Nothing is inflammable, p.17
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 17
They’ve put a chair up there for her that has been ripped out of a police riot van, wrapped a sash around her that’s torn and stained with every conceivable bodily fluid. The men cheer and she breathes a sigh of relief that they are not too feisty this time, probably due to the worsening weather.
This is one of many times I will witness one of these events.
Since I had gone freelance most of my time had been split between Russ and his little anarchist regime, creating propaganda docu’s and shooting reels of buildings falling apart and other forms of the natural chaos they wish to achieve, and the rest of it with the Media Virus guys downtown. But this job came out of the blue from Den Perry whom I hadn’t seen or heard from in a long time. It was a blank note shoved under my door with the words “Fall” scrawled across it. Fall, short for Fuck All, short for “How many of you are up for this job? Fuck All”.
It was high pay and I knew from experience that it would only have been sent to those who were more into the documentary scene than simple filmmaking—meaning it could be a nasty one because it would require a certain level of professional distance
Things had been dry for a while and I was behind on just about everything I could be behind on—editing for past projects, rent on the apartment and my truck. If it wasn’t for the fact that one of Russ’s buddies had hooked me up with illegal cable and electricity I’d have been in deep shit.
The contact was Raoul, the manager of the girl I was to film. She was a contestant in one of the unsupervised Beauty Pageants that I’d heard rumors about in the past and this Raoul thought she was destined for the Big Time, wanted to capture it all on film. I don’t know what Big Time he was thinking of exactly because all I knew about this world was that all there was were Small Times and even Smaller Times.
The square framing of the mechanical zoom captures her as she huddles into the side of the truck. We are speeding across a concrete desert, Raoul in a place where it seems like he is screaming when in fact he is not making a sound as he sits behind the wheel. His eyes are wide, focused entirely on the animal bounding ahead of them. Clarity, her make-up artist, is in the back seat with me, as powerless as the Beauty Queen is, struggling for grip as we are all thrown around inside the car.
Raoul swerves as the animal, some sort of wild dog, suddenly changes direction and heads towards dunes of old tires and oil drums that have been dumped.
“Look at it go!” Raoul shouts, bouncing up and down in his seat.
The Beauty Queen can’t look and can’t not look. She watches the creature run with the terrible knowledge of what Raoul will do to it if or when he catches it but also with the acid sting of the hope that it might escape, as a few have done.
Cut to later, in the cool midnight air, where the Beauty Queen and I stand outside a gas station waiting for Raoul. Clarity is in the back of the truck, his head hung low, occasionally glancing up at us through the dirty glass.
“It was my own fault,” she tells me, and I have to remind her to look into the camera and not at me. “I should have known better.”
“He’s done this before?” I ask her, watching her through the camera’s viewfinder.
She nods. “He says that beauty deserves beauty. He caught me playing with a lizard once and stuck it with a stick before I could do anything. Clarity made it into a wristband for me. I haven’t worn it recently, though. Clarity can make anything pretty.”
Cut back to the truck racing between patches of rocky mounds and dried-up cacti, right over a small crater that looks somewhat like a shallow grave.
I keep the camera on the Beauty Queen because this is about her reaction to what is going on not just what is going on. Yet I can see out of the corner of my eye the wild dog still running but visibly tiring as Raoul herds it in with the giant flatbed. The camera is almost thrown from my hands as we come suddenly to a grinding halt and it’s the Beauty Queen’s terrified eyes I see first, before I realize that Raoul has a shotgun out. The man stands, sliding open the sunroof and taking aim. The framing becomes blurred as an arm flashes in front of the camera and causes the autofocus to go wild and you can hear the Beauty Queen whining.
“Clarity . . . ”
I swivel the viewfinder, instinctively following my subject’s line of sight. The man looks up, eyes circled with black rings and splintered by crow’s feet, the line of facial piercings running across his eyebrow ridge glittering. He shakes his head even as she grabs Raoul’s legs and pulls weakly on them. There is a blast as Raoul takes his first shot and the Beauty Queen screams, pounding his knees and pleading with him. Another shot, another, then a yelp then one more shot and silence.
Raoul slides back down into the truck, grinning widely.
“I got it for you, Precious,” he says, stroking the Beauty Queen’s face. “I got it.”
Cut back to the gas station and the Beauty Queen is framed by a pump that is lined with peeling rust. In the background you can see Raoul in the store picking up some snacks and paying for the gas.
“Step back for me,” I tell her and she immediately responds by leaning back into the light cast by the dirt-encrusted sign advertising the latest special offers to any drivers that might pass by.
I feel strange in that moment, realizing that it was now I who was positioning her.
I bring the camera down across her scraggly form, across the blood that was drying on the tops of her breasts and across her shoulders. You can see the skin beginning to curl there as if it were her own, like the dark petals of a dying rose. There aren’t as many flies as there had been earlier.
Cut again and we are in the middle of the concrete plains. Raoul is holding out his hands as the Beauty Queen stands before him proudly, the dog’s fresh blood trickling down her back. I pan down to Clarity, hunched in the shadow of the truck, the knife in his bloodied hands but before I can zoom in Raoul shouts at me, reminds me what I am meant to be filming here.
