The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama's Worst Fiasco 5
The Manage Mother’s Poison Explanation ^ + Stretched Finnegans Wake Allusions + Stretched Kalki Allusion + Stretched I Ching Allusion and the Returnian ^ Phew
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. You won’t be surprised to hear this is fiction, satire.
Chapter 1 is here.
Laura-Carrie’s Scream results in Magick!
The Manage Mother’s Poison Explanation
IT SHOULD BE SAID that Césars have denied that the Richard we’ve never met before dreams every scene preceding his appearance in a motel bed. Would you like to hear their alternative explanation? Would you like to take some deep breaths first and do stretching exercises on your toes and ankles? What follows summarises the worst ending of all time and so won’t be pleasant reading, but it’s necessary for an appreciation of how low this show sinks.
To understand this explanation you should know that going by the researches of Franck Boulègue, who believes the structure of this eighteen-part ‘best television series ever’ is partly based on the I Ching, one model for the show’s ending comes from the 18th hexagram which says ‘manage mother’s poison’. You should know as well that this character Richard is played by Kyle MacLachlan. That’s the same Kyle MacLachlan as plays Dale Cooper, Dougie Jones the manbaby, and Mr C the Big Bad. So here goes with the Manage Mother’s Poison Explanation.
After Dale Cooper journeys back in time and saves Laura Palmer from being murdered by Leland/BOB, she is whooshed off to live in an alternate dimension. We don’t see this happen, but whooshed off she is, seemingly. And it turns out the Richard we’ve never met before lives in this new dimensional realm. But while Richard is Richard he is also inhabited by Dale Cooper and Mr C, who’ve somehow travelled here to find Laura Palmer. Here her name’s Carrie Paige, though, and she can’t remember she’s Laura Palmer from a previous dimension.
Then the two of them, Cooper-and-Mr-C-in-Richard and Laura-in-Carrie, travel to a house that was Laura’s old house in the previous dimension and supposedly in this one too. We’re given nine minutes of virtual silence and nothing happening as they travel there by car, just as we got nine minutes of the same earlier in the episode, which means that of the last fifty-four minutes eighteen are taken up with quiet uneventful travel.
Gordon Cole and Cooper-and-Mr-C-in-Richard’s plan, claims this explanation, is to destroy the Experiment AKA Jowday AKA Mother who’s possibly inside the house within the body of Laura’s mother and abuse-enabler Sarah, played by Grace Zabriskie, even though the woman who opens the house’s front door isn’t Sarah but someone called Alice Tremond.
Then comes the Scream/Electricity Magick! Boulègue’s established that this scream is an allusion to Finnegans Wake and Giambattista Vico’s belief that the age of chaos, selfishness and sterility will be ended by a thunderclap. Notice again the questionable correspondence between The Return’s detail here, a scream, and what it’s alluding to from a celebrated work, thunder. This is among the Twin’s craftiest ways of making this the most pretentious art project there’s ever been.
1. Yoke some of the most pitiful points in artistic history to key elements of globally renowned classics.
2. Then make the links between them so tenuous that you have to stop in your tracks and go, ‘Wait a minute, a scream’s a pretty strange way to refer to a low-pitched sound like thunder.’ Or ‘ “Manage mother’s poison” is a painfully stretched link to maybe destroying an alleged transdimensional entity offscreen via an unexplained scream somehow switching off the electrics in the house where the alleged entity lives, maybe.’ Or as we’ll see later on, ‘Hold on, Bloom’s first extended appearance doesn’t come 90% of the way through Ulysses’; or ‘Please don’t tell me Diane’s drink on the rocks alludes to T.S. Eliot’s “And the ragged rock in the restless waters/ Washes over it, fogs conceal it”.’
The effect is to make Mr Lynch, in actual fact so very unflashy, so very sane, so very diligent, look not just pretentious to an almost deranged degree but brainfogged, inept and/or sloppy too, which makes the allusions even more pretentious—it isn’t that great a look to habitually leech your show onto the world’s masterworks if you’re a brainfogged, inept and/or sloppy randomly-finger-waggling homebody.
But to pull off this rare effect to perfection time after time throughout 1000 minutes is hardly inept or sloppy. It requires serious finesse and rigour, even for a ten-dimensional entity. Despite the cruelty to Mr Lynch, you can’t help wearily admiring the audacity, imagination and malevolent craftsmanship. It’s sadism but it’s also supernatural virtuosity.
