The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (17 page)

MARK

(reading aloud)

“There are those who will not want to miss
The Tetherballs of Bougainville
for its opening scene in which two revoltingly sleazy teenagers in filthy, reeking
Terribly Toothsome
warm-up jackets unzipped to the pubes, automobile air-fresheners dangling from cheap gold chains around their necks, cruise the Piazza Navona in Rome, hustling tourists for loose lira and doing grappa shots until they’re vomiting into the Fountain of the Four Rivers, as other kids sit around, high on the popular club drug Special K, strumming guitars, singing ‘Mandy.’ There are many, many more who will want to make sure to miss it. Especially when they find out that this scene—surely unsurpassed in its rapt depiction of emesis—has absolutely nothing to do with the movie that follows—a movie that takes place not in Italy, but briefly in suburban Maplewood, New Jersey, and then primarily in Bougainville, a squalid, war-torn island in the Solomon Sea.

“The Tetherballs of Bougainville
was written, directed, and edited by 13-year-old Mark Leyner, whose only previous credit is as musical director of a video of the abortive execution attempt of his father, entitled ‘I Feel
Shitty.’ Extravagantly mannered and constantly undermined by a nose-thumbing nihilism and hollow flashiness that reflect its creator’s rock-video affinities,
Tetherballs
is an autobiographical account of the year that follows the sentencing of Leyner’s father, Joel, to New Jersey State Discretionary Execution (NJSDE). One can’t help but marvel at the sheer chutzpah required to actually base a movie’s formal structure on the vertiginous mood swings of adolescence, so that moments of flabbergasting kitsch (the control tower at Bougainville International Airport is a 160-foot statue of Herve Villechaize as Tattoo from
Fantasy Island
) and Grand Guignol sadism (a philandering insurance adjuster, archly played by Charles Durning, is filled with candy, hung from the ceiling like a piñata, and savagely beaten to death by the sugar-frenzied, bat-wielding, blindfolded children at his own daughter’s 6th birthday party) alternate with wrenchingly passionate scenes of paternal devotion and filial ambivalence.

“Unfortunately, the movie’s self-congratulatory misery, showy camera tricks, and overindulgent, almost compulsive emphasis on medical imaging are frequently unbearable. For example, in what would otherwise have been an extremely poignant scene in which Mark returns home from the New Jersey State Penitentiary at Princeton and attempts to console his disturbed, kamikaze-guzzling, Thierry Mugler-accoutered mother (smolderingly played by Nell Carter, who was absolutely riveting as Madame Verdurin in George Romero’s terrifying remake of Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
), Leyner inexplicably chooses to shoot the scene using a positron emission tomography scanner, emphasizing the glucose metabolism of the characters instead of their emotional interaction.

“With the exception of several Bougainvillean tetherball stars who play themselves—most notably Offramp Tavanipupu, whose sinuous, taunting performance conjures up a Melanesian Adam Ant—the movie’s characters
are predominantly 13- and 14-year-old kids played by adult actors. Mark’s best friend from Maplewood Junior High, Felipe, who suffers brain damage from a skateboarding accident, is played with great magnetism and triumphant bluster by Roddy McDowall. Stellar cameos include Ze’ev (Benny) Begin, son of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, as ‘Creepy Man at Futon Store’ and Tommy Hilfiger as ‘Demented Kid on Railroad Trestle.’

“Amazingly for a movie that includes scenes of wild-haired men with bones in their noses eating ‘long pig’ (cooked human being) aboard the Mir space station; boy soldiers who, having just looted a women’s clothing store, lurch down some blighted boulevard in flouncy hats, billowing dresses crisscrossed with cartridge bandoliers, huge spliffs in their mouths, lethal fusillades bursting errantly from their AK-47s each time they stumble in their spike heels; and supermodels Nikki Taylor, Helena Christensen, Carla Bruni, and Yasmeen Ghauri backstroking in an Olympic-size pool filled with gin and vermouth, its lanes demarcated by strings of olives;
The Tetherballs of Bougainville
was shot entirely in Leyner’s bedroom in his parents’ Maplewood home.

“Although we may deplore the film’s scatological language, sexual explicitness and gratuitous gore as seemingly designed only to shock, in the manner of an angry, attention-craving child, we must remember that this movie was actually made by an angry, attention-craving child.

“And if you’re an aficionado of witty dialogue, be prepared to find
The Tetherballs of Bougainville
a singularly ungratifying experience. The movie bristles with such urbane repartee as:

‘That’s me playing Super Mario 64 with this guy in his stepmom’s condo in Teaneck.’

‘He’s all like, y’know, “Tonight you die!” He looks so into it.’

‘OK, that’s me drinking fermented mare’s milk with this nomadic Mongolian herdsman. That’s like the summer between tenth and eleventh grade … You wanna see another picture of him?’

