The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama's Worst Fiasco 6
Aftermath of the Finale ^ Club Gevurah ^ Commander Holy Cross of the Grand Order of Geniuses of the United States of, for Now, Still Just President Trump
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. Obviously, this is fiction, satire.
Chapter 1 is here.
Art by Patrick McConahay
Aftermath of the Finale
[Ella]
THROUGH THE SEPTEMBER NIGHT there built a reborn sense of American self-worth. It felt like people could almost grasp this new feeling in their hands as it burst out of foamy waves crashing against abandoned fishing boats, as it floated through dynamos in power stations, through flames from workers’ blowtorches, through the showers of fire which came exploding off them into workers’ visors.
It was certainly felt by drivers of trucks as they watched headlights cut the dark ahead of them, the blackness above dotted with stars which twinkled more magickally than they had ever before. The tired faces of these drivers were somehow gleaming with pride even though they knew nothing at all of The Return, a cheerfulness which would stay within them until the last sip of Monster of the night, the last coil of cigarette smoke as it rose proudly from their lungs.
Across most nations of Planet Earth sentient fields white with starlight were dreaming of the most inspiring facts the show had shared, for example that all that is needed to stop fathers battering their daughters to death is a giant teapot which sounds a little like a dead popstar which will helpfully send you back in time to stop this father in his tracks. Millions of people that had never questioned the capability of any FBI Deputy Director to get erections, or sustain them to everyone’s gratification, stood outside their homes and wondered what was happening to their world. Alone or in groups of two or three they later went walking along the pavements and peered up into the sky for clues which might explain this new feeling in the air.
Here in Madrid troubled Andy’s troubled colleague César posted videos on Instagram of his face as it wept with euphoria at a finale party held in Embajadores where everyone there was white and over forty. As he butted his forehead in joy off balloons and disco lights. As he tried to slap a nearby fan into please stopping with the annoyingly euphoric squeals, and was then slapped back and a fight broke out which featured scratching of faces and pulling of each other’s buns. As he took hold of the waxed ends of his moustache and pulled hard and released a primal scream which eventually faded into mumbled difficult to understand insights about his mama. Men in their forties, fifties and sixties charged around the party with their arms out as though they were aeroplanes and then gathered in a circle to clap and cheer, firstly around César’s breakdancing to the whole of The Return’s original soundtrack, and then the impressive feat of whirling like a dervish performed upside-down atop his bun.
Other Return cultists posted videos reacting to the finale, videos in which their face switched from pain and bewilderment to pain and bewilderment as they tried to become something else, anything else, and then at last to a biblical-conversion face with wide eyes and wide mouth which meant the fan could get more stims into him and glory in the finale’s unprecedented and unarguable genius.
Clips were posted of the pained and then impressed and then full of joy faces of Rian Johnson, Damon Lindelof, John Waters, Bryan Fuller and Jim Jarmusch (see if you can spot anything those people have in common). Next you saw clips of beards and sideburns which were stroked by mainstream critics, followed by gradually comprehending nods and grins of éxtasis. An especially happy clip was posted of New Yorker magazine’s Richard Brophy, who had nearly cracked the case when he said of the early episodes that‘Though they’re directed by Lynch, they play mainly as Lynchoid, like the work of a skilled and dutiful imitator’, before he fell back in Line with the rest of the admiring cultists.
On YouTube and Instagram I watched shots of members of the series’ cast and crew and Showtime executives as they made attempts at There is lots to consider and discuss there, but I am late for an appointment faces. Another clip featured the showrunner we took to be David Lynch, as he ignored a handshake of congratulations from Mark Frost, the quiffed legend’s eyes aglow with fire. Just photographic red-eye, was what everyone assumed.
I watched the finale and these clips, did Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®), and exchanged rubs of toes and ankles with Andy and with Trinna whose smallest toe was bigger than my biggest, and with Les who was already shaken up by his first wrestling relapse in many years (on a bohemian who turned up at a GA fancy-dress party as Dougie Jones). Also my sexdoll Chica got up for the occasion in high heels and a suit which showed off her curves, just like the one Chrysta Bell wore as Tammy Preston.
‘Even Yugoslavia’s war,’ Trinna said, ‘and even the first sixteen episodes, they did not have me prepared for the ordeal of that finale, which was like seeing your good friends and family shot one by one.’
Les adding, ‘By a conspicuously quiffed but still stealthy cunt of a sniper.’
We watched a video on my phone in which a choir of men in late middle-age that were wearing lime-green braces and lime-green beanies sang hymns which poured out their feelings of gratitude and awe, and stretched their arms up towards the Master they seemed to believe was far above them in the sky.