Carrie’s name, meanwhile, if little else, is a reference to Kalki, who in Hindu mythology is the tenth avatar of Vishnu. So The Return supposedly ends on this happy note: the Scream/Electricity Magick! kills off Experiment/Jowday/Mother.
But here’s the weird thing, so to speak. In this drama humans are portrayed as ugly, phoney, petty, infantile, hysterical, solipsistic, or brainwashed plectoids, perverts, parasites, pushovers, dotards, bozos, ballbusters, bimbos, ciphers, slobs, psychopaths, junkies, fembots and other replicants, and underclass people presented as subhuman—basically how you’d expect our species to be portrayed by a demon. That’s the modern-day world, this auteur informs us: multitudes of risible or vile or in other ways underevolved lowlifes, with exceptions like the odd stunner, child or authority figure, and above all the FBI Deputy Director played by the auteur, Stanley’s bête noire Gordon Cole.
Cole isn’t underevolved. He’s the only wholly admirable central character in the series, a principled, dignified, witty, generous, wise, visionary, cultured, courteous, transdimensional-masterplan-orchestrating gentleman-genius who might have an eye for the tasty ladies half his age, cuties who keep their mouths shut and nod and gaze admiringly at the savvy alpha chap in the room, a man who might be quite hands-on with his tasty young subordinate—and what red-blooded FBI Deputy Director wouldn’t be?—but who’s overcome his hearing problems to reach such spiritual heights that he’s primarily, even fanatically, concerned with the salvation of his fellow citizens. A miracle of manhood, an unrivalled saviour-shaman, clearly, a modern-day saint if he wasn’t such a seductive old stud.
If this prize specimen was in your social circle everyone in it would go on about what an incredible person he is and how grateful they are to be his acquaintance in this world apparently dominated by clowns and scumbags, and so would you, and so would I, vermin that we are. He’s too good for this lowlife-infested world, really, a highly evolved, transcendent spirit. Basically an Übermensch.^^
Number of corporate critics who’ve acknowledged this enormous difference in worth between Cole and virtually all the remaining 237 speaking parts: zero. Not a word from any of them. They’re blinded to it by fan worship or refuse to mention it for the same reason, or even because they do view the auteur as an Übermensch, precisely the way Fox News or Newsmax fail to mention Mr Trump’s most extreme instances of megalomania.
And as always with The Return it now gets more honking the deeper you look, comically so in this case, because it has even been convincingly argued by cult high-priest Boulègue that Cole has been written, by the very showrunner who plays the part, to represent the warrior Gevurah who’s one of the Sephiroth, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life’s ten emanations of Almighty God^^. Boulègue’s also established that Cole represents the ancient Egyptian god Thoth^^. I’m not making this up. This is who the showrunner, the hermit showrunner, apparently cast himself as, and Stanley didn’t even know these facts, I think, as he barked and snarled at Cole.
Number of critics, Boulègue included, who’ve acknowledged how toe-curling it is to cast yourself as two supreme divinities in your own TV drama? You can guess, I’m sure.
As well as being an aspect of Almighty God, it may interest you to know, Gevurah is the masculine centre of the universe, i.e. the masculine centre of two trillion galaxies, seven trillion light years. It’s uncertain whether the showrunner’s also self-cast as the masculine centre of the Ultraverse, but you get the feeling such a self-casting would hardly make this showrunner blush with embarrassment. Thoth, meanwhile, is the god of judgement, wisdom, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magick, art, and the dead, and wise counsellor to Osiris, who in the series is represented by Dale Cooper, who in turn is widely known to be a surrogate for the showrunner.
But plenty of characters, many of those not played by the showrunner or his surrogate, well they’re underevolved clowns or scumbags, risible or hideous Unterentwickelt Menschen, aren’t they?
Gordon Cole is the masculine centre of this
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If you’ve doubted that no work’s made its artist look a bigger diddy than The Return does, now might be a good time to consider whether you’ve seen self-casting like this anywhere else. Have you seen any other writer, director or producer of a collaborative work cast themselves as the only undeniably honourable central character?
NO → Me neither.
YES → Have you seen any other writer, director or producer cast themselves as an Übermensch, the god of judgement and wisdom, and an aspect of Almighty God?
NO → Me neither. Of course we haven’t.
