The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (18 page)

“Suspension of disbelief aside, what the hell are we supposed to make of a scene like this?

“Are we supposed to be moved by this father’s extraordinary efforts to keep watch over his young son? Or appalled by the danger in which he (as an NJSDE releasee) heedlessly puts this same child? Or amused by a parody of the typical adolescent’s mortification at being seen socializing with his parents? Or are we to read this as a sort of transsexual twist on oedipal conflict?

“Leyner’s attention-deficit style of editing gives us scant opportunity to ponder any of this.

“As Mark tries to wriggle out of his father’s embrace, The Carousel is hit by several 152-mm howitzer shells, followed by a barrage of AT-3 Sagger wire-guided missiles and rocket propelled antitank grenades, and then several thousand rounds from a turret-mounted .50-caliber heavy machine gun and an M163 Vulcan 20-mm Gatling gun. There’s a brief lull, and then a hit team of NJSDE agents appear, some in neoprene rubber wet suits, some in olive green Nomex flame-retardant overalls and bulletproof Kevlar flak vests. They lob in a dozen F-l antipersonnel fragmentation grenades and
then enter, raking the interior with AK-47s and German-made Heckler & Koch 9-mm submachine-gun fire. The massacre inside is luridly illuminated by thin red laser beams from the commandos’ aiming devices and the glow of crisscrossing tracer rounds ricocheting off the walls.

“Mark and Felipe—probably because they were drunk and their bodies relaxed—miraculously escape unharmed. Joel, the putative target of this assault, presumably survives and disappears—we don’t see his metamorphically full-figured physique among the dead and wounded as the camera slowly pans the smoldering carnage.

“It’s worth reiterating—as we ponder this
tableau mort
, in which corpses wheel in a spasmodic, warped orbit on the crippled baggage carousel, many of them headless and gushing great plumes of thin, pink ‘blood’—how astonishing it is that the 13-year-old Leyner was able to stage scenes like this in his small, second-floor bedroom in his parents’ suburban home, particularly when you consider a production schedule limited to after-school hours and weekends.

“One can’t, of course, overestimate the centrality of the male-adolescent bedroom in the history of western art. It is the sanctuary where the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy seeks refuge from his shallow peers and uncomprehending parents. It is the laboratory where he invents himself. And it is invariably the site of that great initial aesthetic frisson that not only determines the trajectory of his artistic life, but is often its crowning achievement. We rarely surpass in beauty or audacity those first raw, untutored riffs cooked up in the clamorous, totem-packed sancta sanctorum that we (the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boys of America) simply call our ‘rooms.’

“It should also be noted that the decapitated torso disgorging a geyser of blood is one of Leyner’s signature effects and marks a recurrent, obsessive motif in
The
Tetherballs of Bougainville
. To give just one example: In a scene which takes place during a reading by playwrights David Hare and Wallace Shawn at the 92nd Street Y, the camera scans the auditorium and then stops at a seat occupied by a headless torso, its savagely hewn neck spewing a fountain of blood at least ten feet high. The other members of the audience, including those seated directly next to the spouting trunk and those being drenched by Leyner’s egregiously ersatz fuchsia concoction, are absolutely oblivious and listen with rapt attention to Hare and Shawn reading from their own work. Whether this represents some sort of Buddhist memento mori, an absurdist harbinger of the coming millennium, a symbol of how inured we’ve become to one another’s suffering, or is simply an image that the filmmaker finds so perversely satisfying that he can’t help but insert it almost everywhere, blithely indifferent to its relevance, one can’t say with any certainty. But I suspect the latter.

“It’s no surprise that this zeitgeist-savvy film next finds Mark as a guest panelist on a daytime talk show. The theme: ‘My Dad Is an NJSDE Releasee.’

“ ‘Is there anything you’d say to your dad if he were here right now?’ asks the host, eyes moist with empathy.

