Steve Erickson - Zeroville

“Yes,” says Vikar, “someone dies when the movies get into your dreams.”

124.

“Maybe not the absolute pinnacle of Hawks’ work,” Viking Man says, “that would be Red River , of course, but nonetheless a brilliant distillation of themes that Hawks understands to his core.”

Vikar, Viking Man and Zazi are watching a Western on television one night.

“In some ways,” Viking Man continues, “if Red River is his masterpiece, then Rio Bravo ,” indicating the TV, “is Hawks at his most quintessential, although of all directors Hawks may most defy the very notion of quintessence, inspired renaissance man of film that he was. If nothing else, you might say this is existential in its exploration of courage and professionalism even at its most futile, practically Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculinity’s values and rituals, and Hawks knew Hem of course, having directed To Have and Have Not . Dean Martin has always been completely underrated in this — this was around the time he was doing first-rate work in Some Came Running, The Young Lions … for a guy who cultivated, maybe a little too well, his image as a fuck-up … sorry, Zulu …”

“I’m shocked, shocked that there’s bad language going on in this house,” says Zazi.

“The opening scene, where Dino fishes the coin out of the spittoon, with all the piss and phlegm, is silent, you may have noticed, all action, everything expressed in action. Someone once called it a kind of American kabuki, and Angie Dickinson is the modern incarnation of the definitive Hawks woman.”

Half an hour passes in silence, and it’s during a scene when John Wayne goes to visit Angie Dickinson up in her hotel room that Zazi says, “I hate to disturb the rapture with an emperor’s-new-clothes-like moment, but this really isn’t a very good movie.”

For a moment Viking Man is speechless. “Zulu,” he finally gathers his wits to respond, “the genius of Rio Bravo is in its unprepossessing tone, the leisurely unfolding of familiar motifs in narrative and character interplay.”

“Oh, is that it?” Zazi says. “I thought it was basically wankers on parade. A kind of, you know, pointless exercise in guyness. Really, don’t you have to have a dick to—”

“Stop,” says Vikar.

“—to even pretend this is a good movie? A testosterone level somewhere north of growing hair on your back?”

“They learn young, don’t they, vicar?” Viking Man snarls. He gets up to leave. “The woman is fifteen years old — or,” he says to Zazi, “however old you are — and she’s already busting our balls.”

“Perhaps this is one of those movies you hate now and you’ll wind up loving,” Vikar says to Zazi.

“But that’s it, I don’t hate it. I don’t feel anything about it one way or the other. You know this isn’t A Place in the Sun , Vik. I mean, you said yourself,” she says to Viking Man, “that basically what makes this movie so fucking—”

“Stop.”

“—great is its comfort level. There is no comfort level in A Place in the Sun . No movie worth hating or loving has a comfort level.”

“Well,” Viking Man says, “you’ve wrecked it, Zulu.” He actually sounds annoyed. “You’ve gone and fucking wrecked Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo . When did you turn into Pauline Fucking Kael? Remind me not to see Red River with you.”

“Is it Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculine values and rituals?” says Zazi.

“Montgomery Clift is in Red River ,” says Vikar.

“Then I might actually want to see it,” says Zazi.

“Not with me,” says Viking Man, and storms out of the house.

“Jeez, I’m sorry,” Zazi calls after him.

123.

Out at the car with the ever present surfboard, Viking Man says, “Ah, hell, she’s just a smart-ass teenager, vicar. I know that.”

“She used to not like movies at all,” Vikar says. “Because of her mother.”

Opening the door, Viking Man pauses for a moment before he says, “You’ve sort of dropped out of the world.”

“Yes.”

“I guess your Joan of Arc project is dead, huh?”

“It wasn’t actually about Joan of Arc.” Vikar says, “Perhaps they’ve given it to another director.”

“How’s that?”

“I believed,” Vikar says, “perhaps they had given it to you.”

“What are you talking about?” Viking Man says, shocked. “First of all, I don’t want to direct a movie about Joan of Arc—”

“It wasn’t actually about—”

“—and second of all, Mitch Rondell hates me.”

“He always called you the ‘madman.’”

“But third, haven’t you heard? Aren’t you even reading the trades?”

“No.”

“UA’s gone under. Or been sold to someone, or something. Mirron is dead, Rondell is going over to CAA to be an agent. The movie business has bigger problems than you these days, vicar. That hermaphrodite cowboy up in Montana ran it all into the ground with his cowboy Gone With the Wind . Most expensive movie of all time and it was pulled after one screening in New York — just a colossal stink bomb in terms of money and press. Of course it’s one of those things where everyone talks about what a shame it is when secretly they’re in the throes of joy. In principle I’m all for whatever anarchy can be wrought upon the studios, but the truth is UA was the best of them, Rondell notwithstanding, and in the long run something like this, well, it’s just not that great for movies in general. The hell of it? The hermaphrodite’s movie is really not bad. It’s rather good. Not forty-million-dollars-and-a-hundred-miles-of-film good — a hundred miles, vicar! — but good as a thing unto itself. No one can see that now, of course — all they see is all that money and a director who thought he was Erich Fucking von Stroheim. In twenty-five years, when Vincent Canby is an asterisk in film history, they’ll see the movie as a thing unto itself.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Fantasy heroes, vicar! Comic-book characters! That’s the movies now in a scrotum sac — glorified afternoon-serials and cute little robots. Who’s to say it’s right or wrong? Maybe this is the age we need new myths. I don’t know,” resignation creeping into his voice after the futile effort to hold it back, “once we all thought we were going to make grand movies. Me and Francis and Marty and Paul and Hal and Brian and the others, even George and Steven. But then George and Steven fucked it up, and it’s not that they’ve made bad movies, you could almost wrap your mind around that. It’s that they’ve made really good versions of bad movies, while the hermaphrodite cowboy went and made what everyone figures is a really bad version of a good movie, though what he really made is a pretty good version of a grand movie, which is the sort of ambiguity that confuses the fuck out of everyone, including me. Anyway this thing I’m doing now is my Alexander Turgenev , vicar, with a little Genghis Khan tossed in — we’ve got Max Von Sydow and James Earl Jones and a whole Nietzschean slant, and the main character is this barbarian-type in animal furs with horns on his head as played by this preposterous Austrian body-builder so muscle-bound he literally can’t hold the sword, but he is getting blown on a semi-regular basis by one of the Kennedy women, rumor has it.”

“ Bárbaro ,” Vikar says, more to himself.

“Are you getting blown on a semi-regular basis by one of the Kennedy women, vicar?”

“No.”

“Me neither. So what do we know. By the new millennium I’m sure Hollywood will be done with comic-book characters and we’ll be making real movies again. Right?”