YES → Have you seen any other writer-director-producer cast himself in a world with hordes of Unterentwickelt Menschen among its hundreds of speaking parts as the superman masculine nucleus of seven trillion light years, a self-casting that even a José Mourinho stimmed self-pleasuring marathon would reject as too vain, too implausible, and no fan or critic ever mentioning how iffy this self-casting is? Or anything as bad as that?
NO → Good. You had me worried there.
YES → You really have seen some muck, haven’t you? But there’s more of this type of thing to come in this series, much more, and sometimes far worse, in one case over fifty times worse. Let me repeat that. There lurks within this series something over fifty times as repellent as casting yourself amidst masses of human swine as the most masculine thing there’s ever been.^^
And if you doubted The Return makes Mr Lynch look a bigger diddy than Mr Trump, you must admit that even Trump wouldn’t cast himself in a fictional world containing so many clowns and scumbags as a red-blooded Übermensch and two supreme divinities minimum. He’d manage the clowns and scumbags and Übermensch parts no problem, but he wouldn’t then cast himself as the universal hub of everything manly, and of judgement and the rest. He’s not so demented that he never listens to his advisers, and they’ve stopped him committing acts far tamer than casting himself as Thoth. Ivanka’s rolled eyes alone might tell him that’s too vain, beyond the pale, damaging to his brand, while even Newsmax might have to tell him he’d crossed a Line. He may be the second-biggest diddy in history but he’s not that big a diddy. It’s one thing to announce at Thanksgiving that what you’re most grateful for is your own remarkable nature; it’s another entirely to cast yourself among Unterentwickelt Menschen as the divine essence of judgement, wisdom, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magick, art, and the dead, and wise counsellor to Osiris.
This gulf in worth between Cole/Gevurah/Thoth and The Return’s legions of human swine is so great that it makes us wonder why Jowday has to be defeated. Why not just keep knocking yourself out as the zenith of manliness and the rest and let the ultrahorror have her way with all these risible or hideous Unterentwickelt Menschen?
Picture the likes of Houellebecq or Bernhard or Cioran broadcasting a series in which they make it clear how rubbish many of the rest of the cast are compared to the divine heights their own character has reached, then out of nowhere they hit you with an ending about how essential it is to save these inferior hordes from a Big Bad.
Picture The Return of the King revealing as Frodo and Sam climb Mount Doom that what the whole trilogy’s been leading up to, what Gandalf’s masterplan has been all along—this hard-of-hearing Gandalf played by a Peter Jackson who informs the Council of Elrond that he’s more masculine than anything else ever and his staff’s erect—is the salvation not only of the Hobbits, Men and Elves from Sauron’s rule but also of the poor Orcs, Uruk-hai and Goblins.
In a similar way you’re now suddenly meant to care that these people you’ve been encouraged to laugh and sneer at for months get saved from a Big Bad. We can agree that such a project wouldn’t be very well thought-through. In fact let’s agree that such a project, on this ending alone, would already be a trainwreck—though in The Return’s case, it’s doubtful this mystifying switch at the end makes up even a hundredth of its honkingness (though it’s pretty honking, so probably more than a thousandth).
And in the previous dimension, the one Cooper and Mr C just travelled from, Jowday also possessed in the same house the abuse-enabler Sarah Palmer. We have two dimensions, then, two Palmer houses, two enablers and within each of them an ultrahorrific Big Bad. But only the Big Bad in this new dimension gets annihilated, if anything does, by an unexplained scream and electricity marvel. In the dimension over 90% of the series takes place in, the Big Bad remains alive and well.
Ah, respond César and the other bams with manbuns, the Manbams. Ah, but Jowday was summoned to this new dimension from the previous dimension by Sex Magick!
Christ in front of Pilate by Mihály Munkácsy
The Manage Mother’s Poison Explanation (including the Sex Magick! + Scream/Electricity Magick!) + Stretched Finnegans Wake Allusions + Stretched Kalki Allusion + Stretched I Ching Allusion and the Returnian
THROUGHOUT THIS HORRIBLE SCENE, as you probably wish you didn’t know, Diane has to look down into the face of the Mr C who raped her so sickeningly it wrecked her life for decades. Beforehand he tells her to approach him as he’s done to women previously before bedding them, so it’s definitely Mr C.
The minutes that follow focus almost exclusively on her glares down at his face as she rides him in cowgirl position, her hands as they try to cover his face, and her repulsed squirms away from it, even though she’s very aroused too. All this is worth it though, say César and the other Manbams, because it will act as some kind of mysterious summons etc.
