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The narrator goes to Los Angeles in the height of summer to work for a small production studio. Though his own circumstances remain indistinct, he becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people he meets tell him one after another the stories of their lives. 

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Beginning with Small Gathering, where the narrator attends a party, and ending with a Panel, the storytellers talk of their loves, ambitions, and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions, and daily lives. The more they talk the more elliptical their relationship with the listener becomes, as he shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of disillusionment, artificiality, the mystery of creativity itself, and one’s inclination to self-deceive against their own better judgement. 

​

Conversations in Los Angeles is an exercise in writing and talking, self-effacement and self-expression, and the desire to create the human art of self-portraiture. 

Small Gathering_R

( 01 )

Small Gathering

June 10th, 2019

The Dinner party was on Saturday night at my producer’s house in a residential neighborhood on the Westside of downtown Los Angeles, just east of Brentwood and south of Malibu. My invitation had not come from my employer, but from his wife, Adriana, to whom I delivered his dry cleaning and several packages the day before. She asked if I wouldn’t mind helping her carry out a coffee table into the garage. Although the delivery men would surely have done this for her on Monday, she said she couldn’t stand to look at it any longer and was just about to flag down the next person who drove by just to help her get the damn thing out of her sight. 


She was in the process of cutting out the toxic parts of her life and had decided to start with the things around the house she couldn’t bear to look at anymore. As a result, a pile of random items had begun to accumulate in her garage that included lamps, statues, and other strange assortments.  
‘Trimming the fat, so to speak,’ she told me. She pushed a lock of hair from her eyes, and placed her hands on her hips. She had a soft, sallow face with a short nose and eyebrows that gave her a permanent scowl.


She had gotten the idea from a friend of hers, she said, whose intensity of mobilization could be overwhelming at times. Although, she smiled, her friend had taken the idea further than she herself was willing.


‘She divorced her husband, actually’ Adriana said. ‘It’s about damn time, too. You should have seen the way he spoke to other women in front of her.’ She leaned against the counter. ‘Nine years of marriage wasted, and now he’s with all the items in that garage.’


However, she continued, my arrival was well-timed. She and her husband were throwing a small event next evening and the friend she had mentioned earlier, Faye, had messaged saying she wasn’t sure she was ready to see everyone without her husband, as these were people they had known as a couple. To face all these people on her own seemed like too much at the moment. If I hadn’t planned anything already, maybe I could accompany her? Her friend had a flair for the dramatic and would surely enjoy making others wonder whether she had traded in for a younger man. Smiling, she wondered if I minded playing that sort of role. At the very least, she added, I could consider this an opportunity to meet some people in my industry and exchange contacts. However, she added, she needed an answer now if she was going to work on getting her friend to commit.

​

I agreed and she gave me her friend’s address and the details of the event: a small gathering amongst friends. The recommended dress was Los Angeles formal, which for men meant any variation of a dinner jacket, jeans, and sneakers. Lastly, she added, everyone had to be out by 4:00 AM.

 
‘I’m not running a bed and breakfast,’ she said. 
 

. . .

​

The next night, I Lyfted over to Faye’s house, and then she drove us over to the party. Faye was polite, but didn’t seem interested in making small talk. She handed her keys to the valet attendants as we entered the house. I could see that Adriana had downplayed the scale of the event. There were over a hundred people milling around and a few recognizable celebrities. Through the crowd, a backyard terrace hovered over the cliff that faced the ocean. On the far end, a small jazz quartet was stationed behind the pool. Guests were queued at a makeshift bar. Faye leaned over and asked if I wouldn’t mind getting her a drink while she made the rounds. I made my way through the crowd and approached the bartender. He handed me two flutes of champagne and gave an understanding look when I apologized for not having any tip money on me.


I returned to a large space that which I didn't have a name for and looked around for Faye who had disappeared, potentially gone for the foreseeable future. I turned my attention to the centerpiece of the house: a large Royal Poinciana tree with scarlet, fern-like leaves, rooted within a larger cylindrical space. It was enclosed by glass with only one small door. A flamboyant display of flowers adorned to the base.


‘It’s magnificent isn’t it?’ I turned to a man who was holding an empty flute. He wore a suit coat, buttoned at the waist, and a dark polo underneath. He was taller, but slightly stooped.


I nodded and agreed, saying I had never seen anything like this: a house that had been designed around a tree. He looked at both of my drinks and raised an eyebrow. I offered him a flutes, saying the person I had come with had disappeared and that I would rather not be seen holding two drinks at my employer’s party. 


‘No, we wouldn’t want that would we!’ he said, amused, nodding and taking the drink from me. We both turned our gaze back towards the tree. 


He had heard from a mutual friend that the homeowners had planted a Royal Poinciana when they first purchased the property as though the law of nature somehow wouldn't apply to them and that they could make it grow by force of will. After a year or so, they became frustrated: their experiment had barely grown an inch. It would take twenty, thirty, forty years for one of these trees to grow and yield its beautiful display, he said, smiling. When they learned this, they were horrified; they couldn’t imagine either being in this house or married for that long. It reminded them patience and endurance and loyalty--rather than ambition and desire--bring the ultimate reward. It’s almost tragic how many people aspire to these rewards, but fail to realize the patience needed to achieve them. A great many people wander because they can't assess which of their dreams are attainable.
 

So, he paused to take a sip of his drink, the couple purchased a full-grown tree from a vendor in Madagascar and had replaced their home-grown experiment just a few prior. And this, he said, was why this full-sized tree now stands before us.


We both took another sip. His dinner jacket, while lovely, no longer fit him; there were dark bags underneath his eyes. Unlike the other men here, he appeared to have given up hiding his age. 


He was acquainted with my employer, he added, since the city was, in the end, a smaller place than the world realized, and that everyone more or less knew everyone else. Sure, there was some turnover in writer’s rooms, but everyone from the front office to the talent agencies had been around long enough for him to know them either by first-hand or by reputation. That’s the thing about this industry, he said, those who tend to succeed aren’t necessarily the brightest or most adaptable people, they just stick around. He had been busily scanning the room and his eyes suddenly lit at the sight of a woman approaching from his right. 


‘Cockroaches is what they are,’ she said. 


‘This is my wife, Elena’ he said. 


‘Are you chatting up someone you don’t know?’ Elena feigned surprise. She grabbed the flute out of his hands and turned to me, saying that she often found him skulking in the corner, looking at an art installation or fiddling with the dials on his watch, waiting for her to come over and relieve him of his boredom. How I had managed to get more than a few words out of him, she said, was nothing short of a miracle. He tried to take the drink back but she held it out of his reach. Elena turned to him and said she was going to speak to someone before they left and that she was just checking in on him to make sure he would still be able to drive them home. The flash of happiness disappeared as quickly as it came, and we were left alone together again.


‘Strange as it might sound,’ he said, ‘I was relieved at the prospect of a night alone.’ He explained to me that he had fallen behind at work and was looking forward to barricading himself inside his home office until he felt on top of his workload again. His wife had intercepted him at the door, however, and pointed to their bed where she had laid out the outfit that she selected from his closet. 
 

In fact, he continued, he had been childhood friends with my employer; they even attended the same college and stayed in touch long after. Their relationship was more stable than his own marriage, if I could believe it. And though he loved his friend, he was relieved whenever one of them had to cancel. He just couldn’t be bothered anymore. There had been a time, he went on, when the prospect of spending an evening alone would have terrified him. He would have done anything just to avoid it, would have accepted an offer of anyone who asked him. But now he found he’d just as soon be on his own. 


‘Maybe it’s something that comes with age,’ he said, ‘but I’m tired of these parties.’ 


