Mature Themes (8 page)

I WENT DOWN TO THE BEACH

I went down to the beach and wrote a book called
The Beach
, inspired by
Heart of Darkness
, a novel about the perils of inadequately supervised interaction between codified behavior and the Other. To put it more directly, I wrote a novel based on a novel about the degradation of white leadership in the face of non-Western local practice exoticized in fantasy rather than observation. Exterior: the jungle. Interior: Dark night of the white man's soul. In my novel about the beach, which takes place in a remote region of Thailand, a boy is given a map by a man named Daffy Duck that points to a beach where few people have ever been, largely because of how treacherous the path to it is. Richard, the main character, leads a French couple and later two Harvard graduates on an adventure to the beach, an adventure in which they encounter frictional social elements (like an evil marijuana plantation) that attempt to deter them from traveling to the beach. Finally, they jump off a waterfall, float down a river, and meet a highly organized totalitarian society of expatriates ruled by an American woman named Sal. This is the most significant reference to
Heart of Darkness
. Their time at the beach is filled with curious events that create a compelling plot of intrigue, like when they run out of rice and Jed, “the enigmatic loner of the group,” volunteers to go for a rice run. Richard, accompanying him, realizes it is time to escape. Tribe members die. Social complexities contribute to pain, paranoia, and euthanasia. I would describe all of this in greater detail but you have to read my book
The Beach
. To escape, Richard spikes the tribe's stew one night with marijuana so that everyone is incapacitated by an “overloaded high.” He flees with the French couple and Jed, into the night, “back to civilization.”

I went down to the beach and adapted my book called
The Beach
for the big screen, inspired by
Apocalypse Now
, a movie about the perils of inadequately supervised interaction between codified behavior (played by Marlon Brando) and the Other (played by a number of underpaid local Filipino workers). To put it more directly, I adapted my novel using a film about the degradation of white leadership in the face of non-Western local practice exoticized in fantasy rather than observation. Exterior: the jungle. Interior: Dark night of Marlon Brando's soul. In the film version of my novel about the beach, which takes place in a remote region of Thailand, a boy (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is given a map by a man named Daffy Duck (played by Robert Carlyle) that points to a beach where few people have ever been, largely because of how treacherous the path to it is. Richard, the main character, leads a French couple (played by Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet) and later two American surfers on an adventure to the beach, an adventure in which they encounter frictional social elements (like an evil marijuana plantation) that attempt to deter them from traveling to the beach. Finally, they jump off a waterfall, float down a river, and meet a highly organized totalitarian society of expatriates ruled by an American woman named Sal (played by Tilda Swinton). This is the most significant reference to
Apocalypse Now
. Their time at the beach is filled with curious events that create a compelling plot of intrigue, like when Christo (played by Staffan Kihlbom) is injured and Sal volunteers to go to the mainland for medical supplies. Richard realizes it is time to escape. Tribe members die. Social complexities contribute to pain, paranoia, and euthanasia. I would describe all of this in greater detail but you have to see my movie
The Beach
. To escape, Richard flees the tribe after the marijuana farmers violently disrupt the community's activities. He flees with Sal, into the night, “back to civilization.”

At the premier of
The Beach
, Leonardo DiCaprio stole away from the theater three times to the use the restroom. Sitting near him, I couldn't help but notice him leaving so often, and decided after the third time he exited the theater to follow him to see if anything was wrong. Didn't he like the film I'd adapted from the book I'd written? I pushed my way out of my row.

As I walked up the theater aisle, past friends glittering in the changing light of the projection, each smiling or nodding at me as they watched me pass by, I thought about the conditions under which I'd begun the novel. I had originally meant to set
The Beach
in New York in 2012. It was going to be about the hostilities of an emergent, troubling climate in which a flurry of deadly natural events wreck the lives of those living in the city. Shortly after Hurricane Sandy “compromised” the coast and shut down much of New Jersey, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, the news wrote my novel itself and I decided that I would invert the reality into a narrative of departure rather than arrival. I wanted to chase the storm, so I set my novel and my film at the beach, away from a city broken by the weather that would play no role in my work.

I entered the lobby and asked an attendant if he knew where Leo had gone. “He's in the bathroom to the right,” he said. “He didn't look well, actually. I think he's planning to go.”

“Thanks,” I said. In the hallway that led to the bathroom, the theater piped in Katy Perry's “Firework.” Its poppy burst of good feelings and helium-inflated enthusiasm for the body unleashed in a rush of heady endorphins, acceptance of anyone and everyone no matter who or what they are, felt incongruous outside my brittle, unsettling film, in the silent lobby with its dim lights that made even my most beautiful, famous friends look like strange ghosts, haunting the image of themselves. I pictured Katy throwing her arms open to Budapest in the music video, fireworks exploding from her breasts into the hot night and wished at the moment I was there with her, in Hungarian summer and not in New York's brutal winter.

