John Domini - Movieola!

What, character and sympathy, is that nothing but sex? Ha ha, uh-huh, okay. Okay.

Settle down.

Cletus , that’s better, that’s the name we need here. Cletus, that’s her little boy, and that’s what our own boy’s up to. He’s playing with her Cletus. Settle down. We need a hick name, that’s what I’m saying, and can’t you hear it? Good one, Cletus! —can’t you hear it? Carrying across the swamp every time the kid whacks another frog?

Now, as for what he uses to whack ’em, that’s probably his father’s old nine iron. Now, his father, that’s the question. That’s the MacGuffin. I do this for a living, boys and girls, and I know what’s the question. But, as for teachable, that’s names. Names are about the sympathy, I’m saying, maybe the sex but positively the sympathy. Your names need to pull up to the dock with all their signifiers aflutter. Think about it. Think about down in the boonies, down where you’ll find these people, they’ve all got ribbons up. Pink ribbons, yellow ribbons, whatever. Always a ribbon tied to the biggest tree in the yard. Before you knock you’ve got to decode the color. Are these guys Pray for Peace or Kill Obama?

So, Cletus, that’ll do us. In this movie, insofar as anyone’s singing the lovesick blues, one way or another they’re singing about Cletus. It’s on the board.

But, Balcony, something else? What now?

Two names, you’re saying, both for Our Lady of the Cutoffs. Okay, two, I’ll set up a bracket.

One. Down among the frog-giggers, Mama’s got her ribbons tied right, and she calls herself Sally. American as Spring Break. But, then, two. She had another name back in the noir. Back where it’s all in code, MFA NYU, E train F train, there they knew her as Salem Shellac’em—I get it—the anti-liposuctionist. Leader of a terrorist cell.

My brother Balcony. Looks like someone’s left the State Fair far behind. Looks like it.

Okay, brotherman, let’s do this. Back before she left the wicked city, no, before she fled , I hear that, before she fled the urban experience, our girl had the cosmetic surgeons quaking. She wrought havoc across the waiting rooms. All that beige and gray, those calming tones, she hit ’em with tear gas and graffiti. Tagged ’em with SAVE THE CELLULITE. Good. Plus, what’s that, what? Someone else? Don’t everybody shout at once. Just, you’re saying, she gives the docs a taste of their own medicine? Our lovely witch puts the surgeons on the table, she puts them under, and then she leaves another tag. No need for a toolkit, either, the doctors have all she needs. Okay. I mean, she’s already got a tattoo, and isn’t there an old folk song? Something like that? The girl who’s been wronged leaves her mark on the man?

It’s on the board, it’s half the board, backstory.

Back…story, oh? Oh, that’s funny, really? Somebody thinks it’s funny, back like butt, like a butt that could use some surgery. Uh huh. I guess a few of us are starting Happy Hour early.

Settle down. Balcony, help me out here. We’ve got a terrorist body-conscious mid-Manhattan backstory…

Backstory backstory backstory. You can snicker all the way to the unemployment line. Who’s running this session? Who’s going to have time for your cryin’n’pleadin’, after the guys with the checkbooks go thumbs-down on your concept, because your lead girl isn’t nice enough ? She’s got to be nice, if she’s the lead, and I mean genuinely. Inveterately. All part of what I like to call the two-step, and lately, you guys have been neglecting the one. The character half of the board, here, it’s overshadowed by the noir. Way overshadowed. Salem Shellac’em the Sabotage Surgeon, going nasty on the boys in nip’n’tuck, she’s nothing but nasty. Tear gas for the waiting room, chloroform for the doc, and how’s that play with her little Cletus? With him and our lovesick Huckleberry?

I mean, ask yourself: why does a woman break away from the most fearsome anti-liposuctionist cell in Gotham and go live among the simple fisherfolk of NASCAR-istan?

What’s up with that ? Especially when, for a surrogate family, what she’s got is a pair of pudd’nheads who like to catch frogs and throw them to the fire ants?

I’m telling you, I know the questions, and the answers need to include the truly nice. That’s our two-step, first strangeness, then sympathy. First zone out, then zoom in, see the move? Come to think—Balcony, help me here—we need it in the flashback, the warm’n’fuzzies, the high ideals of a High Yaller. So, what, again? Our girl had values? She reserved her punishment, I like it, she chose her targets. The most vain and rapacious. The Trumps and the Barbies and the doctors who, every time they take up a scalpel, first trace a dollar sign and let it bleed.

You got it. It’s in the flashback—but wait, what? Some heartbreak kid? Something else for the flashback, you’re telling me, a pretty little kid? Or pretty for a girl with a cleft lip and a clubfoot. Okay, one minute, I need to make some room up here. So, this kid, this girl. She’s a desperate little freak. Nine years old max, and no need to shout, people. I see her hobbling into Dr. Moloch’s. Down the hall, Salem, lurking. Black full-body leotard, okay, I hear that. Guy Fawkes mask. Then all at once she raises the mask. She’s gaping, shattered, and she cups a hand to her earpiece. Abort, repeat, abort!

Okay, it’s on the board, or pretty much. We’re getting mighty crowded for a flashback. Getting mighty cranky for a wrap session, too, tired and cranky, but, what—you want to keep going with the flashback? You want the bad doc laid out on his own table? Our Camptown Lady stands over him with a hot needle, a whirring hot needle. Let it bleed. The dangling ties of her smock, you’re saying, there’s your ribbons. The glee with which she wrecks his data, slapping defibrillators against his hard drive and wrecking it with a single charge—there’s your Title Scrabble!

Come on, settle down, no need to shout. Whyn’t you try some reading? Whyn’t you take a breather and try the book out in the lobby? It’s all there, chapter and verse: the two-step. Your arc carries you away but also carries you home, the refrain is reassuring, even if the end of the movie is the end of the world. Even if the screen goes black on some gargantuan space cricket rubbing its legs together. Still it’s the dreamsong of an American weekend, the thrum that starts with Friday’s first showtime, and it’s the long and short of why you came to me. It’s what I was put here to teach, the lullaby of the megaplex, the night language of a nation.

Balcony, what, again? You say you’ve got it? The second act, the arc’s comeback—the father?

You’ve got the daddy to darling Cletus. Sometimes at night when the cold winds moan. Though he’s dark, same as her, okay. You’re the boss. The board, don’t worry about the board, I can erase and start over. This country, that kind of thing, isn’t it what we do best? So, okay: Daddy’s got a tat on his throat. A fragment, not the whole tattoo, just what shows above the collar. Though the collar’s mostly rags, sure, a filthy and threadbare set of surgical scrubs. He must’ve worn it all the way down from New York. Only place the aquamarine is still visible is against the tattoo.

Except, what—it’s not a tattoo? It’s fire ants ? Insects, venomous, except in symbiosis…

Silver Lake: The dream begins in incompatibility. How’s that sound? How about we take you there, a place altogether different—incompatibility?

Venice: We know what it’s like for you. All day you’ve got to listen to this stuff.