Mature Themes

MATURE THEMES

Andrew Durbin

Nightboat Books
New York

© 2014 by Andrew Durbin
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States

ISBN: 978-1-937658-23-6

eISBN: 978-1-937658-29-8

INTERIOR AND COVER DESIGN:
Familiar

COVER ART:
Body Without Organs
, by Alex Da Corte, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress

Distributed by the University Press of New England

One Court Street
Lenanon, NH 03766
www.upne.com

Nightboat Books
New York
www.nightboat.org

Even if the words, the fantasies, and the desire are all there, there s this awful policeman who is also there, alive

@Horse_ebooks

THE CANYONS

I once met a television producer who asked me if I had any ideas for a movie. We connected on the cramped set of a new reality-style sitcom he was producing for ABC called
Modern Family
. The director of the pilot introduced us as “two people who should really get to know one another” and praised us both for our work with him in the past.
Modern Family
is about the short-range social economy of a “non-traditional” family in southern California that remains close despite a variety of cultural interventions. Its politics are asymmetrical: the emphasis placed on the non-traditional in the family unit describes a program of normalization disguised as difference, making the show's central focus the slapstick of a self-subverting desire in queerness to replicate that structure more perfectly. Difference is translated into the reenforcing dogma of “family values,” renewed (and concealed) by a “progressive” inclusion of gays and immigrants into its image of itself. It is always sunny and the comedy fairly tame, though occasionally the show touches on complex issues like gender roles, aging, and sex politics. This is how the producer described the sitcom to me. He never stopped smiling.

After the director returned to the shoot, the producer put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed it, and said, “Let's talk.” He took me to a backroom, where production stored an outdoor table and deck chairs next to a grill, on top of which a rack of plastic ribs glistened under the halogen lights. He took a seat in a lawn chair opposite me and called for his assistant, who brought him a cappuccino but didn't ask me if I wanted anything. The cappuccino's foam swelled to the edge of the porcelain cup, nearly spilling over onto the little blue serving dish. The fluffed milk looked like the big clouds I saw drifting over the middle of the country as I flew to California the day before. The producer brought the cappuccino to his lips, paused a moment, then set it down after taking a sip.

“A writer like you,” he said, “must have some great ideas for the movies, right?” I nodded. “Let me tell you the kind of thing we're looking for. It's simple. We want something fresh. Young. But not necessarily something for teens. It can appeal to teens, of course. We actually want that. Just not ... explicitly? It has to be,” he paused to finally take a sip of his coffee, “it has to be something dark. Not too dark, right. No vampires, but still in the
Twilight
market, if you follow me.” I thought about the
Twilight
market. He looked at me and flattened his tight smile into something like a frown.

“So do you have anything for me?”

I tried to put together my ideas in my head. Movies are immortal, I thought, but I'd never been sure whether or not Hollywood was right for me. Film was once our window into the present, “public consciousness” and probably the future, too. Now it seems television is the only worthwhile platform for the communication of real ideas. Could movies be that again? The clouds in the movies have always seemed more real to me than those on TV. There would be no clouds on
Modern Family
, that was certain, and I was not sure I could work in a world without clouds.

I looked at the producer. “I have an idea,” I said, “for a film titled
The Canyons
.”

The producer smiled. “OK. Shoot.”

