Devil in a Wig

“Legacy don’t mean nothing. That’s just some word everybody grabbed onto and now it’s used every five seconds. I’m just passing through. I’m just a guy. And it’s going to be over. Who cares about legacy after that? We’re nothing. We’re dust. Our legacy is nothing.” – Mike Tyson

Dreams are boring, but I did have a dream once where I cast Jon Stewart as Satan. He drove a Tesla. He picked me up from a solitary cottage on a hillside overlooking a brook. The sky was pink and Jon Stewart was shirtless, painted red in a cheap, black Edwardian wig and he had round, powdered tits. I think my psyche had been infiltrated from seeing Jonathan Glazer’s banned chocolate commercial for something called Flake by Cadbury, which I hear is still rampant in England. But the ad, “Temptation,” features a devilish, chocolate-wielding Denis Lavant painted red in black leather pants, a black plastic wig, dancing along the ledge of a marble fountain, toward a dozen desperate female angels, waiting like dogs at the bottom of the stairs – it’s absurd. It’s brilliant. And it was immediately canceled.

The commercial opens with heavy audibles of women screaming, with Lavant lounging in the nook of a marble statue by the fountain. He rises and begins to perform this snarling, stiffened jazzercise around the fountain down the steps, sliding down the curve of the entrance of a grand, timeless Italian palace. When he reaches the bottom of the steps, he tosses the candy bars out sparingly, like small treats to the model angels on their knees, impatiently waiting to be fed. They voraciously eat the chocolate as if they’d been starved for dick. (Lavant also does this subtle, but intentional delicate wafting motion with his hand from his crotch in the beginning of the segment.) It’s like a Satanic hypersexual opera. It’s horror by way of enchantment. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Cadbury fired the ad agency and canned the commercial almost immediately, but it whetted my appetite for almost everything. I don’t even like chocolate, but a bouncing devil in a wig really did me in. Not to mention, this was an advertisement that worked. An advertisement that literally infiltrated my dreams.

“Temptation” was also evidence of what was to come with Denis Lavant’s performative precision in Holy Motors – yet another legendary picture, which I saw with my friend Alan Palomo at the Angelika in New York when it came out in 2012. Alan and I typically aren’t into the same movies. He likes slashers and I do not enjoy slashers because I don’t like blood. But we agreed on Holy Motors. It was Leos Carax and Lavant (who plays 11 different characters) in perfect measurement. Kylie Minogue has a mind-boggling segment. A silent Eva Mendes is carried through a cobblestone town, tossed over the shoulder of an ill-seeming bridge-troll type: a scene of spiritual genius. I probably don’t remember the rest of the movie accurately, but I do recall that both Alan and I were holistically and unequivocally dazzled.

Under the Skin was made around the same time in 2013, but with Glazer’s editing process, he could have finished it long before – who knows. During the Birth press tour, he stated that multiple editors had left the film at different points, implying it was due to his perfectionism. That same press tour with Nicole Kidman is absurd, otherworldly. At certain moments, she looks as if she’s being tickled under the table. There’s an apparent electricity between the actress and director as he refers to Nicole being a distinctive character actress. It’s titillating press coverage. Birth is also an incredible film, even with its flawed ending, which prematurely destroys the primordial situation’s potential to, in fact, be true. Regardless, the scene between a 10-year-old boy and a woman who believes him to be her dead husband’s reincarnation, both of them nude in a bathtub, is transcendent. There is no substitute for that type of hit. It feels like a glitch. The subject matter is so perverse, it feels conspiratorial – because it is.

In 2020, the world was six months into lockdown and I was getting antsy like everyone else. By November, I’d ordered a snakeskin Zentai suit, a blonde Edwardian wig, a trench coat, patent leather boots, a carpet bag and a pair of new sunglasses. I called up my friend Kelly Loudenberg, she met me on Rodeo Drive and we took my glitchy Sony PD150 for a walk. The best stuff we got was probably me, dressed as a reptilian in a wig without a face, slithering down a Banyan tree. People were, for the most part, completely unrattled by my appearance. I had no face and yet … an elderly man gave me clear, cogent directions to the nearest salon for a haircut for my wig. I hadn’t actually ever spent time in Beverly Hills. Filming this little jaunt was, in fact, my first time on Rodeo Drive. I thought, “So, this is Beverly Hills.”