“And Mark responds, ‘I’d probably say: “Dad, I love you and I know you love me and want to be near me and watch over me and everything, but please don’t come anywhere near me or Mom because they could call in a fucking NJSDE air strike on our house the minute you walk in.”’

“The host winks at the audience.

“ ‘How about saying it to
him
, because he’s been listening backstage and here he comes …’

“Mark leaps up and tears his microphone off, shrieking, ‘Are you out of your mind?! Run! Run, people, run!’

“Panic engulfs the studio audience. There’s instant
pandemonium as terrified people rush frantically for the exits.

“Predictably, battered and suffocated bodies soon litter the floor, some pounded and literally flattened into two-dimensional scaloppini by the throng’s trampling wingtips and Birkenstocks. (This is far from the only instance of people being trampled to death in
The Tetherballs of Bougainville
. In fact, rarely do three characters congregate in this movie without one of them stumbling and dying under the feet of the other two. Whenever we’re shown people emerging from a crowded elevator, we invariably discover, once that car has emptied out, the lifeless body of someone who’s been inexplicably crushed to death by fellow passengers. I can understand the Ma Ling Stadium disaster scene in which drunken Bougainvillean tetherball hooligans supporting Wamp Kominika storm the stand filled with Wuwu-Bulolo Puliyasi supporters, and hundreds of people die in the ensuing stampede. But take the scene at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels—a group on a museum tour is clustered in front of Pieter Brueghel’s
Fall of Icarus
, and when, at the behest of their guide, they continue on to the next painting, we find, remaining at the Breughel—surprise, surprise—the crumpled, broken body of some hapless art maven who somehow fell and was pummeled to death by the shoes of his companions as they scurried off to Hans Memlinc’s
Martyrdom of St. Sebastian
. I mean, what’s up with that? I’ve never seen a movie before in which: (a) people can’t manage to remain upright for more than several seconds, and (b) when they do fall, passersby can’t seem to avoid stomping them into unrecognizable pulp. If scenes like this bother you, you may consider avoiding
Tetherballs
altogether, although the gore is so unrealistic and mannered that I can’t imagine anyone finding it really disturbing. We’re not talking Industrial Light and Magic here. I don’t claim to be a special-effects expert or anything,
but I think we’re talking raw chicken cutlets, dressed in Ken and Barbie outfits, and then pounded with a meat mallet. Whether this is an improvisation born of budgetary constraints, or a deliberate aesthetic device—a sort of Brechtian
Verfremdungseffekt
—or simply an excuse for the adolescent filmmaker and his crew to bludgeon meat with a hammer, one can’t say with any certainty. But again, I suspect the latter.

“Anyway, as he flees this latest disaster, Mark valiantly stops to save a girl who’s tripped and fallen under the stampeding feet. The girl’s name is Sylvia, and she’s played by Reese Witherspoon with equal portions of gamine bluster, little-girl vulnerability, bewitching carnality, and a sort of arid, postwar Gallic Maoist, protofeminist, chignon-wearing hauteur that easily falls away to reveal a kind of Squeaky Fromm—like, giggly, non-compos-mentis ‘hey, whatever’ insouciance in a performance that marks a stunning comeback from Ms. Witherspoon’s disastrous turn as ‘Tante Helke’ in controversial Austrian director John Jacob Jingle-heimer Schmidt’s unwatchable S&M epic
My Name Is Your Name Too
.

“Once safely outside the television studio, Mark and Sylvia sit on the sidewalk and introduce themselves to each other. Sylvia’s new in town and, like Mark, about to start the 8th grade at Maplewood Junior High.

“When Mark asks her where she moved from, she hesitates for a long time, I mean a
long
time.

“So
long that I actually got up, went to the men’s room, sat on the John, lit a cigarette, and wrote a poem—a poem whose premise had been in gestation for several days, but the refrain of which had actually suggested itself to me months ago as I gazed down from the Euganean Hills to the plain of Lombardy, with Venice in the distance:

The ground is blanketed with the deciduous wings of pupal cicadas.

Two or three lissome, chemically castrated perverts are always draped over the railing at the rink.

