Marie Buck & Matthew Walker
From Spoilers (1)
The strangest of many strange purchases I make in March 2020 is a printer and a lot of paper. I imagine the internet cutting out or becoming nonfunctional, either because the government won’t want it there or because the engineers and whoever else runs it—whoever maintains the cables that the information runs through, or all the tech workers at Twitter or Google or whatever else—will all get sick at once.
And so, my semi-functional brain thinks back to the things I studied in grad school, things that are only tangentially connected and that are, in hindsight, way too hopeful and LARP-y as reference points. New Masses and Inner City Voice, the moment when the League of Revolutionary Black Workers took over the student newspaper at Wayne State, where I studied all of this history, for instance.
On March 17 I order a printer for $318.39 and 5 cases of 20 lb. copy paper, each case with three reams in it, for a total of 7,500 sheets of paper. Which is both a ridiculous amount of paper and not nearly enough to meaningfully support any kind of revolutionary activity.
Oh well—it seems now that I was far too hopeful about things. And thought myself to be a braver person than I am.
The printer is moderately useful.
Lennie prints some city hall encampment agit-prop from my printer; I print some fliers to try to get my building to rent strike—an effort that seems to have since been turned into a NIMBY-ish whatsapp thread by another resident. I put up rent strike fliers in the neighborhood; I print fliers and leave them at other buildings owned by our landlord; I print fliers for other rent-strikers. My housemates and I eventually move out and never pay our summer 2020 rent. At this point I have used maybe 500 pieces of paper or so.
I have a lot left.
At a protest I want to feel the thrill of solidarity but instead I shrink away from the helicopter diving at us, which is probably forgivable, but I do it before most people there, even.
My giant printer sits in my closet and prints things, mostly for work, and now I’m not even sure I can muster the optimism that would lead to more strategic use.
At the beach, the overcast sky dovetails in my brain with the hurricane brewing hundreds of miles away, and I imagine mass heat die-offs of the little purple-shelled mollusks that appear out of the sand each time the waves recede. Even though I realize later: the clouds aren’t from the storm; the internet tells me it’s another weather system entirely and just a cloudy day, clouds over the ocean, gray sky and gray water. Our airbnb host has written a little note to us about practicalities; it sits in a fruit bowl on the kitchen table, so that I’ve seen her handwriting more than I’ve seen yours.
It’d be nice if the note said something more profound.
It’s tempting to think that the DIY-ness of something indicates its superior artistic merit or the legitimacy of its politics.
I look at the hurricane news constantly as the storm approaches, and you lightly tease me about my wanting to be an expert on every new disaster. I want our host’s little fruit bowl note to tell me what the weather will be, to update like the app on my phone. And the weather app on my phone, instead, to tell me to please not plug the toaster oven in while the air conditioning is on, and for the banner flying over the beach at the end of a plane to include a footnote, with the footnote linking me back to the revolutionary newspaper, not to give me knowledge, so much, but to give me feelings of hope that seem impossible to come by.
I could bury my phone in the sand, Siri reading aloud to the mollusks. The attractive graphic design on the La Colombe cold brew cans we buy could swap out with our pile of beach books so that we drink the words of the books and throw into the trash the blank leaves of paper and then arrive home to an exhausted printer with no more ink, to all the printers in Brooklyn exhausted, and the image I want, the one from I Am Cuba and all the great leftist movies, leaves of paper dancing through the sky and falling onto people, onto the ground, spreading the word—the fantasy that if we could all talk to each other we could all grab the power.
I recall that when I tried to sell papers as a member of a Trotskyist organization, something goofy I did circa 2012, I was not good at it.
The insides of my masks are all full of foundation stains and little lipstick smears. My cat is tearing up paper—notes, books, everything—as an “attention-seeking behavior,” and our own metaphor is just peeing in the ocean—getting absorbed, impossible to notice, like we’re cremating ourselves and throwing our own ashes into the sea but instead of our entire bodies being waste, we’re maintaining for now, just moving the waste along, operating with a notion of the soul.
I hate the phrase “rest in power.”
I want knowledge to help us do something, though it doesn’t.
I recall leading chants at a protest once, and two teens came up to me and asked me if I had, like, a newspaper or anything and said they wanted to get into socialism more and I was like, they have to be cops.
We’re pissing in the ocean, but on the reddit/relationships advice column there is a man seeking advice about his cat-kin girlfriend, who has begun pissing on the floor of their apartment whenever they get into an argument.
I would like to adopt Radish’s paper-tearing behavior, tearing bits of books with my teeth, then ingesting little pieces and vomiting them up later, until you are forced to write into reddit about me.
The waves keep rolling in, like the ocean is refreshing the feed.
From Spoilers (2)
At the end of college, 2004, I work at a historical movie theater that plays up its old-timey qualities. People like to film movies in Charleston because of the historic architecture, and a scene for The Notebook is filmed outside. Ryan Gosling and Amy McAdams arrive at the theater for a double-date, and we, the viewers, see them walk in, under the marquee and the old-fashioned lights.