Increasingly, he found being alone more preferable than seeing even his closest friends. When he was younger, these events were as routine as grocery trips or breakfast. Where much of this industry’s networking relied on chance encounters and out-of-work introductions, one inevitably sought advantage by appearing at the right events. But that was all before he and my employer had done well for themselves. Now, these days, he feels more and more that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. 


I watched him look into his glass, his long, narrow face concentrating as he swirled its contents. Behind him, two couples enthusiastically greeted each other, one woman waving her arms in surprise such that she spilled her drink. 


He knew plenty of people who were still carrying on at forty the way they had at twenty-five. He wasn’t sure if this reflected poorly on him for having succumbed to the comforts of old age or on them for living immaturely. Normally, this sort of life -- the drinking, partying, drugs -- didn’t get one anywhere. For himself, at least, he could write off that lifestyle as regressive when he considered how he could have spent otherwise. These people, however, believed it was freedom. But to stay free, you must reject certain truths.
 

The funny thing is, he continued, when people free themselves, they don’t necessarily change themselves. They usually force change on everyone else, as if they want to exercise control over what makes them feel powerless. For example, his wife -- as conscious and devoted to self-improvement as she was -- had not been able to kick the habit of smoking that she had picked up in her teens. Over the years, he continued, he had gently nudged her to consider quitting altogether, or at least find alternatives with so many of them available now. But she simply couldn’t let it go. What she had done, however, was point out his personal vices and tics, arguing that if she was going to undergo a process of self-improvement, his actions had to be equally pristine. 


‘She needed an accountability partner,’ he said. ‘And unfortunately, that partner was me.’


All of the beer, diet Coke, and sugary pastries had been banished from their house. Truthfully, he didn’t mind; he could live without them. The yoga classes, however, were a pain in the ass. But he found sitting at his desk less painful than before, so he went along. What bothered him was the self-cleansing act of these kinds of changes. When things got difficult, whatever it was they were intent on changing became secondary to the people who they believed enabled their behavior in the first place. It wasn’t until the sight of her sister’s son Juuling, when he thought nobody could see him, that really made something click for her. Of course, since she quit smoking, she had started drinking more. It came as no surprise to him that the first thing people did with their hard-won freedom was to find another prison. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they’d gone to such trouble to attain, though the illusion of change was enough to put them at ease - if only for a while.


He looked away for a moment. My champagne glass was now empty and it seemed a good opportunity to refill it. I wondered how expensive the Lyft ride home would be if Faye never reappeared. 


‘So, what do you do?’ He asked.
 

I said that I was a writer and that I was spending a few months in Los Angeles to see if I could imagine myself working here full-time. Part of my job with the studio was to meet people, scout talent, and attend events at my producer’s behest; the other half of the job would be attending to the needs of an aging friend of the producer’s. Working for the studio was just a way of making some money, I continued. But I had one or two friends in Los Angeles that I might see while I was here. 


A writer, he said. He inclined his head in a gesture of either respect for the process, or total ignorance of it. 

 

‘What sort of thing do you write?’ He asked. 

 

I said that it was hard to explain.

​

The Exercise-Junky

( 02 )

The Exercise-Junkie

June 17, 2019

The office was small and because only one woman ever brought lunch for herself, most of the employees often went to lunch at one of the nearby restaurants. This happened around the same time everyday, every one stood up and moved towards the door at the same time. Although  we often broke off and sought our own meals alone we would walk  together until someone had reached their destination.  On Fridays, however, we went to a small Mexican restaurant together for heavily discounted tacos.

​

I noticed that Dylan would make a habit of returning to his desk for something just before leaving and urging everyone not to wait for him.

​

‘Go on without me.’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten to send a few emails.’ 

​

Dylan was the assistant to one of the creative executives at our office and we had met in the kitchen -- me cleaning some dishes and Dylan looking for a place to leave his. Only a few years older than I, he was one of the younger people in the office and a potential friend. From a distance he was a man of conventional sandy-colored good looks, but close up there was something uneasy about his appearance, as if none of the pieces fit together correctly.

​

This particular Friday, we had left the office shortly after everyone else and found ourselves walking together towards a street with several restaurants and an Erewhon Market. A homeless man sat against an empty store front with one knee propped and a dog lying on the sidewalk by his feet, wilting under the heat. 

​

‘Do you step over a dog?’ Dylan asked, hesitating as we approached it. ‘Or do you walk around it?’

​

He didn’t mind the heat. In fact, he said, he was enjoying it. After spending his childhood under the gray skies of Missouri, the Los Angeles sun had been as addictive as any drug he had ever tried. Now, a lifetime of vitamin D deficiency was finally being balanced. His only regret was that it had taken him till the age of 25 to come here because it seemed like a really fascinating place. Something about the weather in Missouri, on the other hand, had forced him to come to terms with his life’s responsibilities and get started with his day. Getting out of bed in the morning never felt like a chore because there weren’t blue skies and perfect temperature reminding him that he could be doing something else with his time. Here in Los Angeles, things were different. Leaving his house this morning, for example, had been miserable knowing that he would spend his day inside, instead of on the beach or hiking on the trails by the observatory. It was a shame, he said, that the very heat and sun his skin was beginning to grow used to were precisely the same reasons that made going anywhere or doing anything so difficult. 

​

Either way, he had never been to California before a few years ago, nor to any part of the country where you could take the sun for granted. His family had visited him earlier in the year for a long weekend and neither of his parents, now approaching sixty, could be persuaded to go anywhere where the sun might threaten their lives. 

​

We passed a cafe with tables in the shade under a large red-striped awning, and the people sitting at the tables felt superior, self-assured and in no rush to go anywhere. It was as if this meal was their day’s only task. Dylan said he might stop and get a drink; he’d heard of this restaurant from someone he met at a release party only a couple weeks ago and figured the restaurant was worth trying. 

​

It wasn’t clear whether he wanted me to sit down with him or not, but I decided to. In fact he had phrased it so carefully that I got the impression inclusion was something he actually avoided. After that I observed him for this characteristic and noticed that when other people were making plans, Dylan would always say, ‘I might come along later’ or ‘I might see you there’ rather than commit himself to a time or place. I got the hint that he was someone who acted on impulse, and felt rules were something that could be considered on personal circumstances, adjusted for his convenience. 

​

At the table, he angled himself away from the table in order to extend his legs, with his back to the wall facing the open floor of the restaurant. I sat opposite to him and because he was all I could see, I looked at him. He had large white teeth which he always kept a little bared and loose body parts in between muscle and fat, but his head’s shape was narrow and incongruent with the shape of his body. His eyebrows were dark brown and bushy. 

​

When the waitress came, he looked at her eagerly as she distributed the menus, asking her if the restaurant carried non-alcoholic beer. She shook her head. He looked back down at the menu and pointed somewhere and asked,

​

‘Can any of these drinks be made without the alcohol?’ He said this slowly, running a finger down the list. 

​

She leaned closer, scrutinizing the place where his finger pointed, while his eyes fixed themselves on her face. She was young and beautiful, with long ringlets on either side of her face which she kept tucking behind her ears. Because he was pointing at something that wasn’t there, her bewilderment was long-lasting. In the end she straightened up and said she would give him some more time to think about his order, at which point he closed the menu in frustration and said he would just have an ordinary beer after all. She nodded and turned away without writing anything down. I found my attention straying to the people at other tables where dogs sat in purses and well-dressed women in large flowery hats waved their hands animatedly. 

​

‘She’s beautiful isn’t she?’ Dylan said when the waitress had gone. ‘An aspiring actress, no doubt.’  His eyes followed her around the room as she attended to other tables. He took off his sunglasses and ran his fingers through his hair.

