Flicker (64 page)

Because the film seemed to sneak into circulation without any promotional hoopla, reviewers everywhere could flatter themselves that it was their “discovery”—always a surefire way to hook the critics. And so
Sub Sub
got talked about and talked about, debated and discussed, often with the sort of tantalizing disapproval that creates a
succès de scandale.
I may have little to add to that talk now; still, my reaction to what was, in effect, the movie's premiere screening before an audience of outsiders is part of my adventure with Simon Dunkle and my quest for Max Castle. So I will recount the experience here, noting that my recollection of the work is of the unexpurgated version, never seen by more than a handful. Critics who were subsequently to pronounce
Sub Sub
the most awesomely ghastly vision of our postnuclear future ever produced still have no idea how much of its ghastliness they missed—a full forty minutes that had to be cut before distributors would offer the film to first-run houses.

I'm sure there are long-suffering ganglia deep within my nervous system that continue to reverberate to my first punishing impression of
Sub Sub.
To begin with, the sound, the malignantly inhuman sound. Having borrowed rock video as his genre, Simon didn't hesitate to launch his film with a full-scale assault upon the eardrums of his audience. I understood at the time that rock music, as performed in concert, had reached astronomical levels of amplification; but I had no idea sound of such volume could be etched into celluloid.
Sub Sub
opened like a mountain of noise collapsing on one's head, never relenting by more than a fraction of a decibel from beginning to end. Jeanette, sitting beside me, started in her seat, then clapped her hands over her ears, where they stayed for the remainder of the film. I manfully exposed myself to the cacophony, determined to take in all I could, only to discover that within ten minutes my hearing had gone numb.

Before it did, I was able to make out voices—the constant and
incomprehensible yammer of Bobby Pox and the Stinks screaming to be heard above the film's even louder and expertly engineered sound effects, which were, as far as I could tell, a thundering composite of roaring engines, clanging metal, explosions, collisions, gunfire, tumult.

For some five minutes, while we were being bombarded by this nearly unbearable uproar, the screen remained dark, as if the soundtrack were offering us an overture for a movie that was yet to begin. The promotion for the film emphasized that it opened with Bobby Pox's hit bumper-sticker ballad “Bend Over, Baby, and Let Me Drive.” That's the way audiences continue to experience the beginning of
Sub Sub:
sound without pictures. But my studies of Max Castle had schooled my senses; I couldn't fail to recognize negative etching when I saw it. Or rather felt it. I knew the unlit screen before me was alive with imagery; and my instinct told me it was every bit as brutal as the sounds I heard. Before the movie rose to visibility, I could feel panic and terror welling up inside me. And I wasn't alone. Jeanette, working her shoulder into my chest, let me know she wanted to be shielded. I slipped my arm about her and could feel the tremors that ran through her body.

Once the movie was on the screen bright and clear, it took no more than a few minutes for me to tell that Simon had turned a corner in his career. The boy had come out of the garage. While clearly low-budget,
Sub Sub
was a remarkably well-crafted thirty-five-millimeter color production, the filmmaker's first attempt—and a successful one—to make full professional use of his studio. Even where the film had to cut financial corners, Simon found ingenious ways to mask his economies, if only by way of sensational violence or some nicely designed spoof of the very genre he was using. His skill in this respect was exactly what managed to charm many critics. Wised-up reviewers could tell they were watching a devilishly clever piece of work.

But while Simon had upgraded the technical skill of his work, his message remained as nihilistic as ever. Filmed in the harshest regions of the Mojave Desert,
Sub Sub
is little more than a pageant of unrelieved violence chronicling the endless war between several tribes of inarticulate mutants, the degenerate survivors of a world holocaust. The cast is given only one line, which it lip-syncs from Bobby Pox and the Stinks on the sound track, the only fragment of their lyrics I could make out. “We be sub sub. We be sub sub.” Again and again cretinous faces thrust themselves into the camera lens like inquisitive
primates to repeat the words. Sub
what?
They are too far gone to know, devolved to a level from which they can no longer recall the humanity they have left so far behind.