It appears odd, to say the least, that intercourse between Diane and Mr C should summon the Big Bad to this new plane. For a start, to summon the Big Bad into the previous plane it took the world’s first detonation of an atomic bomb, yet in this new one all it takes is a bit of the old Sex Magick! with the man who nonconsensually rammed his penis inside your vagina/rectum/mouth? And why does it have to be sex between these two people? Don’t other people in this new dimension have sex? Or is the evil entity only summoned if an atomic bomb goes off or someone is prepared to have sex with a man who raped them and wrecked their life?
If so, what’s the idea being communicated here? That no matter how traumatic they find it, there are circumstances in which people should have consensual sex with men who’ve violated and destroyed them. And the circumstances are these: if they find themselves in an alternate dimension and this sex might conceivably act as a come-hither for a putative transdimensional entity.
And in these circumstances, the greatest drama of the decade appears to say, the rape victim should probably lay aside their feelings, their anger, repulsion, misplaced guilt, sorrow, despair, misplaced shame, hatred and misplaced self-hatred, and accept penetration by that same violating penis for the greater good, because by doing so they will perchance facilitate the eventual mysterious putative demise of a rumoured entity who possibly lives within a certain mother and house, and who without that penetration might otherwise have threatened masses of risible or despicable lowlifes.
But circumstances like these will of course never apply in the life of an actual rape victim. All we’re left with, then, is a vague fuzzy sense that these victims should sometimes accept further penetration by rapists’ penises, and a far less vague sense that if they do they’ll get seriously aroused.
A question about that artwork you believe might be worse than The Return: Does it have anything as bad as this?
NO → Of course not.
YES → Seems like we have an actual contender, then, for the moment at least.
But now step back and take in the Manage Mother’s Poison Explanation + the stretched Finnegans Wake allusions + stretched Kalki allusion + stretched I Ching allusion as a whole: farcical implausibility, half-bakedness, over-complexity, over-ambitiousness, pretentiousness, narrative chaos, characterological chaos, 4channish cheesy infantilism, events that need treated with maturity and delicacy, the failure to keep inflammatory so-bad-it’s-good apart from subject matter requiring thoughtfulness and tact, a general air of contempt from the writers and production team, a general air of Weimarish degeneracy, the fact that the original audience never understood most of it and nearly everything had to be figured out later on, and all this on top of the default poor acting, stilted dialogue, refusal of suspension of disbelief, zanily lit 1990s daytime-soap/camcorder look, zanily long scenes, gruellingly plodding pace, zany amounts of dead air, and the Master seeming a diddy among diddies because the audience thought he was responsible for this shambles.
As that cocktail slides down your throat, along with a curling of your toes and ankles you should feel a hum round the back of your neck, in your ears, and across your scalp. It’s a hum only ever experienced in relation to this show. That hum is Returnian. You are now in the realm of the Returnian. You are in artistic hell.
Told you I wasn’t overpromising.
(And this still isn’t the rock bottom. And we still haven’t plumbed the full depths of the Sex Magick!’s rankness).
No other artwork goes this low. The contender you still have in mind has several of the above factors, perhaps, but only with the Returnian do you get most or all of these twenty-two factors together and, crucially, working on all the rest to potentiate and therefore multiply the vileness of each. That means 1124000727777607680000 possible combinations working away to maximise the gruesomeness of the Returnian’s twenty-two, which jointly represent only a small percentage of the series’ gruesomeness in total. Don’t worry, I’m not going to examine every single combination.
And the Manage Mother’s Poison Explanation is just one of many such instances. The show features hours and hours of this kind of mince. So you can see why we can’t view The Boat That Rocked or even List of the Lost as a fiasco on the same scale as this, because for all their defects they’re in a different league from the massed elements of the Returnian. List of the Lost only features thirteen of these twenty-two. Both pro-wrestling and porn, meanwhile, only have fourteen.
Porn haunts Season 3’s overall feel even more than it haunts the modern world’s generally, and the spirit of the twenty-first-century’s pornographic enough—gaudy, fake, dehumanised, repetitive, flat, dead-eyed, sadistic and submissive, buzzy but inane, mascara metaphorically running down people’s cheeks. Porn therefore feels like it feeds into the sense of defeat and dejection of both these pre-apocalyptic times and what’s supposedly their TV masterpiece. Hard to see much of a future for a culture that facilitates 10,000,000s of children masturbating to rape and torture porn, or in which a series with such a 4channish take on rape, disability and older women can be lauded as its greatest artwork.
