Week End (1967)

Iris leans over the bar, stretching and twisting her arms seductively and pulling him forward with a beckoning finger. She bats her eyes at him and purrs: “Tell me a story about the war, Jerry.”

Jerry shakes his head, “No. No.”

“Howabout one about your first love.”

“No.”

Frank leans in: “Tell us how you got so fucked up.” Iris slaps Frank on the shoulder, but Jerry nods, looking very serious.

“Howabout I tell you a story about all three?: "In the blinking of the traffic lights and on-coming cars, I could make out Misty in her pink, spaghetti-strap dress, wobbling drunkenly through a dangerous Y-intersection in the downtown square. I run to her and take her arm and lead her across the street. She tries to fight me all the way, but, by reaching the other side, she mostly acquiesced. I guide her pathetic march home. She never calls. I am too young and pig-headed to seek her out. Instead, I get shipped to the front lines.

On one ill-fated, air-raid (The details too horrible to say), we are shot from the sky. I drop from the sky in the parachute all too quickly for my liking, (though very lucky to get out at all!) and land in a muddy field. The co-pilot lands nearby yelling: “Land-mines!”

We stand stock-still and survey the field: It is so torn up, mines could be anywhere. But, there are footprints, and logically, I think, it maybe safe to retrace the steps of another. Until they bring me to an exploded crater, anyway. A truck pulls up on the near-by road. It is one of our own minefields, and one of the culprits who created it can lead us out. Map in hand, he makes his way gingerly to the co-pilot, who is wounded and needs carried out. I’m OK, and can follow him back on my own.

Back at the truck, we are flagged my some stranded motorists and agree to give them a lift back into town. As the nomadic bunch sidles up (there were a lot of them roaming the countryside at the time, protesting the war), I realize that Misty, now in a white sundress, atypical of the tomboy she had morphed into in my mind, is among them. I scuffle to the back seat–achingly, I am somewhat worse for wear in this war. Misty scoots up next to me. She hugs me and I ask her why she never called, and she replies, “Because you thought you loved me.” She sighs and embraces me sadly as the truck bumps along the dirt road. I take her hand. She sighs: “Gerald, I miss you. But in these times, I can’t trust in love. I want you near. I can’t offer more.” “Yes. Just, keep an open mind for me. I will be here.” We embrace. And I do not want to let go. Despite her anxiety, she doesn’t seem to want to let go either.

Soon, I am back on the street and then back to the little off-base apartment I had. As I settle down, with a new drink, to see what the radio had to offer at this late hour, I sense someone at the door. I go to open it. Pulling it open, I find Misty, staring blankly, still in her white dress. As I smile, happy that she has sought me out, she begins to sway forward. I jump to grab her and support her head. But, something is wrong. We both crash to the floor: Her head rolls to my feet! Some fiend had cut it off and propped her up outside my door.

Tragic, I roam the city.

Rounding a corner for the nth time, I hasten my pace, as I spot a seedy group of noncoms for the nth time. But, passing an alley I am accosted by the group at grenade-point. I reach for my wallet with nothing to lose, and I am told it is not a matter of money, but one of territory. As I sigh, an MP rolls up and accosts the gang. But, more grenades appear, many thrown, and the cops drive off. Later, I awake in a hospital bed, but the persistent gang was in the hospital with me. When I escaped they were in my apartment. Then they were in the barracks. Behind me on the plane as I re-loaded the machine gun. They were everywhere. Always were. They are here now. I cannot escape them. You see what, I have become…” At this, Jerry starts weeping again. Frank scoffs bewildered, “I haven’t heard of a tale that disjointed since New Yorker Video put Godard’S Weekend (1967) on DVD in the Summer of aught-five.”

Iris pats Jerry on the back, “You take him back to your place, Frank. And don’t give him any of your shit. Just a beer and to bed.”

Gates of Heaven (1978) Frank has been for several weeks now, holed up in a dingy room above a take-out Chinese place in north Hollywood, squinting and sweating over a Pentium I Compaq laptop. His cats, Tom Horn and Junior Bonner run about the place crazily tearing at the floor and baseboards trying to find the source of the strange noises and smells coming from downstairs. And for this Frank is glad because Bonner’s otherwise favorite pastime is sitting on his keyboard and swatting (ironically) at the mouse as it tacked across the screen. It seems Frank’s generally good-for-nothing agent, Ayleen, had sold a yet-to-be written screenplay to Skull and Bones productions. Skull and Bones had in turn signed a deal for twelve straight to DVD B-movies to be distributed by Tiger Paw Entertainment. All that meant Frank had to get busy cranking out horror scripts with plenty of gore and full frontal female nudity. The only breaks he allowed himself were: 1. A trip across the street for a liter of Philadelphia Blended and a pack of Lucky’s (Both of which greatly eased the writing process), 2. Downstairs for a pint of cashew chicken for himself and some Chinese noodles for Tom Horn (Junior Bonner just liked to chase the paper fortunes across the hardwood floor.) 3. To the Errol Morris film retrospective playing a small theatre two blocks away. Thankfully, they played Gates of Heaven (1978) in conjunction with Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe (Blank 1980), something MGM didn’t think to include on the DVD release (July 28, 2005). Quirky director Herzog (Fitzcarraldo 1982), had made a bet with his then student Morris, that if he got his documentary Gates of Heaven, a tale of two pet cemeteries in California, made, he would in fact (and did, on camera) eat his shoe. Since then Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) was named best documentary of the year by the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle. His film about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, The Fog of War (2003) more recently won the best documentary feature Oscar in 2004. Gates focuses first on handicapped and emotional Floyd McClure and his failed attempt to open and run a pet cemetery. The job of our little friends he says is “to love and to be loved.” When McClure’s fails, the deceased are dug up and moved to the Harbert’s pet cemetery. The second part deals with the Harberts and the training of their two sons to take over the family business. Gates of Heaven is emotional and at times funny. Also it is both at the same time. With a lack of exposition and by extrapolation, didacticism, interpretation is up to the viewer. McClure’s colleagues seem self-aware of their fledgling industry and are careful to sound business-like, while McClure is openly emotionally talking of his deceased collie and his hatred of the rendering plant, or “glue factory,” previously the only other option for disposing of deceased animals. At the Harberts’ Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park, sons Dan and Phil are like a picture of society-to-be at the end of the nineteen-seventies, one a walking self-improvement seminar, and the other, a fading hippie jamming on his guitar amongst the pet tombstones. Thus, in its way, it is not a documentary about pet cemeteries; it is about religion, family, dreams, life death, etc. In short, it is a documentary about people. Morris’ lens is without judgment and his subjects are vulnerable and honest. It is humanity at its most touching and screwiest. Gates of Heaven is proof of what Frank has been saying all along: there is art and beauty in the everyday. The entertainment drawn from the human condition can be drawn from anywhere. Most importantly Gates of Heaven is a god-send for Frank’s unfilled script-hole, and he practically skipped back to his room and began to pound away at the keyboard. Two days later he is squashing out a Lucky Strike into a half-eaten pint of rice and ripping a floppy out of the drive. He is on his way down to Kinkos to print out the first draft of “Nine Lives,” a gory tale of a bunch of cats who get the taste of human blood when their elderly caretaker dies in her kitchen. Unlike the beloved pets in the Morris film, you never could be too sure of cats, after all. They say they’d eat your face off while you slept if you neglected their food bowl for too long…