Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

I saw Having, Not Having, Being, Not Being because I happened to duck into the Global, a theater I dislike, while running from a man trying to break my nose.

The operators of the Global are self-congratulatory and condescending, as if showing foreign films in a prosperous native neighborhood is an act of mercy rather than a profitable indulgence. The programmer is a philistine who prefers to screen sententious documentaries, foreign splatter films, and slow-pitch comedies with the invariable moral that one ought to be nice to one’s parents before they die, if just once. Passing the box office, one sees patrons as resigned to their duty as plumbers.

Not to mention that they charge twenty-three dollars a ticket, and if they get your Pinger ID, they will send you a message every hour until your death, demanding more money so they can continue their mission. The fund-raising is interminable. The pledge drive goes on five months. The director gets paid as much as twelve rail workers, has a brownstone in the Safe Zone, a daughter at private kindergarten.

Patrons of the Global see buying a ticket as an expression of their socioeconomic position, an endorsement of their taste, a buttressing of their personality, and in many respects I found them more loathsome than the man who had been trying to break my nose with his fist, because there was not much unearned self-regard in his intentions, at least toward my nose.

That said, I did not want my nose broken, so I ran inside.

By the time the man, Rolf Millings, whom I’d had an exchange of views with at a party a few weeks previously, had thought to look in the Global for me, I had placed myself in a crouch in Row K, so I could see who was walking in when a crack of light dissipated the spell of the cinema.

Having, Not Having, Being, Not Being does not shy from prefabricated set pieces lifted from other films, including the sullen newcomer who gains respect for the institution, the elderly monk with a teenage passion for rock and roll, merriment in silence, raking, rough-hewn bowls, the beauty of rocks, the pleasures of submission. There is nothing so different as to be interesting and there is nothing so familiar as to be comforting. Because we spend so much of our lives in institutions, I have never understood why anyone would want to spend their leisure time watching the operations of an institution.

The tanned gentleman shoving through the doors appeared to be Millings. I couldn’t guarantee that I wasn’t the cause of his anger. From my vantage between the seats I watched him scan the audience, turn, walk out. He cut quite the figure in his suit, unperturbed by the large stains on his shirtfront, from the packet of rancid herring I had thrown on him, while he sat in a nearby plaza, enjoying the afternoon, twenty minutes before.

Playing tomorrow at the Conspicuous on two screens. See it in Theater Four. Six has bad seats.

O’Rourke, a marine wrestler in the Pacific Northwest, is undefeated until an octopus of public record, Lord Tako, plucks out his left eye and pops it in his beak. As the octopus swims away, O’Rourke tears off one of Lord Tako’s tentacles. O’Rourke swears revenge. Chastened by fate, O’Rourke begins to drink to excess at the wrestlers’ bar, whose logo is an octopus with a mug of beer in each tentacle.

O’Rourke’s little brother, Baby, wants to wrestle. Lord Tako takes all comers. Baby’s corpse washes up onshore. O’Rourke renews his vows of revenge. A training montage.

Piggy Wilson, a mentor figure, thunders from the underbrush of exposition to counsel O’Rourke. Another satisfying montage. Piggy, who has not kept in shape since his halcyon grappling days, is slain by Lord Tako. The shot of Piggy’s severed head surfacing is in bad taste, which is probably why this superlative film is not shown in repertory. Osvald-in-me, the philistine, cheered when it breached. An ongoing discussion between us was never resolved concerning whether Lord Tako twisted or pulled it off.

The scene where O’Rourke comes out of the surf holding Lord Tako, who has sucked out O’Rourke’s other eye in his throes, has all the pathos and beauty of a Nakamura masterpiece. I have never seen or heard it mentioned. Which begs the question: What beauty has disappeared through the ignorance of its stewards?

On the day I thought of my film, I woke feeling ill. My Slaw review was due at five-thirty. Weregild screened at two. The Baxter Cinema calls this the hooky showing, but the senile matrons, narcotics-addled public servants, and preachers of Armageddon who pack the theater have nothing to skip out on. I prefer the sedentary regulars of the Conspicuous, a theater of quality.

In my position as film critic for the Central Hub Slaw , the greatest content aggregator in this city, I am often compelled to review mounds of gaudy cardboard tugged with string masquerading as films. I expected today would be no different. Watch, leave, fume, pan.

Out of my apartment, shivering, sweating. The mild day affronted my sense of infirmity. VR joggers, yoga nuts, and spandexed men on ancient steel bikes filled the streets. It is not enough for the world to be the circus, dump, sweatshop, brothel, and restaurant for the urban professional, it has to be their gymnasium as well.

The Baxter was hot. An usher apologized. The air-conditioning was off because they overdrew their power budget. To fortify myself I had bought a bottle of cough syrup from the pharmacy kiosk on the way. A nimbus of insulin needles and nasal relaxers cordoned it off from the sidewalk.

Many people entered the theater, found it to be the same temperature as outside, and left. The movie flickered by. Maybe I would expire of the flu. I imagined the mourners at my funeral. Held Saturday night, for maximum inconvenience. Closed casket. An organ to oppress the scant bereaved.

Weregild takes place in a vague tribal past, when fur-clad illiterates slaughtered their neighbors over portents and boredom. The chief, Orectirix, kidnaps Geneov, the wife of Seisyll. Speeches are made, threats delivered. Weregild is a lie. The tribe’s teeth are better than ours. Do they have dental care in the Black Forest? On a diet of spelt, those biceps? That’s not possible. The tribe would have to loot protein powders from the warehouses they plunder. Weregild could have been funded by the Agriculture Authority. See how we lived before corn, and tremble. A man kills another man, and puts on his crude bronze crown. The end.

Leaving the theater, my illness was taking the initiative. When I reached for my rail pass, I found that it lay in a marsh of pocket sweat. The sidewalk yawed outside my stop. I seemed to be having hallucinations. I was convinced pedestrians would dine on my liver if I lowered my guard. Back to Miniature Aleppo, my block. My bed, sagging, nonjudgmental. The shadows of oak limbs scraped the ceiling. Fever made fondue of color, sound, language.

Here comes my idea. I must make a film.

Western Europe, the Renaissance. I hate period pieces. Mine will be a period whole.