In the bathroom, I found Leo sobbing on the white tile floor. I rushed over to him.

“Are you OK?” I asked. He shook his head. “What's wrong?”

“I'm not exactly sure, I guess ... I just ... it's that I'm so rarely bothered by my own work, like upset by it. But for some particular reason
The Beach
feels different, almost like it's this narrative for a career I don't really want, from androgynous
objet d'art
to streetwise tough guy, a little fucked up by the world, yah, but still a real strong guy, if that makes any sense. Like do I want that? It gets under my skin with an energy that makes me feel so fucking strange.”

“That
is
strange,” I said. “I hadn't meant it that way.”

“I know,” he said and began to cry again.

I held Leo for a few minutes before I asked him if he wanted me to call his driver. His red and tearstained face lit with real gratitude. “Could you?” he said. “I need to go home.”

I pulled out my cell and called his driver. I pulled Leo up and helped him out of the bathroom and into the lobby, where we waited for his driver. Tilda emerged from the theater and rushed over to us.

“Is everything all right?” Tilda asked.

“Everything is all right,” I said. “Leo isn't feeling well, so I'm sending him home.”

The driver appeared in the lobby and Leo went to him. Tilda and I followed them outside, to the corner of the street and the avenue where the driver double-parked the car.

We watched Leo get into the limo, waved goodbye, then returned to
The Beach
, just as, on screen, our star jumped off the waterfall, into the river that would take him to Tilda.

In
Apocalypse Now
, US special operations officers reverse the geographical trajectory of
The Beach
by going away from it, into the jungle, where they meet the tribe where Kurtz has installed himself as an unflinching, totalitarian leader. In a moment of extra-literary affinity, Brando quotes T. S. Eliot's “The Hollow Men,” which has an epigraph from
Heart of Darkness
. On a micro-level, the US special operations officers are tasked with the same objective as that of the greater US military in Vietnam: intervention in an emergent political order so that its potentially harmful aspects are neutralized and non-Communist leadership is restored. Despite their small number relative to Kurtz's slaves, they succeed; however, in killing the American and setting the Vietnamese free, they pre-stage the eventual failure of the American invasion of Vietnam, the Vietcong's defeat of the imperialist overlord and its acid-bombing campaigns across the landscape.
The Beach
defuses the imbalances of competitive polities, entraps the unraveling plot to reincorporate disambiguated bodies into a tribe of limitless potential. Great spray of light across Thailand. The beaches were untouched before my film crew arrived; we destroyed the landscape to create paradise. The dunes were removed as were many of the palm trees in order to create the site of bliss in the audience's mind. I saw the film, I went down to the beach, I removed my shoes. A little crab walked in front of me. I watched as it scuttled by slowly until it buried itself in the sand.

Once, when I was writing my novel, I went into one of the very last dive bars in lower Manhattan and met a veteran from the Gulf War. It was after Halloween, the hurricane had passed, and the power had been restored to the city. I sat at the bar drinking a whiskey on the rocks when he approached me from behind and asked if I wanted to have sex with him in the bathroom. He had a massive, muscular figure shaped like an inverted pyramid. He wore fatigues and was covered in tattoos so worn down by exposure to the sun that they looked like Rorschach blots on his skin.

Swaying, he slung his arm around me and said, “You'd have fun.” I told him no and asked where he was from. “Virginia. But I was stationed here after Iraq and I've never left.” We talked about the war, and I wondered if he had been responsible for the deaths of children. “If you won't sleep with me,” he said, “I'm going to just go jerk off in the toilet. Do you want to join me?” he said. “I'll be in the toilet.”

I watched him disappear into the back. Thirty minutes later he was found soaked in his own urine, passed out between the toilet and the wall. The bouncer dragged him out into the street while the bartender called the police.

