The idea of doing something very different in the middle of the play may have predated Warren Ellis writing about episode eight of Twin Peaks; if not, it certainly predated when I watched the episode. The concept of the scene, though, goes back even further. In college, having finished "smitten" (which, I'll remind you, starred Carl and Selena), I imagined a series of one act plays. One was about Carl and Selena doing something. Something that was probably religious in some way, because all of these plays would have a connection with religion. One was to be called something like, quoting from what you've just read in "Waiting for Gadot" now, "Absolute Proof of the Existence of the Divine." Let's break that down a bit. I'm not an overly religious person, but I identify as a believer and I dabble in it a bit--what interests me about religion is the way that it calls for a different style of thought than let's say science. I've thought of faith as "belief without proof" so many times over the years that I'm not sure where it comes from--is it biblical?
Either way, "faith" is a type of "trust" in a way that science will always "distrust." (Cue Seinfeld voice:) Not that there's anything wrong with that! What I think there might be something wrong with is the assertion that science is the be-all-end-all for living one's life. I don't mean that in the sense of religion necessarily, just the old Shakespeare quote, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Science provides humanity with the closest thing to what we can call Truth. What do we do when dealing with life situations where science has yet to give us anything like that capital T word? The joke I have here is I ask people "What is your favorite color?" Then I say, "Do you believe that or know it?" Then I say, "What's the rational reasoning for that?" In many cases, there are things we know, often admittedly about ourselves, that cannot be proven scientifically or rationally supported. What does that mean? It means, to me, sometimes we need more than science.
But if metaphysics were to be breached entirely by science and we were one day to be able to say we know everything, what would happen to faith? I've thought about this quite a bit. In some ways, Moses is the weakest believer amongst the Israelites, because even if they built an idol, they could grow to believe again. Moses, as the story goes, knew. What was religion to his people was largely science to himself. Moses speaks with God repeatedly--just like a good science experiment must be done. Sometimes I think that has to play some part in him not being able to reach the promised land. I'm being disingenuous, I know. It's a bit intentional. I think for many people who struggle with faith there might be the thought that they wish God would just make himself known. To be known, though, is to lose faith. Think about it like a friend asking you to believe in him or her--if you can't believe before you have proof, are you really friends? In this way, we desire proof and yet at the same time we know we don't want it.
I might seem a bit obsessed with the boundary between faith and fact, but this serves a purpose so humor me. What would have to happen to you in order to shatter your worldview? My father once calmly described to me an out of body experience he once had while working at a machine in a factory. Were it to happen to me, I think such an event would forever change my perception of reality. To him, it didn't seem to make much of an impression at all. There's a difference here among us all, I'm sure. For some people, seeing a UFO might change everything, for other people witnessing the impossible right in front of their eyes might be simply remembered as a dream. Something that stood out to me as a writer was a mix on a professor's joke: reading a student's essay and seeing that this student plagiarized not just anyone but the professor, herself! I thought, what if that happens but it's not plagiarism? How much of one's own words need be read in another's hand before a shiver runs down the spine? This was the play: a man falls apart when his student uses the same words, the same grammar... He becomes all the more bewildered as he thinks about these words--they aren't out in the world yet, maybe they're scrawled in a notebook in his bedroom, or cleanly typed on a typewriter in his study, but even this isn't enough. Eventually, the student starts speaking his thoughts.
Obviously, that's not what we have here in the middle of "Waiting for Gadot." What I just outlined never got written. Neither did a weird undeveloped play set on a bus called "Trans-(ubstanti/port)-ation" or something like that. I think the thought first occurred to me to revisit this idea when I read about William Marston meeting Olive Byrne in The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Marston is credited as Wonder Woman's creator, but Jill Lepore shows how Olive and Marston's wife Elizabeth Holloway both play a part in shaping the character. For example, as we saw in my play, Byrne's bracelets are Wonder Woman's bracelets. When Olive says, "not even girls want to be girls as long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power," this is a quote from Marston in connection with Wonder Woman. I've co-opted it to use in this question of plagiarism role.
I wondered (pun not intended) about how to open this scene. I knew someone had to walk us into this part of the play as it's separated from the main narrative. When I thought about when this scene would have taken place I suddenly had the idea for this weird black and white filter for the scene. A live black and white film, in a sense, which should be a bit disorienting and yet somehow familiar. As the Anthropologist puts it, "theater was always in color." In writing this play, I've tried to come up with some ideas that I'm sure have done before and better, but that I haven't seen before. A lot of those ideas are part of the closet drama of this play--the way words break up into syllables, for example. This scene in black and white is perhaps the most interesting idea when it comes to actually staging the play. The familiarity of the black and white view comes, obviously, from film. It's no accident, then, that this relatively short scene is called "feature" and the post is called "Feature Presentation." Consider this a film in the middle of the play. Then I knew who would open it. After all, as the Anthropologist tells us, he's "the filmmaker."
