Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

DeGeneres sighs. ‘You’re right. Y’know, I kinda hope that the movies will end up like theatre — a secondary medium, sure, but still a revered one in which original work’s done; but now… I dunno.’

‘The question is, Stevie, if film is dead, who murdered it?’ She sighs again. ‘Could’ve been Mike Ovitz and his clients’ cancerous egos — or maybe it was CGI zapping them with an alien blaster; then again, it could’ve been something less dramatic: the steady downward pressure of marketing on the movies’ lifeblood, as they were used to sell more and more crap to younger and younger kids. But what I want to know is, Will, what’re you gonna do about it?’

‘Do? I’m gonna track down the killer, of course. Literally. I’m going to walk to Hollywood, my eyes fixed on the sidewalk, checking out the spoor. I’m gonna sidle up on the fucker—’

‘Or fuckers.’

‘Or fuckers — that way they won’t know I’m coming, and listen, you can help me here…’

Was it that Thewlis’s imitation of my voice had dropped into a conspiratorial undertone? No, it was my POV’s measured backtracking, first along the length of the dining room, then deftly through the vestibule, before, eyes-rear, madly stepping down from the kerb and into the traffic scooting along Fifth Street. The SUV that grazed my nose with its metallic-blue paintjob made the cut.

I had found Busner’s Riddle tile — it had fallen down the cable tracking slot, together with three others. I got unsteadily to my feet and handed them over. He grunted his thanks, then asked, ‘Have you solved it?’

‘Um, yeah, in a way — it’s this technique Mukti taught me: not just running the tape forward, so that I can reveal the consequences of my own negative thought patterns, but making little film clips out of them that I can play over and over again.’

‘Really.’ Busner was underwhelmed. ‘That Mukti seems more of a cineaste than a psychiatrist — but, still, if it works for you, Will, and I suppose you’ll need such, um, strategies on your… trip.’

‘Which you don’t approve of?’

‘Approve? No, I’m not in favour of your “quest”; to me it reeks of Kunstschadenfreude .’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning the art that indulges its creator’s sorrow until it completely takes him over. Besides’ — he had left off his Riddle fiddling and now fixed me with his watery grey eyes — ‘there’s the film script you say you wrote — it was never completed, was it?’

‘No, that’s true — you’ve got me there.’ I retreated to my chair. Flinging a handful of summer rain against the window Nature called us to come out and play. ‘I–I… I couldn’t bear the thought of having to discuss the creative whys and wherefores with the producer — he wore a sleeveless anorak!’

‘A gilet.’

‘What?’

‘I believe they’re called gilets — sleeveless anoraks.’

‘That wasn’t all,’ I continued. ‘I also had this mounting inability to suspend disbelief.’

‘Explain?’ Busner rapped, and in that moment I realized who had been playing him throughout the entire scene: Orson Welles. Of course! Although master of stagecraft that Welles was — the dates were still all wrong.

‘I’d had difficulties with theatre since my late teens — all those RADA Imogens pretending to be Renaissance virgins; then, when I began writing myself, narrative fiction was the next victim — hauling on the strings of my own puppets meant I couldn’t help seeing everyone else doing the same tricks. Film and TV remained plausible — it was the spirit of the age, and no matter how jaded I might’ve felt, I could still immure myself in the wobbly flats of a daytime soap. But then — it must’ve been ten years ago or so — I began to be insistently aware of the sound recordist hovering out of shot, his furry boom mike dangling above the frame. So I started looking for it all the time — then I spotted other things.’

‘Other things?’

‘Well, continuity errors, anachronisms — anything that marred the accuracy of the representation: the wrong furniture for the period, the characters’ inappropriately modish dialogue — y’know what I mean.’

I stopped and looked at him. It was so much more than impersonation: Welles, a far bigger man, had somehow contrived to shrink himself inside Busner. The cheeks had been padded and prosthetics used on the nose. If the art of screen acting consists in stillness rather than movement, how much stiller did this performance have to be? And yet he’d pulled it off, managing to convince an audience of one who was sitting within feet of him. Then there was the voice, as familiar to me as my own, with its wheezy aspiration suggestive of a high wind in the upper branches of a mighty brainstem — how many hours had he taken to perfect this?

‘I don’t want to upset you,’ Welles said carefully. ‘But, if I hear you right, you take no pleasure in entertainment at all any more.’

‘Pleasure? It’s a torment to me.’

‘And you believe that by undertaking this quest, you’ll cure your depression?’

‘Depression — is that what it is?’

‘Mos’ def’.’

We sat and looked at one another for a while. I had no idea what he saw in me — but I knew what I saw in him: a suspension of disbelief that had endured my entire adult life. So I stolidly accepted the substitution, for to speculate as to why a long-dead Hollywood star had been directed to play my long-term therapeutic mentor, well, that way lay madness, and, as I’ve said, I knew better than to exhibit any stereotypy — let alone become strident.

I got up to depart — Busner tried to detain me: ‘No problems with packing?’

‘No, I don’t think so — I mean, not that I’ve done it yet, I’ll find out this evening.’

‘And the genre of the piece?’

‘Genre?’

‘Yes — I think film noir is difficult to resist, yet… ‘

‘Should be?’

‘Absolutely, I’d go for almost anything else, rom-com, frat boy or screwball comedy — horror, perhaps. Just don’t do anything arty or obscure, there’s a good chap, remember the Kunstschadenfreude — remember me , when you find yourself in a chain hotel room, staring fixedly at the bulbous prongs of a video-games controller, and wondering where it all went wrong.’

I squeezed out through the half-open door, then squeezed halfway back in again to wiggle my fingers, ‘Ta-ra.’

‘Ta-ra,’ Welles replied — he was fiddling with the Riddle tiles again.

I had never found Busner in the least bit pitiable before — this was Welles’s genius entirely.

*I cannot recall tasting pre-minted lamb until the early 2000s, when Sainsbury’s began to offer it among their selection of barbecue meats. This was over twenty years after the events described, so the phrase ‘minted lamb’ is interjected here to convey the implausibility of this reconstructive memoir, and indeed of the genre as a whole.

*The majority of Busner’s papers appeared initially in the British Journal of Ephemera , and have been subsequently collected in The Undivided Self: Existential Torpor and Schizothymia (Poshlost Press, 2007).

Hal, still fiercely red of lens, although now too old and hackneyed to be able to pick up much save for swivel-on bit parts — such as security cameras — gazed down on me from the corner of the Foyles travel section. I had spread out so many maps — checking for pliability, legibility, extent and area covered — that my miniature lebensraum was interfering with the shoppers. A bookseller came over to me; he was tall, raw-boned and wearing a T-shirt printed with the poster for Godard’s Breathless . His blue-black hair was cropped close at the sides of his slab head, and if he’d been better-looking the young Daniel Day-Lewis might have been playing him- or perhaps Lewis, a slave to the uglifying method, was playing him?