I pulled out my notebook and read from it: “In
The Canyons
, the post-Fordist mode of production has collapsed and its constituent parts have broken down under the strain of the resolve of those who oppose it and those who have worked to create new, virtualized alternatives exploding in the street. Nevertheless, their mechanics, and therefore the engineering requisite to dismantle them, remain permanently invisible to those it controls. Your beautiful, holographic face shimmers at the horizon with every totality that underlies my suspicion of your resurgent unity, despite what you do to contradict the burgeoning technologies that grapple with you. I've always had this feeling, almost always had this sense of the facts, that the importance of resolution over craft is one of the most important shifts in art making besides the creation of Photoshop and the invention of the death of painting. There is no plot in
The Canyons
, only its process and a description of the potential of this process as it scales the medium that subsumes you. While the network of these realities is limited, it is singular in its reinforcement of the so-called norm, under which lie the halogen lights that give every tile on the kitchen floor the ambience of a mansion in the Hills. Beneath those lights, there are only more lights. In
The Canyons
, everything is self-erasing and its only goal is to force its viewers to stare into its prismatic light until they lose focus in the digital assemblage that unfurls there, a total work in which Lindsay Lohan, the star of the film, is purged in flames and emerges as pure fantasy set to the dimensions of the tyranny of her infinite replication across all screens, on all devices. It is not the future. It is the present. It is a lovely, nostalgic music for a Hollywood we have dreamt of but never known. The process disassembles and returns to hazardous life as always, bringing you with it through its impossible survival. Eventually Lindsay dissolves or moves her hand to her face to pull it away and reveal her true self, the flat complex of appearances that manifests on the surface as a system of revelations that remain true even when proven false.”

I bought popcorn for the usual price but snuck in my own soda. I went into theater 7 on the left and quickly found a seat before the film started. After a number of trailers for all the movies I couldn't wait to see, Lindsay Lohan's distraught face appeared on the screen, tucked into the wide light of the desert and the smoky wreckage of her Porsche. Her face was smudged with dirt and makeup as she crawled out from a roadside ditch, where her car had crashed after one of its tires hit a spike on the road in one of the desert's numerous obstacles that spares a starlet but kills everyone else. A few stray clouds gathered above her. The camera panned to reveal the empty expanse of earth while the light swelled around her and she summed up her future on the highway. She wondered whether or not she would die there, stalled halfway to Los Angeles. I thought about her famous quote: “Hopefully people will remember me for my work, not my car accidents.” The screen went dark and the words

THE CANYONS

appeared.

I had read the film's synopsis on Fandango earlier in the afternoon when I purchased my ticket: Paul Schrader's new film,
The Canyons
, written by novelist Bret Easton Ellis, is a contemporary noir about the dangers of sexual obsession and the knots ambition produces in the lives of two characters, played by Lindsay Lohan and James Deen, a famous straight porn star whose substitution of an
e
for an
a
produces an uncanny transformation when you watch him “pound the shit” out of some blonde costar, erasing, by the audacity of his enthusiasm for fucking, any memory of the James Dean whose body exploded with equal enthusiasm in a car accident much like Lindsay's car exploded in the desert in
The Canyons
. She lives and he died. I thought: This is the film I have been waiting for, and ordered my ticket.

The Canyons
is about a group of young people in their mid- to late twenties and how one chance meeting in the past unravels their lives, resulting in deceit, paranoia, and the cruel mind games that lead to ultimate violence, ultimate in that the slashing of Lindsay Lohan's throat closes the film. After the first scene, the film cut to the opening credits, then flashed back in time. Lindsay lounged in a blue tub, canopied by houseplants lingering off the edge of the bathroom windowsill. She ran her manicured hand over the edge of the tub, a gesture the camera zoomed in on. She moved her hand slowly, back and forth, letting water drip off her fingers to the tile floor below.

Producer Braxton Pope approached Lindsay Lohan's manager about the possibility of her playing a cameo in a new film by Paul Schrader, but during a meeting with Pope and Schrader, Lindsay said she wanted to play the lead. Two weeks later she screen-tested in the radiance of her very public decline and was cast as Tara in
The Canyons
.

Braxton later told a reporter for the
Hollywood Insider
: “She's very charismatic and she has a lot of acting skills ... So for this part, we felt that she was really the right actor for a host of different reasons.” Other actresses considered for Tara's role were Monica Gambee, Amalia Culp, Amanda Booth, Julissa Lopez, Fleur Saville, Lamorae Octavia, Houda Shretah, Larissa Vereza, Jamie Vandyke, Leigha Kingsley, and Ksenia Lauren. The casting director also expressed interest in French actress Leslie Couterrand, whom she felt had the look of someone who could “die gorgeously” in the desert outside Los Angeles. But when they brought Coutterand out to the Antelope Valley to screen test on site, she looked at the sand and refused to get out of the car.

