Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

My film will unfurl during a time when artists believed they were laboring in their god’s service. Our greatest artists were simpletons and cretins. Their talent was bent to reinforce the validity of a fable. Notions of reality in the Renaissance, at least as far as its art was concerned, were fixed. A god there, man here, plentiful devils to blame. But it seemed real, and seeming is like being, to our wretched species.

Nothing’s real. Everything is printed: a copy of what came before. Load schematics into the fabricator. Human history is squirted, at will, from a reticulating nozzle. Press a button, and out rolls a Venus of Willendorf, a suitable doorstop. Turn the dial, and print a Calder for hanging your laundry. Dry your dishes with a Bayeux Tapestry.

I shall call my film Altarpiece .

A painter, Bellono, paints a triptych of Duke Giovanni, Duchess Andrea, and the duke’s brother, Baronet Enrico. It will hang adjacent to the altar in the ducal chapel.

How will Bellono render Giovanni, Andrea, and Enrico? In shocking, lecherous color.

I must make this film. My sense of beauty demands it. Pretending to care about the trash of the past, reporting on miniature controversies, and inventing grudges against directors I am indifferent to has rotted my spirit.

Perhaps I feel competitive with my friend Osvald. He has been developing a treatment for a film about a sculptor who works on a massive scale. Alison, mayor of the Eastern Hub, commissions Billy Vang, of the Suppressionist school, to print a monumental piece about civic responsibility. Billy has other plans for the installation.

Problems arise when Billy begins to suspect that he himself is printed. Everything in his apartment is carbon, so is he. It isn’t all that out there to suppose he is a programmed object, the science project of a fumbling far-off intelligence, swabbed on the petri dish of the planet to produce, after eons, himself.

How can he protest the culture of replication, if he is a copy himself?

That dilemma is, to Osvald, profound. He calls his film A Replicate . He tried to cast me as Billy to bully me around his kitschy sets. Osvald’s use of the periscope is not as profound as he thinks.

No, the film I have in mind is quite different from Osvald’s.

The Month of Broken Noses has returned to the Conspicuous, and although any of the kung fu conflagrations in the program are worth your time, The Nathan Road Devils is my preferred pageant of punishment.

Li Fang was the product of the pinchpenny Yiang Brothers’ Celestial Blessings Studio, for whom he directed one hundred and eighteen features. Highlights include The Deadly Beggar , House of Iron Pajamas , Shek O Enforcer , The Resplendent Torturer , The Resplendent Torturer Returns , and Fall of the Resplendent Torturer .

His last film stars Billy Lau, the Resplendent Torturer himself, in his first role since his release from Stanley Prison, where he did seven years for stabbing a guy with a fork in a gambling den, and Tony Zeng. Zeng plays Detective Lu, about to lose his job because he’s obese. After a pair of elderly stickup men escape him in a byzantine tracking shot through Jardine’s Crescent, Lu is put on administrative leave until he can lose a third of his body weight.

Our detective spends his nights gorging on siu mei and lager at Joy Hing’s Roasted Meat. He overhears Triad boss Big Squid, played by Lau, order his stooges to off a guy who stood his daughter up. One yes-man asks, Is that not excessive? Big Squid jams his porcine pinkies into said yes-man’s ears. The resulting sound effect could have only sprung from the imagination of a very sick sound designer.

Lu foils the thugs, starting a slapstick feud that ravages noodle shops, pizza parlors, teahouses, and a respected gelato cart. Zeng, whose bulk contains such pathos even the jiggling of his chins moves us, dignifies, through his soulful expressions, a role built around classic fat-guy gags like the Wicker Chair, the Narrow Door to Heaven, and the Mississippi Marriage Proposal.

Camp Chocolate , showing Wednesday afternoon at the Wicker Repertory. A malevolent force enters Miriam, the head counselor, convincing her to bludgeon the residents of Poison Oak Cabin with a vacuum cleaner. How do we know she isn’t plumb crazy? When, on a hike, she stands in a circle of obsidian chunks, the viewer understands she has become deprived of her mental health through supernatural means.

Speaking of which. Osvald has possessed me. Maybe possessed is the wrong word. Possession implies evil, an agenda. My friend has occupied me. Yes. My body is a land in which the trains run on time, the factories are producing, but the people are tired, their clothes frayed. There is no butter in the restaurants, and children watch what they say in public. Over every table a strange portrait.

After the screening, I went to my appointment with Dr. Lisa. She prodded my cheek. A ring in her left nostril. Doctors tend to indulge themselves with an eccentricity. A wacky tie, a morphine addiction. She smells of vetiver and mouthwash. Dr. Lisa was eating jade noodles when she examined me. Maybe she would like someone to eat with, and this is why she dines in the company of her patients. I imagine asking the same three questions must be tiring. What hurts? How long has it hurt? How bad does it hurt?

She said, This was my nurse’s. He should not have left it lying around. Do you want a bite?

I said, No. I had a sandwich on the way over.

She said, What kind?

I said, Well, it was more of a wrap.

I’m not sure why I lied twice. I hadn’t had lunch. Sharing Dr. Lisa’s germs did not bother me. On the contrary, in fact.

She took the chair next to mine.

She said, Why are you here?

I said, My face does not work, sometimes.

She said, When did this occur for the first time?

I said, I was daydreaming of digging a pit along the route of Osvald’s commute. This predated his flight to another city with my wife. I diagrammed how this might be possible, how to finance it, manage the rental of equipment, the forging of permits.

She said, Who’s Osvald?

I said, He’s my best friend. I have not seen him in several years, because he stole my wife and moved to the Eastern Hub.

She said, He kidnapped your wife?

I said, Well, it was a mutual decision, between the two of them. I wasn’t given the opportunity to weigh in.

She said, You were thinking of murdering this man and you experienced bilateral facial paralysis?

I said, It would be more in line with the spirit of my intentions to say I was thinking about the morality of putting him in a position to be murdered at a later date, if I deemed it just and convenient.

She said, Tell me more.

I said, When sketching an idea I had for a trebuchet that could be concealed outside his office, which would be fired when he stepped into the bucket, a tautness spread across half my face. My apartment lacks a mirror. I ran to the latrine of the charging station on the corner. I shoved past the people charging their Pingers and appliance batteries.

I said, In the toilet, I examined my face. My muscles were stuck on the right side. Blinking was not possible with my right eye. When I smiled, only the left half of my face lifted. The overall effect was ghastly. That word must have been invented for cases like my face. A corpse’s face, exhumed for a sinister reason.

Dr. Lisa chewing but nodding to indicate the focus of her attention was on my problem.