Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Twice in the first few weeks of working at Bowery Film, a waste container of nitrate film spontaneously burst into flames. Marvin said that when nitrate film decayed, it turned into a flammable, viscous jelly, which then solidified into crystals, and finally crumbled to dust. Jelly to crystals to dust. Marvin had been employed for a while by the Technicolor plant on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. His job sometimes involved getting rid of huge quantities of old and flammable file copies of films the studio had processed and released over the years. They were reference copies, Marvin said, for the studio to have a record of the correct densities and color for prints they had manufactured. All day long, Marvin and two other men took rolls of film out of canisters and mutilated the film rolls with meat cleavers, and then tossed them into a gigantic trash bin behind the studio. Marvin spared a few things from the meat cleavers for his own private collection. A thousand-foot roll of trailers for The Naked Dawn, by Edgar G. Ulmer, one identical copy after another. Pieces of imbibition stock, or IB, which was a different texture than regular film, according to Marvin, thicker, but still pliable. He also got a roll of “scene missing,” which was cut into a print to mark a gap.

I learned a lot about film working with Marvin and Eric, and they let me process my own films basically for free, so I was coming in with sixteen-millimeter footage I shot with my Bolex from the film department at UNR, mostly scenes I filmed from the fire escape on Mulberry. The films weren’t all that good, but they did capture something. I made panoramic sweeps of the Sunday morning chauffeurs, one to the next to the next, black limousines and white drivers, their faces on zoom revealing little, just dulled patience, as if nothing could surprise them and nothing did. Did they wait like that out of loyalty? Fear? Good wages? Or was it pride, docility, boredom? Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it. My camera grazed their faces as they stood at attention, a secret parade on public view, pretending as they waited that time had no value and what a lie. A lie they didn’t mind. They were on the clock, being paid to forsake time’s value by standing under the sun like they had all day.

The filmed footage of their patient faces reminded me of how I felt that morning after the unnamed friend of Thurman and Nadine’s had departed while I slept, leaving me alone, hungover, bereft.

Marvin and Eric loaned me a projector, and I showed my film to Giddle on the wall of my apartment. She liked it, but said it might be better to get a job as a chauffeur. To have to wait like they did, she said. As a kind of performance. But who would be the audience? I wondered.

“No one,” she said. “You’d merge into an environment. Film it and you will never join it. You’ll never understand your subject that way.”

This was her own method, I was beginning to understand. Giddle, who was a waitress but also playing the part of one: girl working in a diner, glancing out the windows as she cleaned the counter in small circles with a damp rag. Life, Giddle said, was the thing to treat as art. Once upon a time she had hung around Warhol’s Factory and would have been too cool to speak to me, much less serve me a meal in a hole in the wall with a grease-coated ceiling, handwritten signs (“cheeseburger and fries $1.25”), and humpbacked men and women lurching toward each other in the vinyl booths. “Personne,” that Factory crowd had said to one another, assessing people as they filed into Rudy’s. “No one. Don’t bother.” Giddle had been offered a role in one of Warhol’s films, of a girl sleeping on a bed. “How do I prepare?” she’d asked him, and he’d shrugged and said maybe sleep a lot, or don’t sleep much so you’ll be tired. The day her life changed she was in Hoboken, New Jersey, going to thrift stores, looking to find the right outfit for the role, a lace peignoir. Giddle went into an old chrome diner for coffee. It was winter and freezing. She started talking to the waitress. There was something suspicious about this waitress, Giddle told me. She wore glasses and had a dour and educated New Englandy face. She didn’t seem like someone who would work at a diner in Hoboken.

“So I pressed her,” Giddle told me. “And she admitted she was actually not a waitress, but a sociologist, and that she was living for one year on minimum-wage jobs to gather data on how difficult it was to get by in that life, to understand and expose a kind of American ugliness.” So it’s like a performance, Giddle had said to the woman. You’re performing the role of a waitress. Giddle was a performer herself, and it was what most interested her. The woman insisted, No, it’s sociology — I don’t care about performing. I infiltrate to study this world.

“But that is performance,” Giddle said to me. “She didn’t see that, but I did. She was performing, as a real but not actual waitress. She was rushing from table to table and clipping orders on a little metal wheel that the cooks spun around, and calling out sides of biscuits and gravy and carrying stacked dirty plates one-two-three up the inside of her arm, which I still have not learned to properly do. I can’t quite explain what happened next. I was in a strange mood that day. I was all alone. It was February. The sky was very white. The trees were bare. The diner was warm and humming with a kind of life that seemed new to me. I watched the sociologist smooth her apron and slide a pencil in her hair and share a knowing smile with the cook, who called her by her server number, forty-three. When she came to refill my coffee cup, I said, ‘I’d like to work here. Are there any openings?’ And she said that there would be, because her research was almost finished, and to come back in a week. I had a strange feeling, like I’d decided to go over a waterfall in a barrel. I rented an apartment nearby, a studio with a Murphy bed. It was over an old shoe-repair shop. Neon blinked into my window all night long, startling me from sleep. At first I thought I would hate the neon, but I began to like it, the way it lent this air of tragedy to my so-called life, my performance as a waitress, neon flashing into the room, making me feel as if I were living inside a film about a lonely woman who threw her life away to work in a diner. And I was that woman! But the whole thing was in quotes. I styled my hair in a bouffant, like the white women in the South who responded to civil rights by teasing their hair higher and higher and lacquering it into place. I wore a uniform, not actually required. The other ladies just wore black pants and an apron, but I purchased a pink uniform with a white Peter Pan collar. I thought I was very camp and ironic. The sociologist had finished, although she still came in now and then, sat at a table and did follow-up interviews. She didn’t want to talk to me because I was a downtown hipster and I might screw up her data. She pretended I was invisible since I wasn’t authentic.

“But the thing is, I became authentic,” Giddle told me. “Little by little. My performed life grew roots. I was lonely, and the work was demeaning and hard. I wanted to go get drunk as soon as I was off shift, and so I was always hungover and barely keeping it together. I discovered that being a waitress was not about the uniform, or the cook calling you twenty-six, which at first I thought was cute. I even thought, what if I fuck the cook and he calls me twenty-six? Hilarious, right? What a riot. I did sleep with him and he called me Patricia, which was what I’d put on my name tag, and it was unpleasant. The next morning I had to face him every five minutes to pick up my orders.