Flicker (74 page)
Authors: Theodore Roszak
“Jesus is. Not Yahweh. He just pretends sometimes. And then, wham! He smashes it all.”
“Is Jesus the true God?”
“Well, not exactly. He's the Messenger.”
“But he really existed, really walked the earth, right?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Was he an illusion?”
“⦠not exactly.” Simon began to become restless with this line of questioning. I tried one more query.
“Maybe he was sort of like a motion-picture projection ⦠without a screen?”
Simon perked up at that. “Who said?” he asked eagerly.
“Just an idea,” I answered casually and picked up where we'd left off with Yahweh. “So you really believe the God who runs the world is a sadistic monster?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Doesn't that make you feel frightened?”
“Uh-huh. I get these nightmares.”
“Nightmares?”
“Yeah. That's how I think up my movies.”
“What does the black bird stand for?”
“For the true God.”
“And who is that?”
“Well, he's got lots of names.”
“Abraxas?”
“Yeah, that's one.”
“And Abraxas is fighting with Satan, or Lucifer, or Ahriman, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you think Abraxas will win in the end?”
“Nobody knows that.”
“Could he lose?”
“Yeah, he could.”
“And then what?”
There was a long pause. He was bringing the answer up from deep inside. “Just dark. Cold. Dead. Forever. Everything would be like ⦠black ice. The whole universe just burnt out.”
“That sounds peaceful at least.”
“No. We'd know it.”
“Know it?”
“Know the true God is dead. Know we're lost. Forever. We'll never stop knowing it, and knowing that it was our fault.”
“How could it be our fault?”
“Because we kept it all going.”
“Kept what going?”
“Life.”
“I don't understand. If we stopped life, wouldn't that be death?”
He struggled to explain. “That'd be
one
death. But not the
other
death. It's okay if just the body dies. It's the
other
death that means being damned.”
“You mean something like with the vampires? Dead but undead?”
“Yeah. Like that. But like that everywhere. Forever.”
“You believe the body is a bad thing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“Because it's ⦠the body. It's made of icky stuff. Skin, blood, terrible rotten stuff.”
“Some people think the body is a marvelous thing, the way it works and all.”
“No. No, it isn't. The Evil God made it. He made it to torment us. He locked us up inside of it to make us suffer.”
“Then why don't all the members of your church just kill themselves?”
Simon's eyes widened in authentic horror. “Then we'd be damned.”
“Why?”
“Because it isn't allowed to kill. Not yourself, not anybody.”
“But why?”
“Because we have to fight against the Evil God as long as we can. We have to redeem all the others, everybody.”
“But don't some of the elders starve themselves to death?”
“Yes.”
“Why is that all right?”
“Because they're ready to withdraw.”
“Withdraw?”
“You'd call it dying. When they're old and ready. So it shows how strong they are. When you're too old to redeem others, then it's okay to withdraw, see?”
“Who discovered it?”
“It wasn't discovered. It was made.”
“How do you mean?”
He shrugged as if observing the obvious. “S'how the projector works. It's made to teach the flicker.”
“Teach?”
“Uh-huh. The flicker's what movies are, what they teach. It's what you're really seeing, but don't know it.”
“And the flicker is ⦠”
Very solemnly. “The war.”
“Between the two gods?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But movies aren't just projected light. There's all the rest. What about the story? The pictures, the music, all that?”
“That's on top of the flicker. If you do it right, the story makes the flicker stronger. You should try to tell a story that helps the flicker get through.”
“What kind of story does that?”
“Scary stories, spooky stories. Stories about rottenness and killing people and all very gross things.”
“Like your movies.”
“Yeah.”
“Did the orphans invent the projector?”
“No. Well, sort of. Actually, yes. We helped the inventors. We gave them the idea.”
“You mean persistence of vision?”
He nodded.
“But Roget discovered that.”
“Yeah, but it's our idea.”
“Roget was an orphan?”
“Uh-uh. We gave him the idea.”
“Do you know who it was who did that?”
“No. We don't remember the names. Somebody ⦠”
Peter Mark Rogetâthe Roget of the famous thesaurusâwas the Victorian Englishman who is usually credited with having written the first scientific paper on the queer phenomenon of persisting vision, the basis of all perceived movement in the motion picture. That was fifty years before a real projector was invented. But soon after his
paper appeared, little optical novelties based on his discovery began to catch the public's fancy. Nobody has ever clearly understood where Roget came up with the concept. Now Simon was telling me there were orphans who had passed the idea along to Roget, and who had inspired all the machines that followed.
“Did the orphans help Thomas Edison?”
“Oh yeah.”
“And Lumiére?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And ⦠” I ran through the usual textbook list of early movie pioneers. The answer was yes, yes, yes. All of them had somehow been assisted by anonymous orphans somewhere in the shadowy background of history. At least, that's what Simon had been taught.
“What about this man LePrince? Do you know what happened to him?”
Now there was a long pause. After which, very furtively, “He was captured.”
“By whom?”
No answer.
“By Oculus Dei?”
No answer, but a sudden amazed stare.
“Was he captured because he was promoting movies?”
No answer. But then a very slight nod.
“You have enemies, don't you?”
No answer.
“Why do you admire his work so much?”
“Because he got it just right. The flicker and the story and the lighting ⦠everything all together.”
“Which movie of his do you like the best?”
He thought the question over carefully.
“House of Blood
, I guess. And
Count Lazarus.
And, oh yeah,
Zombie Doctor.