Aspects of porn and pro-wrestling are bad news but they don’t induce that hum. At most as you watch you get sweaty under your thighs, nauseated, twitchy, guilty, confused, heartsick about our species, bitter, furious in fact, and a little cross-eyed. But no discernible hum.
The hum isn’t that unpleasant, is it? In fact the hum is healthy. It’s the hum of your sanity resisting The Return’s demonic nature. The people who should be worried are those who hear no hum at all.
Now forget for a moment the rest of the mingers from the finale. The retcon, Richard’s dream, the auteur’s unlooked-for workplace salutation of his penis, and so on. Pretend none of them happen. Even in the absence of those other artistic choices, any episode containing the woman really aroused by traumatic but perhaps necessary miracle-working sex with her rapist and life-wrecker + arguable interruption of electrical supply by a scream orchestrated from a different dimension by the auteur-played Übermensch channelling God, all to possibly save multitudes of pilloried clowns and scumbags from an offscreen rumoured entity + stretched Finnegans Wake allusions + stretched Kalki allusion + stretched I Ching allusion combination would still be by some distance the worst piece of drama ever broadcast. It is the worst ending to any artwork and nothing else comes close. It’s ultimate mince. Or near-ultimate, as the ultimate mince is the rock bottom. It’s near-ultimate mince, then.
But remember the parts of the finale I just asked you to forget. Each of them was in fact aired, plus plenty more mingers. Now step back and try to take in as much of the finale as you can.
And now step back again and remember this is just the finale, just two hours out of eighteen.
At last you have a glimpse of the scale of this catastrophe.
Picture yourself sitting through eighteen minutes of silent car journeys for the payoff outlined by this explanation of the finale not just to the five-month Season 3, but also the entire narrative televised over twenty-seven years. And nobody even knew before the finale that Jowday’s defeat was what the series had been leading up to. Nobody knew anything about anything, not even the most obsessive cultists. And the above is the most popular explanation they’ve come up with. It’s their favourite. It’s the one that really thrilled men like César.
And not a word of protest from corporate reviewers. Conspiracy of silence. Greatest film of the decade from Cahiers du cinéma, though, and at Cannes a standing ovation for three minutes.
If you want an enlightening time, put yourself through some YouTube clips of The Return then watch that ovation. Watch everybody’s faces, the faces of the boomer and gen-x corporate-cinema elite as they applaud and Bravo away, as all of them including Kyle MacLachlan face in towards their quiffed Grand Maître to grin and rejoice. Watch the Twin’s expression as like Mr Trump’s after a rally it soaks up the adulation. Though at least you sometimes saw protesters at those rallies, didn’t you? At Cannes, however, there’s not a single protester. Every last person is on their feet, in their tuxes and gowns, cheers and roars and whistles rolling down from the balcony in waves. Impressive discipline from the Twin, proper Sasha Baron Cohen professionalism, not to burst out laughing and spill the entities’ joke.
Don’t skip any of that ovation, please. Keep watching for the full three minutes. I promise it’ll do you good. It really brushes away the cobwebs, really clarifies matters.
It’s roughly the equivalent of footage of Pontius Pilate’s decision to murder Christ. That’s how historic the misjudgement is. I know this might sound blasphemous to some people, to all those scandalised and shellshocked by The Return who’d rate that ovation far below what Pilate did. And they may have a point, I suppose, because Pilate got his information about Christ second-hand, didn’t he, whereas these millionaires at Cannes had just sat through all the first-hand evidence anyone could need.
Now, fair enough, as at a Trump rally mass psychosis was clearly in the air, but still: five bloody minutes. They could have kept it to a polite twenty seconds. They could have remained sitting. They could have made a quiet exit. But no. Look at their faces, the grins of the company men and women who decide what cinema and TV drama you get to see. Look at their eyes, the abomination-betwinkled eyes of the people who control our most influential artform.
Pontius Pilate couldn’t have just made a quiet exit. The spotlight was on him, if you like, and he’s now been condemned for two thousand years. How do you think that audience at Cannes will be remembered? Does anyone have a full list of who was there? Because the information will be needed by future historians, perhaps even future theologians.