‘That’s him? No way.’

‘That’s him in American clothes. We were so fucked up in that picture.’

‘He looks baked. I like when you look in a guy’s eyes and you can see that he’s like totally baked. I think that’s so adorable.’

‘I like when you look at a guy who’s not high, but you look into his eyes and it’s like, y’know, total flat-line.’

‘What about when a guy’s like that, y’know, really retarded,
and
he’s really baked. Both!’

‘That’s the best! That is
so
sexy! I’d be like: Yes!!’

“I can’t think of another recent film so saturated with fin-de-siècle morbidity. Everyone is perpetually covered with seabird guano. Almost every single major character has been left with permanent brain damage from a skateboarding accident. And those few individuals who haven’t suffered from some equally disabling malady or medley of maladies, e.g., Thereza, a hard-drinking neonatal nurse, gamely played by Amy Irving, suffers from epilepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, St. Vitus’ dance, and a psychological aversion to infants so severe that even the whimsical illustration of a baby on a package of disposable diapers sends her into a murderous rage that can only be stilled by a self-administered Thorazine enema.

“During a scene in which an ambulance—siren screaming, lights flashing, sign on top reading ‘Caution: Student Driver’—plows into a crowd of fans waiting to purchase tickets for an Offramp Tavanipupu concert, and one of the mortally injured victims, a dissolute, syphilitic Dutch aerobics instructor, played with wisecracking sangfroid by Joe Don Baker, who recently won
a People’s Choice Award for his performance in Jerry Lewis’s rollicking remake of Ezra Pound’s
Pisan Cantos
, looks up at the camera and rasps: ‘Roth … Hagar … Cherone …,’ reciting the succession of Van Halen’s lead singers with the portentous gravity of someone intoning the plagues visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus, and then dies, a 15-foot geyser of obviously fake blood shooting from the top of his head, the guy sitting next to me in the theater, Joel Siegel from
Good Morning America
, turned to me and said, ‘What the fuck does this
mean?’
and I said, ‘I think it has something to do with coming to terms with your father.

“ ‘But maybe I’m projecting too much of my own filial dilemma onto it. Admittedly, I often see my own life as paradigmatic of the history of mankind, and, inversely, read complex, tragic historical events merely as allegories of my own fleeting, frivolous, trivial contretemps.

“ ‘And every object, every phenomenon becomes a mirror in this completely claustrophobic, totally solipsistic constellation, e.g., the rain … the moss … the noodles … It’s all me! I think that’s what Jude meant in Renny Harlin’s exercise video when he said to Sue, “It’s all you, baby!” Like in the Wallace Stevens song, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”: “Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, / And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. / I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself.”

“ ‘It’s the same with movies. All the movies I find most affecting, like
The Towering Inferno, Dawn of the Dead, Die Hard, Bloodsport, Hellraiser, Speed
, and, most recently,
The Nudniks
, a home-invasion comedy in which a loose confederation of North Korean teenage Cyclopes (mutants spawned in the wake of a Yongbyon plutonium plant accident), gold-fanged black superpredator congressmen, and amped-up cannibal models in blood-encrusted New York Rangers jerseys sack Karl Lagerfeld’s lavish eighteenth-century residence on the rue de
l’Université in Paris, smashing the gold-spouted bidets, mosaic-and-black-terrazzo floors, trellised gardens, and marble fountains with sledgehammers, and then remove Lagerfeld’s liver and ponytail and have them FedExed to Ristorante Ai Tre Scalini (on the Piazza Navona), where they’re prepared by chefs (“Fegata e tréccia alla veneziano”) and served to the ghost of Pier Paolo Pasolini (drolly played by a wizened Paul Sorvino), as meanwhile, back in Amalfi, Lagerfeld’s muse and confidant, ex-Hüsker Dü guitarist Bob Mould, is put into a drug-induced coma and kept in a glass sarcophagus à la Snow White, where he awaits the revivifying kiss of the Antichrist, who, according to Nostradamus, will manifest himself after failing the bar exam 666 times—to me, all of these movies are ultimately about the intricate, tangled reciprocations of father-son relationships.’

“ ‘Through its furious incomprehensibility,
The Tetherballs of Bougainville
radiates a kind of white light. It attains a white opacity toward which sloughed molecules of our own autobiographies float. These are the motes seen drifting in the projector’s beam in the darkened theater—the spores of our own autobiographies pulled towards the white, blank screen. And this superstratum of autobiographical spores that colonize the silver media ultimately becomes “the movie.” So, in a sense, power accrues to “the movie” parasitically.’

“ ‘What the fuck does
that
mean?’ asked Siegel.

“ ‘Would you two please shut up?’ said Michael Medved
(Sneak Previews)
, who was seated in the row directly behind us.

“ ‘Hey, fuck you!’ Siegel shot back, doffing his eyeglasses to add, I suppose, swagger to the macho retort.

