Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

“Sylvia’s idea of a good time is to chill on the couch, munching caramel-covered popcorn and Rolos, and watch hidden-camera shows like America’s Funniest Violations of Psychiatrist / Patient Confidentiality . Mark returns home from these strictly platonic trysts, and takes out all that pent-up libidinal fury on the tetherball in his backyard. The tetherball scenes are filmed in a bluish haze with severe fun-house mirror distortion that lends them a hallucinatory, ritualistic quality. (These scenes can induce flashbacks of recovered-memory sequences from made-for-television movies with Patrick Duffy and Lisa Hartman, which some viewers may find disturbing.) And then, later, drenched in sweat, his palms and knuckles raw and bleeding, he collapses onto his bed and, as the camera dollies out of his bedroom window and tracks across the moonlit rooftops of Maplewood, we hear his primal howls of onanistic release echoing throughout the slumbering suburbs: ‘Aaaaahhhh-ooooo-unnnnng-ohmigod-gh-ghrrr-oh-oh-oh-like-whoa!’

“Whenever anyone says something derisive about tetherball, Mark — who typically employs the impoverished lexicon of his hydrocephalic cronies — quotes ominously from Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ intoning, either in voice-over or viva voce , ‘Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made,’ and then appending his own patented ‘See you in hell, my soon-to-be-dead friend.’

“Sylvia loves Mark deeply, though she limits demonstrations of her affection to hugs and chaste pecks on the cheek, and even these often precipitate the licking and biting and humping. Functioning in loco parentis, she’s the only one he can really heart-to-heart with about his absent dad, who hasn’t been seen since The Carousel. Mark’s mother isn’t eliminated entirely from the movie’s diegetic space, though she is reduced to the by-now-familiar icon of Mom as booze-sodden, semi-invalid. But there’s a brilliant scene — a schistlike melange of horror, porn, melodrama, and sentiment — in which Mark opens the door to his mother’s bedroom one afternoon and finds her ‘partying’ with three men. (‘Partying’ is as delicate a euphemism as I can think of to describe a woman engaging in simultaneous anal, oral, and vaginal sex with three different musicians from a klezmer band that had appeared that morning at the Short Hills Mall.) This scene (which plays to a klezmer version of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webbers ‘Close Every Door’) powerfully correlates Joel’s NJSDE exile and the wife and son he leaves behind in Maplewood with Agamemnon’s fabled absence and the more sinister machinations of Clytaemnestra in Aeschylus’ stylish shocker The Oresteian Trilogy .

“This section of the movie, though more tautly paced than what’s preceded, is nonetheless marred by two completely superfluous characters who seem to have wandered in from other films: a crooked boxing manager and a cemetery groundskeeper — a hulking, gargoyle-like mute with a child’s mind. Luckily, they are ignored by this movie’s cast and eventually leave.

“There’s also the de rigueur joyriding/wilding scene. Mark and Felipe hot-wire a jet-powered car they find parked in front of a Benihana. Outfitted with two General Electric J-79 engines from a U.S. Navy F-4 Phantom fighter jet, the 25-foot-long, dart-shaped vehicle, emblazoned with the logo Spirit of America III , is capable of reaching speeds in excess of 650 miles an hour. Guzzling small-batch bourbon, they take it out for a spin, careen out of control, the car loses both its wheel brakes and drag parachutes, flips over, and smashes into telephone poles at 400 miles an hour before sinking in a salt brine pond. Mark and Felipe walk away unharmed, all giggles and high-fives. After smoking a blunt and swigging a bottle of Bailey’s, they set off on a mini crime spree that I can’t begin to describe in detail here; suffice it to say that it begins with targeting yuppies in Burberry raincoats and injecting them with the drug Versed, a central-nervous-system depressant that leaves a person conscious but paralyzed; negotiating to buy a bottle containing about an ounce of liquid VX nerve gas (an amount that, if released in a crowded area, could kill 15,000 people); a clumsy, halfhearted attempt at sodomizing a police horse; the vicious, completely unprovoked beating of a waiter outside Osteria del Circo; shooting a neighbor’s seeing-eye dog because, the day before, the woman had casually remarked that Naomi Campbell ‘looked bloated’ on Leno; and culminating with spraying graffiti on Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center including swastikas, slogans praising cancer, and gruesome, smiling ‘oncogenes’ with obscenely misogynist speech balloons.

“Predictably, reviewers have criticized this scene as ‘irresponsible,’ ‘morally reprehensible,’ ‘pernicious,’ etc.

“I disagree. An unintended consequence of liberalism has been to deprive sullen, alienated adolescents of a language or iconography of transgression, forcing them to turn to ever more blasphemous rhetoric and imagery, and, when these are invariably co-opted, to sociopathic behavior, and then, when even these modes of behavior are appropriated by the entertainment and advertising industries, to increasingly deviant and destructive acts. So I actually don’t see what choice Mark and Felipe have but to behave precisely as they do. And as far as the woman with the seeing-eye dog goes, what does she mean Naomi Campbell ‘looked bloated’ on Leno? I thought she was supposed to be blind. So, apparently, what we have here is some lowlife pulling an insurance scam that’s going to mean higher premiums for the rest of us. So why not shoot her fucking dog? But let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that the behavior depicted is ‘vile and repugnant.’ I think that’s exactly what makes this scene such an intrepid act of filmmaking — the adamant refusal to airbrush, candy-coat, or sentimentalize reality, however unpalatable.

“Let’s not be naive. Kids are going to experiment with drugs and alcohol, vandalism, callous violence, semiautomatic handguns, chemical weapons, and neofascist hate crime — it’s inevitable behavior for adolescents trying to determine what ‘truth’ is in a world torn between the self-replicating apocrypha of the Internet and the info-hegemony of Eisner-Murdoch-Turner. We did it when we were kids, our kids will do it, their kids will do it, their kids’ kids will do it, etc., etc., until the end of the world. And surely that’s how the world — or at least the human species — is going to end. I don’t care what lofty endgame scenarios the pundits concoct: asteroid collision, global warming with melting polar icecaps, biosphere toxic shock, iatrogenic plague, the ultimate Darwinian triumph of Artificial Intelligence, cosmic entropy, etc. The end will lack any such grandeur. It will be undignified, banal, and breathtakingly stupid. The world is going to end because, one night, a carload of solvent-sniffing 15-year-olds from Long Island mess around with something they shouldn’t have messed around with. Take all your unsolved disasters from history — mass extinction of the dinosaurs, Pompeii, the Black Death, the great Siberian explosion of 1908, the Andrea Doria , the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, the Lindbergh baby, the Hindenburg , Amelia Earhart, JFK, Hoffa, the Exxon Valdez , Bhopal, Chernobyl — ultimately there’s only one consistent explanation for each of these — a bunch of skanky, dyslexic adolescents, high on drugs, looking for trouble.

“Ironic, isn’t it, that the civilization of Dante, Caravaggio, Keats, and Einstein will end with some fried, feebleminded kid breaking into a Level 4 maximum-security biological weapons facility, mumbling ‘Yo — what the fuck …?’