individuals that…

GM: The Collingwood Five.

NHM: Umm…yes. The Five. Marlys Trachtenburg, Denny Fields, Craig Bender and Kavita Patel.

GM: And me. Greg Martens. See, this is why I don’t like going here. I’m always the fifth. Asha, why not just come right out and put me at the head of the list? Why always the back end. Do you think I don’t see it coming, somehow.

NHM: I’m sorry. I can see how this is uncomfortable for you. I think, and I’m only speaking for myself here as a journalist, I think I place you at the end of the list because you’re the only one not in prison. I’m guessing it might be the same for other members of the press, too.

GM: Ahh, you’re right. I’m being unfair. OK.

NHM: You’re OK to continue?

GM: Yes. Yeah, sure. OK. Heh, there’s that breeze again. It’s like it’s right in my face. Is my hair blowing back? Yeah, go ahead.

NHM: All right. Can you speak about the event that brought the Five together?

GM: Together? We were never together, not in the way you mean. We were kids. Craig was a seventh grader, the rest of us were in sixth. And I was never with them, not after the board. Not later, either, when the killings started.

NHM: They named you, though. The other four. They put you there.

GM: Yeah. I don’t blame them for that. I was there. After all. I was a part of it, and a weird JW kid, too. So…

NHM: It must have been hell on your family.

GM: It was. I’ll tell you, though, I think, on some level, they were proud of me. For doing the right thing. The right thing by some reckoning, anyway. For the publicity it brought the Tower.

NHM: Can you walk me through that morning?

GM: Understand, I was eleven . So were most of the people there. Who knows what we actually saw? It felt like a dream when it happened, and there are days I believe it was. I do. Some days I have to believe that.

NHM: It wasn’t, though. Two teachers witnessed it, as well as the recess monitor. They testified, even. And the events afterward…

GM: Doesn’t mean they weren’t lying. Or believed the story enough to also believe it true. Doesn’t mean they weren’t dreaming with their eyes open. Or were affected by the, what did you call it earlier, the plague.

NHM: Babel Syndrome, yes.

GM: Yeah. Shit. No, you’re right. I wish you weren’t, that’s all. Did you hear about that group in San Bernardino now? Cut out their tongues and speak only in emojis?

NHM: I have. Their membership is growing. Sales of personal holo-emitters are up. Personally, I think the literal speech bubbles floating above their heads is pretty cool. Like living in a comic book.

GM: Well, there you go. I might agree with you, too, if it weren’t for the ritual mutilation. That’s going to get worse, you know.

NHM: Can we get back to that morning? The Five?

GM: Right. Right. Well, there was the board. One of them had brought it. I think Marlys? She had a witchy, kinda hippy family, if I’m recalling correctly. Not that it matters who brought it. It was there. You can see these waves of interest in the occult surge through the popular culture. Youth culture. Have you noticed?

NHM: Sure. I sat on a panel once with an MIT guy who was convinced it happened on an eleven-year cycle that corresponded to sunspot activity.

GM: Seems legit. I mean, as anything else, really. So, y’know, kids had been trying that light as a feather stiff as a board levitation trick the week before. Other things. Who doesn’t like a good scare. Marlys brought her Ouija board. Milton Bradley! What a thing. Anyway. I stayed well away, being JW and all. Or tried to. I was curious. Painfully curious. There was this big rock outcropping at the back of the schoolyard that we’d scramble around on, and they’d set the board up there, Marlys and the other three. You know how Ouija boards work?

NHM: Vaguely.

GM: It’s like dowsing. When you dowse for water, or anything, you hold the forked stick or a bent wire or a pendulum lightly, so lightly, and then ask your question. You’re not asking the spirits, you’re asking your own unconscious to access the flood of information that’s always available to you but which gets reduced to manageable levels by your waking awareness. Your body can feel where the water is, you know it, on a deep level, but your waking mind needs to receive that info from some other perceived source. So the tiny fibers in your forearms and wrist and fingers twitch and pull and nudge and hey, dig the well here, because guess what, water. Or oil. Natural gas. I’ve dowsed for my car keys.

NHM: Do you find them?