​

‘I have no clue why there are restaurants that still don’t carry non-alcoholic beer.’ He said. 

​

This past year he’d been on a health kick, going to the gym every day and eating salads. Part of his new lifestyle meant cutting down on drinking too. Only years ago, if I could believe it, he was extremely overweight. In fact, had there been an adolescent spin-off of Weight Watchers, he could probably have qualified easily. Where he came from, rural Missouri, the entire culture militated against healthy eating. Neither of his parents cooked especially well and everyone had cravings for their local diner. As a teenager, he and a few friends would treat themselves to triple servings of fried chicken and waffles every weekend. He’d had a number of allergies, as well as asthma and acne scarring. 

​

‘You can imagine how difficult gym class was,’ he said to me with a smile on his face.  ‘It wasn’t a very appealing image.’

​

As a teenager he was self-conscious and sedentary, avoiding any physical exposure of himself. He remembered the feeling of estrangement from his body and the self-disgust that came from looking in the mirror: his clogged lungs and itchy skin, his veins full of sugar and fat, his wobbling flesh shrouded in loose hanging clothing. He had always been conscious of other people’s space to avoid any unwanted touching on their part. 

​

But then he spent a summer here in college before making the transition to work full-time, and had discovered that by effort or sheer volition he could make himself look completely different. There had been a gym on the corner of his street, an easily accessible and far underutilized place by his neighborhood making the space open for someone like him. 

​

The local grocery store had food he had never heard of--bean sprouts, kale, cherry tomatoes--all brought in from farms north of Los Angeles. And not only that, he was surrounded by people for whom the notion of self-transformation was an article of faith. Overnight he had adopted this new lifestyle with absolutely no difficulty. He could decide how he wanted to be and then do it. The idea that his former physical shape and sense of self were out of his control, could stay, he now realized, back in his hometown.  

​

On the first visit to the gym, he noticed that while some people were certainly performing the way one would expect one would at a gym -- what with flailing arms and exhaustive breaths and so forth -- many more were performing stationary movements on elliptical machines or bikes, while watching or reading something. He had discovered that all the machines in that gym had book stands or a place to rest one’s phone. Over the course of those three months, he must have biked thousands of miles while consuming hundreds of hours of television content--content recommended by people at work whose recommendations he respected but never thought he would have the time to try. Biking those miles was the work he had to do to separate himself from the world from which he had come. 

​

The waitress brought our drinks, placing his beer in front of him and I saw his full smile for the first time as he looked back up at her. She turned around and returned to the counter without returning the gesture.  

​

‘They’re beautiful people,’ he repeated. 

​

After a while he said that he supposed it wasn’t all that hard to explain, when you considered the climate and the way of life, and of course the way people diet here. That Los Angeles was filled with healthy restaurants, endless sunny weather, and a dedication to physical beauty made him wonder why anyone in this town could be anything but the most perfect version of themselves. This pursuit of health and beauty, he continued, was something that had somewhat taken over his life -- the question of whether or not his current activity was helping or hurting his goals.  He could safely admit that his personal fitness goals were based on a childhood of feeling left out -- be they social circles or other circumstances where his weight had prevented him from feeling included. But now that he had begun to feel closer to something--he made air quotes--‘normal,’ he felt he could achieve things he had never allowed himself to consider possible, such as dating women who would not have noticed him before. 

​

It was more than just a stroke of luck, he said, that he happened to move to Los Angeles: it was the defining episode of his life. When he thought about what he would have been and what he would have done had he not moved here, it frightened him. 

​

It was his English professor at college whose wife knew the producer of our studio, the very same wife that he had been having an affair with while serving as an assistant at the club where she met with friends for yoga twice a week. There, refreshing towels and checking women into the class, he felt he had become the token younger man -- someone whom the older women saw as something that represented what they were capable of achieving through these classes. Allowing themselves to indulge in fantasies of romances with a man half their age became as much a routine of the class as the yoga exercises, and yet he realized that she could allow herself to indulge these fantasies until they were extricated for her in real life. This was proven, he continued, after weeks of their clandestine arrangement when she became paranoid and organized his internship with a comfortable pay for Hollywood standards, sending him to the furthest point of the country. 

​

For several weeks after the first time together, he had felt nervous, worried that his professor and mentor would revoke his apprenticeship, but it occurred to him that he might already know and be in favor of the situation, affording him some power over their relationship. 

​

‘In any case,’ he said, ‘What my professor’s wife saw within the realm of possibility were the very same motivations that expanded my confidence, allowing me to consider possibilities for myself--physical appearance, personality, relationships--that I hadn’t been able to before.’

The Journalist

( 03 )

The Journalist

June 25, 2019

When I arrived at the hotel, the doorman stuck his head out of the front door and waved me in. I must have looked confused because he explained that the front view of the hotel was designed to remain shrouded under several sycamore trees because they were located off a busy avenue in West Hollywood and tourists had stumbled in by accident in the past. The Spanish colonial lobby was spacious with Moroccan-inspired rugs, billowing drapes, grain sacks, detailed tile work, and deep bursts of color evoking Persian decor. Concierge and desk attendants gave an appearance of constant watchfulness. The hotel had a long central corridor on each floor with rows of rooms on either side. Each floor was identical with brown carpets and beige walls and rooms with traditional lock-and-key entries. Adjacent to the front desk was the lobby elevator which was one of those old lifts with the sliding doors and an attendant seated in the corner. 


I was here on orders from my employer Jean-Luc who was scheduled for a digital feature with a prominent magazine. He had given me instructions to introduce myself to the interviewer and let her know that he was running late and would soon be on his way. When the timing felt appropriate, I was to let the interviewer know that Jean-Luc had unfortunately stumbled into some personal issues and would need to reschedule. How I framed the excuse was up to me, so long as it wasn’t lengthy or over-detailed because that’s when lies are easy to spot. 


‘And there is no better hiding place,’ he said, ‘than somewhere as close as possible to the truth, something all good liars know.’


When I arrived, a smartly-dressed woman approached me and offered a hand, introducing herself as an assistant to Paula, the journalist who would be interviewing my employer, and asked if she could bring me a coffee or water while the crew was unloading their equipment behind the hotel. 


The hotel, she said, laid claim to literary associations that were more or less spurious, since they consisted entirely of the fact that a restaurant once stood here--one popular among writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald who supposedly penned his essays from The Crack Up while sipping gin and tonics at the bar. When the restaurant was demolished for this new hotel, some fifteen years ago, the owners insisted on preserving the legacy, commandeering a history that wasn’t really theirs so they could sell an experience that wasn’t really accurate. Nonetheless, the literary theme had been conserved by the hotel’s insignia--a motif of famous faces of Keaton, Warner, Nillsson on the walls--and though in their haste to recreate the ambiance of this once seedy place where celebrities sought to compromise their sense of responsibility, they had ignored the fact that those essays were written long after the height of Fitzgerald’s popularity when he was ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercially. That this town immortalizes even the places that wish to be forgotten was something Los Angeles could be relied on for, and which was why she was surprised that my employer--as elusive as he was--had agreed to meet here of all places. 

​

The cameramen had filed into the lobby by now and were directing their stands and tripods at a very tall woman. She stood and greeted me with a smile, introducing herself as Paula while extending her hand. She wore thin clear-rimmed glasses that highlighted her green eyes, dark brown eyebrows, and fair skin. 

​

I explained that I arrived in advance of Jean-Luc and that he would be here shortly, coming from a series of events that were scheduled without any consideration for the time necessary to travel between them. She nodded politely as the producer approached with his headphones off to whisper a few words to her. She turned to me and asked if I wouldn’t mind sitting where Jean-Luc would be to give their technical crew an opportunity to adjust their sound levels and work out what the problem was. We sat across from each other on two antique chairs placed at a conversation angle and assumed the positions of two people conducting the real interview. They had told us to just talk about what we had for breakfast today, she said, though there were probably more interesting things we could discuss. 

