Sasha Grey - The Juliette Society

So I fantasize about playing my part as the dutiful girlfriend and I have this all planned out. I’ll dress for the occasion. Stockings and heels with my favorite double-breasted khaki trench coat, just like the one Anna Karina wears in Godard’s Made in U.S.A . And underneath, some lingerie; maybe a sheer black bra and panties and a matching garter belt and suspenders. Or I’ll go topless and wear knee-high white stockings and these cute little pink polka dot panties I have that seem to drive him wild. Or else just heels and bare legs with nothing else but a slinky cream silk slip or a chiffon babydoll. But always a smear of ruby-red lipstick. Got to have the red lipstick. A girl’s best friend.

The campaign office is in a storefront downtown. There are windows on all sides and the lights stay on all night to make sure that everybody who goes past sees the line of identical red, white and black posters pasted along the windows with Jack’s boss mugging for the camera under big bold type that reads, VOTE ROBERT DEVILLE.

So the only place we could get a little privacy is the utility closet, the bathroom or the office that Bob – he likes everyone to call him Bob – uses when he’s there, which isn’t very often. It’s tucked right at the back, near the exit to the parking lot, so he can sneak in and out without having to waltz in through the front entrance, on the street, in full view of everybody.

I’m pretty sure there must be at least a few people in that office whose kink is to fuck in the bathroom or the closet during working hours and hope they don’t get caught. But it’s not mine, and certainly not when we have the run of the place to ourselves. And anyway, Jack usually lets me in the back door, which leads directly out into the lot where I park my car and the office is just… right there.

I should just say this again, because I really don’t want you to get the wrong idea: we’ve never actually done this. We’ve never even discussed it, Jack and I. I’m not even sure he’d be into it. But in my fantasy, as soon as we get in that office, and the door’s closed and the lights are off, all the kissing and cuddling is over; I’d take control.

I’d push him backwards into the chair, Bob’s plush leather swivel chair, and we’d do it right there, in the ‘seat of power’. I’d tell him not to get up, not to touch himself, not to move an inch, and do a little strip-tease, to show myself off for him. First undo the belt of my coat and slip it off my shoulder so he can see some skin. Then quickly throw one side open, keeping the other pressed close against my body, giving him just a glimpse of what’s underneath. I’d turn my back, let the coat drop to the floor, bend over and touch my toes so he knows exactly what he’s going to get if he’s a good boy and does what he’s told.

His cock is hard before I’ve even got his trousers off. And when I do I can see it bulging against the cotton fabric of his boxer briefs.

Then it’s time for some close contact. But he’s still not allowed to touch. I’d position myself in front of the chair, straddle his legs with my back to him, and grip the handles of the seat as I brush and bump and grind my butt, first soft and then hard, into his crotch. Then lower myself down onto it, hold him between the cheeks of my ass and clench, feeling it flex and twitch and grow against the curve of my…

But I’m getting off the point. The point is, I had no business whatsoever being there, at the Juliette Society, among those people. And I didn’t exactly answer an ad on Craigslist or go to a job interview to gain entry to it.

Let’s just say I had a talent, a persuasion, a hunger.

And I was spotted.

We could argue back and forth forever about nature or nurture but this talent, it’s not something I was born with. At least not that I’m aware of. No, this is something I realized. But it has been with me for a long time, hard-coded, buried like a switch in a sleeper agent, and only recently turned on.

And saying all that, how do I even begin to explain what happened that night? The first night I encountered the Juliette Society.

The first thing we ever learnt in film class is this:

Plot is always subservient to character.

Always, always, always and without fail.

Any creative writing teacher worth his salt will tell you exactly the same thing and make you repeat it over and over and over until it’s as recognizable to you as your own name.

As a general point of principle governing a fictional world, that’s as immutable as Einstein’s theory of relativity. Without it the entire fabric falls apart.

Take any classic movie (or any movie, really), strip it down to the basics, and you’ll see what I mean.

OK, Vertigo , a movie that every film student like me is expected to know inside and out. Jimmy Stewart’s character, Scottie, is a detective whose single-minded and dogged pursuit of the truth, coupled with a crippling fear of heights and an obsession for a dead blonde that borders on necrophilia, are the very things – his Achilles heel, as it were – that blindside him to the elaborate con to which he falls prey.

Let’s assume instead that Scottie was a cop with a sweet tooth. It would have been more realistic. But it just wouldn’t have worked. He’d be a cop drawn inexorably to the donut stand instead of the femme fatale, and Hitchcock wouldn’t have a movie.

There you have it. Plot subservient to character.

Let’s take another example. Citizen Kane . Film critics love to call it the greatest movie ever made, and for good reason, because it’s all in there. Subtext, art direction, mise en scène, all the things that make a great movie into a work of art and not an extended commercial for Microsoft, Chrysler and Frito-Lay, the way movies seem to be these days.

So Citizen Kane , the story of a news mogul, Charles Foster Kane, felled by hubris and ambition – the self-same qualities that fueled his drive to the top, qualities derived from an overwhelming mommy complex that dwarfs his achievements, damns his marriage and, ultimately, destroys his life.

Condemned by this vicious circle that reaches to the very core of his being, poor old Charlie dies alone and unloved, simply because he could never detach from his mommy’s tit.

Or maybe not her tit… because the last word Kane utters with his dying breath, when his grip loosens and he drops that snow globe – or crystal ball, or whatever it was, in which he failed to see his immediate future, that his life was not just fucked but over – that word, Rosebud, was, so legend has it, a sly reference inserted by Orson Welles to the pet name used by William Randolph Hearst (the real Charles Foster Kane) to describe his mistress’ vagina.

Rosebud. The first word heard in the movie and the last one seen, painted on a child’s sled tossed into a furnace, as the flames lick at it and peel the word away to nothing.

Once you know that little tidbit of information, you’ll never watch Citizen Kane again the same way. You hear Rosebud, you see Rosebud. You think ‘vagina’.

You think Orson Welles might have been trying to tell us something? I think he was trying to tell us this: Charles Foster Kane was a real mother fucker. And that, not surprisingly, was the source of all his problems.

Just as an aside, there is one type of movie, and only one, that doesn’t conform. One genre that flagrantly breaks the rule. Not only breaks it but turns it on its head, just because it can, and it doesn’t give a fuck: the porn movie.

But let’s not go there.

Anyhow, this rule, I’ve realized it applies as much to reality as it does to fiction. That it’s not only in the movies that what happens to us is subservient to who we are, how we act and why, but also the stories of our lives, the choices we make and the paths we take.