Are you getting the sense yet that Twin Peaks: The Return might not quite be up to scratch, that there’s something a bit off about it? Would you be surprised to hear the Twin, who’d never made a TV show before, didn’t edit it for coherence or flow but according to the colour of index cards, so that what occurred next in the story was determined by the frequency or otherwise of each colour, and if this resulted in numerous plotlines or arcs ending at random and therefore forcing rewatchers to endure countless scenes they know won’t lead anywhere, well hard luck, folks.
Would you be surprised to hear relatively little that was filmed didn’t appear in the final cut, that little was edited out compared to most digitally filmed series? But even without this The Return would still be the worst artistic travesty of the last three thousand centuries. So what we end up with is the worst travesty of the last three thousand centuries and inordinate amounts of mince that would normally be edited out.
Would you be surprised to hear the Twin based a fair amount of the series on the works of Neil Breen, a man frequently cited as the worst human filmmaker of all time? The bleak Las Vegas settings, cheap outdated camcorder look, ugly lighting, irritatingly slow pans and scenes (including the long boring car journeys), chaotic storytelling, bogging dialogue, cringey mysticism, pathetic hitmen, lingering shots of ugly carpets, the re-used footage, the repetitiveness generally, cheesy special effects, the Messiah complex of Dale Cooper and the auteur, Mr C’s lifeless eyes, long dyed hair, droning voice, computer hacking, and unconvincing pulling of beauties half his age and his subsequent sexual awkwardness, the bogging acting, the onlookers’ unconvincing concern after Part 6’s road accident, Dr Jacoby’s unconvincing rants about the environment and political corruption, the fixation with so-bad-it’s-good—many if not all of these have been lifted from Breen’s illustrious turkeys Double Down, I Am Here.... Now, and Fateful Findings (and Breen then returned the compliment in 2018 with the Lynchian touches of Twisted Pair).
Neil Breen in Fateful Findings
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Would you be surprised to discover that the Twin complained that Showtime’s production schedule for the series meant the Twin felt rushed?
You know, this is sick, this fucking way to do it, you don’t get a chance to sink in anything. It isn’t a way to work. […] You tell me I got two fucking days to do all these things. This is just BANG BANG BANG, it’s like a fucking machine.
We were. We were very surprised. These words really are hard to get your head around. The Twin sets out to employ all its demonic capabilities to construct the worst pile of art muck of the last three hundred millennia, then complains that the construction’s being rushed and therefore mings so much worse than planned it makes the Twin upset. How are mere humans such as you or I supposed to process facts like this? Can you see now why The Return is a category to itself, why it is and will always be The One?
When you’ve said or thought sentences like these, or remembered the series’ honkers you had to cut to get your narrative’s wordcount under 200k and then 100k, all you can really do is gaze into space and blink, soothe your toes and temples, and if you’re lucky let your thoughts about the series trail off into nothing. The Return was an absolute miracle of mince.
That’s if it ever existed. Could such a TV drama actually have existed? It did exist, didn’t it?
Yes it did. It was shown from May to September 2017 on this world of ours. I’m sure of it. It appeared on lots of best-of lists.
That May most Twin Peaks fans I know, including fellow recoverers from childhood abuse, gave up on the shambles after watching at most a couple of episodes. But some of these recoverers eventually asked Trinna and me how the series had turned out, how the story that once gave them solace had been brought to an end.
We just said it was a mess and to pretend it never happened (pun acknowledged). Why ruin their next watch of the original Twin Peaks or of Fire Walk with Me by telling them they’ll be followed by comic-turn Green Glove versus BOB, and the retcon that among its many sickening consequences robs Laura’s tragedy and self-sacrifice of all meaning, and absolves her father of responsibility for battering her to death? They don’t need to know that stuff, do they?
But there can’t be many other works you have to lie about, cover up for, a conspiracy of silence, so you don’t upset your friends.
The following section contains material that may disturb some readers.
Phew
MY UNDER-12s wrestling bout with Kenny Fairweather was at nine o’clock, first on the bill at the Town Hall ahead of the Under-18 amateurs Bonz Smith and Russell McKay and then the adult pros Tam the Bam and the Hothering Horror. Batter Kenny, really degrade the boy whatever it takes, Dougal had phoned last night and said, and Maddy and Demmy and Suds might start to think about keeping their distance.
Outside the pubs I passed on the way there stood men with scars and bruises, alongside hardfaced women with pregnant bellies thrust out like turnips ripening in the evening light. Whenever I walked these streets I felt a sense of recognition. Demmy’s family the Uaths had its share of scumbags, lost voices in the hills, drunken killers and torturers and diddlers of their kids.