​

She was hoping her conversation with my employer would focus on the question of what tethered him and his work to the present, if at all. Perhaps I had some thoughts on that subject I could share with her, so that she could make sure to ask the right questions in the interview. The topic had probably crossed my mind as she figured nobody could work for Jean-Luc without being a little bit familiar with his work, but it might well never have occurred to her viewers that Jean-Luc has put himself in a singularly unenviable position: he has taken the entirety of cinema upon himself, or so it seems. 

​

She had come to realize that Jean-Luc’s highly particularized obsession with the past and future of filmmaking had left him with virtually no share in its present. And though today’s state of Cinema could use more of what Jean-Luc was offering, she continued, she was certain that the burden he has placed on himself meant exchanging his place on Earth for his place in history. What would drive a man to bring it on himself to carry the weight of all his predecessors through the muck and scum of today’s Hollywood was something she had wondered about.   

​

Her eyes had been busily scanning the lobby and they suddenly lit up hopefully at the sight of a man coming through the big smoked-glass doors, only to be disappointed when she realized that he was someone else. She turned back to me. I asked Paula how long she had been working as a journalist. She said that she has had this particular job for several years. Before this she was working towards her PhD in comparative literature--something that fell apart before she could complete her studies--so she found work at a reputable literary magazine.

​

‘This was a better job,’ she said, gesturing to the technical crew, as she had always been drawn to the visual arts. She remembered watching All in the Family or Laverne & Shirley with her parents as a girl and being absolutely mesmerized. She didn’t know why, and she couldn’t put it into words, but there was something about television that grabbed her. She had studied English in college, but only because film programs weren’t as common then as they are nowadays. It was better than medicine which was what her parents were hoping she would pursue. 


‘There was no chance of that.’ She said. ‘I couldn’t stand the sight of blood.’


She fell into the world of television criticism and quickly realized she had entered a losing battle. All of those conversations she had with her parents--arguing that a television show needed to be celebrated, criticized, and evaluated on its own terms--had paid off.  People were inclined to justify their choice of television shows by comparing them to things they believed were more respectable. It was unfortunate. She had spent her entire career devoted to encouraging people to drop the status anxiety that drives them to say ‘guilty pleasure’ or shyly admit the title of the show they are watching for fear of being judged. Of course things have gotten better since the turn of the century, what with streaming services and the wave of television makers who are more irascible, aggressive, and auteurist than their predecessors. She would like to think her own writing converted a few agnostics in the process, though. You see, she continued, the question of whether television is worthy of criticism, for most people, is obscured by their consumption of television which is characterized as a bad habit. 


‘Just several days ago,’ she said, extending her arms out and looking theatrically around the room at camera crew workers still tinkering with their equipment, ‘my colleague who manages the film criticism arm of our arts section told me that character was the pathology of television and that the reason why people had come to love these extremely intricate character-driven series was because they were lonely themselves.’


Putting aside his comments, she informed her curmudgeon of a colleague that he had managed to conflate television with the internet, attributing one’s motivations for watching television as the same as seeking virtual companionship or pornography: something that certainly didn’t characterize her own television experiences. 


Working in an office where a managing editor of film didn’t share her views on television was demoralizing. It seemed everyone was vulnerable to the same childhood she had herself, where parents could endow a set of beliefs that were almost irreversible. Ironically, she continued, her colleague--the old decrepit ghost--had scared everyone willing and capable to support the film department, which had led to this very interview.


It was true, she said, that film and television were the sorts of performances that positioned critics closer to theater criticism or sports beat writing. Notes must be taken in person, working from first impressions unlike book reviews that have the luxury of dog-earing and re-reading.(probably sentence structure again) That she and her colleagues were forced to take notes in the dark and without taking their eyes off the screen was doubly harder, and required a recognition that goes unnoticed. 


‘And yet,’ she told me. ‘Film is fundamentally different from television--the narrative format, aesthetic aspirations, character-centrism, and industrial standards.’ 


It was her practice to read the entirety of a filmmaker’s oeuvre, she added, seeing me glance at her list of notes, and not just the latest one as so many of her colleagues did. She had been surprised by how many filmmakers seemed to feel that this constituted an investigation into their past life, as if their films were an extension of their personalities at different stages of their life. On one occasion, a filmmaker couldn’t remember anything about one of his earliest films written over a decade ago; or another, a personal favorite director of hers, admitted she liked only one of the many films she had made--movies which achieved mass critical and box office success--and felt they were worthless. Still others, and this was far more common, seemed to value their work on the basis of the rewards and recognition it had received, and to have adopted the world’s assessment of their own importance; but only, she added, adjusting her glasses, if that assessment was positive. Over time, interviewing these people had become something like triage and she was growing tired of different filmmakers or actors, primarily men, she added, pretending they were something they were not. 


Recently, she had found herself drawn to stranger things--in both television and film--that proposed an original take on the act of creating art. She had always been compelled by experimental works--provocative, lurid, works like those early ones of Yorgos Lanthimos before making The Lobster and The Favourite--because they at least showed a filmmaker’s efforts to unshackle himself from conventions and formulas which, after a while, felt like something being jammed down her throat. Of course, she said, whether these experimental works were successful or unsuccessful depended on whom you asked.

 
I nodded and said that I knew of a professor who attended an experimental film festival in Ann Arbor and had been an early supporter of the event. After some years, he reached out to the festival administratives and persuaded them to let him host a special screening of the strangest, most outrageously absurd film in the programming for a special viewing experience called “What the fuck was that?” Audience members were encouraged to yell as such whenever they pleased followed by a discussion where people air their grievances and comments on what it was they just saw. The event was wildly popular among the festival’s events, attracting some people who attended only this event, perhaps because this was the only opportunity for them to express their opinions: some of which were that experimental films serve no other purpose than to provoke anger or elicit a similar response. 


‘I don’t believe there are many people who can claim to enjoy experimental films,’ she replied. ‘It’s something of a feat to have been creating them for as long as Jean-Luc has without being seduced by Hollywood.’ She added that she was more interested in the people who were devoted to their medium’s essence. Incidentally, she continued, there have only been a few moments in history where commercial cinema and arthouse cinema have aligned such that any one film or television show embraced and satisfied both audiences. Jean-Luc has somehow managed to do this more than once.


She paused for a moment to look inquiringly towards the camera lights, beyond which the men were gathered in showy consultation, their arms full of cables. The director shook his head and she raised a perfectly drawn eyebrow and then slowly returned her gaze to me. 


‘It seems extraordinary,’ she said, rising from her chair and beginning to disentangle the microphone cord from her clothing, ‘that all these men together can’t fix the problem, but they say they will have to take the equipment back to the studio to repair it.’ I assured her that this was fortunate as I had never received any notice that Jean-Luc had finished his previous obligations and that we may have been waiting quite a while longer. 
 

The Cameraman_R

( 04 )

The Cameraman

July 7, 2019

The screening was being held at a venue north of Hollywood and my Roommate, who worked for a different studio, had decided walking would be our form of transportation. An early version of the film was being released for employees of the studio and as an intern, I could bring one guest. We had met just a few days before and I figured this might be a good way to begin the relationship. 


My Roommate was a tall thin boy with olive skin and lucent black hair that reached his shoulders, messy in a tidy way. He wore a brilliant smile that seemed practiced and which he displayed for most of the time we were together, eyes shifting from side to side, constantly taking stock of our surroundings, assessing passing pedestrians, moving cars, buildings, and anything else in motion. 