When the movie is out, the theater uses the fact that its façade is in the film to advertise screenings of The Notebook, and throngs of middle-aged women friends and mother-daughter pairs come to watch this movie in the theater at which a very brief scene is set.
And so I eventually watch the movie after a shift one day; I want to see the theater on the screen while I am inside of it despite how uncomfortable I am with the gender-y sappiness and the crying women who have bought entirely into conventional ideas of love.
For weeks I have been side-eyeing everyone who emerges from the theater crying, thinking about what dupes they are. They all take little tissues from a basket of tissues that we have made available just for this movie. We hold the basket of tissues and offer them to the movie-goers as they file out. Everyone takes a tissue, though it turns out this gesture on the part of management is confusing: a large percentage of the women respond by saying they thought it was a mint but they’re glad it’s a tissue.
For weeks, I offer the basket-of-tissues-that-looks-like-a-basket-of-mints to the exiting crowds at a time I would normally be able to just read a book on the clock and I am irritated.
When I finally watch the movie, I cry.
Later, when I revisit this movie in 2021, I realize that the director turns out, surprisingly, to be Nick Cassavetes, son of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. And instead of John Cassavetes directing and his wife Gena Rowlands playing a woman either being terrible to men or dealing with men being terrible to her, Nick Cassavetes gives us his mom in a Hollywood romance, with a perfect, entirely devoted partner.
Most of the movie is a flashback to South Carolina in the forties and shows the two main characters falling in love, with Ryan Gosling’s character doing boorish things that get figured as romantic. But the present of the film is the moment it is released, with James Garner and Gena Rowlands playing the couple decades later, Gena Rowlands suffering from dementia and James Garner reading her their love story from a notebook and hoping she’ll recognize him.
It seems like an amazing skill, to make theaters full of people cry.
What I mean is that I wish I could make this breeching occur, again and again—James Garner reaching into Gena Rowlands’s consciousness, Nick Cassavetes reaching into some part of me where melodrama works on me the way it should, and I cry.
Did I cry because the plot is sad?
Did I cry because your lover forgetting you’ve loved them is the saddest plot of all?
Did I cry because I was in the theater, nestled into something real as it was depicted before my eyes, the letters from the old-fashioned marquee both in front of me on the screen and behind me, outside, where I would change them out with my coworker on a weekly basis?
The letters dance on the marquee outside; the letters dance on that same marquee as recorded on a strip of film and projected.
I envy the projectionist.
I call up the steep stairwell to the projection booth to offer the projectionist leftover chicken strips toward the end of the night.
There is strange light and the noise of the film moving.
In the lobby an ancient projector from the early days of the theater functions as a sculpture.
In the scenario in which I sit in the theater watching The Notebook, I can invert my world whenever: I can emerge from the theater and whatever I have just seen onscreen will then be duplicated in real life. I can walk out of the theater and onto the set.
Or, in reverse, control it from the get-go: arrange the letters on the marquee to say what it is that I want. Go watch the movie. In the movie the letters advance my desires. Walk out of the theater. The letters show me what is new.
*
Before Sunset is sappy. And yet there’s a faint edge of grit to how things play out. Enough to make it feel just real enough to be moving. And in fact, I’m mildly embarrassed by how gutting I find it, the first time I see it.
It’s like at the beginning of Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971. We watch it on Jake’s couch, me keeping an eye after Jake’s cats, you slipping in and out of sleep, your head in my lap, relishing the idea of “getting away with something,” as you put it, meaning falling asleep in a situation where you’re supposed to be awake.
In Rainer’s film’s opening voiceover monologue, we hear a young girl speak of a strange occurrence, of getting shivers down her back when she hears a patriotic song at an assembly. She realizes this is in fact a recurring bodily reaction that she has when she hears stories of bravery or high emotion. But these cascading chills don’t come without resistance. She says:
“I really fight against them because basically I reject such stories for their contrived nature and unreality. Intense drama is always so removed from my own life that it leaves me with an empty feeling … then what in God’s name do those damned shivers mean?”
And despite my own resistance, the final sequence of Before Sunset is amongst the most affecting of any movie scene to me in its capture of the feeling of love, the way it’s shot through with laughter and chance and sorrow.
Antonioni says that he classifies love as a disease, a condition that one must suffer through, a state of being that’s inextricably linked to pain and sadness. In my late teens and early twenties, this notion seemed so profound, so completely in line with my limited and undercooked experiences with romance. And I can still empathize with Antonioni, and with my teenage self, though now I’m less skeptical of love and more skeptical of Antonioni’s self-serious fatalism.
But it’s true that falling in love with someone, feeling like you can’t live without them, is always undergirded by an inevitability that one day you will indeed be forced to live without that person, or they’ll be forced to live without you.
Spoiler: whether the love fades, the relationship fails, or the body succumbs to death, the final endpoint of love, whether mutual or unrequited, will always be grief.
From Spoilers (3)
It’s 2019. I have the window seat and Juliette Binoche is unlacing her black boots, unbraiding her waist-length dark hair. She unbuttons her crisp white lab coat.