Early on, the filmmakers considered casting Sean Brosnan as Christian, but when Monica Gambee fell through, they wanted to cast somebody more edgy and unexpected. Ellis, who in recent years has developed a strong interest in straight porn, had mentioned several times that he had Deen in mind for Christian's role. Schrader was reluctant at first to cast Deen out of fear that a curse might befall the set should they attempt to spiritually erase the ultrastar of the original James Dean in the course of the production of
The Canyons
. In the hope of assuaging the murky guilt that surrounded the set, Pope purchased Dean's infamous Porsche, dreamiest coffin of the last century, and hid it in a shed at an undisclosed location in Imperial County until the film's release. Deen went on record to say he did not share Schrader's concern, but that did not stop him from privately encouraging Pope to purchase the vehicle. Other actors who had been considered for Christian's role were Zane Holtz, Alex Meraz, and Daren Kagasoff.

When Gina's character was cast, the primary concern was whether or not the actress could work against Lindsay Lohan onscreen. The point was not to be ravishing but to ravish the camera in redress against its intrusion on their youth, Schrader said, and so they needed someone who could resist Lohan. A villain, more or less. After many auditions, Brooks was cast because she was overheard snickering at Lohan when she arrived on set the morning of her audition, visibly intoxicated. Other actresses that had been considered were Jenni Melear, Elizabeth Guest, Eline Van Der Velden, Spencer Grammer, Emma Dubery, and Jessica Morris.

When asked about casting
The Canyons
during an E! Entertainment interview, Bret Easton Ellis said: “Dealing with the casting of
The Canyons
was a great, liberating process—for both the production team and for the actors in general. We saw some amazing people that we will definitely keep in mind for future projects. The way the entire cast came together so quickly was a thrill and everyone who landed their roles deserved them. Using social media,” referring to the Let It Cast method of finding talent online, “as a way to help build a film is really like riding the wave into the future.”

Pope said to the same interviewer: “Nothing about this film was orchestrated in a traditional way. We wanted to actively embrace all the digital and social media tools at our disposal and give the film real cinematic value.
The Canyons
is the result of a forward thinking experiment with a terrific cast.”

Schrader said: “Bret Easton Ellis's characters are beautiful people doing bad things in nice rooms. Lindsay Lohan and James Deen not only have the acting talent they also have that screen quality that keeps you watching their every move.”

Youth is boundless. In this it resembles everything else. The future has erased the need for us to consider our bodies in terms of their need. I live in a chamber in the canyons surrounded by the screens that drift over me, broadcasting the faces of friends lost in whatever poor connection remains to bring us close, friends whose voices tend to my every whim, whatever they may be. I spend my days lying in the bath, though I cannot say who draws it for me. When I consider leaving this place I shudder and remember my happiness by pinching myself. Since I no longer feel pain, I feel nothing, which in things-as-they-are is exactly as I want them to be. I think about idols and the Venus who fell to the earth and was, for some time, rumored to live among us. Did you know her when she was alive? Do you recall seeing her across the pool in summer or has even that time relapsed and expunged from your memory the moment you later made eye contact at the hotel bar? Her smudged makeup cannot be restored; it too has receded into channels of a televised past, glittery in static, a face from which you cannot remove your gaze. The light is deep, every toilet seat pink. The weather distends any sense of time. It is only ever the best of summers, warm but cool. When it was hot, as it so often was, I used to lie on my kitchen floor, wondering when it would end. Now that it has ended, the present is soft and replete with pillows that surround you. I love my home, where everything appears on TV. And though you wouldn't have known it at the time, by the end of the nineties, this future was more or less ensured.