Starring, one last time, Nicolas Cage
We are in Nicolas Cage’s film production company, Cronus Saturday Pictures, one flight up from ground level, in a gleaming glass building in downtown L.A. – an address on one of the city’s main drags.
I sit in a large chair in the reception and drink a late coffee that Cage insisted on brewing for me, which I didn’t have the heart to refuse. I look out a window into the dark and feel as though The Big Blue Lady is mocking us through the night – those stars are her eyes twinkling as she scoffs.
Cage brought us up a side entrance off an open-ended alley rather than through the building’s main lobby and elevator. Perhaps he did this because of the situation with the Lossers, but regarding this I am merely making my best guess.
He’s left this second emergency-exit door to the office propped open with a half-sized Losser figurine, of the type now on sale in junk stores across L.A. This way we can see the landing outside the door, the single flight of stairs back down to the bottom from where we came, and the alleyway entrance door, which Cage has left open, too.
Through that door, we further see a part of the alley, freshly slicked in the light of a street lamp by a recent rain and framed for us like a dark picture.
Cage says he wants the doors that way, as long as he’s here, notwithstanding all the Lossers in the streets:
“Not exactly fresh, baby, but it’s still air,” Cage says.
He sits behind the reception desk poring over old comic books, and I too rifle through some small fraction of his vast collection. I am somewhat on edge from the coffee. These comics – so old, so cryptic, so strange – almost mesmerizing… fascinating… fascinating…
And now, there is nothing but the rustle of old magazine pages between us – that, and silence. It is possible that we have already said everything and there is nothing left to say. And if there was, what would it change?
Below, in the street, a Losser passes by, but he doesn’t look up the stairwell at us as he goes, and to me, that feels a little surprising, a little unexpected.
I am so engrossed in what I am reading, it is only when a voice in our midst grows louder with excitement that I look up and notice a sheriff explaining something to Cage as Cage listens to him respectfully.
I did not know sheriffs worked L.A., but apparently I was wrong. But then, what do I know – I’d never been here before.
“There are no murder charges,” the sheriff says, referring to all the Lossers we’d killed back in the Goldstein Fields – that all but endless and desolate wilderness, which starts where Los Losseros ends.
“And there are no charges,” the sheriff continues, as though it is difficult for him to accept the inescapable, and perhaps unprecedented logic of what he is saying, “because there are no records of any of these – whatever the hell they are – ever being born. And if these… these… Lossers were never even born, then they don’t exist – well, at least officially, that is.
“Well, boys, that’s as far as the law is concerned, and I think we pretty much have it covered.”
It is clear the sheriff wants to continue; he wants to piece together what it all means. And now, having made up his mind and accepted the conclusion, he tells us:
“Meaning, you just go on killing them as best you can, because none of us, and I mean no one, wants these things around here changing our lives. Why, just the other day my wife was saying…”
As the sheriff goes on and on, it is not that I stop listening, but I somehow stop hearing him.
I see Nicolas Cage nodding and nodding his head respectfully as the sheriff talks and talks, interjecting a word or two of his own every now and then – the way people do from a sense of deference and awkward politeness they feel needs to be maintained in situations like this one.
Maybe it was the comic books – I don’t know; but as the sheriff talks, my thoughts try reaching into that thing we call a future, but I cannot picture one there.
I can only make up just another dystopia, as all futures ever spoken or written of or portrayed in film ultimately are.
And if all these dystopias are always metaphors for the ways in which we live now, speaking back to us in our present out of a made-up future, then they are not metaphors, but in fact a reflection of exactly the ways we live now.
We are faced with the realization that the metaphor is actual reality, made more stark and shocking through the medium of some wholly inadequate and broken art – by the temporary overlay of crafted illusions, some better, others worse, that work their cheap magic only because we have volunteered our minds to them, no doubt to satisfy a drug-like need to indulge our always fleeting fantasies, and our far more enduring delusions.
There is no future. Oh, there is, but not one in which we are necessary, in which we are indispensable.
There is the past, upon which our present is based, and a future that is made up of no more than what we can do for ourselves, and perhaps for someone else, tomorrow – if we make it there.
Everything else is dystopia, including and always the present; the lives we are living this very day.
I think of H.G. Wells’s “Time Machine” – and we need go no further, for there, in that small beautiful paean to our ultimate human tragedy, he said it all.
Millions of years from now, we are stopped on a sloping beach surrounded by giant crabs, foul slow-stirring monsters; the sun is bloated, the sea with no waves or breakers but just rising and falling with a slight oily swell; the earth at a standstill.
And 30 million years hence, only green slime on rocks testifies to the persistence of life; a flaky snow falls; a black thing the size of a football hops fitfully about, trailing its tentacles.
And none of it, none of it at all, needs us.
As I recall these passages, I wonder, chuckling to myself, whether this might not actually be better than having to face an increasing crush of Lossers, who daily rise out of nowhere, and through the sheer force of their numbers, despite all our efforts and murders to stop them, are becoming overwhelming, and are taking over Hollywood and all of L.A.
I laugh out loud as I now see, instead of the sheriff, a Losser standing in Nicolas Cage’s lobby, walleyes glaring down at me – at me! – through his steamed-up glasses.
I am not shocked, because by now I have come to expect it. Perhaps oddly, what distresses me far more is that nowhere do I see Nicolas Cage. But then, there he is again, a draft manuscript of our screenplay in his hand.
And there HE is, a Losser: no talent, no imagination, but through a jealous and destructive low-level dullness, intense malevolence, vicious will and a depraved covetousness, he wants it – whatever it is, and he is driven with a murderous certitude to make it his, even though, as soon as he touches a thing, anything, it turns to shit.
“It’s not going to happen,” he’s saying directly to me, and I feel degraded and sullied, as though I am being sexually violated and spiritually raped.
“She’s not yours,” he’s telling me, and I know he’s referring to The Big Blue Lady – someone he hadn’t even the slightest inkling of, until I’d spoken of her myself.
“She doesn’t belong to you. Nyugets-nyag…”
That raspy voice, those smacking drool-shiny lips – I am furious that this freak dares even address himself to me.
He is angry, he is vicious; his fat arms, floating up at his sides, are balled into pudgy fists; he is determined and deformed.
I am indignant. I am highly insulted.
“It’s not going to happen, nyaow… except how we want, nyar…”
And now he turns to Nicolas Cage, as another, and now another, Losser join him:
“And we’re putting a stop to your pre-production of ‘Release of the Gardener’. It’s not gonna happen…”
I am outside, walking toward The Big Blue Lady. I cannot see her, nor can I imagine what she looks like, but I know that I’ll know her when I find her. I know that she is there.
Filed by Saint Stephan, January 6, 2017, Ukrainian Christmas Eve