I Think You're Totally Wrong (22 page)

CALEB:
I'm back.

Wally: (voice-over narration) … [André had] been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life” …

DAVID:
That, to me, is the most important line of the movie.

CALEB:
Why?

DAVID:
Perhaps not most important. The line I identify with the most.

CALEB:
There's a difference?

André: … a kind of SS totalitarian sentimentality in there somewhere … that love of, um—well, that masculine love of a certain kind of oily muscle. You know what I mean?

DAVID:
The specter of the Holocaust haunts the film. It's very intentional. André returns to it over and over again. He was born in France in 1934. Both of them are completely assimilated Jews.

André: … but since I've come back home I've just been finding the world we're living in more and more upsetting … and I saw this woman who looked as bad as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau …

André: Have you read Martin Buber's book
On Hasidism
?

Wally: No
.

André: Well, here's a view of life
.

DAVID:
Can you pause while I go to the bathroom? Caleb?

Caleb is snoring
.

DAVID:
Caleb?

CALEB:
Uhh?

DAVID:
Pause.

CALEB:
Okay, sorry.

DAVID:
No problem.

Wally: I mean, people used to treat me—I mean, uh, you know, if I would go to a party of professional or literary people—I mean, I was just treated, uh, in the nicest sense of the word, uh, like a dog.… Let's face it. I mean, there's a whole enormous world out there that I just don't ever think about. I certainly don't take responsibility for how I've lived in that world. I mean, you know, if I were actually to sort of confront the fact that I'm sort of sharing this stage with-with-with this starving person in Africa somewhere, well, I wouldn't feel so great about myself. So naturally I just—I just blot all these people right out of my perception. So, of course—of course, I'm ignoring a whole section of the real world
.…

CALEB:
Every artist thinks about this. Or should.

DAVID:
I.e., it's what your work is about, so you think it's the sine qua non of literary art. I'd say if in your work you consciously try to think about the world like this, you're doomed to fail.

Wally: … But frankly, you know, when I write a play, in a way one of the things I guess I think I'm trying to do is trying to bring myself up against some little bits of reality and I'm trying to share that, uh, with an audience. I mean—I mean, of course we all know, uh, the theater is, uh, in terrible shape today. I mean, uh—I mean, at least a few years ago people who really cared about the theater used to say, “The theater is dead.” And now everybody's redefined the theater in such a trivial way that, I
mean—I mean, God. I know people who are involved with the theater who go to see things now that—I mean, a few years ago these same people would have just been embarrassed to have even seen some of these plays
.

DAVID:
Same with books.

André: It may very well be that ten years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something
.

CALEB:
André is insane.

DAVID:
What do you think
Fight Club
was about?

André: When I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert … He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves.” … We really feel like Jews in Germany in the late '30s … I think it's quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing
.

CALEB:
André's beginning to sound like DJ Spooky.

DAVID:
Here's where it turns. Just watch.

Wally: Do you want to know my actual response to all this? Do you want to hear my actual response?

DAVID:
Acch. So beautiful. I love this so much.

Wally: I mean, I just—I just don't know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy, uh, reading Charlton Heston's autobiography or, uh, you know, uh, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that's been waiting for me all night still there for me to drink in the morning and no cockroach or fly has—has died in it overnight. I mean, I'm just so thrilled when I get up and I see that coffee there, just the way I wanted it. I mean, I just can't imagine how anybody could enjoy something else any more than that. I mean, I mean, obviously, if the cockroach—if there is a dead cockroach in it, well, then I just have a feeling of disappointment, and I'm sad. But I mean, I—I just—I just don't think I feel the need for anything more than all this
.

CALEB:
Wally sure likes to say “I mean” a lot.

André: … just as the Nazi demons that were released in the '30s …

Wally: … Heidegger said that, uh, if you were to experience your own being to the full you'd be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as a part of your experience …

André: What does that mean—a “wife,” a “husband,” a “son”? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there's this huge man lifting you off the ground and then he's gone. Where's that son?

Wally: (voice-over narration) … When I finally came in, Debbie was home from work and I told her everything about my dinner with André
.

DAVID:
That gorgeous Erik Satie piano as the camera pans the stores Wally went to as a child—it's hard to think of a more perfect ending to anything.

CALEB:
He's a hedonist who realizes—or doesn't—his own faults.