GM: Every time. It’s the same with the Ouija board. Hands lightly rest on the planchette, and it moves across the board thanks to the gentle push and pull of the players, movements that they don’t even notice .

NHM: So, the answers are pulled from the collective unconsciousness of the players?

GM: Hm. Yes and no? There’s a random factor to it, which is why the early minutes of a Ouija session are almost always very tentative and frustrating. Once you get into a groove, though. Once the players get in sync.

NHM: Surely one player must dominate?

GM: You would think so, but no. Whatever comes through, it’s like Burroughs’ Third Mind.

NHM: That would have been you then.

GM: No. No, I wasn’t playing. I didn’t ask any questions. The Third Mind is generated by other minds in concert. If anything I was the fifth mind, at the end. Small m . I hovered around the edges of the crowd. Like I said, curiosity. And there was a crowd. Not just kids, either. One of the teachers you mentioned. The recess monitor. It was theatre in the round, almost.

NHM: What kind of questions were the four asking?

GM: Oh, the old standards. Kavita and Marlys wanted names of boys they would marry. Denny was worried about his parents divorcing, wanted to know which one he’d end up with. It was Craig who started with the demon questions. Greasy little shit, Craig. He asked for names of demons that could hurt his enemies, scare his stepdad, make him rich, nothing more than that. He was twelve.

NHM: When were you brought in?

GM: Ah. The board did it. They did it, through the board. It asked a question of them and they decided I was the answer.

NHM: And that question was?

GM: “Who is the holy boy near?” Which could be interpreted at least a couple of ways. But see, I never swore. I didn’t go trick or treating on Hallowe’en. And I had that squeaky smugness that young JWs have and never really get over. Stood out like a sore thumb. Craig signaled to his bruiser friends and before I knew it I was picked up by the armpits and flung to the ground in front of the four.

NHM: Where was the teacher during all this?

GM: She’d turned her head for a moment. The monitor, too. You remember the criminal stuff you could get away with if the timing was right. The moment was structured that way. And it’s not like I yelled in protest or anything. I wanted to be closer, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. They wanted me to ask it something, and there was a threat of violence if I didn’t. The whole scene was charged .

NHM: There’s a similarly charged scene in Spirit Board that’s spawned any number of theories. “The silent question.” I’ve seen it ranked with Bill Murray’s final whisper to Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation, and Monique Bledsel’s chilling off-camera petition to the Pleiadian Intelligence in Void Children .

GM: I’ve read some of those. Interesting stuff. I’m glad it makes people think, but I…

NHM: What did you ask the board? That day.

GM: …

NHM: Was it in fact a silent question? That later found its way into the film, or…?

GM: No. I spoke. I asked the board if it could tell me the name of God. Oh. Oh god. I just…Jesus. Jesus Christ.

NHM: Are you all right? Should we move on?

GM: No, I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s…there’s just so much happening now, I feel, I feel like everything is compressing down. Crushing. This terrible gravity to all our doings. Do you feel it, Asha?

NHM: Sometimes, yes. That’s just the world, though. It’s always been that way.

GM: You’re young. That’s nice. Nice, but wrong. I think you’re wrong.

NHM: OK. Do we need to take a break?

GM: No. They answered me, through the board. Or the board did. Something answered. I’m not sure it was them, now. It was and it wasn’t. Something came through. Heh. That’s what they were always warning kids about, in the Kingdom Hall. Hell, any church of that type. Demons come through. They always come through.

NHM: May I hazard a guess as to the answer you received?

GM: Hazard away!

NHM: Jehovah . The name of God, or at least what you knew as the name of God. The kids, the board, spelled out Jehovah .

GM: Yes. And no. Not really. They spelled out the Tetragrammaton. Y H V H. Yod Hey Vav Hey .

NHM: The Hebrew name for God?

GM: The ineffable name of God. The unutterable name of God . Throw some vowels in there and you’ve got the bastardized Jehovah my old crew loved to toss around so much. The name I was familiar with. The name I knew and expected, in my smugness. I was gonna break that Ouija board, understand? Like a good Christian boy. Throw it a holy curve ball, right over the plate, set that board to spinning and cracking in half. Whatever was behind it was going to howl in terror and flee back to the dark. Like when Christ cast the demon Legion into a herd of swine and the piggies plunged off a cliff into the sea. Like when Wayne’s head finally shimmered back into view after a few weeks of intense Bible study. Instead, I got letters I didn’t recognize. And then the incident.