The corpse has been rotated.
Apply the secretions.

Heathcliffean men wearing two-toned alligator shoes, Mirabella baseball caps, and well-pressed military attire, with flutes of champagne in their prosthetic left hands, trawl the baccarat pits, whispering into the ears of scantily clad dowagers, wearing only their golden-stringed Venetian tampons.

Florid, hyperbolic allusions to vampiric sex merely elicit “been there, done that” rolls of the eyes from the dowagers as, meanwhile, miniature velociraptors run wild in and out of their profusely powdered buttocks.

“Their mannerisms are totally
nha que
,” they giggle to each other, mixing California syntax with Vietnamese slang for “country folk.”

The corpse has been rotated.

Apply the secretions.

It’s hard to believe that someone named “Gushy” Grubenfleisch is considered by so many to be “the great genius of our time,” that cassettes of his lectures in the grand amphitheater of the Sorbonne circulate clandestinely throughout the kingdom.

We see him on television in his multicolored Coogi sweater and freshly laundered blue do-rag and are told to imagine future generations of similar “geniuses” spawned from his cryonically preserved sperm.

And yet when he opens his mouth to speak, he’s like … way-stupid, totally
nha que
.

The corpse has been rotated.

Apply the secretions.

When rats are threatened, they emit very high frequency (20,000 to 30,000 cycles per second) screams.

Emerson said in
Nature:
“… my head bathed by the blithe air.”

I’m somewhere in between, I guess, with my own “Stoned on GHB, soft tiny duck tongues seem to lave my saddle-scorched perineum.”

Strangely, that afternoon’s $25.95 All-You-Can-Eat Foie Gras at Lespinasse doesn’t preclude an overpowering yen, later, for an eggplant parm hero and Twizzlers.

Oh well … soon enough the acacias and Jacarandas, even the shimmering ingots stacked high, will be replaced by brambles and shriveled, bitter berries.

But for now, to the strains of a scratched, warped 45 of The Boxtops’ “Cry Like a Baby” that’s been slowed down to 3 rpm, a springboard diver—
molto bèllo
notwithstanding a bad-hair day—arcs slowly through the air and slices through the slime of filamentous blue-green algae that covers the surface of the pitiless canal.

The corpse has been rotated.

Apply the secretions.

“I submitted the poem, via E-mail, right from the stall, to
Logopoeia
, Francis Ford Coppola’s new poetics journal, and sat there waiting for a response. Finally I got one—a rejection, but fairly encouraging, I thought. It was from the poetry editor, Sofia Coppola, and it read: ‘We went back and forth on this one, but ultimately decided that all-you-can-eat foie gras at Lespinasse would cost more than $25.95. Please try us again.’

“When I returned to my seat, Sylvia was still staring into the middle distance, her eyes misting.

“ ‘Well, where’d you move from?’ Mark reinquires, thrumming the pavement.

“And finally she says tragically, ‘Roquebrune-Cap-Martin,
near Nice.’ Then, brightening, she says: ‘Well, we lived most of the year in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, but we spend summers in Seaside Heights.’

“Two quibbles here.

“Her family lived on the French Riviera and summered on the Jersey shore? I don’t think so.

“Secondly, I hate to cavil about continuity, especially with a filmmaker this young and exuberant, but inside the TV studio when Mark helps Sylvia in the stampede, she’s wearing a sky-blue and black bustier, black satin pants, and a delft-blue jacket. Outside, only minutes later, she’s wearing a tailored pinstriped jacket and a leopard-patterned chiffon skirt with ruffles. Hello?

“School begins that September and the plot accelerates.

