THE SCOURGING OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.
We’re dancing a delicate pas de deux at the moment. And so this next act or movement is an act of pure bravery on my part. With the emphasis very much on ‘act’. I’m by no means as in control as I’ve been at pains to paint myself. I wear the mask almost all the time now. It’s a dangerous game. I line up a killer move, a daring manouvre. You see I do realize, my dear doctor, that I haven’t as yet described myself to you in anything like adequate detail. My appearance remains a mystery to you. Well, as you can see for yourself, my potato head is stippled; my flying buttress ears are comically large…as is my elongated hooter. My belly is distended and my feet are clubbed. I have bad teeth and arched eyebrows. My stories, such as they are, unfold with coffee table modishness…I have my eye on the filmic possibilities, movie rights are in the forefront of my thoughts…my characters are drawn from B-grade experience rather than inspiration. Dialect hides emptiness, parochial exposition masks elephant tracks, but now you meet in me your nemesis…
It’s a mid-shot…nourish shadows are predominant…silence on silence…pre-violence silence…more silence…the silence of potential creation…procreation…the quiet act of begetting pre-imagined beings…Potato Head sits motionless, poised over the virgin sheet. He is cadaverous. Out of the mouths of psycho-babes, the silence is in itself a dialect; a demotic language, a cinematic overture of pure intent, and these 4 under-conceived half-baked lads are giving tongue. Spectral voices yammer inside his potato head. He pours himself a drink (bourbon, naturally) dives into the ritualized head-space, he’s mining a fecund seam, spews out the surrendered garbage, makes good the filmic aspects, relying on the gloss of adman squalor. The life spirited away from his malignancy and badness by ghosts in fleeting celluloid overcoats, the dialect tones ringing in the potato headed author’s dizzy cheque-book imagination, and they are re-birthed…. 4 lads on the razzle; Pinko, Wankbait, Guzzler, Scally…out on the pickup, bagmen for Mr. Big, Frank’s lads, his muscle, commission paid in kind, crack head street guys, operators each and every one…in their own right, hyper-imagined goons with realized lives, storybook rubber-stamped and psychologically profiled. The imagination is raped for major effectiveness, stony-faced invective issues from blabbering caricature mouths. Bad mouthed vitriol a discoursing language, a dialect, a dialectic, an everyday rite. Potato Head exhibits his own rage spawning dialect cursing, his ticket to a big entrée in soiree society. Movie bad-mouthing now a fine art, a newly minted language of cash from contempt, cynicism made celluloid. Good guys doing bad things instead of bad guys doing bad things. Crucial difference, which elucidates the new cultural matrices. But now he thinks he’ll make it with big-titted babes and unfortunately also with a variety of hangers on, celluloid whores, movie moguls re-writing his precious “original” manuscript. Anyway, the trailer is almost complete. Fast cuts and edited highlights, every thuggish exchange made good for matinee audiences. Pre film-school demotic, the movie angle prefigured, Potato Head the author is now a fetish figure of pure mogul-fantasy, the moneymen creaming their chinos, and a 7-figure sum is assured.
The obligatory moment of rumbling silence is raped by vernacular sound bite. Wolverine toothed, pockmarked head, the bloated body in the dining room is covered with tooth marks, intestinal gas expanding, the cash corpse rapacious. The results of the author’s covert perversities are now on camera. Estate agent bumph is scattered every which way, a quick sale not now on the agenda, the estate agent/author lying in a pool of his own effluvia, blood and guts. The trailer’s too short to provide respite for him. Potato Head the dealer in movie commissions is spread-eagled, a knife in his blubber guts, a claw hammer ripped through his windpipe. It’s in the imagination of Potato Head, in front of whom the masked assassins lick their chops. Two hippo masks – one monkey head – one elephant. No escape therefore for the author. At least one elephant inspired individual, one at least of fuller powers to make the unaware author eat authorial shit. This will get him in trouble with the moneymen, or conversely will open new doors. One or the other.
