Unger House Radicals Page 6

- Which persona are you currently occupying?

  - Are you afraid of me young Vincent?

  Vince waits a moment before admitting - Yes. I'm afraid of you.

  - Then why did you come with me? If you're so afraid of dying for the cause. I thought you were at least committed.

  - I... think I’ve made a grievous error of judgement coming to Unger House with you.

  The imitation of Vince smiles warmly. The imitation gets up and kneels in front of Vince. He takes his hands in his own and looks the mirror image in the eye.

  - The whole point of this is to bring about the onset of The Great Isolation, to humble people into retreating socially. We have to know that we’re ALL guilty.

  - You’re not the same person, are you?

  - I’m the same person who killed Suzie.

  Vince couldn’t talk. His tongue went dry instantly. How could he know about Suzie?

  Vince blinked twice and the imitation was gone. Poof! —Just like that…

  He was left kneeling in front of the crackling fire. Alone again. His default status…

  *

  It was almost a decade ago, back when he was a better person. When he was innocent and the world first betrayed him…

  Vince was just an ugly kid with a hair full of rats. When the other kids called him a faggot he felt like the world had made up its mind about him. What was the point in trying to be good? In the end everyone leaves…

  The rotors of a helicopter chopping above them in the near-distance. He waited for the mirror image of himself to react, that sudden paroxysm, but it never came. Vincent could feel himself dissolving into the annuls of history, becoming one with the doppelganger, finally becoming one person for everyone to remember. Cats squawk in a mangled chorus of agony. They hiss and spray and get their backs up. Cats know.

  - Is that...The Backstreet Boys?

  PART II

  “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” Pablo Picasso

  The second film I’ve been to see in as many days, it’s longer than the first. Longer than Warhol’s SLEEP. Longer than EMPIRE even. EVOLUTION OF A FILIPINO FAMILY is almost watchable, but at 10 hours, 50 minutes, your attention starts to drift maybe halfway through. The premise is very basic—it documents a family of farmers under a state of siege during the Ferdinand Marcos era. In the most interesting thread, one family member is hired to kill celebrated filmmaker and open homosexual Lino Brocka (who directed INSIANG, the first Filipino film to get screened at Cannes). In the movie there is hardly any dialogue which makes the experience even more isolating. In this screening no one talks. There are no teenagers making out in the middle or back rows. There are three viewers present, all of them are as spectral and anti-social looking as I am.

  There is a mentally ill mother in the film who cannot raise her son and berates him. I identify with the character Kadyo, the one who is assigned to kill Brocka in the movie.

  Two men walk in this time, this time I’m positive it’s Kevin Bacon and Bill Murray, both wearing novelty t-shirts. Kevin’s says - “I like children they are tasty” and Murray’s – “Please Don’t Let Kevin Bacon Die…” A teenage dance sensation and a Ghostbuster. And, you know, why wouldn’t it be them? They go to the movies too, don’t they? They probably hang out with other actors all the time, even if they’ve never been in a movie together. Kevin Bacon is an acclaimed actor. Bill Murray is a real actor too. He was in a lot of great indie films towards the latter half of his career, why wouldn’t he be interested in EVOLUTION OF A FILIPINO FAMILY? Kevin Bacon has a parlour game named after him called ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. His name is used to sum up the interconnectedness of the universe. He is a god among men. Bill Murray will go to college parties and crash birthday parties on a whim then stick around, sign a whole bunch of merchandise and clean up the mess. Why wouldn’t they be here watching EVOLUTION OF A FILIPINO FAMILY? They probably have more right to be here than me!

  Bill Murray is flicking through his cell phone. Kevin Bacon comes up behind him to look at the screen. I see mouths moving. This is, to my knowledge, the first time these two actors have been seen together on screen or off it. This might be a momentous conversation. I try to overhear their conversation. I make up most of the dialogue. This is really what I think I hear…

  - Is that a Darger original? Bacon asks.

  His eyes look burnt out, as if he’s looked too long at an eclipse.

  - It is – Bill Murray replies – The reason we’re all doomed.

  - Huh?