For some two hours, these freakish remnants of our species race about a barren landscape in bizarre vehicles improvised from the remains of trucks, fork lifts, tractors, airplanes, bulldozers. The gasoline needed to fuel these makeshift engines is the only wealth they respect. In pursuit of it, they smash and crash into one another, slaughtering everyone in sight with grotesquely savage weapons: harpoons, blowtorches, crossbows, cattle prods, chainsaws. The variations on human carnage reach a level of diabolical inventiveness. Much of the mayhem is so blatantly realistic, it is difficult to see how it could have been filmed without somebody getting maimed or killed. Again and again, I felt Jeanette turn in my embrace to hide her eyes in the hollow of my neck. I felt guilty that my curiosity kept me from yielding to a similar queasiness. Our fellow viewers, however, clearly had no such qualms. The more graphic the violence became, the more exuberant were the howls of sheer delight that went up from Bobby Pox and his party—and from Sharkey, trumpeting his approval right along with them. And theirs would be the response
Sub Sub
would enjoy from adolescent audiences everywhere, who relished the film as the first of what permissive critics would herald as a new genre: genocidal farce.

Yet as excessively brutal as the movie was, it had the same riveting quality that Simon managed to bring to all his work. Arresting images, sly touches of pathos, macabre humor, above all a driving conviction that made one willing to watch just a little more, a little more. There were, quite simply, elements of undeniable artistry to the boy's work. No desert put on film ever looked more utterly desolate than the world of the Sub Subs, a sterile, glowing hell under a merciless sun whose brilliance is allowed to flare the film and batter the eyes throughout. It is the wasteland to end all wastelands, a setting whose inhumanity is as dumbfounding as the mindless carnage that fills it. As time passes in the movie, we have the impression that the sun is expanding, scorching the earth, drying up every last source of life. The light grows more and more blinding until we can scarcely make out the images that move in the sweltering shimmer.

Still the senseless war goes on, the tribes contending for a trophy that lies hidden in a deep underground chamber. Throughout the tale we wonder what the object is, for we glimpse only portions of
its shadowy form. It would seem to be the last relic of a civilized sensibility. At last we see it whole. It is an unexploded missile warhead that has been transformed by its brain-damaged possessors into a barbarous icon. It looms up at the end of the movie mounted on an altar that, if examined closely (something Simon's audience wasn't likely to do) reveals itself to be a junkyard jumble of defunct religious images and artifacts: crucifixes, Islamic crescents, Egyptian ankhs, yin-yang circles, Hindu mandalas. Simon's films often included touches like this, details and elaborations that didn't have to be there but which were, usually slipping by too rapidly to be noticed. Finally, inevitably, the Sub Subs accidentally ignite the warhead. Its fireball rises to merge with the blaze of the sun in a marriage of annihilating light that swallows the scene, the story, and all meaning.

For a half minute at the conclusion, the screen pulsates with a light too bright to watch. The voices of the Stinks wail like the cry of the damned, then suddenly fade. The screen goes dark. The end. An end that seems to vibrate through the theater like a vast, cosmic beat. I was sure this hideous interval was filled with one of Max Castle's swirling motifs, the black hole of despair.

When the movie ended, someone brought up the house lights a bit too rapidly. Simon, who was sitting a few aisles in front of me with his dark glasses off, turned, startled, in my direction. Indeed his eyes were bunny-nose pink. He blinked at me painfully out of a paste-white face like some subterranean creature that had been unearthed into the daylight. Quickly he replaced the glasses and then sat staring down into his lap, his jaw knotting and twisting as he chomped on a cheek-bulging wad of Milk Duds.

But his guests—other than Jeanette and myself—were all abubble. Bobby Pox and his contingent—which had consumed more than a joint or two in the course of the viewing—could hardly contain themselves. Slutty was writhing in her seat. “Oh, barfy!” she squealed over and over. “What a barfy flick!”

“It screams real good,” one of the other girls added. Humper, his eyeballs now featuring pupils dilated to the size of black nickels, vaulted awkwardly over two rows of seats to thump Simon savagely on the back. “Wild, man! We got a crotch-buster here for sure. But, hey, y'know, we should boost the amps. It don't pierce enough.”