Granny Uath’s world had come down to us through the nasal tones of the woman’s voice, and returned Dougal and me to some unco place in nature, to the madness in our blood. There was poison there, she told us with a grin, brown and thick and maddening. She fed on pain with gusto, rape and murder and torment and despair, the plecto lives of folk out there in the wilderness. Uath women like Granny were as lawless as the earth, as criminal as nature, who roared on their drunken men as they chucked their seed into their children’s bodies, then some of those children brought to life offspring who died in infancy or fought their way out of childhood against the ignorance, squalor, drunkenness and lust that always menaced them. Other tribes came up out of the earth, flourished for a time, and then failing went back into the ground. Only the Uaths went on clinging to life and pinning you down and chucking in their seed, and they would not be erased.
And I belonged to that world, even as centuries of Uath blood belonged to it. The Uath mark was on me, their taint was in me. And the blood of the raped and skinned children that soaked down into the mountains, this was my guilt and burden too. It was on me every time I tried to make a wrestling opponent cry out ‘Submit!’. It would be on me soon when I butted Kenny Fairweather’s face.
A few rows back from the ring Suds sat and downed some Advocaat. Demmy lit a menthol and combed his quiffed hair. Beneath these floodlights Maddy’s clownish make-up and dyed yellow hair looked oddly forlorn and for some reason made me feel guilty.
Six years ago they’d crossed the Line. Something possessed them and they got the eyes of people who’d been thrown about the ring too far, too often, until their old selves were lost for good. It started with the mascara, on Dougal to begin with and then me too, then within weeks Demmy and Suds were sodomising us with their penises or rolled-up Belgian niche mags and targeting the mascara with their semen. Then they all came at us, a ritualistic ten burns or squeezes each time, with their fags and coaltongs.
As Kenny and I approached the ring there rose from the crowd a roar that mounted as we climbed through the ropes. A blazing point in time, this, a concentration of the total energies of those years at the mercy of Maddy and Demmy and their soulmate Suds the postman. Brutal and weird as the town itself, what happened next resolved every element of my life.
The contest lasted four minutes. The crowd barely knew it had started. Kenny rushed me, jammed his thumbs into my temples. The four of them merged as one: Kenny-Maddy-Demmy-Suds. Eight hands ran through my hair and beneath my singlet placed ten fag-burns. They kissed the scars better and caressed my squashed Pictish face. I wasn’t exactly a looker at this time, no. But that was fine because it justified my anger, I told myself, and my dirtiness in the ring.
Since last September I’d known about the nearness of another life, and I’d often seemed close to finding it again. In the days following that first mushroom trip it was everywhere around me, waiting as though a wall in the air was soon to be revealed once more and some form of door would open again in regal silence.
I’d never found a name for this place but I did have rituals to conjure up memories of the life it promised. I’d twist my hand the way I did during that first trip, or rotate my neck to remind myself of that hidden world. One night I decided that in certain situations tomorrow I’d do the tenth thing possible. When I woke up the next morning I swung over to the left side of bed as usual, then swung back to the right, then the left again before finally getting up on the right after seven more flips right and left. And that night the door to the hidden world slid open. As I stood there in the ring a sliver of light gaped beneath my flattened opponent’s twitches.
Sometimes in bed I quietly repeated the old carny wrestling word kayfabe in blocks of ten or ten times ten until every bit of its meaning was lost. All that I’d follow would be the rhythm and the number of kayfabes muttered so fast they were just a blur, but a blur that contained ten or a hundred kayfabes. Apart from boozing or tripping, this was as good as life got in those years, chanting kayfabe in blocks of ten so fast and disciplined I began to picture raped kids across the housing scheme and Buckie and Scotland chanting kayfabe ten or a hundred times or even higher, so fast and disciplined that surely between us we’d make the sliver of light reappear. There it would be in front of us, the door to a perfect world tauntingly near that every one of us was desperate for to take us from this existence.
But still it only appeared when I was out of my head on mushrooms. So this past week I’d given up on my tens and hundreds. Instead I’d try to make the light appear in the ring with a well-aimed headbutt. Butt Kenny and make him scream out—so Dougal had recommended—then look right in Maddy-Demmy-Suds’ eyes.