  - The Slave State bible man, the one that fell into the hands of Baroness Un and his buddies, is called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. The author? One Henry Darger. The same reclusive native of Illinois and religious fanatic who wrote the 15,000 page tome across the span of his life whose artwork you so admire. The Glandelinian race sought inspiration from Darger’s text and set out to be the scourge of Abbieannia.

  - No kiddin’?

  I cease my earwigging. Lav Diaz shot the film over 10 years—during which time, actors on the project died and the director himself went through a messy divorce. Do I hear Yo la Tengo?

  I’m starting to realise why I do this to myself.

  Dayton Priest

  The one time I visited Unger House was a significant moment for me. I am an exponent of Ultra-realism and of its main principles. I am on a mission to further the objectives set by Vincent Bittacker and Brandon Swarthy, otherwise commonly referred to as the Unger House Radicals.

  My name is Dayton Priest. I’m originally from Arizona but have since decided to relocate to Louisiana so that I may better pursue a career in my chosen cinematic genre. I have all the right credentials—after attending Arcadia High School in Phoenix I moved back to California where I graduated from Saratoga High School.

  There was a time, long ago, when I attended Hebrew school. It was Rabbi Miskatarian who got me into experimental cinema and, by proxy, Ultra-realism. I immediately enrolled in UCLA Film School for graduate work in film. There I directed a short experimental piece film called WHY I WANT TO FUCK PRESIDENT OBAMA and a soft-core Ballardian comedy called THE MONOGAMY EXHIBITION.

  At UCLA, I met Chaz Anderson, a wannabe horror director with a rubicund face. At first he did not interest me at all, horror movies don’t excite me that much, but when he told me that his sister Clara had been murdered by Otto Spengler, the godfather of Ultra-realism, suddenly he seemed like a man I ought to know.

  Anderson was as obsessed with his sister’s murderer as I was with the sub-genre her killer had spawned. Anderson was like a celebrity to me at this point. This was as close to the legendary Ultra-realists as I’d gotten. I begged him for more information, but all he knew was that Spengler was an escaped mental patient who’d once been a high school teacher. After going completely insane Spengler started taking children to Unger House and the surrounding Louisiana countryside with the intention of raping, killing and cannibalising their corpses. To Anderson I played the role of the morbidly fascinated serial killer aficionado. This succeeded in luring him in. If he found out the admiration I held for his sister’s killer he might recoil and withhold information that could be precious to me.

  Of course, Anderson and I soon struck up a friendship—a big pornography company brought us both in to re-cut a Turkish film titled ‘Ben Benim dev Horoz ile Yüzünüzü fuck Istiyorum’ (roughly translated that’s ‘I WANT TO FUCK YOUR FACE WITH MY GIANT COCK’). I added some new 3-D colour footage and we earned a writer's and director’s credit each. Anderson found he enjoyed the production and editing sides of things. I was more concerned with story and the message of a film. It was a professional match made in heaven.

  One night, while getting high on Benzedrine inhalers, I convinced him to take a road trip with me to Unger House. I explained that we could do a documentary on his sister Clara and perhaps stumble across an explanation for her death along the
way—even though I had a strong feeling that Spengler’s motivations were purely animal and spontaneous. The nature of a man like Otto Spengler is something that cannot be quantified or studied with any degree of exactitude. He was an aberration of the highest order, driven by thoughts and desires he deemed justifiable and worthy of lifelong pursuit. I don’t think Anderson ever understood this or was capable of understanding it. He was very much a believer in the just-world-hypothesis; that men like Bittacker and Swarthy deserve to be punished because they expunged his ugly sister. He is driven by emotion and the muggy feeling of being hard done by. Loss kills all rational thought, in my opinion. Anderson was a man too bereaved to provide any sensible input and thusly was unable to get fully on board with a project like this without being deceived into doing so. To understand a man like Spengler, or even men like Bittacker and Swarthy, one must silence all emotional content. A reaction infused with negative emotion is only ever going to end with an unsatisfactory conclusion. Without sounding arrogant, I have always possessed the ability to ignore my nagging conscience.

