Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

It was the pathetic non-order of a subaltern of style, who knows nothing and so uses the quince spoon to ream his pipe.

Two pools of thick soup soon lay before us, inscribed in truffle oil with the worthless autograph of the sous-chef. ‘A script is a commodity,’ Bret was saying; ‘nothing more — oftentimes a hell of a lot less. It’s no longer simply a case of “to the victor the spoils”; the actual craft of screenwriting has become having the balls and the connections necessary to get your credit.’

He stopped speaking and began paddling his fibreglass face towards the soup. I already regretted having given him the whole death-of-film shtick, although at least he seemed to think it was a metaphor — and when I’d contemptuously observed Postlethwaite babbling my lines, I’d held back from admitting I was in Hollywood to find its killer or killers.

‘But, Bret,’ I said, ‘you’re a native Angeleno, your own books have been filmed — isn’t The Informers in production right now? — you must feel an affinity for the industry?’

‘Industry? It isn’t an industry any more, man, it’s a fucking business. I tellya, if I’d’ve known the whole extent of the bullshit I was going to get caught up in, I never would’ve come back — and now there’s this other crap, the writers’ strike.’

‘Why did you stay?’

He sighed, an expiration that was mouldering in its dead civility: ‘Phew… Money, dummy — I need the money.’

Welles and Ellis — they seemed like a failed anagram or a botched palindrome. Certainly, Welles had never bettered this performance, what with its re-uptake of inhibited diffidence, its Mesolithic tedium vitae . I recalled that shocking first sight of him as Captain Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil , lunging up from his squad car, his saltpan of a face mottled and cracked. He was only forty-two when he wrote, directed and acted in the movie, yet the taint was already on him: green grave weeds, rotting at the edges. Did he see then how it would all end up, with his final role being the voiceover of Unicron, the planet-eating robot in the first Transformers movie?

The waiter came across and took our soup bowls. The restaurant had filled up with hay-hair honey-skin blondes in knock-off couture squired by men fully suited. Still, with no climate variation to speak of all four seasonal collections could be spanned by a few degrees: if the temperature fell to seventy, couples began promenading Sunset togged up as Nanook and Nyla of the north. The waiter returned with the halibuts and a bottle of Powerade tucked under his arm. I was about to remonstrate with him when he swerved aside and plonked it in between the tête-à-tête at the next table, so that it hovered in my own mid shot.

‘Whoa,’ Bret muttered, ‘the hard stuff.’ Then he went on about the death of film as he teased out fish bones with the tines of his fork: ‘I don’t think you’re right, there’s always dynamism in movie culture, whatever the mechanics of production. Even now with this, like, avalanche of product there’re still innovative things getting made.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, Knocked Up — didya see Knocked Up ?’

I groped in the mildewed reticule of my memory and came up with, ‘Um, yeah, sorta slacker comedy type thing. Not bad.’

‘Not bad? It was a whole new approach to formula pictures like that. You should read the New Yorker review — actually, it was more like an essay—’

‘By Anthony Lane, right?’ I simpered disparagingly, while thinking most of what follows. *

The Love Guru

Billboards advertising this movie’s release dominated my circumambulation of the Los Angeles basin, and during my 120-mile, week-long walk I must have passed scores of them depicting the Canadian comedian in a fake Bhagwan beard and the orange robes of a sannyasi, sitting cross-legged, one hand grasping a yellow flower, the other held — incorrectly — in the Varada Mudra pose of Theravada Buddhism: palm out, thumb and index fingers touching. Myers was, it transpired, welcoming moviegoers into an entertainment that — even by his own unexacting standards — was a pile of shit: impotent sexual innuendoes, incontinent scatological jokes, bigoted intercultural gags — The Love Guru had ’em all.

I assert this, but when I eventually saw the movie in my local hot-buttered multiplex, I realized I was in no position to judge it, for so long had I been out of the celluloid loop. Sure, it was shit — but then for all I knew all movies were shit; either that, or, given that cinema was the world’s dominant narrative medium, the silvery mirror in which Humanity viewed its own raddled features, perhaps those features were themselves daubed with shit.

Besides, I was not insensible to the halo effect, whereby the new work of any given filmmaker is surrounded by the penumbra of his or her earlier efforts. In Myers’s case, The Love Guru came haloed in shit, because I’d disliked his movies from the very first time I’d seen one, on a flight back from New York in June 1992. I suppose if I had the exhaustive critical intelligence of an Anthony Lane, rather than the planet-devouring negativity of a Unicron, then I might reserve my judgement (both then and now), not having seen the original Saturday Night Live sketches on which Wayne’s World was based. But I appeal to your own better judgement: would it really have made any difference?

Sixteen years ago I failed to find any charm in the two provincial bohunks and their amateurish cable TV show. My companion on the flight, Charles Hudson, was, however, happy to lose himself in the fartantics of Myers and his co-star Dana Carvey for 94 minutes. Then we talked, drank vodka miniatures and I smoked. Strange to recall how cigarette smoke looked in plane cabins: the ghost of a smirch in the rapidly rarefying atmosphere; it’s something my own children will never see, although they may well live to witness the extinction of mass air travel that my own generation saw evolve — all those dinoboeings, choked on their own tailpipes.

We drank many, many Smirnoff miniatures and decompressed from our Stateside trip in the acrid fuselage. On our first evening in Manhattan the crack vials had crunched under foot as we made our way downtown to go clubbing. Late that night I had to wake Charles up and ask him for a sedative — I knew he had some, old-school things, chalky little manhole covers inscribed with one of those Big Pharma coinages — Evaqual? Navarolt? Intephrine? — that make anxiolytic medications sound like the bastard offspring of a Turkish fisherman and a planet-eating robot.

Slowly, the Kematrol beat the cocaine hydrochloride molecules into submission. I stopped having to patrol the nylon trench in between the twin beds, ceased to be worried that the TV stand would sink further into the tufted orange hotel carpet. A couple of hours later I fiddled open the glassine envelope and tipped the last of the coke on to the toilet seat in a stall at La Guardia, then flubbered it up.

The flight to Syracuse was uneventful, if, that is, you’re used to the transcendent misery of realizing you have been sent back from the future and at any minute will be killed — a murder that you yourself witnessed as a small child. I was used to this. From the airport I took a cab to the university’s Health Science Center. Dr Thomas Szasz, a dapper septuagenarian in a neat blue suit, was waiting for me in a room full of ventilation ducts and polystyrene fire-retardant tiles that audibly crackled with static electricity.