“Meaning what?” I said.
“Meaning that Trip, once he’s read it over and approved it, will copyright the transcript in the same manner that he copyrighted ‘On Private Viewing’ and ‘Living Isn’t Functioning,’ so you’ll be free to do with it whatever you like, for whatever profit you can make, just as long as you don’t alter it.”
“Alright,” I said.
“I knew you wouldn’t be broken up,” he said.
“So what happened?” I said, again not really caring; I just wanted Burroughs to keep on talking. Apart from inans, food-delivery drivers, gas-station clerks, liquor-store Terry, and a couple of prostitutes, I hadn’t had a conversation with anyone since the morning my father had left for Austria. It was nice to hear a voice not belonging to someone who was selling me something or had sold me something or wanted me to help it end its existence. It was nice like the air on my face, like the Scotch. “So what happened?” I said. “The museum saw A Fistful and thought it was too…what? Disgusting? Mean?”
“No, nothing like that. It was Triple-J who canceled the screening,” Burroughs said. “The museum loved A Fistful. In fact, their lawyers, after Trip pulled out—they tried to get heavy with us about it, can you imagine? It’s resolved now, though. Trip’ll still be screening a film on the appointed date. A better film in everyone’s opinion. Colorized War Crimes. That’s the title.”
“Is that…what it sounds like?”
“That and more. War crimes,” Burroughs said, “are a little more broadly defined by the film than you might be thinking. There’s the Nazi concentration camp stuff you’d probably expect, some mustard-gassed trenches, death marches, Hiroshima, a tortured Algerian, skeleton piles out of Franco’s White Terror, Kristallnacht, and so forth, but also a couple lynchings in Mississippi, some Africans hobbled and deformed by failed vaccines, some thugs breaking a strike at a factory in London, a clitoridectomy ceremony, a guy in a labcoat pointing with a stick to a brain on a table labeled ‘homosexual brain…’ I’m forgetting a couple, but you get the point. It’s a twenty-seven-minute compilation of silent footage with a drony, ambient soundtrack, and it loops four times. Some of the clips are of the war crimes or ‘war’ crimes being committed, some are just of the evidence that they’d been committed, some are both, and the whole thing starts out black-and-white but progressively colorizes til it’s so saturated with color that it’s nearly a blur, and then it progressively decolorizes til it’s black-and-white again. Over the four twenty-seven-minute loops, it goes, with gradually decreasing speed, through twenty-four saturation/desaturation colorizing/decolorizing cycles, and by the ninth or tenth cycle, the effect takes hold. That’s where the art is.”
“The art.”
“Well, it’s hard to describe, this effect. Maybe not. Maybe more like hard to accept, I guess. Basically, the viewer ends up feeling almost nostalgic—not almost, no: nostalgic.”
“About the war crimes,” I said.
“Sort of,” said Burroughs. “Well, yes. I could say it’s more about the black-and-white—I want to say that—that it’s about the footage’s return to black-and-white, or the dawning recognition of there actually being a refrain in the droney ambient music, but that’s more a statement about how it operates on you. Except you can’t really separate the treatment of the subject matter from the subject matter itself, right? Not if you’re being rigorous, you know? Anyway, what happens is, by cycle nine or ten, you start looking forward to the desaturation/decolorization part of each cycle, to everything returning to black-and-white, and when it does, there’s a rising sense of ‘Oh, the good old days’ that is eerily, eerily unironic and warm. You walk away from the whole thing feeling violated, but rather masterfully violated. Violated in a way that you can’t help but think you were complicit in—maybe even responsible for—your violation. That you were asking for it.”
“It shook you up.”
“It did,” Burroughs said. “It’ll shake you up, too, if you want to see it. I’ve got a DVD right here for you. Trip’s going to do the whole thing a lot more straightforwardly than he’d planned to do A Fistful. No transcript or anything. A few months after the screening at the MCA, Fon’s pal Ronson Boyle will auction it—he’s already garnered some interest from collectors—and it’ll almost certainly end up running in some museum somewhere, but it’ll be a little while before that happens. Short of it is: Trip, who’s convinced you’d love the film, he wanted to get you on the guest list for the MCA, but Jonboat…he wouldn’t have it. Hence: this DVD right here. For the well-being of everyone involved, I’m unfortunately compelled to let you know that if you were to show this DVD to anyone else, now or later, we’d thoroughly destroy your life and so forth.”
“You know, it doesn’t really sound like something I’d be into.”
“Getting your life destroyed?”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant. And that’s fine,” Burroughs said, “but you’ll still accept the disc, alright? That way I can tell Trip you took it, if he asks. And not for nothing, he’s really proud of this, and I think he’s right to be.” Burroughs threw back what remained in his glass. “Good stuff,” he said. “Confit plums, custard, and pine. Don’t you dare twist my arm into having another.”
I poured him another.
“So why’d Trip cancel the screening for A Fistful?” I said. “I mean it seems like he could have probably screened both, or just booked a second screening for Colorized War Crimes, no problem.”
“Oh, right,” Burroughs said. “I guess I skipped that part. Trip didn’t actually make Colorized War Crimes til after he’d canceled the screening for A Fistful. See, things got rough for him once those AOL clips aired. The first one—the one with just the mirror—that wasn’t quite the end of the world. It got him a little annoyed because here was a clip, he thought, that he’d have to add to A Fistful, which he’d felt was already perfect and probably shouldn’t be messed with. But he’s diligent, you know? And so he went ahead and messed with it. He spent the following week cutting the clip down to various lengths and inserting it in various spots til he found the right length and the right spot, and after that, for a couple of hours, he was back to his old self, feeling good and confident, but then, that very same evening, the second AOL clip aired. And when he saw the second AOL clip? the one where the P.A.L. guys keep interfering with the AOL? He saw its potential, really saw how it would play out, how people would start, in his words, innovating Curio interactions in revolutionary ways using Independence.