They’re fighting over the bourbon, the crenellated edge a tawdry bludgeon in their minds. The author imagines fighting talk. He’s fighting mad, taunting and urging them. Perhaps unwisely. The boys at any rate pay no heed, or lip service. Already they’re half out of control. A hammer blow awakens Mr. Potato Head. Ripped shirt. Blood. Balls hanging by a thread…It’s all vernacular ad-friendly, the camera’s whirring, a weapon now as well. The fear is now tangible. His face spells it out. Will they kill him, their passive aggressive mentor? Has he miscalculated? He was drinking himself to death anyway, and now the producers will be really happy. But he is perturbed, a prey to new terrors. Imaginings are fully sketched out, story boarded. He has drawn them himself. He’s only storyboarded his own demise. The lighting cameramen and sound technicians cough deferentially. They wish to set up the shot. They can’t work out what his problem is. Silence, as the alchemical juices buzz and spit in the crucible of Potato Head’s wiry brain. He is alarmed now. Alarmed at the immediacy of the creation. He shies away, cowering in the tenement murk…
[Relevant elements recovered later from shooting script/murder scene…The future and past histories of Pinko, Wankbait, Guzzler and Scally are destined to remain pre-imagined, at least for the foreseeable future. The past…4 prole lads on the celluloid sellout, a nice earner for the interior monologuist. Pinko, we infer from notes left by the deceased author, is a bit of a cunt, a mooching head-fuck…a small time druggie and petty documentalist…Wankbait is his “wife”, all queenish attitude…assumed camp mannerisms…was already done in…with no more than a toehold in harsh, degraded, 16 mm reality…his reliance on smack is, of course, to be emphasized in editing/lighting etc…We’ve had our eyes on him for months now. Guzzler is a fantasist; a gloomy rhetorician…a sofa bound alky, in development as a sardonic wit, full of eey-orrish truculence…in abundance. A Gnostic technician, he spends his time in psycho-geographic contemplation…brewing up fantasies…a jack the lad of re-invention, he is the studio’s wet dream, the lad most likely to trouble the copywriters in years to come. He habitually wears an elephant mask…he’s the real deal, the bee’s knees, the grim reaper. Scally is a hulking great wardrobe of a man, knuckles dragging the floor like bottom feeders, all unwonted profanity and boorishness. He is a fat bottomed frontal attack. Offensiveness not so much an add-on as integral to his very being. He is pure film filth. Avoid close ups… All 4 now in custody, awaiting re-invention. The author’s body has not been found. Blood of a type we can’t yet identify is on the walls and the floors]
…more silence…a prosaic eruption, testosterone fuelled, into the dirty ambience. One after the other, the 4 are present, floating above his head. More power, they turn up the juice for real, they are squeezed out in hyper imagination, real horrorshow stuff, and they are realer than real. Celluloid real. Technicolor real. Dead floorboards heaving with dust, windows caked with grime, kitchen smells mingling with 3 day old sweat perfume, the furniture a sorry pastiche of junkie taste, dirty plastic cover on the table, diseased carpets. Bugs all over, junk fug hanging in the air. The usual 35mm thing. The author had, in a fit of pre-imagined pique, swept the manuscript away from him, pages see-sawing to the floor, and had then reached out on instinct, inadvertently knuckling the iconic bottle from the table. Crenellated edges, Mississippi black and squat/stubby, the bottle hit the deck and the liquor ran out in waterfalls over the floor. A man as yet with no brand name, the author heaved himself onto creeper feet, the authorial footwear carrying him on crepe soles into a kitchen far removed from the fictionalized arena he’d been willing himself to imagine. The 4 dilapidated homunculi, canny orphaned brainchildren of his imagination, stand there on balled feet, testosterone and speed in equal measure affording them cartoon fortitude. Leering like gagging wolverines behind their fright masks, they do their thing. All lairy and mock solicitous, they regard him with humour, falling over themselves to enquire after his health. Good cop, bad cop, dumb cop, dumber cop. As yet under-imagined, they aren’t in a position to hit him with really sharp dialogue, to eviscerate him with any really caustic repartee. The easy facility of cartoon invective eludes them. Pinko is in any case the only one of the 4 who will in the fullness of time be capable of raising his thuggish game to artistic heights, but even he is at this juncture merely a blurred edged bruiser with a bad mouth, a psychotic product of council estate deprivation and drug dependency with no discernible talent for extemporization. The 4 of them start to dance. Until and unless Mr. Potato Head is capable of re-birthing (some hope) Pinko is destined to remain incapable of transforming mere violence into an articulate aesthetic of violence, cinematic violence. The script is not yet written; it’s only an outline. So in this instance their lines are gauche, feebly rendered and lacking in any real vivacity or sparkle. The delivery is amateur. But their undeniable potential for violence is of course due solely to Mr. Potato Head’s real pre-occupations, the most recklessly over imagined aspect of their nascent dramatic life.
