‘I’ is someone else (1/7/02)
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Lunatics. A Love Story. [Josh Becker, 1991.]
In a seedy residential hotel in the heart of the urban jungle that is Darkest Los Angeles, bespectacled geek Ted Raimi, an absurdly agoraphobic aspiring poet who models his verse on that of Edgar Allan Poe and Doctor Seuss and his behavior on that of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, is passing his Hollywood nights cowering beneath his bed in the foetal position and his Hollywood days beleaguered by terrifying waking hallucinations [the residue, we gather, of a protracted stay in a mental hospital] of mad surgeons brandishing gigantic hypodermic needles and whirring power saws intent on breaking down the doors and hacking out the busy little animated spiders he pictures nesting in his brain. His only links to the external world are the lingerie model on the billboard across the street from his window [who periodically comes to life and gives him that Barton Fink feeling], and the mocking voices that reject him when he tries his luck on the phone-sex lines — that is, until a freak crossing of the wires connects him with Extremely Anxious blonde bombshell [and erstwhile Valley Girl] Deborah Foreman, another alienated immigrant to the City of Angels who happens to be hiding in a booth in the bus station when the phone rings. As it develops, since her deadbeat boyfriend Bruce Campbell dumped her and stuck her with the bill at the exquisitely sleazy motel from which she was forthwith evicted, Ms. Foreman has been aimlessly wandering the streets of the inner city carrying a dead potted plant, and her subsequent adventures have included a delicate negotiation with a posse of hoodlums whose proposal of gang rape she met with gunfire. Desperate to escape these crack-addled Furies who have now vowed to stalk her to her doom [not everyone responds well to constructive criticism], she agrees to visit Raimi in his room, and, though she is not favorably impressed by the panoply of locks upon his door, the aluminum foil with which he has lined the walls of his sanctuary [“I feel like a chicken in a roaster,” she remarks], and his offer of a Thorazine pick-me-up in lieu of coffee or tea, warms to him nonetheless when she discovers their common interest in writing; and reads his verse aloud from the weird cuneiform that decorates his notebooks.
Obviously a girl pursued by external demons and a guy pursued by internal demons have to hit it off; in more ways than one, this is a marriage made in Tinseltown. [He may be mad, but he isn’t dangerous; and the world without is obviously both.] Alas, the budding romance is interrupted in its progress by another flurry of hallucinations and random gunfire; she bolts into the clutches of her pursuers; and he must sally forth to rescue her. Wrapped in foil like a faux-knight-errant and wielding a baseball bat in lieu of sword, he braves a hallucinatory landscape in which the streets seem to open into the pits of Hell, and dump trucks seem to menace him like giant spiders. — In other words, it takes two-and-a-half out of three acts to figure out that this really should have been Don Quixote in La-La Land; and that our hero might better have staggered out the door a trifle earlier, and tilted at a few more windmills.
Nonetheless this is charming and ingenious, particularly effective in conveying the loneliness of the immigrant alien [Foreman and Raimi are both represented as refugees from the Midwest] in the urban wasteland of LA: a hostile and baffling world, where paradoxically [just as the closer you are to the ocean the farther in spirit you may be from the beach] the more closely you may seem to resemble the natives the more different from them you may actually be — for it is not the color of your skin or the language that you speak that mark you as different here, but a sort of metaphysical Will to Bullshit, a kind of invisible caste mark whose only outward sign is an overcultivated prettiness, that much more effective since unnoticed by those it is intended to exclude. A poet has no place here; he might as well be a throwback to the Age of Chivalry.
You have to guess that this theme lies close to the heart of Becker, who remarks on his website that in the course of a lengthy career battering his head against the gates of the walled city of Hollywood he’s written twenty-eight screenplays and sold only one [and even that one didn’t get him into the Writer’s Guild.] One can only hope that fortuitous accident [the unseen hand of the Divine Screenwriter] has steered him to his own muse, and that, like Raimi, he’s managed however improbably to live happily ever after. Stranger things have happened. Or at least they ought to.
____________Let’s do the time warp again (1/1/02)