Cut once more, a few minutes earlier.
You see Raoul’s blurry face as he leans across in the front seat and kisses the Beauty Queen. You see him flinch momentarily as he tastes her bile on those cracked lips.
“Come on, we’ll go see it,” he says and grabs the Beauty Queen’s wrist harder than necessary, tugging her across the gear stick and out his side of the car. Clarity gets out and follows a few paces behind them and it takes me a few moments to catch up and come out after them. I only realize as I step out how fast my heart is beating. You watch an amateur with a camera and when something noteworthy happens they remove themselves from the viewfinder and watch it with their own eyes. But me, and others like me, we can’t help but stare through the mechanical eye because its somehow become our only way of seeing.
In Clarity’s hand is Raoul’s flaying knife which he grips tightly as debris blows across him and the heat of the smog cover scorches his shaven head, watching the two of them ahead, mere shadows in the rising dust storm.
The dog is still twitching as Raoul raises the butt of his shotgun and drives it down onto the thing’s tiny skull. I miss the killing blow as I hurry towards them and quickly move to the Beauty Queen’s reaction but there is none. She stares off at the distant pyres of infected farm animals being torched, black smoke crawling across the darkening sky, trying not to listen as Clarity begins to expertly remove the creature’s skin below her, out of shot. Raoul comes up behind her, wrap his arms around her waist, one finger brushing against the scar tissue of her gunshot wound, making her tense suddenly.
“You’re the most beautiful thing in this world, you know that?” he whispers through her strangled, clumpy hair. “More beautiful than anything I have ever seen.”
He looks straight at the camera and there is one of those little moments where you jump because it’s as close as someone looking at you. I stay on them, shooting them like newlyweds that have just stumbled out of church.
There are wet sounds from beneath them as Clarity works then the thud of the knife hitting the soft ground as he finishes. Raoul turns, taking the Beauty Queen with him, as they behold Clarity, smeared in the animal’s fresh blood, holding aloft the dripping skin.
Raoul draws her towards Clarity and turns her back to him. His eyes are wide with delight and he nods. “Let me see my fairy princess,” he says.
“It’s not ready yet,” Clarity tells him. “We must dry it out properly first—and I need to bathe it.”
Raoul shakes his head. “Let me see.”
Clarity looks at the Beauty Queen and there is recognition that she is back in that vacant place she seems to spend so much of her time in. He spreads out the skin as Raoul slips off her sash and removes the flimsy gown she had been wearing, pooling on the ground at her feet as if it were a part of her. Then the flesh is draped across her, cold and wet on her bare skin, she shudders as it touches her. Raoul replaces the sash, not wanting to let her forget that she won the latest contest, and stands back to admire her.
The Beauty Queen stares back numbly as the dog’s blood trickles across her breasts and down her back.
Cut to later that day and a diner sandwiched in between aged iron ore plants.
Before they had entered the place, Clarity had managed to convince Raoul to let him clean the Beauty Queen up and remove the dog skin.
Overlay audio from earlier shots as the viewfinder pans across a half-full café populated by fat truckers and teenage runaways, stale coffee steam and Perspex barrels of donuts –
“We must save it for the next contest,” Clarity argues, his breath uneven as he hurries across the parking lot. “Give me one day to alter it here and there.”
“”We don’t need to alter it. Her beauty is raw, therefore everything else about her should be too.”
“Fine—but at least let’s not spoil the surprise.”
So while Raoul pays for a room for the night and goes to the diner to make his calls to the rest of the Collective, I go with Clarity and the Beauty Queen. I load a new cassette and hesitantly film what follows.
A collage –
Clarity showering her, rolling a bar of orange soap across her to remove the smell. Caresses that are somewhat maternal. Neither seem bothered by my presence.
He is helping her into a black leather dress but she insists on wearing the sash for Raoul over it, arguing with him long enough to cause the makeup he has applied on her to begin to run in the mist of the shower room.
Her face, reflected in the bathroom mirror, smudged with black mascara tears.
Then a sudden jump to the noise of the diner as we see her shuffle through to meet Raoul, seated in a booth with another man. Some of the diners glance up at the camera as it passes but most take no notice.
“My, my,” the man next to Raoul says and I hurriedly frame his ugly face.” So beautiful—and I’ll bet even more so close up.”
Cut to the Beauty Queen, wrapped in a bathrobe, sitting hunched up on the sink counter, pellets of water frozen on the glass behind her. She holds the razor blade Clarity used to shave her earlier in the palm of one hand as if it were an insect she had found. I am standing at an angle to her to avoid showing up in the mirror.
“So you’d seen him before?” I asked her.
“At some contests. I know it’s a terrible thing to say but . . . sometimes they all look the same.”
“Is he a manager like Raoul?”
“No,” she says, her voice wavering. “He always hangs around the guys with the cameras.”
“And what do they do?” My question is hesitant as I become aware of the direction of the conversation.
“They film us girls.”
“On stage?”
“Yeah.”
“Anywhere else?”
She shrugs. “Sometimes.”