Pox, sitting back and dragging deep, judiciously pronounced the work “Epic. Total butt-fuckin' epic.”

And, of course, Sharkey was certain we had witnessed a “classic.”

I glanced at Jeanette. She stared back at me, her eyes wide and hollow, the face of someone who had just stepped out of a car crash. “Still want your interview?” I asked. She just kept staring. I repeated the question, then realized she hadn't heard me. She was waiting for her ears to stop jangling.

Brother Justin bustled over at once to move in beside me. “So, Professor, what do you think?” A few rows ahead, Simon craned around in his seat, his eager white face staring back at me, a mute but urgent echo of the same question.

This called for a nicely balanced answer. Nothing too severe. There were things I still had to learn from these people. And yet, with Jeanette there beside me, I didn't want to offer outright lies. But for that matter, I wasn't at all certain what I did think. At one level, disgust. At another, admiration. “Well … it was surely an experience. I haven't caught my breath yet.”

“You found it powerful … moving?” Brother Justin's toothy smile pressed in closer.

“I was definitely moved.” Playing for time, I raised a question that had troubled me throughout the movie. “Were any of the stuntmen injured?”

“Stuntmen … ?” The question caught Brother Justin off balance. Impatiently, he looked across at Decker.

“Actually, we didn't use any stuntmen,” Decker answered.

Simon struggled to amend the remark. “Except for f-f-f … ”

“Oh yes,” Decker interpreted. “Except where fire was involved. Otherwise, we just recruited extras on the site. One of our many economies.”

“Extras?” I couldn't imagine rank amateurs agreeing to take on the hazards I'd just seen.

“Bikers, scooter nuts, wheel freaks, and such. They hang out in that part of the desert over the weekends. In and around Barstow. They were happy to be in one of Simon's movies.”

“Dope ‘em up, they'll drive into a truck for you,” Pox explained with a mean laugh. “Dumb fuckers! Remember the turkey who ran through the grinder?” His party sent up a howl. “We told him there was a pound of hash at the other end.”

Brother Justin, annoyed by the digression, reverted to his line of questioning. “You think the film will prove successful?”

“Successful … in what way?”

“In reaching a larger audience for Simon.”

I did all I could to conceal the regret behind my answer. “Yes, I believe it will.”

“Ah!” He was pleased. “You see, we have invested a great deal in this production, far more than in Simon's other efforts, which were frankly intended for a limited public. We hope that this film … ”

“It's a breakthrough,” Sharkey assured him. “This'll go first run, no question.”

Bobby Pox had a deep thought to add. “It's what the world's been waitin' for.
Quid pro quo.”

But Brother Justin was clearly more interested in my judgment. I tried to assume a professionally objective air. “Of course, I'm no expert on film marketing, but I'd say you have a good chance of getting into some first-run movie theaters in major cities. It's a polished production and in a currently popular genre. Of course, there'd probably have to be a number of cuts… .”

Simon leaped at the word. “C-c-c-c … ”

Offering him an apologetic look, I said, “There are a few sequences that really go too far for a general audience. Not that they aren't done well … I mean, convincingly. But the picture does run long, so it could do with some trimming. And it is rather loud.”

“What'd he say?” Humper asked in all directions.

“He says it's too loud,” Pox shouted, laughing off the idea.

“Oh shit, man!” Humper protested, tossing me a look of aggressive contempt. “You must got bunny ears. We could crank it up to a hundred twenty dbs easy.”

“Just don't cut out my big part, that's all,” Slutty insisted. She meant the scene in which she'd been the victim-star who gets “done” by the whole tribe. I'd been watching for that especially. To my surprise, it hadn't been so hard to take, primarily because, in her scene as in the rest of the movie, nobody seemed human enough in action or response to evoke sympathy. Like all the Sub Subs, Slutty had emerged as a sort of imbecile simian. Nevertheless, hers was among the first scenes I would have expected to see cut, if only because the sex organs remained recognizably humanoid.

“But otherwise,” Brother Justin went on, “allowing for some tactful editing, you believe the film can find critical approval?”