He often walked in Los Angeles, he told me, since public transportation prevented him from making use of his navigational abilities, which he had been told were unusual. Since he could first read maps, he had been able to build photographic libraries of every place he’s ever visited by memory, navigating those libraries within his own head like a computer running simulations, visualizing optimal and alternative routes based on a set of given circumstances. For example, he explained, should today have been rainier and we had forgotten to bring umbrellas, which he would never forget, he assured me, he would have taken us on a different route along retail and restaurants where the possibility of walking under awnings and overhangs would be maximized, the alternate route being realized within seconds in his head. He acknowledged that in Los Angeles, where urban planning prioritized car transportation, I may have wondered why we had chosen to walk to the screening when logic would suggest we call for an Uber, or use what other public transportation was available. Considering the alternative of being enclosed in someone's backseat, he said, forced to crane our necks a little to peer outside at everything we could be seeing at our own pace, walking was far more appealing. Given traffic in Los Angeles as well, he added, we were to arrive at no more than five minutes more than the time a car would require. 

​

We were several blocks away from our apartment building now and were walking on a wide sidewalk alongside a six lane road. The road was radiating heat and in the distance sunlight was refracting off the road forming the appearance of pools on the horizon. Traffic was steadily roaring by, making it difficult to hear my Roommate. 


The problem, he explained, with understanding and knowing the optimal route, was that every time he walked with anyone, he was constantly interrupting to point to where they needed to go. Sometimes, this upset his companions for disrupting their train of thought. Others were led to question his certainty. He meant no harm, but found that remaining quiet and continuing on a route not optimal in time, scenic experience, or some other justifiable function was unthinkable. His mother had often reminded him that he could appear uncompromising in this way, but if I found myself being guided by him in a new direction while I was speaking, I shouldn’t think anything of it as he was merely directing me without interrupting. This could be startling for some people, he realized, when they were suddenly being touched or leaned against without any preparation or notice. As someone who took satisfaction in the seamless ability to function in several different ways at once, this reaction of surprise upset him. Perhaps, he looked down pensively, being misunderstood was what bothered him the most. Seen as uncompromising or thought not to have been listening to what his companion was saying, they could erupt into anger or frustration. Being navigationally gifted, he confessed, was as much a curse as it was an asset. You see, he continued, our attentional capabilities are limited as humans, and when one’s mind is fixated on visualizing routes, like someone reading a live map, their attention to other details was limited. 

 

‘Or the ability to get lost,’ I said. 

 

He turned and nodded at me, an expression as if he was seeing me for the first time. He apologized, he said, if I found him talkative. His mother had always encouraged him to ask questions, so it surprised him that other people rarely asked each other anything. So many of the questions people ask, he explained, were to confirm facts we already knew to be true. Indeed, two plus two equals four. It was only when you answered incorrectly that you realized they already knew the answer and that they were asking to eliminate any doubt, or just to fill the air with noise. He had always found this maddening and needlessly time wasting. However, his mother had reassured him that he was more than capable of finding logical solutions in times like this. As easy as finding the fastest way from location A to location B was for him, when it came to traveling with others, he need not be so concerned with getting there quickly at the expense of the enjoyment or sense of serendipity for others.


She had urged him to read more books, such as fiction or poetry all of his life, he explained, not because she believed he was illiterate by any means but because she believed that studying imaginative works would instill more empathy and awareness in him. As early as he could remember, he had found stories very upsetting. Plainly, he felt he was being lied to. The tendency for people to exaggerate and embellish details, narrativizing otherwise very straight-forward information to the point where even they couldn’t distinguish between reality and fiction was, for him, extremely maddening.  He had learned to remind himself in those situations that he wasn’t deliberately being lied to, and that those people were likely even lying to themselves. That and he would be able to better distinguish certain conversations between truth and fiction was, he explained, the reason why his mother had urged him to read. But on the occasion when he found himself surrounded by people speaking this way, he would pass the time by revisiting math problems in his head or tracing car routes in his hometown, turning and curving to go to whatever location, practicing and simulating various new routes.
 

I asked him what kind of college he went to and he said it was a specialized school for math and science. He asked if I was good at math or science, quickly reframing the question to ask if I liked either of them. I said I had never been drawn to those subjects. 


My Roommate had done quite well in college, but had not formed any strong relationships with his professors. Based on the curriculum and the topics covered in most of his classes, he explained, attending class wasn’t required and most professors live-streamed their lectures for a class of students presumably still in bed. One could go through four years at his university never having stepped foot inside a classroom other than to attend office hours for debugging codes or correcting proofs. Early on, he would stumble over to class to find lecture halls filled mostly with freshmen, a few remaining sophomores, and a professor who didn’t seem to address them as his audience -- maybe because he realized he was addressing the camera that was recording the lecture. Forming friends in class wasn’t a priority and teacher-students interactions were impersonal. Until recently, this had been fine with him as this was all he had known. What’s more, he added, this enabled him to avoid large swaths of time traveling to and from his dorm, and opportunities to meet friends or to have a social life had become reserved for extracurriculars, social media, and the rare occasions he found himself out at a bar or club near his campus.


 For his senior year, however, he had yet to take the one creative arts course required of his degree, a strange requirement for a program in which virtually every student chose this university because they weren’t interested in padding their education with, he formed air quotes, ‘artsy classes.’ He enrolled in a course on cinematography, something his advisor had recommended would be appealing for someone who was interested in visualizing problems. 


‘The alternatives were poetry and literature courses,’ he said. ‘So I followed her advice.’


We had turned a corner and were now traveling down a more quiet street. Homeless men were camped in front of an abandoned shop watching pedestrians walk by. 

 

He was surprised to learn, he continued, that the problems that were difficult for others -- what his professor claimed were counterintuitive for academic backgrounds hailing from the maths and sciences -- had come easily for him, though not because he was any more gifted than they were. The difference between his classmates and himself was, he believed, the frustration of not being able to quickly reach a solution. 


‘There’s something uniquely satisfying,’ he said, ‘about working through problems that cannot easily be solved by equations.’


In fact, he added, one classmate in one of his film classes was convinced that the relationship between color grade and perceived tone from the viewer’s perspective could be expressed in mathematical terms, although she was never able to prove it. Why should they have to do trial and error for every scene when they could just determine the terms and variables that achieved the desired outcome? This very effort to condense set design or lighting compositions into something definitive seemed to be her only concern and, he added somewhat venomously, for all her logical brilliance and highly purified arrogance, she couldn’t seem to understand why this couldn’t be done. 


His classmate’s frustration however, was something that gave him insight. For the first time, he had encountered a series of challenges for which all of his previous knowledge and understandings offered no help. Advanced topology and integrated circuit systems offered no assistance when capturing an actor's display of grief. As the cameraman, he said, he was constantly responding to and adjusting for the actor’s performance -- a form of ongoing negotiations that can never be completely resolved.

 

The location of our screening was only a block away now. The theater appeared to be under construction, but this was a known false facade to conceal the event and prevent anyone from walking into the theater randomly. 

 

He apologized again for being excessively talkative, adding that he wasn’t always able to tell whether his presence was wanted or not. If I grew bored at any point, all I needed to do was to let him know and he could find other ways of amusing himself. We were silent for a few moments. Our side street had emerged at a busier boulevard and the steady roar of traffic eliminated any possibility of continuing the conversation.