The first one to raise a weapon in anger is Wankbait, claw hammer raised in obligatory camp gesture of self-empowerment. Down it comes, smashing his bulging head to mashed potato. The grainy authenticity is enhanced by apparently real blood. The grimy tenement is awash…fictionalized renderings of dialect loutishness sprayed at words per minute on the walls, papers flapping to the floor, blood oozing…The extras frown temperamentally, liquid starlets with higher aspirations. The lads are thus unmasked by their creator, caught in the act of setting about him. They are extempore surgeons of his rebirth, stomping about the walls, in for the kill. The walls are red with authorial blood. The murder, being fictional in intent, is victimless although the author lies in a pool of his own real blood. As though obeying a sort of implicit protocol of unintended irony inherent in the butchering of their own creator, the 4 fictional creations are immediately subsumed, on film, into an occluded fictionalized realm. They appear to go up in a puff of artfully arranged smoke. They are gathered into a plane from which they won’t be able to escape until imagined by someone else, some other potato headed author. The police, keystone cop extras puffing and blowing, are of course bamboozled by this lack of corporeal suspect matter, and by the absence of a corpse.
Potato Head was thus, my good friend and doctor, brutally beaten to death by Pinko, abetted by Wankbait. Guzzler and Scally made with the pious guilt trip. Guzzler, the only one with broader vision and untrammeled though as yet unrealized spiritual feeling, knew that the death of an author was a religious event.
“That’ll teach ya to turn us into stereotypes, ya soft cocked fucker!”
The author was done up like a kipper. Sliced in two, a real movie death, a snuff killing. Broadsworded and battered, his body crumpled, slid in sections through the floor. All subsequent fictional careers were suspended, the studio put out by the lack of usable footage, pending investigation. Cultural rape became the studio issue, legal minds fixed on the prospect of the huge sums to be lost from subpoenaing lazy caricatures. All future fictional renderings therefore to be passed for public consumption by a board comprised solely of re-birthed individuals. The author was martyred to the cause. The issue of cultural stereotyping was then no longer an issue, and was reconfigured as material that could be safely devolved upon the soaps. Studio memos included exculpatory text: If you have been affected by any of the stereotyping portrayed in this production, please refer to the user’s manual. All cultural bulletins are presently carrying the numbers of relevant pressure groups…and there’ll be special phone lines open for the next 3 months for all pre-birthed individuals who don’t have access to the talk boards…
…I sit up. Stare straight ahead, the death of a sense of solidity afflicting me again. The walls are a million miles away. I look over at Dionysia, my million-dollar wife. She’s sitting at the table, a vision in purple velvet. Have I killed him? I don’t know if I’ve killed him. There’s no clue from the sheep-shaggers behind the screen. They aren’t giving anything away. I allow myself to close my eyes and then open them again. The visions pour out. Dionysia enfolds me in her arms.
Tags: buffy strangelove, david kettle, Dionysia, Elephant Gnosis, Mr. Potato Head
ELEPHANT GNOSIS 
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