DAVID:
Well, good night. Thanks for dinner. Tomorrow I'd love to go into Skykomish, if that's cool. I'll treat for breakfast. Lunch, if we get up late.

CALEB:
Wow, it's past midnight. It's almost one.

DAVID:
We started close to ten, and we stopped to make notes.

CALEB:
I was trying to fight sleep.

DAVID:
You slept for an hour, easily.

CALEB:
I missed that much?

DAVID:
You snored through all the major epiphanies.

CALEB:
I thought I missed maybe five minutes.

DAVID:
You were out cold. See you tomorrow.

DAVID:
I think it's a very good story, but if I were you, I'd rework a couple of things. First, you need to evoke Eliza better. You write, “Yes, she has sexual attributes, but why shall I tell you about them?” This probably sounds like conventional creative writing advice, but the whole story pivots on the narrator trying to get over Eliza, so I would do something to make the reader feel that ache. Then there's this long section where you're endlessly playing out the confusion surrounding her transvestitism, but we already know this from the opening.

CALEB:
But the narrator doesn't.

DAVID:
But we do. How stupid can the narrator be?

CALEB:
He knows afterward.

DAVID:
Of course. It starts to feel like—what was that movie?

CALEB:
The Crying Game
.

DAVID:
It feels like we're watching
The Crying Game
for the fifth time. What's so interesting about you to me, and what's so different to me about you, is that even if it's a bit of a fiction, you pride yourself on “I'm a man of experience and adventure. I've done this and I've done that. I've traveled here and I've traveled there. I know this person. I know that person.”

CALEB:
What other stuff?

DAVID:
Everything that isn't in books. Life, I guess. The story gets to something very deep about you or one version about you. It's a fascinating decision where the guy says, more or less, “You know, our charge on earth is to experience everything,” so he calls himself out and makes a potentially suicidal choice. He plans to prove his manhood to himself by, er, fucking this guy. I really want more about this guy who circumlocutes himself into such a pretzel of logic that he convinces himself, suicidally or potentially suicidally, to have sex with someone because the gay guy calls out the narrator's masculinity over being willing to have more experience. That's the story. And that's you. From the age of twenty-six to thirty-four you roamed all over the map. You tried to resist the blandishments of ordinary life. You're understandably and justifiably—

CALEB:
Your observations are valid. You've hit flaws. To me, the story is about homophobia and how far a gay-friendly person might go. I wanted to layer in, as you would say, this sexual culture that accepts transvestites: in Polynesia, when a family has too many boys, they raise the youngest as a girl. So I first wrote about two guys, the narrator and his friend. They meet two transvestites, go to this beach, the narrator pulls at the bra, and then, in shock, shouts to his friend, “Stop!” The friend says, “Why? I'm getting my dick sucked! This better be important.” The narrator says,
“These girls have dicks!” The friend screams, “Aaaaaah!” And the two friends run into the night back to the hostel.

DAVID:
This happened to you?

CALEB:
I'll tell you eventually.

DAVID:
Well, now I'm obviously—

CALEB:
The story goes on. The next day the Australian guy tells his two friends about the culture. One friend is pissed, gets drunk and violent: “These fags—I want revenge!” My narrator says, “Well, it's no big deal, it's our secret, but hey, that's their culture. What if you were dressed like a woman from infancy?” The two guys go out that night, get drunk, the friend asks a transvestite to dance, and then goes off with the transvestite. The narrator follows, discovers his friend beating the hell out of the transvestite, and then pulls him off.

DAVID:
And these transvestites were prostitutes.

CALEB:
Probably. I also wrote another version of the story and focused only on me.

DAVID:
That's the one I'd be more interested in.

CALEB:
In this second draft I receive oral sex, but I don't know it's really a guy, and then I step back. I want to bring in the culture, anthropology, literary, historical references.

DAVID:
You probably need to make it much longer.

CALEB:
Have you ever been hit on by a gay man?

DAVID:
Sure.

CALEB:
What happened?

DAVID:
I said no thanks.

CALEB:
I have a gay friend, Matt. One day I asked him, “Have you ever had sex with a woman?” And he says, “Yeah, a
few times.” “How many?” He says, “Three.” I say, “How was it?” He says, “Not bad. Like eating an ice cream flavor you're not crazy about. It's better than no dessert but doesn't really satisfy.” Many gay people try heterosexual sex, but not the opposite.