First Date

( 05 )

First Date

July 20, 2019

Shreya's profile featured several different photos of her holding up food or drinks, smiling in each of them. Unlike many of the women on the dating app, she wasn’t from UCLA or USC--or worse, an aspiring actress--and her “From” location was somewhere closer to home, so we fell into conversation easily. What began with helping each other locate various necessities such as pharmacies, farmers markets, and bars that carried a wider selection of cheap beer, evolved into lengthier discussions on shared instances of culture shock or boredom. After a couple days of back-and-forth chatting, we agreed to meet for dinner on the busiest strip in Japantown where there was a restaurant called Tsujita LA Artisan Noodles that always seemed to have a line out the door for every meal of the day.

​

When she stepped out of her Uber, she went for a hug and apologized for being slightly late, though I didn’t mind waiting. She was still adjusting to commute times in Los Angeles, she explained, and had originally planned a time cushion that would have left her standing outside of the restaurant for forty minutes if I never showed up. We moved towards the line and took our place. She wore a pink blouse and a white-washed denim skirt. Her dark black hair was drawn smoothly around her ears where it quickly became curly by the time they reached her shoulders. 

​

‘You’re not as tall as your account claims to be,’ she said, smiling coyly as if I had gotten away with something. 

​

I arched my back and extended my neck until I was the 6'2 frame listed on my account. Her eyes widened as I assured her I wasn't lying on my profile, I just have this habit of slouching to match the eyeline of whomever I was speaking to. I didn't like looking up or down at people, I said, and with a heavy backpack most of the time, my friends were usually equally surprised to see me at full length. 

​

Speaking of inconsistencies between real and online persons, Shreya said, she had a friend who preferred dating older men, which had yielded plenty of amusing stories for her benefit, but had resulted in her friend’s disappointment more than she would have liked. On one occasion, this friend had been waiting for her date at a bar with his profile on her phone so she could identify him when he arrived. When he did, she looked back at her phone and then at him, and then back at her phone again. 

​

‘You are nothing like your photograph!’ She exclaimed reproachfully, when he was close enough to hear. Her friend pointed out that the photograph this man had chosen for his profile was more than fifteen years old. Immediately after exposing this difference rather loudly for the entire bar, she apologized and added that she loved the photo because he looked guileless. When they were seated at their table, she delicately raised the question of why he hadn’t used a more recent photo of himself. Apparently, Shreya continued, this guy would have none of it, saying, ‘Why should my photograph be accurate? So that I can be identified by the police?’ 

​

The photograph from fifteen years ago, he continued, felt more representative of who he was than anything from recent years. Now, he had gray hair, was one more hamburger away from overweight, and needed glasses when looking at the menu. Although this is what looked like right now, it wasn’t who believed he was. And the photo--he preferred being seen that way; A man with fewer wrinkles and more naivety around the eyes and a slightly wider smile. Some part of himself still believed that was who he was. 


‘I guess a degree of self-deception, Shreya said, ‘is essential for living with ourselves.’ 


We had been slowly edging up to the host’s booth where an overworked young woman was hustling people into their seats, gauging the time remaining for those at tables already with their food, and taking requests from waiters who couldn’t be bothered by any more customers in their section. 


Shreya turned to me and said that she had known several people that went to my University and wondered if I might know any of them. She listed several names but I had never heard of any of them--most of them studied business, apparently. I told her that I would ask my roommate later if he knew any of them as he was involved with some business-related extracurriculars. She said she was sure he did as she already did some background checks, so to speak, looking on Facebook and LinkedIn, noticing all of the mutual friends. She admitted this easily, as if this level of research before a first date was standard, which it may have been for a girl in a large, unfamiliar city. She confessed that at work earlier in the day, her fellow intern pulled up a background check software used by police departments that he still had access to from his previous summer internship. He did a thorough sweep of my social media accounts and official record. The sweep had come up clean, though, she assured me while smiling at my bewilderment, which was part of why she was standing before me just now.


‘I’m someone who likes to know what I’m getting into before it’s too late,’ she said. ‘So, I also did some research on this restaurant, not because I’m the kind of person who needs hours to make a decision about what to order, but to get a sense of what people liked and there wasn't a single negative review.'


We now stood before the hostess, so Shreya leaned forward and asked for a table for two. We were led to a seat and handed over-sized menus. Each item’s description was in Japanese, so all we had  to go off of were the little pictures next to them, which looked like they had been taken several decades ago. Shreya appeared to reach a decision quickly, folding her menu and looking up to take inventory of the restaurant's interior. It was small and dimly lit. I was having trouble focusing on the menu. She must have caught our waiter’s eye because he was asking what we would like before I could finish looking at them all. I pointed at one of the Ramen dishes and Shreya asked for a Tuskemen with Char siu. 
 

While she missed Philadelphia, Shreya said, the asian food was unquestionably better here on the West Coast. She was still unsure about Los Angeles as a city, though. She didn't have a car and felt she couldn't see much of the city the way she would have preferred. Like me she pointed out, she was here only for three months working a finance internship in private equity for a boutique-ey firm in Century City. They were nice enough to provide food every day, flexible work hours, and a generous hourly pay, but these were all obscured by the fact that she was the first and only female analyst in the office which had spurned a series of questionable experiences and interactions. 


She had expected a few instances where she might feel out of place or the butt of some semi-inappropriate jokes because, after all, finance was a bro-culture and she hadn’t gotten this far without a little tough skin. But what she hadn’t anticipated was being deliberately passed over for assignments. The other intern was one year younger than she was and for reasons she couldn’t wrap her mind around, he was being given far more difficult projects and learning more about the business and the industry. 


‘Meanwhile,’ she said, ‘I have been consigned to data entry and other tasks that any high schooler could figure out.’


Her fellow intern was sympathetic and would occasionally stay after work, catching her up on what he was working on, but he was largely helpless to voice any change. You see, she explained, this was the first time a female analyst had been hired by the company--intern or full-time. The only other women have been human resources or front-desk assistants and, Shreya added, they are all rather attractive--poreless skin, high cheekbones, small neat noses, and fully lush lips; the kind of beauty that, from the perspective of many of her male colleagues, would cause one to let go of reason. 


‘They haven’t been the most welcoming crowd too,’ she said.

​

Several weeks ago, she continued, she had gone out with some friends she had met in the hallway at UCLA’s summer housing and was introduced to another woman several years older than she who was an assistant for the CEO of a venture capital firm in Santa Monica. Upon hearing that Shreya was an analyst intern, the woman smirked and began looking around at anything else that might be more interesting. When Shreya began explaining her frustrations with being treated unfairly relative to her male peer, this woman had glared at her such that Shreya avoided the topic for the rest of the night. Later, it occurred to her that she might have sounded ungrateful for complaining about having a position that this woman would kill to have herself, and for a moment, she wondered if she really was being ungrateful. 


Our food arrived and we fell into a silence as we tried to figure out how best to approach eating our meals. Everything had come separately; We had to put the noodles into the broth ourselves. 


I asked if she studied finance at school. She replied she was at Wharton's school of business which covered finance as well as other topics like accounting, technology operations, to name a few. She was mostly satisfied with the experience, though there was a lot to be desired on some fronts. You see, she explained, the school often brought notable business leaders or wealthy alumni to speak about their work and more often than not, they were men. The dean had received some backlash for the gender inequities and had defended himself by saying there simply weren't as many alumni women, much less alumnas willing to travel back to the school for networking, workshops, or recruiting. Unsurprisingly, she added wryly, this resulted in even more of an uproar which had led a group of female undergraduates to approach the dean and explain that this sort of action was endemic of the larger issues in their industry. It reinforced a cycle that categorically prevented women like themselves from the same access or growth opportunities as men. 