The song in Rodeo was a recording I made on my phone of a local radio station I was listening to while driving in Northern California. It was a late-night program and locals would call in and sing covers or read poetry, or sometimes both. The woman in the recording did both. She read a healthy erotic poem she’d written – she’d sigh and growl and then there’d be the synthetic command of rain and thunder. Then the piano came in and she sang the cover of “Misty” by Frank Sinatra. And so Rodeo (which was likely unconsciously influenced by Glazer’s “Temptation”) was born and died in 2021.

There have been many projects I’ve participated in that have died on arrival. I trained to become a salesperson for a vacuum cleaner pyramid scheme for a shelved short that Kelly and I made called Suckers. Last month, I heard that one of the CEOs of the vacuum company had died and his death was being investigated as a potential murder.

I suppose I am now ruminating on dead projects. There are projects that one knows during production will be completed, then immediately and permanently shelved. Then, of course, there is the opposite experience. I’ve never regretted making anything, alive or dead. Aborted projects are valuable in almost every way, except monetarily. Making anything costs some money, no matter how you dice it. And now, in the “current state of our industry” (an overused phrase that I, in fact, despise, in spite of using it – no one actually knows what it means including myself), grants are being pulled after being granted, there’s a 200 percent decline in work, shrunken writers rooms, and a pretty much inarguable decimation of the working-class film industry since the strikes in 2023.

Call it conspiratorial, but it hasn’t been since the 1950s that we’ve had movie stars teaming up with studios in this way. “Picture Deals.” Marilyn Monroe and MGM. Humphrey Bogart and Warner Bros. Sophia Loren and her five-picture deal with Paramount Pictures. Only now, the picture deals are with movie stars who are now also producing. Now, it’s Margot Robbie’s production company and Warner Bros. Ryan Gosling’s production company and a first-look deal with MGM. Emma Stone’s production company signed with Universal, and so on. I’m not saying this is good or bad, but it is happening. I pitched this idea that things are changing in the “industry” and making some type of 1950s return to an unenthusiastic listener. He replied, “People just don’t care as much about movies.”

Shortly after this brief interaction, I fell ill post-Sundance (like everyone else) and I was coming to the bedridden terms that I had never supported myself financially outside of the food industry or acting since I was 24. So, I asked AI to make me a resume in an attempt to find out what alternative jobs I might qualify for. I can barely work my phone, but I managed to get the bot up and running. The bot asked what I’d like to list for work experience. “Chipotle” and “acting” were not compelling cases for work qualifications. In reality, there is a terror that is becoming more and more of a possible reality that I might end up as my dad ended up; $80,000 upside down on an RV, cash buried in the yard, working for a pyramid scheme in Utah.

In my case, making films doesn’t really feel like a choice, rather some distorted compulsion. But perhaps the most crystallized understanding I took away from the last few (which, as of late, have been made within, but around, “the system”), or maybe it came from the last few years in general (time, a concept), was that there is no real remedy. Death, of course, being the incurable resolve. Remedies seem, thereby, overrated. I understood Mike Tyson very well when he told a child interviewer: “There is no legacy.”

But this could also be coming from the angle of a soft pessimist. It’s possible that it’s simply a side-effect of growing up in a household with NLP and reiki as “remedies.” Reiki is a calculated attempt to dazzle. A true dazzle is worth staying alive for, worth the looming promise of death and it cannot be calculated into existence. A dazzle happens to you and it is a game of luck and attention. One is handed a carton of eggs in a paper bag, and one becomes quickly haunted by the vulture of fragility for its entire, brief shelf-life. To be dazzled is to be made, given, without question or exception, an impending expiration.

When I watch Denis Lavant traipsing shirtless and red around an Italian fountain, I become an admirer – that’s that glitter. The image of Nicole Kidman in a bathtub with a 10-year-old boy in Birth shimmers in my mind. The way Emily Watson speaks in the voice of God in Breaking the Waves finds me misty and awestruck each time I watch it. It’s a mere glint. It’s there, and then gone, like everything else.

Featured image shows Denis Lavant in Jonathan Glazer’s never-aired commercial for Flake.