Leonardo DiCaprio directed his driver to take him to beach. When they arrived at Far Rockaway, he asked him to wait while he went down to the water to think. The sky was the color of steel, the mottled gray of New York in winter, generalized and monolithically opposite the lightness of coming spring, when Leo would finally be at play. The dunes had been mostly destroyed by Sandy, replaced by Christmas trees lying in neat rows along the coastline. The branches caught the sand flying up from the water toward the streets and homes. Eventually they would be covered up, restoring the dunes to how they once were. Leo took his headphones out and stuffed them into his coat pockets. He walked down to the waterline and looked at the ocean. It felt like nothing, only the huge swelling of the absence of things, present for him but at the same time annihilating—a vector in a dream he slides down into oblivion. Damage is unplanned obsolescence that contradicts the order of things. Katy Perry in Budapest, Leo at the beach. Damage is a reminder that glamour is contingent on its destructibility. He placed his hands in his coat pockets and thought about what to do next, whether he would return to the theater or fly home, back to Los Angeles. Despite how cold it was, he felt warm, and the moment of seeing a piece of cardboard fly into the sea generated in him the weird desire to say to the accumulating waves, “I haven't told you of the most beautiful things in my lives, watching the ripple of their loss disappear along the shore, underneath ferns, face downward in the ferns my body, the naked host to my many selves, shot by a guerilla warrior or dumped from a car into ferns which are themselves
journalières
. The hero, trying to unhitch his parachute, stumbles over me. It is our last embrace. I have forgotten my loves, and chiefly that one, the cancerous statue, which my body could no longer contain, and against my will, against my love, become art. I could not change it into history and so remember it. I have lost what is always and everywhere present, the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses, which I myself and singly now must kill to save the serpent in their midst.”

YOU ARE MY DUCATI

Between the wars, Antonio Ducati and sons founded Società Scientifica Radio Brevetti Ducati in Bologna to produce radio parts. Repeatedly bombed and later reformed as a manufacturer of motorized bicycles after the defeat of the Axis, Ducati is recalled by R&B artist Ciara sixty years later in a one piece wrapped in fur, “You are my Ducati,” a motorcycle more theory than vehicle, you whom I ride are my everything. Also, Ciara of F
antasy Ride
, the never-too-real always glistening at the edge of the sparkly ethos of forward motion she calls “love sex magic,” what she says she'll “drive her body around.” Middling production of second-rate bikes for a time, yet eventually love sex magic seized in the automatic transmission, the desmodromic valve. Ducati finally distinguished itself by means of speed with the Mach 1, a motorcycle that could travel at 100 mph (its lightweight frame the color of the bill of Ciara's Atlanta Braves baseball cap), exceptional in its design, now a collector's item. (It doesn't ride.) List of objects that appear in the video for Ciara's “Ride”: a car, a mechanical bull, a chair. The Ducati Multistrada 1200, a bike of such sophistication that it rides like a breeze out of some future world, doesn't appear in the
Ride
video, but its presence directs the trajectories of these objects in their collision with Ciara: “All up on your frame, baby say my name.” Everything around her rises to gossipy transcendence. Ducati's founding mission was to manufacture the radio, a point now echoed in Ciara's music of objective romance, constitutive in its mysteries, but perhaps only a kind of body glue, like that which secures the one-piece.

Since first listening to Ciara's “Ride,” her 2010 chart-topper about the reversal of expectation, gender trouble loosened in the declaration that her man is her Ducati, the mobilizing object parked in the garage that begs you, slick with rain, to take him for a spin, I've become obsessed with the Italian motorcycle company, specifically their Multistrada 1200. Ciara repurposes the bike as an interpretative tool: You are my Ducati, she sings, converting the male body of her rapidly shifting attention into the mobilizing figure of European racing sports. Where does Ciara want to go? Most likely she wants to leave you behind, lonely in the sunset as she flees with luxury trailing behind her. Her perfectly manicured fingers grip the handlebars. You are my Ducati, utilizing the rhetoric of sex to mechanize her partner into the process of love as engine of speed, you make me want to ride, glassy body exteriorized into a system of gears hieroglyphic in their trippy gorgeousness, building into a complex of metaphors a second life more exhilarating in its imitation of how well, and fast, she dances, than the first—even at the risk that it might circle back to collide with you. The song has really become rather important to me.

Ludacris, in his interlude toward the end of “Ride,” tries his best to retrieve Ciara from her liberating theory by integrating her into a series of confusing sports metaphors that situate the male in the consummate exclusionary field where he might feel most at ease, soft wet grass under the stadium lights: the football game—hurrahed by cheerleaders, the only women on the field. Their presence in the game doesn't interrupt the play of male athletes, it cheers on the spectacle of their bodies beneath heavy equipment. In football, Ludacris can finally assert himself by forcibly removing Ciara: “I put her out like a light ... Call me the Terminator ... I gotta put her to bed.” Sports, for Ludacris, reestablishes his active, rather than passive, mobility, patching his name onto Drew Brees's in order to “score” with a woman. He tries to capture the energy that would exempt him from becoming a Ducati, supercharging the song with his own flittering agency in the third-person: “I throw it in / touch down / he scores.” But together, Ciara and Ludacris are totally out of sync—“you better cc me,” he sings, to which Ciara replies, ignoring his call for office etiquette in order to restore her own wish: “He love the way I ride it. He can't stand to look away.” But where else might a Ducati look?

