Flicker (72 page)

Father Angelotti broke off his brief digression into movie machinery with the Templars, but not before he'd dropped one last tantalizing remark: “After the destruction of the Albigenses, such illicit devices
disappear from sight. The story of their subsequent clandestine elaboration for dubious religious purposes remains to be told.”

So at last I had the key to Max Castle's movies, the secret of their uncanny fascination. The man drew upon an ancient tradition, an art of light and shadow used to teach the war of the two gods. The flicker
was
that war. Twenty-four times a second, as the frames of film raced by—click, click, click—it pounded its way insidiously through the bedazzled eye into the unguarded depths of the mind. Light against Dark. Flesh against Spirit. The Good God, the Evil God locked in combat. Watching movies was a way of being surreptitiously catechized.

Expecting little more than his usual evasive action, I nevertheless brought up what I'd learned with Brother Justin. Had he ever heard about the use of flip-books among the ancient Manichaeans?

“Do you mean those little picture books they put in cereal boxes? Children's toys, are they not?” One of his usual tactics: trying to make my questions seem foolish. “Of what use could they possibly be except for amusement?”

What did he know about the Templars' magic-lantern shows? Why, nothing at all … what were they?

How far back did his church's interest in motion-picture machinery go? Why, no farther back than the invention of movies by Thomas Edison … or whoever deserved the credit.

Had he ever considered the flicker of the projector to be a sort of a symbolic combat of light and darkness? He pretended total astonishment. What a charming idea! Where had I come across it? I handed him Father Angelotti's monograph, watching closely as he opened it. His glance paused long enough on the inscription to tell me he registered its significance.

“Ah yes. Angelotti. I've come across his work. Not very reliable, actually. The man knows nothing about our tradition. A Dominican, I believe. The inquisitional order.”

No thanks to Brother Justin, I'd arrived at an important new level in my understanding of Max Castle. A score of scattered pieces had fallen into place. Now I could see that everybody, each in his or her own way, had been right about some piece of the man and his movies. Saint-Cyr was right about the flicker. But he vastly underestimated the depth of its penetration. Castle was hardly concerned with something as ephemeral as class struggle; his theme was cosmic warfare.

And Clare was right. Castle was out to subvert the conscious art
of cinema by his use of sensational subliminal tricks. But she didn't realize how serious was the intention behind those tricks.

And Olga was right. Both in his films and in his strange bedroom antics, Castle, like every good Cathar, was out to “fool the devil at his own game.” As prurient as the subliminal imagery of his movies might be, the technology that delivered them to the screen secretly tainted their titillation with persistent shame. At one level, delight, at another disgust. “… enough to put you off sex for the rest of your life.”

And Rosenzweig had been right about the diabolical agenda of Castle and the orphans. But he, like all the Cathars' persecutors, would never admit that his devil was their god, his god their devil. Every Cathar in history had gone to his grave believing that the God of
this
world, the God of the Church of Rome and of every church except their own, was the God of Darkness, Lord of the hell in which we live out our days as slaves of disease, desire, death. Where the rest of the world saw darkness, they saw light; where they saw darkness, the rest saw light. Because the God of Darkness had turned our mind inside out, upside down. We mistook the negative for the positive photograph of reality. Knowing the true meaning of the words, the Cathars proudly worshiped “the dark God,” the light that shines in the darkness and is comprehended not. The black bird was his emblem, the unlit theater his temple. Only at the end of time, when the war of the two gods reached its climax, would these eyes of flesh melt away and our vision become clear enough to see the light as light and the darkness as darkness.

And little Zip Lipsky had been right. Castle was indeed one hell of a filmmaker—though Zip would have been the last to know why. It was because Castle's art served a purpose beyond art. It was the handmaiden of a mighty and ancient teaching.