“Up to this point,
Tetherballs
has suffered from an unaccountable tendency to suddenly lock onto a particularly banal object—a disfigured Nerf ball, a piece of brisket on the highway, a price tag dangling from a bra entangled in a treetop and buffeted by a hurricane—and then subject it to exceedingly minute and prolonged scrutiny. We’re talking about a movie in which a peripheral character—a lovelorn quantum electrodynamics professor at nearby Seton Hall University, played by a woefully miscast Willie Nelson—paints a wall in his apartment, and we’re then treated to—I kid you not—a one-hour close-up of the paint drying. Although I appreciate the concept of rubbing an audience’s nose in its own clichés, and the witty cross-reference to the Musée des Beaux-Arts trampling scene (Brueghel’s
Fall of Icarus
is an illustration of the Flemish proverb ‘Not a plow stands still when a man dies’), thank God it was a flat coat and not gloss enamel, or we’d
still
be there.

“The junior-high milieu, though, is one in which this filmmaker obviously feels comfortable, and the story line picks up major momentum, each scene invested with kinetic vitality and propelled by split-second transitions,
dizzying montages, and frenetic line readings by superenergized actors. (Not to harp on the film’s amateurish lapses, but there are times when production assistants’ hands are visible in the frame, administering methedrine suppositories to those actors and actresses whose recitations have flagged.) By the way, apparently
all
of Maplewood Junior High’s boys wear Versace leather motocross trousers and no shirts, and
all
the girls wear sepia lipstick, plaid skirts, and no shirts.

“Sylvia and Mark become inseparable, with Felipe a resigned, albeit happy-go-lucky, ‘wised-up-about-girls’ third wheel. Mark desperately wants to have marathon freaky sex with Sylvia, but Sylvia rebuffs him, arguing that it would jeopardize their friendship. She advocates a kooky regimen of abstinence and fennel. Crudely updating an exchange from Michael Curtiz’s 1945 classic
Mildred Pierce
, in which Joan Crawford says to Jack Carson, the horny, cynical bachelor, ‘Friendship is much more lasting than love,’ and Jack replies, ‘Yeah, but it’s not as entertaining,’ Sylvia here assures Mark that ‘Our relationship is too precious to be spoiled by a tablespoon of warm goo,’ to which Mark replies mordantly, ‘Yeah, but a tablespoon of warm goo is, like, more entertaining.’ Although Sylvia is resolute in her refusal, Mark’s efforts to undermine her resolve are indefatigable. He’s constantly moaning as if in actual physical agony, the purple head of his raging boner rakishly protruding from the waistband of his Hugo Boss boxer briefs, and he’s incessantly licking and biting and humping her, and reading her excerpts from Anka Radakovich’s old
Details
columns, or just turning up on her doorstep naked and hogtied, but the unflappably good-natured Sylvia’s always like ‘Tsk tsk tsk, now c’mon, settle down, settle down!’

“Sylvia’s idea of a good time is to chill on the couch, munching caramel-covered popcorn and Rolos, and watch hidden-camera shows like
America’s Funniest Violations of Psychiatrist / Patient Confidentiality
. Mark returns
home from these strictly platonic trysts, and takes out all that pent-up libidinal fury on the tetherball in his backyard. The tetherball scenes are filmed in a bluish haze with severe fun-house mirror distortion that lends them a hallucinatory, ritualistic quality. (These scenes can induce flashbacks of recovered-memory sequences from made-for-television movies with Patrick Duffy and Lisa Hartman, which some viewers may find disturbing.) And then, later, drenched in sweat, his palms and knuckles raw and bleeding, he collapses onto his bed and, as the camera dollies out of his bedroom window and tracks across the moonlit rooftops of Maplewood, we hear his primal howls of onanistic release echoing throughout the slumbering suburbs: ‘Aaaaahhhh-ooooo-unnnnng-ohmigod-gh-ghrrr-oh-oh-oh-like-whoa!’

“Whenever anyone says something derisive about tetherball, Mark—who typically employs the impoverished lexicon of his hydrocephalic cronies—quotes ominously from Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ intoning, either in voice-over or
viva voce
, ‘Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made,’ and then appending his own patented ‘See you in hell, my soon-to-be-dead friend.’