“Where did they take you earlier? Did they film you?”
The razor blade flares in the camera’s view for a second. She won’t look at me anymore.
“Of course they filmed me. Someone had to, right? I mean, how will people know that’s you’ve done something if they don’t film it?”
She smiles nervously and looks down at the blade; it flashes as she turns it, catching the glare of the strip lights above us. “Do you think I’m pretty, Miss Afterlife?”
I begin to look away from the eyepiece, catch myself. In the harsh light you can see the white keloids of her older scars even more clearly.
“Elisabeth,” I correct her. “And yes I do.”
She nods vaguely, frowning down at the razor blade as she plays it across her palms and I don’t think she really hears my answer.
Cut back to the diner once more.
A waitress arrives with plates of breakfast food, lays them down randomly on the booth’s table and blushes at the way Raoul and his friend stare up at her, then hurriedly makes her exit. She ignores me sitting at a booth across the way.
“Eat,” Raoul tells everyone, slotting a piece of crisp bacon into his mouth. He pushes a plate towards the Beauty Queen with her runny black tears and tells her she will need her strength.
“Why do you watch?” I ask Clarity.
This is back in the hotel room, later that night. You can see the corner of the TV in the shot but I train the camera firmly on the waif-like figure slumped in the chair. There’s a half-empty bottle of pills on the bedside table nearby and he has the wild dog’s dried out skin draped across his knees, a needle and thread abandoned in it. I feel a tendency to avoid what is on-screen but he’s been playing the tape over and over for an hour now ever since Raoul gave it to him.
“I have to. Have you ever noticed how shows about murderers always have reconstructions from the murderer’s point of view? Like their sole purpose is to the let the viewer fantasize about committing the crime themselves. Why do people watch things over and over again if it disgusts them so much?”
“So are fantasizing about yourself in this video?”
He points to the TV screen. “Shoot it. You know you want to see it properly. Voyeurism is nothing to be ashamed of—it’s what we’re all being brought up to be. I’ll keep talking, if you want. Just shoot it.”
I hesitantly swivel the TV screen into view. The tape has come to an end and he is rewinding it again. It’s a strange image, someone squeezed into a toilet cubicle getting fucked from behind in reverse by the man holding the camera.
“She told me nothing was going to happen this time.”
Clarity shakes her head. “But it always does. These contests don’t take place just so they can give out sashes, she knows that.”
“You knew what was going to happen when they took her out of the diner?”
“I had an idea. There’s only one reason that Raoul separates her from me.”
“Do you ever do anything to stop them?”
He pauses before answering. “If I truly thought she wanted me to, I would.”
As her clothes are peeled onto her and as she is bent over the toilet seat and as a small crowd of eager and slightly bewildered truckers are visible gathered around her and as they are invited to show her how beautiful they thought she was.
Cut back suddenly to the diner and Raoul’s friend leaning across the table. “So beautiful,” he tells her. “And I’m sure even more so close up.”
And back to the video in time to see vomit fly into the Beauty Queen’s mouth as she leans over a sink, then Raoul removes his fingers from her throat and take his hand from her head.
“I don’t think her body knows what a calorie is anymore,” Clarity says and he hits PLAY once more.
The tape is the first of the hundred or so copies currently being made in the portable setup that Raoul’s friend has had ready in his own motel room while awaiting their arrival.
The Beauty Queen’s features are blurred because the camera is held so close, every now and again crashing into her face and at one point near the end smearing with a spot of blood from her lip where it splits it. Clarity watches it, over and over.
“What are you feeling when you watch this?” I ask him.
“Nothing.”
“Lust? Anger?”
“Nothing.”
“Frustration? Sadness?”
“Nothing.”
He just watches, as many more will once the Filmmaker has begun sending the film out via the Splendor Collectives’ many distribution branches.
Clarity suddenly turns and I pan around to follow his line of sight.
The Beauty Queen watches us from the bathroom doorway, her lip still bruised and a little swollen, her dressing gown open and sloping off her bony shoulders, one finger brushing against the scar of a gunshot wound in her belly.
Clarity turns back to the TV and hits the rewind switch as the screen goes blank then the video starts again.
“Turn around for me,” an off-camera voice says on the video, barely heard because of a lack of microphone.
Clarity hits pause then looks back and sees that she is now gone, the bathroom door shut. I’m muddled. I’ve lost my train of thought, what I was shooting.
Without saying a word, Clarity hits PLAY again to the muffled sound of vomiting.
She is wiping her mouth when I enter, leaning over the sink. She throws a tissue into the toilet bowl, then rinses out with a glass of water to get rid of the bitter aftertaste of her own stomach acids. Her gown hangs open as if it were an outer skin that had been partially flayed away, revealing the innards of her scarred breasts and stomach.
She watches herself in the mirror that is almost a TV screen, ignoring me for the meantime and she is a young starlet. Her hands cross the keloids that she is collecting along the way on this never-ending journey. Raoul says the circuit ends at The Shore, underneath the piers late at night after the bare-fisted boxing matches have finished, but they have never gotten that far before, caught in some intangible hurricane-spiral that kept them away from that mythical ending.