For my own part, I couldn't endorse that teaching in any religious sense. I surely didn't want to believe that this world, the only one I knew for sure existed, was the Dark Lord's playground. And despite all the antierotic propaganda I'd absorbed from Castle's films, something in my libidinal energy still fought stubbornly to assert its dignity. Maybe I simply hadn't suffered enough to give up on life. Or maybe I'd known the love of too many good women to go the Cathar way.

And yet … and yet …

The memory of Mrs. Feather acting out a long-dead girl's deadly ordeal by fire would never leave me. Nor would the things Olga had
once told me so simply, so earnestly about “making babies for Herr Hitler's world.” Her words filled my mind with pictures of the waste and wretchedness that took place all around me, more than I could or cared to take in. The starving children, the butchered thousands, the commonplace terror of the sick, the mad, the poor. News of the day every day. Olga, who had lived through the death camps and had seen the massacre of the innocents, had no doubt that the world was indeed hell. At that brute level of historical fact, I had to admit there was something to be said for the Great Heresy.

“It is like talking to the oracle at Delphi.”

Jeanette made the remark with some consternation after our first interview with Simon Dunkle.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“He babbles, he stutters. You cannot understand a word. Somebody has to translate what he says. And then”—she gave a nice, emphatic French shrug of the shoulders—“it means I don't know what.”

It was an apt comparison. Simon's stammer turned out to be so severe that very little managed to fight its way up his spastic larynx and get past his teeth as coherent English. On our first weekend visit to St. James School, we spent three long meetings with the boy. I came away with no more than four sentences from his own lips. The rest had to be mediated by Sister Helena, who never failed to leave the impression that she was doing me a great favor by providing her services. But as time went by, I came to feel she was on hand to function more as censor than translator, intercepting Simon's halting remarks and recasting their meaning entirely. She had little trouble getting away with that. Simon was so shy he never protested, even when I could tell that Sister Helena was rerouting his words in very different directions than he intended. Three times when he struggled
to cough up a word I knew to be “flicker,” but couldn't get past a spluttery “f,” she intervened to construe what he meant to say as “film” or “fun” or “photograph.” When he bogged down once more on the word, I mischievously asked if he might not be trying to say “fuck.” Sister Helena never missed a beat. Without the sign of a blush, the good lady smiled and said, “Why, yes.” By that time, we'd arrived at a tacit understanding. She was misleading me, and I knew she was misleading me, and she knew that I knew she was misleading me. What choice did I have but to go along, hoping to pick up tiny glimmers of the truth here and there?

Caught between the stammering Simon and the devious nun, my frustration grew with each visit. I could never tell if I was learning anything reliable; I certainly didn't feel I was getting any closer to Simon. In that respect, I began to fear my trips to St. James School were going to finish as a total waste of time, except for the chance they offered to view Simon's movies. As it turned out, I was to see his films several times over, because the screenings offered an unexpected benefit. Timid and tongue-tied as he was, Simon was able to relax enormously whenever his films were on the screen. The boy clearly lived for his art—and through his art. It spoke for him, saying all he had to say. In its presence—with the aid of enough Milk Duds—he found the confidence to articulate a great deal more clearly. And sitting by his side in the darkened theater, I could easily lean close to lend him an ear to whisper in without giving Sister Helena the chance to intrude herself between us. Not that she didn't try. While we screened Simon's films, she would sit directly behind him, bent forward to catch whatever remarks we might be passing back and forth. That was awkward for her and besides gave her no excuse to butt in and speak for Simon.

If my attempt to get through to the oracle of Zuma Beach proved frustrating, Jeanette's situation was much worse. I hadn't yet told Brother Justin that she was on hand to conduct a magazine interview with Simon; nevertheless, I encouraged her to take notes along the way for later use. “I'll let Brother Justin know what you want when the time is right,” I told her. But it took no more than the first few sessions with Simon for her to realize that her task might be impossible. She was getting nothing from the boy himself; and what Sister Helena was passing along made no sense whatever to her.