A low drone of strings and electronics thrums claustrophobically in my headphones. High and wordless feminine vocals wail softly as a silvery metal phallus slowly swings into erect position, flanked on either side by red leather cushions. Binoche slides a pitch-black condom firmly down the length of the gleaming dildo, and I start to squirm in my seat when I realize what’s coming. Goddammit, I whisper under my breath, as I attempt to use my bent arm as a dividing wall, ineffectually shielding my ipad screen from the sightline of my middle-seat neighbor as Binoche, now fully nude, reaches her arms up to grip the handles of a pair of hanging straps and lowers herself down onto the menacing obelisk.
As Binoche begins to thrash in the so-called fuck box, the film cuts between a series of disorienting close-ups, Binoche’s pale freckled skin framed against a thick black void, as dark as the outer space that she’s hurtling through, aboard a prison ship of death-row criminals. The camera homes in, first, on a gnarly scar that descends down from her belly button, and then to her hands as they roughly grip her own breasts, at which point I decide I’ve pushed my luck far enough. I frantically bring the tip of my finger to the screen and scrub through the rest, too nervous at the prospect of a fellow traveler catching a glimpse of the scene.
High Life is not even the first time a Denis-Binoche team-up prompts me to censor the director’s work while flying. While much more conceptually tame, Let the Sunshine In catches me more off-guard, immediately opening with a shot of Binoche lying naked on a bed, her lover entering the frame moments later to commence a protracted sex scene. It lasts about four minutes and I miss all but the first few seconds, quickly leaning forward to block the screen and fast forward to less racy visuals, fearing my neighbors might think me a pervert.
It’s 2005, one of my first solo flights, and I am flying south for the winter holidays. Newly 21, I order my first in-air cocktail, a gin and tonic.
I have the window seat and the woman seated next to me, probably early 40s, taps my shoulder, gesturing for me to remove my headphones. She asks after the time. I interpret the innocuous question as a sign that she is looking for conversation and, with Bombay Sapphire confidence, manage to keep us talking in a relaxed flow for the rest of the flight. She also grew up around Dallas / Fort Worth but now lives on a sailboat in Sausalito, where she works as a purveyor of “adult fine art,” as she puts it. She is also going south to see family. I order a second drink, she follows suit, and we exchange frank recountings of our respective romantic relationships, which both seem to have reached ambiguous and fraught stages.
She tells me she is preparing to embark on a voyage in the new year, a circumnavigation of the globe. Apparently, the trip is a bohemian experiment of sorts, and the exclusive passengers will be selected for their singular professions, one per field. There will be one artist, one scientist, one chef, one poet, one philosopher, one mathematician…one purveyor of “adult fine art” I guess? I tell her that I am a composer and she exclaims that I’d be perfect for the trip, that I must join. I agree.
I’m dizzy, dumbstruck by my luck. I feel like I am in a dream, or a movie, a dream sequence in a movie. Newly legal, I am drinking cocktails with a beautiful stranger on a night-flight. She’s a peddler of erotica and she is inviting me to sail the world with an exclusive cadre of intellectuals. She gives me her card at the end of the flight and tells me to write her, that we will figure out all the details of our upcoming trip.
I send her an email but I am not surprised when I never hear back. I visit her website and the adult art on offer seems tame, and certainly not good. Years later I will still be able to clearly remember one photograph, a black-and-white close-up of two bearded older men, probably in their 70s, their faces smashed together in a desperate kiss that looks almost painful, a lusty physicality emanating off the screen. In the sixteen years that follow, I don’t have another conversation of substance with a seat partner.
But I love flying. The longer the flight the better. I love the constraints of being truly off the grid. I never opt for in-flight wi-fi. Sometimes the low drone of the engines feels trance-inducing, an irrefutable invitation to doze. I pull the dining tray down, cross my arms on its surface, and smash my forehead down onto the soft flesh of my forearms. I don’t concern myself with the sightlines of my fellow travelers, with how I look, hunched over like a child. I give in gladly to the whirring sounds of the hurtling vessel and my worries about the world below dissolve.
My favorite thing is when there’s unexpected turbulence, the plane shaking, the chime of the seat belt lights flickering on, a quiet shared tension emerging between the passengers. I relish occupying the liminal state in these moments, too lulled into tranquility to even lift my head up. As the frame of the plane rumbles, I fantasize about the engines cutting out. The pilot lets us know we’re going down. The plane’s cabin transforms into a fuck box; the panicked travelers are desperate for a last orgasm, phalluses emerge out of the seat cushions, arms reach up to grab hold of the dangling oxygen masks, steadying themselves as they prepare for the twin impalements of pleasure and obliteration.
I imagine myself not being rousable from my half dream state, understanding our collective fate, yet continuing to calmly float through the snoozy murk until impact.
Marie Buck is the author of Unsolved Mysteries (Roof Books, 2020), Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul (Roof Books, 2017), and Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya, 2015). They are the managing and web literary editor at Social Text and live in Brooklyn.
Matthew Walker is the executive director of Primary Information, a nonprofit publisher of artists’ books, and one half of Ex-Official, an imprint and production house for electronic music occupying a liminal space between hard boundaries.