I recognize the movie just as the rookie cop goes to get a cup of coffee: I remember that he’s going to see something amiss over by the coffee maker, something that triggers him because he recognizes evidence of an actual trigger in the hands of a notorious madman and there will be explosive violence that drives the rest of the plot and fuck! I hate this movie, did Paul put it on again? I run down the hallway from the coffee maker scene but I am too late; I see with chagrin that I am closest to the crazy guy with the gun and am therefore the first person he captures as a hostage. There are several others, of course. There is a long, drawn-out section of the movie all about hostage endurance and the crazy’s guy’s craziness. I am not always his focus; sometimes I am barely a walk-on. But this time, it appears, we actually bond.
He’s got all his hostages completely under his thumb now—the gun is ever present—so he settles down on the floor next to where I’m sitting, leaning against a wall of windows in the institutional hallway, just off the confluence of hallways where I first was ta’en hostage. I’ve been trying to remember what happens in this version but, no, wait a minute, this is definitely new: crazy guy settles down to rest under a blanket and he puts his feet up on my lap. I’m pretty sure this is mean as a provocation—See, look what I can do and you can’t do anything about it!—but when it comes down to brass tacks there is no other movie in the universe than Brain Needs Smut, so... his feet, which started stockinged, are bare and he is kneading my (bare) thighs with them. It’s still a provocation, of course: he’s daring me to touch his feet and threatening immediate violence if I do. Also, he’s pushing me down the hallway as he kneads: we’re both sliding along the floor, slowly, against the glass window.Gradually the original focus on the hostage-taker degrades. By the time we reach the end of the long hallway, there are other people walking around doing other things; we are only one thing among many (and whoever sees that way heals his heart, without knowing it, from various ills—Czeslaw Milosz). He has been villain-talking and it’s gotten more and more explicitly sexual. His feet and ankles and slick with sweat. I finally parry his threatening talk with ‘Oh, come on—I could make you squirt in a heartbeat.’ I still do not touch his feet but the non-touching is now the erotic part. Do I say ‘I know you want me to’ or just rehearse saying it?
This erotic impasse take a weird turn. Not exactly sure how: it must be one of us mentions a mythical-mystical authority figure—say, the Wizard of Oz or Doctor Benway—and as each of us is certain he knows the good doctor (or whoever) better than the other and that the latter’s sympathies would lie with him in this situation, we finally resolve to hie us, as it were, off to see the wizard.
I do not perceive how the change happens, but the crazy hostage-taker with the gun is now very much the embodiment of Kirikou (from Kirikou et la sorcière [1998]). This short, naked, brown baby leads me by the hand out the double-doors at the end of the hallway onto the concrete landing and to the left where a series of stadium stairs lead us up, finally, to the rooftop deck. There are more and more people milling human-herdlike around us as we go; the entire hostage plot is gone but the little boy leading me is still a formidable antagonist—which is one of two reasons, the other being that we’re both naked, I’m wondering why nobody is paying any attention to us.
Anyway: we come up on the roof and follow a bustling crowd of humans around anticlockwise until we see the uber-antagonist we were aiming for: except now it is a woman, a fabulous hipster guru in diamond-encrusted spectacles; and her temple, her throne, her funky-styled, famous-and-infamous oracular headquarters is a wee corner of this roof where she has a barber-type chair in a single booth, garish in red vinyl and pop art. It is clear—it is known—that everyone wants an appointment with this woman: everyone wants in her chair and can’t nobody get there; what is less clear is whether the chair and the booth are for cosmetology, optometry, or dentistry. But despite the impossibility of seeing this fashionista demigoddess, when we reach her she is madly happy to see us. Like she has been waiting for nobody but us. I suppose she is la sorcière in this story—she has a name but it is lost in the waking—only she and Kirikou are now in cahoots and let the fucking nations just quake about that. There’s a crescent moon above and this whole scene is gloriously rad: it’s a perfect cinematic mythmaking moment, the love child of Jim Jarmusch and Keith Jarrett.
Mind you, these are still vicious, violent antagonists; they’re just in a good mood right now, like technicolor Batman villains, whooping it up and having a grand old time. I remind myself of this as this scene morphs to a sort of drugstore counter with an adjacent optometrist office: of the peril that remains, that could be set in motion by any false word or action that spoils the effervescent good mood of our villain (still the hostage-taker only now she is a punkish teenage girl who is too cool for me and everyone else around her). A random, NPC optometrist is chucklingly sharing with us her usual advice for mothers buying their offspring their first pairs of glasses: ‘Buy extra. Buy a dozen.’ I wholeheartedly agree with the advice.
Although I am still, technically, a hostage, I have some wandering space. I happen upon a fanzine—no idea what the publication called because this particular issue consists entirely of a novel called /Snuck 2/ and that title is prominent on the cover. It’s a Buffyverse novel and its antagonist is none other than the young women I have left sitting at the counter just over there (the obvious villain analog here is Glory) whereas I am wending my way through the tall grass and wondering if I can just vanish. I flip through the novel, noticing how ‘Snuck 2’ is printed in gray text in a different font face as the first word on every verso page and the last on every recto—rather than being a headword—and reminding myself of all the evils this malefactor has wrought.