“Sylvia loves Mark deeply, though she limits demonstrations of her affection to hugs and chaste pecks on the cheek, and even these often precipitate the licking and biting and humping. Functioning in loco parentis, she’s the only one he can really
heart-to-heart
with about his absent dad, who hasn’t been seen since The Carousel. Mark’s mother isn’t eliminated entirely from the movie’s diegetic space, though she is reduced to the by-now-familiar icon of Mom as booze-sodden, semi-invalid. But there’s a brilliant scene—a schistlike melange of horror, porn, melodrama, and sentiment—in which Mark opens the door to his mother’s bedroom one afternoon and finds her ‘partying’ with three men. (‘Partying’ is as delicate
a euphemism as I can think of to describe a woman engaging in simultaneous anal, oral, and vaginal sex with three different musicians from a klezmer band that had appeared that morning at the Short Hills Mall.) This scene (which plays to a klezmer version of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webbers ‘Close Every Door’) powerfully correlates Joel’s NJSDE exile and the wife and son he leaves behind in Maplewood with Agamemnon’s fabled absence and the more sinister machinations of Clytaemnestra in Aeschylus’ stylish shocker
The Oresteian Trilogy
.

“This section of the movie, though more tautly paced than what’s preceded, is nonetheless marred by two completely superfluous characters who seem to have wandered in from other films: a crooked boxing manager and a cemetery groundskeeper—a hulking, gargoyle-like mute with a child’s mind. Luckily, they are ignored by this movie’s cast and eventually leave.

“There’s also the de rigueur joyriding/wilding scene. Mark and Felipe hot-wire a jet-powered car they find parked in front of a Benihana. Outfitted with two General Electric J-79 engines from a U.S. Navy F-4 Phantom fighter jet, the 25-foot-long, dart-shaped vehicle, emblazoned with the logo
Spirit of America III
, is capable of reaching speeds in excess of 650 miles an hour. Guzzling small-batch bourbon, they take it out for a spin, careen out of control, the car loses both its wheel brakes and drag parachutes, flips over, and smashes into telephone poles at 400 miles an hour before sinking in a salt brine pond. Mark and Felipe walk away unharmed, all giggles and high-fives. After smoking a blunt and swigging a bottle of Bailey’s, they set off on a mini crime spree that I can’t begin to describe in detail here; suffice it to say that it begins with targeting yuppies in Burberry raincoats and injecting them with the drug Versed, a central-nervous-system depressant that leaves a person conscious but paralyzed; negotiating to buy a bottle containing about an ounce of liquid VX nerve gas
(an amount that, if released in a crowded area, could kill 15,000 people); a clumsy, halfhearted attempt at sodomizing a police horse; the vicious, completely unprovoked beating of a waiter outside Osteria del Circo; shooting a neighbor’s seeing-eye dog because, the day before, the woman had casually remarked that Naomi Campbell ‘looked bloated’ on Leno; and culminating with spraying graffiti on Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center including swastikas, slogans praising cancer, and gruesome, smiling ‘oncogenes’ with obscenely misogynist speech balloons.

“Predictably, reviewers have criticized this scene as ‘irresponsible,’ ‘morally reprehensible,’ ‘pernicious,’ etc.

“I disagree. An unintended consequence of liberalism has been to deprive sullen, alienated adolescents of a language or iconography of transgression, forcing them to turn to ever more blasphemous rhetoric and imagery, and, when these are invariably co-opted, to sociopathic behavior, and then, when even these modes of behavior are appropriated by the entertainment and advertising industries, to increasingly deviant and destructive acts. So I actually don’t see what choice Mark and Felipe have
but
to behave precisely as they do. And as far as the woman with the seeing-eye dog goes, what does she mean Naomi Campbell
‘looked
bloated’ on Leno? I thought she was supposed to be blind. So, apparently, what we have here is some lowlife pulling an insurance scam that’s going to mean higher premiums for the rest of us. So why
not
shoot her fucking dog? But let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that the behavior depicted
is
‘vile and repugnant.’ I think that’s exactly what makes this scene such an intrepid act of filmmaking—the adamant refusal to airbrush, candy-coat, or sentimentalize reality, however unpalatable.

