Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

More movies:

She sees Dark Star (isolated outer space explorers become bored, cynical, and out of touch with the original purpose of their mission, living only to wreak violence while arguing endlessly among themselves).

She sees The Stepford Wives (women who resist the stifling conformity demanded by their small town and the patriarchal group that runs it are replaced with compliant replicas).

Jeff Wolfritz brings an old friend around, a white man doing grad work in Afro-American Studies at Berkeley, the idea being for them to submit themselves to the guy’s scrutiny, become the subject of his fieldwork. But the man is perplexed and piqued. Where are my black people? he demands. The answer is, Hang on, any minute now. We’re doing the best we can. 1

After going early one morning to firebomb the house of the day’s fascist, a construction company executive (the bombs, which explode at dawn, destroy a small greenhouse and kill a cat), Tania and Roger take a drive down Highway 1. It’s a brilliant day, the ocean sparkling below them, and they stop at Montara, sit on rocks overlooking the tidal pools, hold hands. Sweet Roger. A group of children, bundled up in sweatshirts and windbreakers, plays on the beach. Their parents, huddled on wind-ruffled blankets, watch benignly as the children pretend to shoot one another and to be shot, rolling on the sand in extravagantly enacted death throes. One of the kids, fresh out of murder victims, rushes up to them.

“Pougghhhh!” he says, pointing a reasonable facsimile of a snubnose revolver at them.

“Pow!” says Roger, who carries an automatic concealed in a camera case.

“You’re dead,” says the boy. There’s no heat to the remark, only a simple statement of fact. He stares at Roger, the snubnose held at his side, and Roger obliges him by toppling over into the sand.

“You killed him!” says Tania. She kneels and turns Roger over. He doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t crack a smile. A thin dusting of sand coats his cheek and lips. “You’ve killed my husband!” She takes a crack at keening.

The boy, alert to the wit involved, cautious about becoming the butt of the joke, takes a wary step forward to examine Roger’s immobile form up close. This is something you want to check out. Tania recalls the childish thrill of playing so hard, pretending something so intensely, that you just about believe it if all the cards fall right, if everybody cooperates, your stupid friends don’t mess it up, call time, screw you out of the climax that is your due. Here comes the kid’s mom, looking halfway curious, halfway concerned.

“What’s going on here? Michael?”

She’s about thirty-two, wears black toreador pants greenish with age, a San Jose State sweatshirt, and sunglasses. Her hair is tied back in a scarf. She sips something from a Styrofoam cup.

“Don’t bother this man and lady,” she says.

Roger opens his eyes and sits up, brushing sand from his face. “It’s OK. We were just—”

“He was dead!” the boy screams, outraged at Roger’s resurrection. “You’re dead! I killed you!”

He runs to join the other kids in his group.

“I’m sorry,” the mother says. “I don’t want him to play with guns, but he wouldn’t let up. The others. Look at them all! I’m so sorry.” She seems as distressed as if Roger really had been shot.

“It’s OK,” says Roger.

“It really isn’t,” she says.

“I didn’t mind.”

“It’s not OK.” She says it sharply this time and leaves.

Blowing things up becomes just another job. A routine is established. A workaday mood prevails. Owing to her past experience with Willie Clay’s Revolutionary Army, Joan is drafted as explosives expert. She’s a little rusty. Some of her bombs blow up; some don’t.

The actions are incoherent, like punctuating their rambling argument against the system with inarticulate screeches. A partial catalog of them is gnomic, imperspicuous:

GMC, San Jose

Pillar Point Air Force Radar Station

Vulcan Foundry, Oakland

KRON-TV, San Francisco

PG&E transmission towers, Oakland

PG&E substation, San Jose

PG&E installation, Sacramento

California DOC parole office, Sacramento

PG&E office building, Berkeley

Prison Guards’ Rifle Range, San Quentin

Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alameda

SFPD Mission Station

SFPD Taraval Station

Emeryville Police Station

Marin County Civic Center

They cram the bombings in amid continuing quarrels over strategy, philosophy, politics, over ever-keener edges of extremism that need to be explored, rejected, studied. The most persistent arguments have to do with revolutionary violence — i.e., “armed propaganda” versus murder, assassination, etc. — and black leadership, that enduring problem. Teko insists that they are mere stewards of the Black Revolution.

“And you’re the stewardess, right?” Joan asks Yolanda.

Yolanda lectures her. “You need to take this more seriously, Joan. You’re the one who’s refusing the moral responsibility of assuming minority leadership. You.”

The new development in the evolution of Teko’s revolutionary thought? He’s decided that only the members of a certain enlightened class of white — such as, say, himself — may participate in the class struggle. Other whites are worse than useless. Teko would simply put them up against the courtyard wall. Anyone exhibiting counterrevolutionary tendencies at any time would be eligible for such therapy.

“These aren’t terms you can present,” says Susan.

“I just presented them.”

“You can’t win this way. Nothing’ll change.”

“It’s got to be this way.”

“Teko, you’re not black.”

“I feel like, in many respects, I am black.”

“‘Woman is the nigger of the world,’” adds Yolanda.

Joan takes Tania aside. “Now’s the time, hon.”

Tania’s eyes widen; a smile spreads across her face. “Boston?”

“One step at a time. Out of here, for sure. This is final craziness. This is some sort of political puritism, not revolution.”

“I didn’t think you cared about revolution,” says Tania.

Joan gestures dismissively. “It’s all crap. The point is if Teko’s only interested in offing white people, then what’s left but dying? I mean serious martyr stuff. Even on the farm I was like screw that. But we’re here now, not out in some boondock. Pigs all around. Now I can understand what happened in L.A. That Cin-Q must have been some sweet talker, because I really think they died on his say-so. It dawns on me now that this fight to the death idea is the plan. No revolution, only suicide.”

“THE GIRL HAS SHOULDER-LENGTH blond hair.”

“Yes?” Rose Rorvik held a plastic laundry basket under her left arm and drew on the cigarette in her right hand.

“Lives in the Bay Area, with her boyfriend. Works as a waitress.”

“Ah?”

“Tell me if this sounds familiar: ‘Brings to the cloistered Nell a sort of irascible verve, making of her senile ramblings at Nagg lucid poetic sense.’”

That, she had no idea what he was talking about.

“Does any of this remind you of anyone you know?”

The two men stood on the porch, sweating beneath their suits in the August heat.

“Yes.”

“How about this? Does this sound like something you might have heard before? ‘Keep fighting! I’m with you! We’re with you!’” The man tried to restrain a malicious smile as he raised his right fist, a decidedly stunted little flourish, like a Nixon wave. His jacket was dark with sweat at the armpit.

“Yes, it does.”

“Tell me, has anyone told you not to talk to Agent Toomes or myself?”