“This was a mistake, because then Medved took a purse-size canister of Mace from his jacket pocket and sprayed Siegel point-blank in the face.

“And Siegel lurched out of the theater, howling, ‘My eyes! My eyes!’

“I can’t say I really felt sorry for the guy. I mean, he
must make like half a million bucks minimum on
GMA
and I write reviews totally gratis for
Der Schweißblatt
, this German armpit-fetish ’zine out of Düsseldorf, and he’s like ‘What does
this
mean? What does
that
mean?’ y’know, pumping
me
for information … Let him do his own fucking work.

“The Tetherballs of Bougainville
first finds Mark (played with pitch-perfect menace by Chandrapal Ram, a 16-year-old contortionist dwarf from the Great Raj Kamal Circus in Upleta, India, who is little known in America, but, if we’re to judge by this astonishing, galvanic debut, seems destined for instant megastardom and then an equally precipitous descent into obscurity, impoverishment, substance abuse, a spate of botched suicide attempts, and, finally, a day job) at The Carousel, a topless bar on the outskirts of Princeton, several hours after the failed execution of his father and his subsequent sentencing to NJSDE. The Carousel is a state-operated, officially alcohol-free, topless club for minors. Youthful patrons skirt the booze prohibition, though, by simply going to the ‘Gourmet Shoppe’ located conveniently next door and purchasing 10-ounce bottles of ‘Cooking Vodka,’ ‘Cooking Beer,’ ‘Cooking Jagermeister,’ ‘Cooking Captain Morgan’s,’ even ‘Cooking Robitussin,’ and ‘Cooking Methadone,’ and bringing it back to The Carousel, which provides setups. Designed to simulate an airport baggage carousel, the club features topless women who slide down a long chute and then revolve on a conveyer belt until customers, seated around the belt, signal them for table and lap dances. Mark and his heavy-lidded, barely coherent compadre Felipe are knocking back rum-and-Cokes and puffing cigarettes. Felipe wants to know why the execution took so long, and in a close shot of Mark’s face, which fills the frame for some eight minutes as he offers a précis of his day, Chandrapal Ram’s virtuosic skills are given full rein. I have never seen such a finely calibrated
choreography of affect, such a deft, protean composition of smiles, pouts, smirks, winks, and scowls, as he recounts, in eidetic detail, his attempt to reach 40,000 points in the Game Boy version of
Gianni Isotope
. And then this physiognomic kaleidoscope of emotion so vividly manifest as he recounts rescuing future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees such as Oasis singer Noel Gallagher, Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn, Shirley Manson of Garbage, and Eye Yamatsuka of the Boredoms from the gruesome processing plant in the Lwor Cluster, abruptly (and brilliantly!) collapses into impassivity when, distracted by the continuous cascade and slow, mesmerizing orbit of nearly naked women, he assumes a perfunctory singsong to describe the ensuing events (Then he had to tell me this whole long story about turning a brunette without a cranium into a blonde, and then they tried to execute him and then he didn’t die, and then I had to go talk to the prison doctor, and then he was resentenced to NJSDE, and then they had to explain what NJSDE was, and then we had to pick a song to go with the video, and then we had to say good-bye all over again, and then I got high with the warden, and then I had sex with the warden, then I read my talismanic movie review to the warden. It was just one thing after another.’) and he admits to Felipe that he’s terrified by the prospect of his father resurfacing out of paternal concern for him (‘I know how much he cares about me, man, but those motherfuckin’ NJSDE agents—they could come for him anytime and they’ll take out any sorry assholes who happen to be around, including us.’). Mark signals one of the strippers circulating on the baggage carousel, a blowzy woman with huge, cantilevered silicone boobs, who comes over and dances at their table, fondling herself, writhing, moaning, and taunting the young boys, who are promptly apoplectic with lust. And then Mark espies a scar on her thigh—the characteristic scar from a scrimshaw-engraver impaling. ‘Daddy!’ he screams, a
scream recapitulated from multiple angles to the horror cliché of shrieking strings. ‘Dad, it’s you!’ he gasps, in the first of this movie’s numbing succession of epiphanies. Felipe, one of those adolescents who’s unctuously ingratiating to his friends’ parents, is like: ‘Mr. Leyner, sir, those are the most gorgeous fuckin’ tits I’ve ever seen, man. You had that done this afternoon? Unbelievable, dude!’ Unbelievable indeed. Sex-change surgery and complete recovery in several hours? ‘This is just Plan A,’ says Mark’s father, Joel (hauntingly portrayed by Gérard Depardieu), cupping his breasts and twitching his G-stringed mons in a campy air-hump. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were OK.’ He hugs Mark and buries his son’s head deep in sweaty cleavage, muffling his plaintive ‘Dad, would you
please
get out of here.’