This was several years ago, and from what she can tell, it was successful at first. What began several years ago by a class of aggrieved students had turned into the most successful lineup of speakers the school has ever organized. Notable women from every business sector imaginable caught whiff of this initiative and requested to be a speaker. After a while, the initiative had received so much publicity that the Dean was appearing on talk-shows and featured in business periodicals as a part of a new wave of feminist businessmen, and like a moth drawn to light, he leaned into this publicity as much as possible. Admissions improved and advanced the school's ranking such that it was the most applied to business school in the Ivy League, even topping Harvard most years. The problem was, she continued, that the very ideals of feminism and gender equality the school was pursuing within the curriculum, external relations, and marketing materials, were being used by the school as means to promote its own reputation. While she and her friends were now seeing more female guest speakers, the school seemed to receive the immediate benefits. And though the Dean was exploiting their cause, she had observed something even more unsettling in many of the women who had succeeded in their respective industries. 
 

What she had noticed on her recruiting trips and or visits to various businesses was that plenty of these women have more or less ignored their femininity, and it might be argued that these women have found recognition easier to come by, perhaps because they draw a veil over the parts of themselves that male intellectuals find distasteful, or perhaps simply because they decided it wasn’t they who should bear the weight of fulfilling their biological destiny. And who could blame them? It is completely understandable, she said, that these women might resent being fated to the feminine subject and might seek freedom by engaging with the world on other terms. But to think she was being handed the baton now and running her portion of the race had forced her to wonder what she could achieve and whether those achievements would come at the expense of her personal sanity. 


Our waiter returned and asked if there was anything else we needed. For a moment, we remained silent again, dipping our tsukemen into our broth and slurping to avoid burning our tongues. 


She let out a laugh and apologized for such a polarizing topic on a first date.

 
‘My friends,’ she said, smiling. ‘always remind me of how chatty I can be when I’m nervous. It’s just that these first few weeks have given me plenty to think about. This was the career I believed I wanted only a few months ago, and now, I’m not so sure.’


I said her description of those business women--steely, determined, and implacable, but resentful of what had been placed on them--had struck close to home for me. My mother, as it happens, was actually the breadwinner in my family. My father had devoted himself to the mundane so that she could dedicate herself to the extraordinary. She had the same reserve as these women, having made her way in an industry dominated by men. Although she hadn’t disclosed anything to me or my sister, I was sure she had seen things--or worse, been involved in things--that nobody should have to experience. It was depressing just to imagine it. Even more understandable, though--after hearing her observations of older women on recruiting trips--was the exhaustion of being constantly aware of one’s own gender, and what that meant in different contexts.
 

I had been thinking about my own experiences at my internship recently. Both of us were wondering if there was a place for us here, but the difference was that she had some sense of what she was getting into only to discover an obstacle that seemed fundamentally unfair and seemingly insurmountable. Mine was a little more embarrassing. I was here against my parents’ wishes. They would have preferred that I develop some kind of quantitative skillset or, at the very least, find summer work that paid a little more. My choice to study film in school hadn’t been well received, so I was here on my own, really. Seeing films and television shows come together had been, oddly, a process of disassembly for me. It wasn’t so much the process of writing and producing as it was the people I worked for. Everyone in the office disliked their job and were always exhausted, enduring a workload that required twice the amount of people. They all seemed disillusioned from the reasons that drew them to Hollywood in the first place too. What they were presenting wasn’t exactly a promising or alluring career choice. I felt foolish for being so naive in the first place and for buckling so quickly when I didn’t like what I had found. The whole summer had felt like a bust and the fault was my own. 


She was watching me while I spoke, her dark brown eyes revealing nothing. I saw that the bowls had been removed from the table, though I couldn’t remember the waiter ever taking them away. 


‘It sounds to me like you’re getting on top of things,’ she said. ‘Shall we go and get a drink somewhere?’
 

The Panel

( 06 )

The Panel

July 28, 2019

The panel was called ‘Narratives of Personal Experience’ on the festival’s pamphlet and featured an unlikely pairing discussing the influences of their lived experience on their work. The first panelist was James, an actor who had recently written and starred in a film describing his own childhood. The other man was named Wes, a director of several notable films, although I was unsure of his relationship to the panel’s conversation topic. 


The event took place under a large outdoor tent where a stage had been assembled at one end with rows of chairs lined all the way to the back. Outside the tent, the weather had been fluctuating between drizzles and downpours. I found a seat a few rows from the stage and settled in, noticing the chairs were the kind of lightweight folding chairs that folded side-to-side with a scissors action. The panelists’ last names were taped onto the chairs. The audience began clapping as a group of people walked on stage. Each of them was soaking wet like they had just been caught in a downpour. 


‘Have we come to the right place?’ James said, addressing the crowd and pantomiming confusion. ‘We’re looking for the wet T-shirt competition. We were told it was here.’


The audience immediately laughed. James shook one of his legs, his black jeans clinging to his body. His brown hair was thick and clipped very short, so that it looked like animal’s fur. I recognized him from his films, the strangely childlike manner and the aura of discomfort hung faintly around his body, which he moved often as though to dispel it, crossing and recrossing his legs, leaning forward, turning this way and that way. 


‘From personal experience, being wet is a lot more fun than being dry,’ he added, above a second wave of laughter. 


James sat in the first seat and Wes took the one next to him. The Moderator sat in the seat after that. The Moderator was laughing at James’s remarks along with everybody else, his legs crossed tightly at the knee, his costive eyes darting around the interior of the marquee. He had a notepad on his lap and he opened it. Wes was watching James with a slight smile, his stained teeth slightly bared.


‘I’m told that sometimes I can be a bit forward,’ James said to the audience. ‘I don’t always know when I’m doing it -- I have to be told. Some actors pretend to be shy, but not me. I say it’s the quiet ones you want to watch, the tortured souls, the artists, the ones who say they hate all the attention. Like Wes,’ he said, and the audience laughed. Wes laughed too, baring his teeth even more. ‘Wes is the sort who actually claims to enjoy the writing process,’ James continued. ‘Like those people who say they enjoyed school. Me? I hate writing. I have to sit there with someone massaging my shoulders and some hot tea on my desk. I only do it for the attention I’ll get afterwards -- I’m like a dog waiting for a treat.’


The Moderator was looking at his notes with studied nonchalance. It was apparent that he had missed the opportunity to intervene: the event had set off like a train without him. 


All actors, James went on, are attention seekers: why else would each of us be sitting on this stage right now? The fact was, he said, we weren’t given enough attention as children and now we are having our revenge. Any actor -- or writer for that matter -- who denies the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar.

​

‘Although,’ he said pensively, ‘the basis of our profession is just that.’ He turned to Wes, smiling mischievously, ‘the more convincingly you can deceive, the better an actor you are.’


But what most people didn’t realize, he continued, was that actors were fooling themselves, insofar as they thought they could truly escape themselves. The only solution though was to sit down and write about it. If you wanted proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.


‘When I told my mother I had written a screenplay,’ he said, ‘the first thing she said was, “You always were a difficult child.”’ The audience laughed. For a long time she had refused to discuss the story; she felt he’d stolen something from her, not so much the facts of their shared story but the ownership of it. 


‘Parents sometimes have a problem with that,’ he said. ‘They have this child that’s sort of a silent witness to their lives, then the child grows up and starts blabbing their secrets all over the place and they don’t like it. I’d say to them, get a dog, instead! You had a child but actually what you needed was a dog, something that would love and obey you but would never say a word, because the thing about a dog,’ he said, ‘is that no matter what you do to it, it will never, ever be able to talk back.’ 

 

The place where he spent his childhood -- just in case anyone here had had the bad manners to turn up here without seeing the film first -- was about a two-hours drive south from where we’re sitting right now. It’s a small town inland where nobody except semi-trucks were expected to pass through, though there were probably plenty of visits from social services departments. It was poverty the modern way. Slum motels and a cheap circus where visitors could stop from the highway in between Los Angeles and San Diego. Everyone was living on benefits, obese, and consuming cheap food, and the most important member of the family was the television. 