NHM: It wasn’t the first outbreak of Babel Syndrome, but it was certainly one of the most dramatic. An entire school losing the power of speech? The Collingwood event pushed the health crisis into the national conversation.

GM: Oh, we had the power. We could talk . We just couldn’t make ourselves understood . For weeks. It’s why I made the fucking film in the first place. Why I don’t trust myself with language when I make any film. And why I went to talk to the others, years later, after they did what they did. There was nothing to learn from them, though, nothing beyond what they’d already claimed in court. I think Craig enjoys prison. Denny and Kavita. Marlys. I dunno. They’re hollowed out people now. There’s nothing there but noise.

NHM: They say you exposed them to God.

GM: That sounds dirtier than it was. Or it’s spot on. I don’t know. Crazy people say things.

NHM: They say He made them do it.

GM: That old chestnut. That old noise . What’s worse than the devil, Asha. What’s worse than demons. Listen. Those letters, the Y H V H. It’s not just a name, it’s a principle of pure Being. Do you get what I’m saying? You’re not supposed to sound it out, but when you do, when you do, shit, it sounds like breathing. Yaahh in vaahh out, yaahh vaahh, in and out. He, it, breathes the universe into being.

I spoke to a rabbi once, my producer on 30 $ilver Pieces put me in touch with the old guy, and after he very patiently sat with me as I blubbered out my theories, he said that God “is the Source and Foundation of all possibility of utterance and thus is beyond all definite descriptions.” How do you like that? Was that supposed to be a comfort?

NHM: Was it?

GM: Oh honey, fuck no. No, it wasn’t. Because it doesn’t explain how those stupid kids knew about the Tetragrammaton. I don’t think they did. I didn’t even know, and I was the good JW boy! I prayed to the thing every night.

NHM: Do you think God is responsible for Babel Syndrome?

GM: We don’t know what we are, Asha. We don’t. We talk and talk and talk and we don’t know what we’re doing. Language, it’s already a kind of half-miracle. The weird fact that I can make certain sounds with my vocal apparatus, my monkey-mouth, and because our dictionaries happen to agree, you can hear these sounds and understand them, and reproduce them, and we blather on and on. We do it because it works. But it’s bizarre. It’s power. And it’s nothing because all words are made up, all descriptors arbitrary. I don’t mind telling you, this stuff makes me afraid. I’m afraid all the time these days.

NHM: Why?

GM: Babel. Babylon. It was a city in the Fertile Crescent. It’s in the book of Genesis. Nimrod, the mighty hunter-king, and his tower, purpose-built to pierce the vault of Heaven. Do you know this story?

NHM: No. I was raised New Reformed Atheist.

GM: The post-Dawkins bunch. Yeah, they do good work. How nice for you. Well, I won’t bore you with it then. I’m scared because I look around, and I see what we’ve done, and what we might yet do. I think about those tongueless in San Bernardino, and I think about H. Jon Benjamin living in a block of superconductive crystal a mile deep in the earth’s crust with thousands of other wealthy ghosts. I think about the Collingwood Five and collective minds from Outside and murder. I think about how this interview will be burstcast directly to the noönet, and people will watch it in their dreams or on their phone, depending on how much they want to spend. Jesus! And that Ouija board, that ridiculous cardboard tech. That’s never far from my thoughts, Asha.

And I wonder if we haven’t gone and built another tower. And I wonder if that’s the kind of project that might agitate an invisible disembodied lifeform that hides in plain sight, colonizing our minds and moving us according to its will.

NHM: You’re talking about God.

GM: Yes. No. Good Bye. I don’t know. I’m always afraid. I was told, from a very young age, that the fear of God brings wisdom. I thought I was over that. Thought I knew better, but now I’m not so sure. I babble on, afraid and wiser by the minute, while they speak in emojis to save their souls. What do their prayers look like, in those little bubbles? Milton Bradley. Am I wise, Asha? Do I seem wise to you? Because I’m very afraid. What’s worse than demons?

NHM: I can’t speak to that.

GM: Probably for the best.