“Let’s not be naive. Kids are going to experiment with drugs and alcohol, vandalism, callous violence, semiautomatic handguns, chemical weapons, and neofascist hate crime—it’s inevitable behavior for adolescents
trying to determine what ‘truth’ is in a world torn between the self-replicating apocrypha of the Internet and the info-hegemony of Eisner-Murdoch-Turner. We did it when we were kids, our kids will do it, their kids will do it, their kids’ kids will do it, etc., etc., until the end of the world. And surely that’s how the world—or at least the human species—is going to end. I don’t care what lofty endgame scenarios the pundits concoct: asteroid collision, global warming with melting polar icecaps, biosphere toxic shock, iatrogenic plague, the ultimate Darwinian triumph of Artificial Intelligence, cosmic entropy, etc. The end will lack any such grandeur. It will be undignified, banal, and breathtakingly stupid. The world is going to end because, one night, a carload of solvent-sniffing 15-year-olds from Long Island mess around with something they shouldn’t have messed around with. Take all your unsolved disasters from history—mass extinction of the dinosaurs, Pompeii, the Black Death, the great Siberian explosion of 1908, the
Andrea Doria
, the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, the Lindbergh baby, the
Hindenburg
, Amelia Earhart, JFK, Hoffa, the
Exxon Valdez
, Bhopal, Chernobyl—ultimately there’s only one consistent explanation for each of these—a bunch of skanky, dyslexic adolescents, high on drugs, looking for trouble.

“Ironic, isn’t it, that the civilization of Dante, Caravaggio, Keats, and Einstein will end with some fried, feebleminded kid breaking into a Level 4 maximum-security biological weapons facility, mumbling ‘Yo—what the fuck …?’

“And so, eighth-grade transpires. Wracked by his unconsummated passion for Sylvia and the loss of his father, Mark is a surly, apathetic student. The only class in which he pays the slightest attention is ‘The Punic Wars,’ a seventh-period elective taught by a Ms. Hogenauer (Steven Dorff, for all intents and purposes, reprising his role as transvestite superstar Candy Darling in Mary Harron’s
I Shot Andy Warhol
). Hogenauer, a veteran
of the downtown performance-art scene, has relocated to Maplewood after a series of disastrous marriages with Mafioso restaurateurs, and moved in with the director of a Satanic day-care center in neighboring Mil-burn, played with over-the-top lesbian-supremacist fervor by Kyra Sedgwick. This section is firmly in the
To Sir with Love, Dead Poets Society, Mr. Holland’s Opus
, pedagogue-as-charismatic-hero tradition with scenes like the one in which Hogenauer shimmies up the down escalator at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square on a purple-and-aquamarine ACG snowboard with a big stuffed Dumbo draped across her back, symbolically reenacting—I assume—Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants, and lines like: ‘Gosh, Ms. Hogenauer, nobody ever made the Carthaginian victory at Cannae come so alive before!’

“In all his other classes, though, Mark sulks and daydreams, filling his notebooks with drawings of grotesque heads.

“Sylvia is continually preaching this nauseating Anthony Robbins,
Awaken the Giant Within
–style self-empowerment, and urging him to accomplish something,
anything
—to actually start a project and finish it. Mark insists that he wants to write and direct a film that will do for tetherball what
The Poseidon Adventure
did for synchronized swimming. But, of course, he never does. He’s too busy getting fucked up with Felipe. Finally, disgusted with his inertia and excuses, Sylvia takes matters into her own hands. Through some relative’s friend of a friend, she’s able to finagle Mark a summer internship with
Game Face
, an inane MTV-style cable sports show whose target audience is 12-to-14-year-old boys, and which entails going to—guess where?—yes, Bougainville!—and gathering information, maybe even writing and producing a short feature about the glamorous and bewilderingly arcane world of Bougainvillean tetherball.