​

‘My father,’ he said, ‘spent more time with that television than he ever did with me.’

 

His mother had left their family before he turned ten, though he didn’t blame her because the motel they lived in was smaller than a one car garage. A faint ripple of uncertain laughter rose and died away again. The reason she left, he continued, was because his father’s episodes had become too much for her. Years before James had been conceived, his father had fought in Vietnam where something had broken him. Of course, he continued, he would never know what it was that happened, only that this event had affected his life more than anything else ever had. And isn’t that the worst, James wondered, to be hurt by something before you even know what it is? In a sense, he was damaged goods before he even knew it. Coming to himself was like buying one of those Christmas trees    from a parking lot vendor and cutting off the net only to find gaps where branches should be.

 

‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘how when parents do things to their children, it’s as if they think no one can see them. The truth is, the only thing my father ever gave me of any value is pain.’

 

His father was there for him, he recognized, which was more than he could say for his mother. His father’s cruelty was of a more refined variety. He would go to any length to underscore James’ inferiority, questioning his entitlement to food and drink, clothing, even to occupying the small apartment itself. You almost had to feel sorry for him, James said, a father who was financially dependent on his teenage son. They lived in a grubby motel only a few miles from the circus where James’ father was a former rodeo clown. On top of that, he was a recovering alcoholic, an ex-convict, and a sex offender. Some nights were understandably a well of self-pity. They had too much pride to go on welfare or food stamps. That obsession, that cruelty, was a kind of attention in a way, he continued, because the fact of his existence was made noticeable in everything that happened. Of course, he didn’t realize this until he experienced attention in another form: acting.

 

James couldn’t remember exactly when his mother brought him to the studio lot where she was a supporting dancer, but suspects he was around age 12. The boy who was supposed to play a minor role on set never arrived, and so he was dragged on stage. 
 

‘You would have thought I would have been nervous,’ James said candidly, “but performing felt like something I had already been doing all of my life.’ As soon as the camera was pointed towards him, he mimicked his own father actually, borrowing all of the bravado and flame that his own father displayed.


He wasn’t going to say much about what he felt in those years -- which lasted until he came into himself, as an actor that is, and was admitted into rehab for alcohol abuse -- the fear, the physical discomfort, the trauma of having to remind his delirious father that he wasn’t back in Vietnam at 3:00 AM as a gun was pointed at him. That stuff was all in the movie. It was tempting, he said, to consider that the same rage that landed him in rehab had made him an artist. Writing the screenplay had been both a torment and a relief, like pulling a knife out of his chest: he didn’t want to do it, but he knew that if he left it there, the pain would be worse in the long term. 


‘That, and they wouldn’t let me leave rehab until I produced something of worth to say I had acknowledged and processed the trauma,’ he said, chuckling to himself. The audience was silent and the Moderator had folded his hands on his lap, his papers tucked underneath his thigh. He was as much an audience member as I was. 


James made the decision to show the screenplay to his family, to his mother and his father. At first his mother accused him of making this all up. Part of him almost believed her. The problem with being honest, he said, is that you’re slow to realize that other people can lie too, even without knowing it. His father on the other hand wasn’t interested when offered the chance to read it. 


‘All he asked,’ James said, ‘was that I make him look good.’


He wasn’t obliged to get his parent’s permission, but he wanted it anyway, because it wasn’t enough for it to be simply his point of view, his truth. Whether his parents or anyone else were willing to corroborate the events wasn’t as important as re-telling the trauma he had experienced in a way that could be understood. Despite the fact that it was the only thing he had ever truly written that had broken him down and built himself back up -- something that was his understanding of their shared history -- he needed their blessing if he was going to send the screenplay to anyone around town. Of course, they gave him something along those lines because he was up on this stage before us today. 


What had bothered him was that the reviewers for the film seemed to misunderstand his intentions. They called it obnoxious and self-indulgent, forcing paying audiences to endure all the endless suffering a boy could remember about his childhood. His decision to portray his own father was, apparently, a bravura evocation of resentment, not an attempt to understand himself. Even the film’s director, Alma Har’el, was accused of having no sense of narrative trajectory, jumping all over the place like a spastic bullfrog, and that the story was a dizzying series of anecdotal swatches, whatever that meant. All he knew was that the act of making it was meant, ostensibly, to help others. 

 

A few people have called him brave for writing about it, but in fact, once he’d done it, he’d blab his story to anyone who’d listen. Once the cat was out of the box, he said, you couldn’t put it back in. He’d moved to the East Coast and started the process of becoming himself, he was a bit of a mess. He was like the closet rammed full with junk: when he opened the door everything fell out. It took time to reorganize himself. And the blabbing, the telling, was the easiest thing of all. Getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did he know that he had gotten the better of the things that happened to him: when he controlled the story rather than it controlling him. 


Anyway, he said to the audience, he’d taken up enough of their time. Agonizing as it was for him, he had to let the others get a word in. And on top of that, he’d gone and done what he always did which was give away the whole story so that some of them wouldn’t have to see the movie. Frankly, he didn’t care whether they saw the movie or not, so long as they bought a ticket. 


The audience laughed and broke into spontaneous, heartfelt applause.


‘I’ve been called a self-publicist,’ James added above the roar, ‘but I learned everything I know from him.’


He pointed at Wes. 


‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about,’ Wes said, red-faced from being put on the spot. 


The truth was, Wes went on, he was confused when the event organizers had first asked him to appear here for a conversation between artists, writers, and directors on how their work reflects their own lived experience.


‘It was obvious why James had been asked to speak,’ Wes said coyly, ‘but me?’ 


The audience laughed again, with only a little less enthusiasm. 

 

The question of translating personal experience into visual storytelling, was something he hadn’t given much thought to. Over the course of his career, he had made nine feature-length films, all of which he’d directed and written himself with the same recurring cast of actors and performers who, he liked to believe, emerged from their caves for him only. In fact, these actors were so familiar with him and each other by now that the most recent productions had begun to feel like the same cast of a long-running sitcom. None of them, though, had ever mentioned what they thought about the relationship between these films and his personal experiences.  


What Wes had been accused of was being a hipster which, as his wife had pointed out, was better than having an obsession with violence. It was no secret that he had an affinity for the colorful: eye-catching decors, pastel-colored buses and newstands, and anachronistic furnishings, or for the symmetrical. He learned a long time ago that he preferred to devise scenes and contexts that were a little surrealistic, but with characters who were real, such that the emotions would come through anyway even if things were a little unusual. Building sets were more fun that way anyway.


‘The trick,’ he said, ‘is to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless.’


The rain outside was pouring down even harder now, making it difficult to hear anyone. I adjusted myself in my seat and wiped the sweat off the back of my neck.


He felt he could relate to James’ frustration with being probed by critics, Wes said, because only a few months prior, he had been featured in a prominent magazine for a large spread where the journalist had attributed his visual style to, if we could believe it, his parent’s divorce. It was no secret that his style had, for a long time, been misconstrued as a gimmick, a sort of confection, an amusement, but this journalist had gone so far as to suggest that in fact, his style was an intensely personal thing, very much a part of his character and mode of expression. 


His mistake, as he saw it, was letting this journalist on the set of his most recent production in the first place. Access to a place he had no business being in. He drew a relationship between Wes’s directorial approach and his need to exercise control over one part of his life. As tempting as it was to believe there was a relationship between his profession of constructing fictional worlds and a childhood with a messy divorce, he just didn’t believe it was true.
 

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