She mounts the bike—not quite the Multistrada 1200, not quite Ludacris, but rather a dreamy, pulsing confluence of object relations, a paralyzing network of competitive masculinities, each sinking under the weight of its indebtedness to a rule of social law—luxury epitomized in the exemplary technology of speed, derived from an upper-class music of leisure transported from Italy to New York—suddenly foiled in its power by its own controlling interests. She rides it.

When I listen to Ciara, I think about what it would be like to rent a Ducati and joyride up the West Side Highway, onto 9G, toward upstate at the start of fall. I think about how fast I could go—and at what point up ahead I might permanently lock myself into the moment between ride and accident, the twin poles I imagine a motorcyclist, weaving between cars on the narrow roads of the Catskills, pivots between with a glee that accelerates toward a death indistinguishable from life. As for me, I'm transfixed by the moment speed hits a wall and the totalizing event that both binds and unbinds us to it (what I want to drive my body around), an accident breathtaking in its approach, arrives at last to slow me way the fuck down. Ciara's dancing speeds up and slows down the known world in its claim on global time, New York's autumn

of autumn, pastels that sunset over us, foundering in a haze at the horizon veering from greenish blue to purple like money burning in your hands.

Later, Ciara and I meet in a semidarkened vacant mall and wander through various shops until we find a somewhat new JCPenney, swept up in creamsicle light. When we enter the department store, it turns out that Ciara and I are together the 10,000th customer and have won a Ducati motorcycle of our choice. It's a spectacular moment, one christened by confetti as Ciara leans over in her fur to accept the hand of the JCPenney employee who congratulates us. Muzak elaborates the celebratory atmosphere of the empty department store, where no one is celebrating, at the moment of our win. I blush as I realize that here I am, with Ciara, pop star unfixed to a music that would determine her, like really it's all pretty plastic in its one-size-fits-all quality, and though she's in love with her beau Future, she's in love with me, too. The JCPenney manager greets us and leads us to the back lot of the department store, into the cool breeze of a late October night, where there are ten bikes lined up, each glinting in the street light. Ciara selects the Multistrada 1200 and says, “This is the one.”

“I love it,” I tell her. The manager smiles and removes a contract from his suit pocket. He unfolds it and hands it to us. I don't spend any time reviewing the endless pages of terms and conditions and sign immediately. He hands over the keys and the deed to the Multistrada 1200.

Ciara mounts the bike, which, at that moment, doesn't
not
feel like me, and asks me to climb on. Where should we go? she asks. I can hardly speak. This moment becomes a second dream in which I imagine where I might go, out of here, so that even when I do shake myself out of it I can't let go. I remember seeing a Ducati two falls ago on Canal before joining my friends below a moment sparkling in the presence of the Goldman Sachs employees who toasted our protest

let alone a motorcycle for $15k. Ciara is right: we are each our own Ducati, molded into the steel frame into which we can lean, one night in fall, to ride you, all the bodies upon whom one rides, impaled by such disasters as the sudden recognition that you can't stand to look away, caught in the remaining sunlight, and yet must.

The cop, egg dripping from the visor lowered over the helmet, runs forward with his club.

“Catch me in the mall, I can do this, however you want, I can do it up and down, I can do it in circles,” Ciara sings, articulating a body I cannot call my own, but might locate somewhere close to it a secondary body in which he love the way I ride it, impounded by the desire to manipulate and be manipulated into the shape of others, to become with others yet another who might race back with a club of my own, the shape of the fastest motorcycle we can find. Sleek in the discourse that describes us as the inimitable technology designed to destroy one another, I love to ride it.

Outside the JCPenney, Ciara breaks my concentration and asks if I want to go. I hesitate to ask her where, knowing the location she might suggest would be essentially absent everywhere except where it televises itself semirandomly, against the bark of a tree in the woods upstate or in the champagne glass at evening or the broken visor of the egg-soaked cop, now falling back. You make me want to ride it, Ciara sings to Ludacris standing under the street light as he debates whether or not to mount the Ducati. At this, he atomizes into the moment his appearance is rendered nostalgic, a translucent memory that hardly registered at all yet for a time was all-controlling, an event that is replaced by another in a cycle of replacement too rapid to isolate the particulars of.

Actuated methods in a cluster of instruments, loss of the self in the attenuated seams of biopolitical production, blue-faced for the fallen world dropping even faster: Tell him I'm a gymnast, tell him I'm a Ducati, tell him to get off the street, tell him to ride, tell him to step back, tell him to find me later, tell him to check