Worst of all, poor Jeanette had no idea what most of my questions were all about, since they often related to film techniques or religious
doctrines that were a complete mystery to her. I confess it was selfish of me, but I'd decided to tell her nothing about the orphans or the Cathars. All this was mine to reveal when I felt ready to do so. I hardly wanted to see my long years of research scooped by Jeanette in some quick and flashy item published by
Rolling Stone.
So whenever she asked me to clarify one of my mysterious lines of questioning, I obfuscated shamelessly. As a result, after weeks of commuting between L.A. and Zuma Beach, Jeanette was getting nowhere with the project that had brought her to California—though of course she'd gained the opportunity to be saturated with Simon's films, including some juvenilia that had never been released. Unfortunately, that only made her more certain that she detested his work—all of it. Which made her less and less eager to pursue the interview.

The Simon Dunkle assignment may have turned into an ordeal for her, but her pilgrimage to filmland was paying off rather nicely in other ways. Jeanette, whom Sharkey had hastened to offer bed and board the day she showed up in his office, had decided to accept my hospitality instead. Sharkey was magnanimous about it, as if he had ever stood a chance with her. “She's the academic type,” he explained to me. “I've sworn off the academic type.”

She moved in with me and quickly made herself at home, only to discover that the allure of “‘ollywood” circa the mid-seventies was swiftly exhausted. In fact, it wasn't there at all. But we'd gracefully renewed our affectionate friendship, and that made her prolonged stay a promising possibility for both of us—or at least, so I allowed myself to believe for the next several months. She was a bright, highspirited, adventure-seeking young woman whose company I found both comfortable and stimulating. Her visit, however, coincided with my full-time research into the Cathars. And this I preferred to do in my office on campus, the better to elude her predictable curiosity. There were also a number of books, among them the most valuable, that Brother Justin wouldn't allow me to remove from the school grounds. These were private publications of the church nowhere else available. I was permitted to see them only in his office. That kept me away from the apartment for whole days at a stretch, leaving Jeanette to amuse herself.

This she managed to do very nicely, finally drifting into marginal jobs around the edges of the movie industry. She had little trouble bringing herself to the attention of company executives who were always happy to have another pretty young thing hanging around,
especially one who was willing to work for peanuts and show up unattached at parties. The job offers that came her way were mostly thinly veiled sexual advances, but she soon learned to fend off the savages. She ended up with a job reading for Disney Studios. She complained that the scripts she was given were silly stuff—especially those that went on to earn big bucks—but the work paid well enough and that took the pressure off her to deliver on the Dunkle interview. She soon felt free to skip more and more of our visits to St. James School.

Clearly her heart was no longer in the assignment. On the contrary, Jeanette had become Simon Dunkle's severest critic, always on hand to needle me with questions about his work. Why, she wanted to know, was I spending so much time with this “poor, sad, little boy”? Yes, she agreed, he was very clever. His films showed remarkable low-budget production values. “But they are
sick.
They are decadent.” And finally, in a whisper she declared, “they are
evil.”
Her words echoed those I'd heard from Clare years back when she'd been exposed to more of Max Castle's films than she could stomach.

“Well,” I answered, “Simon is becoming a phenomenon. He deserves critical atttention. That's what I'm giving him. There'll be time to say all these things when I write my piece on him.”

Jeanette could appreciate that. She was as astonished as I was to see how Simon's reputation was growing from month to month.
Sub Sub
had all the success Brother Justin expected for it. In its wake, distributors around the country ordered up thirty-five-millimeter versions of some earlier productions he had in reserve. And these too proved themselves at the box office.
Attack of the Skull Suckers
was as gross an example of a splatter flick as anyone would ever dare to put on the screen; but it was also a skillful spoof of the genre that succeeded in charming those reviewers who could pick up its underlying sophistication. As for
Annihilation Derby,
what more need one say than that it was the first Dunkle film that Clarissa Swann saw fit to review. That in itself was enough to give any movie status.