And His Journey Home
This is a long time getting back to you. I know. I want to be there, but I cannot. I am drawn back home; the pull is so strong, too strong, that I, Manny Face, cannot fight it. Despite a desperation here, among the ancient hills of Kyiv, to a situation I cannot put a name to involving Tango Baby and myself – my Tango Baby, captive, brainwashed, humiliated, violated, and tortured, whom I have only recently understood I love – my mind is overpowered by a plaintive, wounded signal swelling into my head out of the Catskills, the covering lair of my genesis on this Earth.
I move into stasis most of the flight home September 1 – United Airlines to Newark Airport, connecting from Kyiv-Frankfurt on Lufthansa.
From Newark, with a change at Secaucus Junction, I take a New Jersey Transit train into the mountains, where I debark and find my way home, into the earth and sky, by paths to no one known.
I embark on this trip as though one blind. I don’t know what awaits me. I can’t see the reason or the purpose. I can only sense that I will learn something, something that will reveal the key to my torment. But this is only a possibility. There is no certainty. I may just be fooling myself. I may be doing so to forge or counterfeit a sense of hope and epistemological meaning to a senseless and meaningless journey I have no control over. There is only the lament and the wail of the tumescent signal, growing stronger, pulling me in ever-building surges that grip my skull and paralyze all independent function. I follow it, resigned. Or maybe it is only imagined. And so I think is there a signal at all, or is my mind breaking up, and this overpowering urge toward home, back to my beginning, is some monstrous hallucination I have become mentally sick to suffer. Dredging up the past is painful for Manny Face, even the parts that had been happy. I fear it is all in my head, and even that the past that rises up in my head is not the real past, but a memory I have made up, and my head is breaking up, and I am suddenly dying – and I don’t want to die; but maybe my life is just the projection of a disembodied mind – one that has already died, or one created as a joke by a higher power, to be snuffed out at any moment, never again to remember itself – but if that’s so, then that’s good; for it is only a matter of time before you are let go. None of this matters, then, so there’s no cause to worry. Just let it all take its course, because none of it is happening, anyway. But Manny Face, he is here, and something has happened to him; drenched in sweat; and I am dying… I fear… I am dying…
As the jet hurtles us over the Atlantic through our dark world, between moments of consciousness, as my mind submerged rises out of stasis, I watch as others watch their movies on the little screens in the backs of the seats in front of them; each film a silent, blinking, flashing movement of disparate and illogical images that each passenger has selected from his individual console brought together into a semblance of sense by the sound traveling through their headsets.
A couple of rows up to the right, “Broken City” – 2013. Ex-cop turned Private Eye Mark Wahlberg and corrupt New York City mayor Russell Crowe face each other down. The flick is half-baked noir, with a plot that is part awkward, part simplistic, and part unlikely, but somehow still manages to intrigue on some rudimentary level, and thus entertain.
A few rows up to the left, “Olympus Has Fallen” – 2013; with the exception of the riveting and emotionally involving opening scenes, which might as well be part of a completely different, and far better, movie, it is a film so hackneyed and banal in its composition, that its predictability, after the first ten minutes, is a given. One watches it only to confirm the prediction.
Here, North Korean terrorists, led by a loon, take and half destroy the American White House, unleashing absolute carnage, killing dozens of high officials, on flimsy pretenses. Disgruntled turncoats, of course, appear on the inside, to help them along. A lone special forces agent – the very best the U.S. President has, of course – ruthlessly and dispassionately takes every square foot of the priceless real estate back, knocking off every one of the terrorists, including, finally, and of course, the leading loon in the culminating hand-to-hand altercation. While the American President is held hostage and his Vice President is cold-bloodedly murdered on live big-screen video feed for everyone to see, Morgan Freeman, as Speaker of the House and next in line to the presidency, gets to be Acting President in the White House basement for most of the film. Inexplicably, the political correctness leaves me with a warm, tingling feeling inside – notwithstanding Barack Obama’s real-life presidency concurrent with the film.
And so Manny Face asks – as he is wont: If you’re going to make a film about terrorists taking over the White House, thereby giving them the ability to launch a nuclear attack on the United States from the inside, detonating silos across the country and turning the entire landmass into a percolating wasteland of radioactive decay, then why not do it?
It is the film of inevitable convenience versus the film of irreversible catastrophe. And so, which kind, Manny Face asks, is better?
In the one, a program is fulfilled that makes the film artifice – it is contrived. In the other, ends, whatever they may be, are pursued for their own sake, making the movie a work of art.
It is not about working through archetypes that are at the primal root of all storytelling, supposedly somehow deeply embedded in our collective unconscious and strangely familiar to everyone.
If these archetypes are familiar to us, it is precisely because the formulas for their expression – formulas of convenience, which can hardly be called artistic – have been rolled out before us, times without number, in endless permutations.
The art that most succeeds in plumbing the depths of our unconsciousness is precisely that art which shatters the beliefs we live by, forcing us to face what is most terrifying within ourselves and about ourselves in this world – and about the world itself.
The “Planet of the Apes” movie franchise (1968-1973), for example, gave no quarter. That world, this Earth, was so insane, that Charlton Heston finished it off with a nuclear bomb as early as the second of the five “Apes” films. Better no Earth at all than one run by apes – and humans their slaves.
In the entire series, Earth is never returned to humans – neither by ape misfortune nor by war between the species.
Those damn, filthy apes.
In the 2011 “Melancholia” of Danish director Lars von Trier, sanity or its loss has nothing to do with it, for the Earth is destroyed not by the hand or mind of Man, but by the resulting collision with a rogue planet on its inexorable freak and mindless trajectory into Earth.
No one is responsible, and there is nothing Man can do to stop it.
Now that’s entertainment! Know what I mean?
But then on another small screen some rows up the center, I see Daniel Craig flickering across a moving train, chasing a man who needs chasing. James Bond. Starting with “Dr. No” in 1962, Manny Face has always been a fan.
I touch the screen in front of me and put on my earphones. This is “Skyfall” – 2012 – film Number 23 in the 50-year 007 franchise. This one I’m going to watch.
Continued in The Journal of Manny Face, Installment 8½
Manny Face, December 8, 2013