I want to remake those. I want to remake lots of his movies.”
“Your movies use many of his techniques, don't they? I mean all the things people can't see, or don't know they're seeing.”
Simon gave me a quizzical look, as if he wasn't certain I should know about such things. “Yeah, I use all that,” he answered hesitantly.
“I think you use them better than Castle did.”
His little pink eyes brightened at that. “You do?”
“You have more of a chance to use them. Castle didn't have as much artistic control as you have.”
He pondered that. “I guess not.”
“Lots of people in the church don't approve of Castle. Why is that?”
“I dunno. I think because he was disobedient.”
“About what?”
“He wanted to show things he wasn't supposed to.”
“Like what?” He gave no answer. “But you like his work anyway?”
In a solemn tone, “He was a prophet.”
“Was he? Even though he was disobedient?”
“Yes. Because his movies spoke the truth.”
“Did you ever hear of a sallyrand?”
“Uh-uh. What's that?”
“It's what Castle used to call a multifilter.”
“Oh. How come?”
“Just a pet name he had for it. Do you have one?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You don't?”
“I don't use one. The editors do, not me.”
“You
never
use it?”
“I used to. I don't have to anymore.”
“Why?”
“Don't have to hide things. All the sex stuff and blood, you can just show it. People don't care. They like it.”
“There was hidden stuff in
Sub Sub,
wasn't there? At the beginning, where the screen was all dark?”
“Yeah. The editors stuck that in. I didn't want it. The worst stuff came later. And I just showed it.”
“Do you think I could borrow a multifilter? It would help me with my study of Castle's films.”
He gave me a suspicious stare. “You should ask Brother Justin.”
“You couldn't get one for me?”
“I'm not allowed.”
On occasion I met Simon in the little room where he lived in the studio. It was a dim and cluttered cubbyhole; the shades were never raised to admit the light of day. A couple of the windows along with all the walls were covered over with a chaotic collage of posters, clippings, photos ⦠the images that animated his genius. Most of the posters were from movies or rock concerts, especially those of the Stinks. There were some reproductions of works of art, a few of which I could identify. Figures from Michelangelo's
Last Judgment,
some Blake prints, some Bosch and Breughel. There was a lot of pop art, plus some rather unlovely cartoony stuff that I discovered were Simon's own sketches and doodles: strange, usually obscene, anatomical variations, monstrous beings, bizarre sexual couplings, tortured faces.
Other than a few catechism pamphlets, the room was heaped with gore and porn comic books. These go by the name “adult comix,” but their main audience is kids, most likely unbalanced little boys. There were also several cartons filled with triple-X-rated girly magazines, the vilest kind.
“Do you have any favorite books?” I asked.
With some embarrassment, Simon told me what I already knew. “I have trouble reading.” Whenever he wished, however, he could get students from the school to read to him. So what did he like them to read? He seemed reluctant to let me know, even irritated.
“You can tell me, Simon,” I coaxed.
He went to a bureau and from deep inside one of the drawers fished out a book. He handed it to me like a precious possession. For the first and only time Simon succeeded in warming my heart. The book was a cheap paperbound edition of
The Wizard of Oz.
It had been leafed through so often the pages had to be held together by a rubber band.
“One of my favorites too,” I confided to him.
He lit up at that, then sadly added, “She doesn't like to have the students read it to me.”
“Who?”
“Sister Helena. The other teachers too.”
“Why not?”
“She says it's a big lie.”
“Oh?”
“She says it teaches children wrong things.”
“Well, it
is
a fantasy.”
“Yeah, that's okay. But it's when everything comes out happy.”
“Sister Helena doesn't like that?”
“Uh-uh. Well, I guess she's right.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. But ⦔He fell into a guilty whisper. “Sometimes I like how it comes out in the book.”
“Do you know the movie?”
He sneered. “Don't like that.”
“No? Why not?”
“It's silly. It isn't really scary at all. Just for little kids. I could make it lots better.”
“Have you ever thought of remaking the movie?”
“Oh yeah. I've got it all in my head.”
“Have you?” And we talked about that for a while. It was soon clear that what Simon had in mind would be lugubrious in the extreme and as graphically frightening as possible. All the little excitements of the tale came out as ghoulish horrors, while the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion took on the proportions of Wagnerian heroes. Thank God, I thought, that nobody was ever likely to bankroll this production. Worst of allâand it really hit me like a rabbit punchâin the end Simon would have Dorothy die! And not very nicely. Her role was to function as the Cathar symbol of a tragic humanity persecuted by an angry God. An image formed in my mind: Judy Garland nailed like Christ to the cross. It was too much.
“Oh come on, Simon! You can't be serious. You're going to kill off Dorothyâthe heroine?”
“Sure. Like Janet Leigh in
Psycho.
And Toto too. Anyway, that's how Sister Helena says it should end. And the Wicked Witch and the Wizard go on struggling ⦠and we don't know who's ever going to win.”
The next week I made a special trip to a little bookshop I knew in Westwood where I'd seen an illustrated first edition of
The Wizard of Oz.
It was still there. I bought it and gave it to Simon. He was delighted. Quickly he thumbed through. “Pictures aren't very scary,” he commented. But he was overjoyed to have the gift.
“Do you realize how bad that candy is for your teeth?” I asked on one occasion when, counting the Milk Duds as he crammed them in rapid succession into his bulging cheeks, I reached the number fourteen. The candy seemed to make it easier for him to talk, but when he was that loaded up, he drooled chocolate with every word.