When I lunged Kenny stepped aside, caught my arms and span me around. Before I got my bearings I was slammed hard on the canvas. My eyes opened to see saliva spray glisten beneath the lights as it flew from my lips. Maddy’s hair shone brighter with each rush of liquid agony up my spine. For a moment I would stand up, then I wouldn’t fall but just collapse as though my legs were broken, stunned like an animal.
People ringside roared at me to get up. Maddy jumped to her feet with her bloodshot eyes glaring and yelled at me to ignore the script and quit playacting and get back on my stupid useless fucking runt’s fucking feet. She couldn’t even get kayfabe right. I’ll try to explain what I mean.
Unlike in pro-wrestling this contest with Kenny wasn’t scripted in advance. It was a genuine battle to see which eleven-year-old could hurl the other about the ring and inflict sufficient exhaustion and pain to win, and so entertain in a sincere way the hundreds of Buckie ladies and gentlemen who had come to watch. What Maddy was getting at was something different, though, something to do with kayfabe.
The way the pro-wrestling world used to go about keeping kayfabe was that the bouts were planned in advance but this was hidden from the watching crowd, who were known as marks. Dougal and I named this type kayfabe 1.
As the crowds got wise to the scam and became known as smarts there came the rise of what we named kayfabe 2, in which smarts know the bouts aren’t real contests but to keep the fun going we pretend they are, sort of. Plus we read up on what’s happening behind the scenes with the TV companies showing the events, the melancholic private lives of those who script them, the supposed rivalries between the wrestlers’ wives and children, attempts by wives to bribe refs with pies and sex that are irrelevant when the results have already been scripted. You know how it goes.
An important thing about kayfabe 2, though, is you can sense within it memories of kayfabe 1 and the belief that the bout you’re at isn’t scripted. It’s like kayfabe 2 is haunted. Because the truth is that the marks haven’t all gone away. At every pro event there are still kids who think they’re at a contest with an outcome no one knows. Not that many such kids, true, but enough so that you can feel smarter than these poor marks you know are present, though you don’t know who exactly. An odd feature of being a smart is that you know people in the crowd think you might be a mark. And if nearly everyone behaves like a smart and not a sincerely booing and cheering mark, you get a quiet venue with not much occurring outside the ring and everyone gets bored. What happens, then, is that the smarts, including you yourself, all behave as though they’re marks.
And the thing getting Maddy so fired up was this faux-naive level, kayfabe 3, which is also called marking out, and happens at those moments at pro bouts when you get so caught up in the whole event that, while never forgetting your smart’s insider knowledge, you just lose yourself among the mass of people and yell your head off like a total mark. Maddy’s yells at her child to stop playacting in an unscripted bout make no sense to me as anything other than a drunken halfwit’s take on kayfabe 3.
In the second round I got in close to Kenny. What happened next would stay with me forever. What happened to me, to Maddy-Demmy-Suds, it all followed from this moment.
I nestled my head backwards into Kenny’s face. Before I could be thrown I brought my skull forwards and then backwards again fast and hard, catching his left eye with a perfect reverse-headbutt.
Blood ran from the ripped lid. Gouges from my fingers ripped the lid some more. Kenny screamed.
The bell clanged. The referee examined the wound.
I stood in the middle of the ring facing Maddy-Demmy-Suds, who wouldn’t meet my eyes.
No big deal, though, because out of nowhere materialised Jiang Qing, wife of Chairman Mao Zedong, wearing oven mittens. She’d been sent here by the tripartite Celtic goddess the Morrigan. Jiang’s mittens clipped the ears of Maddy-Demmy-Suds, who then rebounded about the walls and ceiling until there was little left of them but bloody pulp. And that was the end of that. No more facials, no more tongs, or burns from mentholated fags. The Morrigan and Jiang Qing and her miracle-working mittens had saved the day.
Didn’t matter, though, seeing as everything in the hall began to fade. The hall was fading into nothing. My body faded, and then my mind. None of this was real. None of it ever happened. Some well-meaning stranger had nipped back in time to the hospital where I was born and rescued me from a life of rape and torture.
Anyway, the fading hall and mind and life etc. were irrelevant, as they never happened either. The hospital rescue, Andy’s birth, and everything else in this story were all just some guy’s dream.
No, sorry, wrong again. One of the few decent pieces written about this book establishes that along with everything else in the story, even this guy’s dream is itself just the dream of some guy or other you’ll never meet.
Now please watch that ovation at Cannes. Look at their eyes. Look at their eyes.
Reworks material from Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock.
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