And he is. Back from "Vampires on Campus" the closing poetry sequence of a self-published book that I've written about here before, he's a college kid with a video camera trying to get the unimaginable on tape. From the first poem (disregarding his introduction), we learn that the Anthropologist "picked up a video camera/and he filmed/the most interesting story he could find/or he just thought it all up." This helps develop the uncertainty if the Anthropologist is actually a character in the sequence, or if he is the writer. Don't look at me, I don't know the answer! Later, regrettably, the Anthropologist describes his work in mockingly long lines of poetry:
"This was supposed to be a story about blood and thus iron and death. It was supposed to concern the frequent action of going to a party off campus to drink because you are young, hot, and beautiful but obviously underage. And also about wanting to rule over monsters and how that can make us realize that sometimes relationships are good from the side of the subject as well as the king./I'm not too sure if I got any of that across, because I am not an author, but simply a biographer of Gaia, herself, digging through all the dark, dirty things inside her. I've spent three and a half months now, searching for lost symbols in images I've extracted from her wet dreams. And if you haven't realized, by looking through these tapes, I've done a very slick editing job."
That slash (/), yes, is a line break. So those that paragraph is ostensibly two lines of poetry. It's interesting to me to revisit this and think about where my writing would go later on. It's still indisputably me. There are times when I can't remember writing something and am a bit stunned by my lack of familiarity with the words, but that's not the case here. It's more of a surprise to see ideas present in what I was writing way before I ever thought I actually had those thoughts.
"I'm not Justin Timberlake!" the Anthropologist says early in his opening monologue. He's referencing the fact that I've read that JT only wrote down the lyrics for one song of his FutureSex/LoveSounds from 2006, preferring instead to record them from memory in the sound booth. Even with that one song, it was his producer who talked him into it. The Anthropologist, like me, isn't like that. This seems as good a time as ever to reference Warren Ellis again--he's been reading a lot about essays lately and relates his own web presence with the various essay writers of history. Writing for one's self rather than an audience and not bothered by the presence (or lack thereof) of the eyes of readers. While Warren Ellis actually has a lot of readers for his morning notes at morning.computer and his newsletter Orbital Operations, it makes me think of my writing here, where I've written oh so many thousands of words with much that will likely only be seen by my eyes. Hey, anything that lets me compare myself with Warren Ellis!
The Radiohead bit was another happy accident. I've been reading Leaving the Atocha Station and while planning this part of the play in my mind, I happened to read the quote I used in this scene. It was in typing "from a great height" that it occurred to me I might as well have Thom sing that part over the words. I've written Radiohead, my favorite band, into a story before, as their song "Like Spinning Plates" plays on an alarm clock in a story that for some reason I can't remember the name of at the moment. That's a story that is narrated by Fred Johnson and may or may not detail the lead up to his nervous breakdown and suicide. Is that how that works? I'd have to research it were I to return to that writing plan.
Now the aspects of the actual film scene; I don't want to go too much into detail here. I think it's a Neil Gaiman quote, "Never apologize, never explain," and while I end up doing both, I do think the work needs to speak for itself in some ways. Here's what I will note: I'm partial to both Jude Law and Alessia Cara (Jude Law is fittingly referenced in Brand New's "Jude Law and a Semester Abroad" from their first album). Marston invented the lie detector test and then had it by and large stolen from him by the man who created the polygraph. That actually adds a bit of background to his characterization here as a paranoid afraid of his ideas and, yes, his words being stolen. Something Jill Lepore presents in The Secret History of Wonder Woman is how the lie detector test is not the most scientifically accurate test. Bill, himself, in using the machine had a near perfect record when the lie detector test was itself tested, but with other people in the tester's role, findings were less certain. That's why Marston said he was the lie detector, not the machine. In my play, this builds into a debate within himself over his status as a man or a machine. "Are we human or are dancer?" as Brandon Flowers might ask.
Olive and Bill's discussion of "Ripples" echoes the beginning of Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama, which has a prolonged discussion of "specks." I've frequently referred to BEE as my favorite writer (and his rivalry with David Foster Wallace might be why I haven't read Infinite Jest), but I wonder how much influence he really has had on my writing. Of course I write that, but then I think about how in writing "smitten," I wrote in the third person present tense in order to play off of Ellis's own choice to use the first person present in his first novel Less Than Zero (and in most subsequent novels; I think Lunar Park might be in past tense), which was given him by his writing teacher at university. I think BEE first tried to write the novel in the traditional style of third person past tense.
And what about what Bill and Olive discuss? Here's something I really don't want to discuss in detail, but I will include one note. I actually saw Jill Lepore on The Daily Show talking about her book back before the Wonder Woman movie was even on my mind (likely in 2014 when the book came out, maybe 2015?). I'd read a bit about Marston before that, usually by people who were embarrassed to discuss him in detail, a problem that thankfully Lepore does not have. Marston is a feminist, but his type of feminism is a bit off to me. Even the quote included in this section doesn't quite ring true to my beliefs: sure, we shouldn't make women and girls believe that to be female is to be lesser and we should not portray femininity as essentially negative. Who would want to be a woman when, to use a phrase from Pamela Adlon and Louis C. K., referencing a quote from John Lennon, "Woman is the Something of the Something"? What bothers me about Marston's view is that he seems to wish we push our women to celebrate their womanhood, something I fully support, but also to act correctly as women. I come from a feminism that is much more interested in troubling gender rather than redeeming it--why act like a woman at all? What does acting like a woman mean? Acting like a man? The questions could go on.
Final point to make: nothing in this scene purports to be true, for that I point you to Jill Lepore's book (with the title once again), The Secret History of Wonder Woman. I think what she does very well in the book is she portrays the people as all people are, truly complicated. Marston is both championed and mocked for different aspects of his life and belief. I hope that my characters inspire a mix of the same, and if I do as well then I think I've done my job well.
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