  I can separate art from the artists. I don’t think twice about Polanski fiddling with children, Burroughs gunning down his wife or about Bergman fleeing from the Inland Revenue. In some cases foibles laid bare provide a more intimate insight into these artists as men. The ugly spirit. Ultra-violence, more than a genetic predisposition, is an embracing of the ugly spirit. We needed a Brandon Swarthy, someone who was born insane, to show us all how to follow suit.

  As the universe evolves towards higher levels of complexity and consciousness we have to learn to adapt ourselves in time for Omega. ‘God from god’. The noosphere has another stage to go until it has reached its apex, maybe more than one stage.

  One must have complete and utter contempt for their audience—why?—because that is the nature of the Ultra-Realists. The overarching message, if there is one that is definable, is that human life is not special, nor should it ever be viewed as such. The brutal act of one human erasing another is something we should become desensitised to if we are to avoid becoming the awful hypocrites of the universe. After all, we kill animals, plants and sully our planet as readily as we might release a toxic cloud of methane from our anuses or spit our tarred mucus upon the soil. It is Ultra-Realism that might save us from judgement. Once we realise we are not special and are in fact inferior to the natural predators of earth can we hope to enjoy any notion of life following this one.

  This could just be a dress rehearsal. In the audition we must accept our deviance and accept that it is a by-product of our flaws and weakness as a species. For instance, you should be able to watch me kill another human being. You should be able to watch someone you do not know kill someone you do know. You should also be able to watch someone you know kill someone you do not know, or kill someone you know on similar terms. Perhaps most importantly, you should also be able to kill another human being without hesitance.

  *

  Anderson and I took a night time journey to the old Unger House place, in much the same way Bittacker and Swarthy did. We told no one where we were actually going. I told my parents that I had a big job working on the latest Atom Goyan movie as a technical consultant. Anderson’s only remaining family was a crazy mother with Alzheimer’s. He was able to slip off with much less hassle or trickery.

  We arrived at mid-day on December 2nd. The Great Isolation was coming even then, I could feel it.

  When we drove up the dirt road that lead to Unger House I’m not ashamed to admit that I was a little nervous. This had been my dream for the longest time. I was meters from cinematic history. I was about to galvanise the genre, bring it into the public conscious. It also occurred to me that I hadn’t planned on what I was going to do once we got there. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that I might re-enact the old Swarthy footage, hack off old Anderson’s head and film the murder. But I’m sure that had it come to that I would’ve keenly done so accordingly. Instead, as I walked up onto the porch, I was struck with a tremendous feeling of this being a kind of homecoming. My joy was almost orgasmic. I’m sure Anderson was wondering why I was so happy to finally be present at the scene of his sister’s brutal demise. He was suitably sombre and I could tell he wasn’t enjoying being here.

  - This place isn’t right – he said, rather cryptically. I asked him to elaborate.

  - It feels… wrong somehow. Like when you go to an old Nazi concentration camp that's become a tourist attraction or something. You can tell a lot of unnecessary death has happened in this place.

  Already Anderson was ruining the experience with emotion.

  They never did catch Vincent Bittacker. Some folk say he had a tumour, in which case he’d be long dead anyway. Swarthy was reputedly a fantastic actor with unlimited range who could blend into surroundings and assume entirely new identities at will. I think Bittacker picked up a few of his tips. Maybe he got possessed by the same radical spirit that imbued Swarthy (whose gutted body was discovered in a gas station bathroom in Greensboro). They think a trucker killed him. No one knew why.

  That is what’s so fascinating about the Ultra-realists—they defied universal conventions—like dying! Three days after Brandon Swarthy was killed and his body reported he appeared in the video recording killing a girl. How was this possible? Was it a different Swarthy who got back in Bittacker’s car and accompanied him to Louisiana? Yet police reports identify that the man in the recording is irrefutably him. It’s not so unbelievable. Every religion has their martyr. Swarthy is our Jesus Christ, only real and infinitely superior.

  If you ever see the footage of Brandon Swarthy killing the Janice girl he looks possessed by something. Maybe it was just the impression left upon him following a shuddering revelation? Perhaps he finally saw through all the bullshit and was able to act without constraint?

  You know, Swarthy really does look like a ghost, all deathly pale, manic eyed. He has this perennial calmness about him. I wish I knew exactly what happened that fateful weekend when he and Bittacker went to Unger House and became radicals.

  On the horizon there is a ship potted on the still water with a flag at half-mast. The sunset is mauve and blood-orange.

  *

  I remember Unger House and its smells.

  It was icy to the core and marshed in dry-rot, entirely faithful to the old legend by the way. Of course, this really pleased a fan-boy like me, but I could spot Anderson's regret at having come here instantly. He started shivering and exhaling so heavily that his frozen breath started to catch in his lungs. There were a few moments of wheezing. Coughing followed, then came the cold sweats. His reaction to Unger House was one of shock. I tried to reassure him that everything was alright but his body was too busy convulsing.

  - We shouldn't have come here - he muttered between chattering teeth. I don't mind telling you I found his attitude wholly unprofessional. I unpacked a blanket and threw it over Anderson's shoulders. He eventually calmed down. Then the questions came flooding out of his mouth like pellets of candy from a broken, unrelenting PEZ dispenser.

  - Why did we come here? What could we hope to find that's of any use? Surely what's done is done.

  - Don't you want to know why Spengler butchered your sister? - I tried to mask my giddy enthusiasm at having spotted a dried blood stain spattered up the wall.

  He shook his head.

  - No, not anymore. I just want to get back home. I'm sorry Priest, I hope you're not too disappointed, but I just cannot spend another second in this fucking... house of torture.

  You might be surprised to discover that I did not kill Anderson, although I really felt like killing him. Instead we gathered up our things and left Unger House. I didn't cause a fuss about it either. We went to an oyster house in the next town up and never spoke about the murders again, although I did immediately start looking for accommodation in the Louisiana area, something which perplexes Anderson to this day. We still maintain a frequent dialogue, he and I. I find his closeness to the subject of m
y obsession to be rather vital. Talking to him reminds me of my connection to the case and to the genre.

  It was enough just to've been there. To've inhaled that fetid air and walked the rotting, blood mottled planks of its floorboards. It was enough to confirm that the self-imposed Great Isolation is the way forward. There can be no doubting it now. Most Ultra-realists seem like perfectly ingratiated members of society to the naked eye but outward appearances can be deceiving. They are often two people—one-part man, who is affable and seemingly content, but they are men in constant collaboration with their unconscious mind. It’s the collision of intellects that makes the movement so interesting.

  Imagine it—human beings quietly locked away in cell block high rises for the duration of their lives. Deprived of food and love long enough till they expire naturally. If we had any threat of a conscience, we would put this lifestyle into effect with the utmost immediacy. Killing off this race is the most responsible thing we could do as a species. It's what we deserve, it's our fucking destiny—to die alone and starving. But, alas, we have more fight in us than that. I am realistic. Not everyone would be likely to go along with this ideology or its practices and it would probably take the most expensive subliminal advertising campaign in history to convince them otherwise. We can't accept when we're beaten, we have to keep on going. I think it's our biggest flaw. No such thing as lying down and taking it. Oh no! We have to fight for every last shred of our pathetic existences even if it's to the detriment of the world around us and our own sanity.

  We have our soundtracks, we have our great movies, our works of fiction and journalism. There’s no need to keep fighting or striving for better. We don’t need or deserve one last swansong. We can go out heroically with our artistic integrity intact! It’s time to check out.

  Which is why Ultra-Realism happened in the first place, right? All great cinematic movements are a reaction to the social constructs of the time. Ultra-Realism is a reaction to a species that has gone past its expiry date, outstayed its welcome. I'm positive that's what Bittacker and Swarthy had intended. People who slow down to get a good look at auto wreckages and who watch beheading videos and revel in the intimate, gory details of celebrity suicide will be the first to join. They won’t be able to help it. Their morbid fascination will bring them into Ultra-Realism whether they want to die or not. It’s called Excitation-transfer theory. It is a call for self-awareness. For the sake of our souls!