We watched a reaction vlog in which a man that called himself Meeckk, a veteran ‘bat-barber’ that worked hanging by his legs from a trapeze, compared his enjoyment of the finale to his tastes in sex.
As soon as some Dom’s tugging my tongue or waxed nasal hair everything becomes quiet. It gets quiet and calm and I’m just here and now. It’s such a liberation. And it was the same when I was watching the finale and the Master and Genius Auteur had me, figuratively speaking, and in the nicest possible sense, splayed across his rack.
We watched another video which was suggested by the algorithms of YouTube. This one was called Season 3 Subspace, which was a phrase we all immediately took to our hearts, and it featured the thoughts of a scent artist called Lex Lux.
I feel like the Master’s holding my brain in his hand. It’s a little lump of jelly and I’ve given it to him as an offering, an expression of my gratitude. I’m far gone in Season 3 subspace and I’m really thrilled and have masses of endorphins in my body and no control at all.
It’s as though the Master is right there in the room with me saying, ‘Now I’m going to undo the murder of Laura Palmer and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. Would that excite you, Lex Lux?’
And I just say, ‘Yes, yes, Master. Please undo Laura’s murder and wipe out everything that’s ever happened in my favourite show. Please do that to me and let me hand my little brain to you in appreciation.’
The next suggested video featured Bradley, a skateboarder older than my papá, whose first experience with Season 3 subspace occurred as he watched Dougie Jones very, very slowly play slot machines for eight screened minutes in Part 3 and each time he wins money shout out a long idiota “Helloo-oo-oo!”.
I felt as though I was seeing myself in the third person. That I was floating outside myself. And to be honest it was damned scary. I thought, what is this? I did feel aroused because I knew the Master and Genius Auteur had written and directed this scene. But also… what on earth is happening? No one had told me Season 3 would mean this many hours spent hovering outside my own skin.
It wasn’t until I went on reddit that I learned there was already a name for what I’d gone through and would keep going through. I’d been in Season 3 subspace.
One time after being engulfed by it I was unable to sleep and instead just ruminated on those slot-machines and skateboarded around and around in my duplex, tearing at my dreads and keffiyeh in bewilderment and shouting out ‘Helloo-oo-oo!’ so frequently and loudly my neighbours called the cops.
When I told the cops about Dougie and Season 3 subspace they misunderstood me. They thought I was complaining about the show and to reassure me said the FBI were investigating how bad it was, at which point I asked them to leave and got my board and in the hallway nailed a bitchin frontside Lynchian 180 pop shuv-it and a kickflip while calling out the night’s loudest and bitchinnest ‘Helloo-oo-oo!’.
Quietly Andy asked me if as I watched The Return I had ever experienced this kind of out-of-body subspace. I shook my head, cuddled into his chest and listened to this needy Conor McGregor’s heart, still pelting away despite our TRE®.
‘Only with you,’ I whispered, wiping a crust of dried tear from his cheek. ‘When you go on about it all the time.’
Next up on YouTube was a man called Kryztle in his early sixties who had three buns on his head, one on top and also a couple of Princess Leias.
The Master does not so much trespass over any well-policed moral boundaries but rather immanently recasts extant taboo-transgression axes and vectors operating within the contemporary media culture. We might thus claim á la Dansereau, Isadore, Delahoussaye, Degrange, Imbert, Eppinette, Sauveterre et al that the Master’s ferociously transgressive tour de force poetically re-arranges extant signs and symptoms in a novel fashion, albeit while granting them new textures, shapes and meanings within the confines of a TV drama that ignites febrile forms of metaphysical cogitation, in my own case at any rate.
Les asked me to replay Kryztle’s comments. When I did this he asked for a second replay. He shut his eyes and made his fingers into a kind of steeple, sí? He finished off his premium ginger ale and tickled Stanley’s throat. He told Andy it was time to find a higher power other than the unhinged hermit.
The next video which was suggested had nothing at all to do with The Return. In this video a submissive man and Proud Boy called Paulo spoke of the links between BDSM, religion and watching the speeches of Donald Trump.
Practising BDSM and watching the president talk to Boy Scouts about millionaires’ orgies on yachts are both rituals for people like me, and the church is built on rituals. In the context of politics God would be the president himself, though he’s also a Dom, obviously, Don the God-Dom, while the Dom priests would be Mr Tucker or Mr McInnes telling us to kneel. The dynamics are similar to the intense rites of passage in shithole countries.
Tuts and rolled eyes at this point from Trinna, who believed Trump was sent to earth by heaven. There was nothing ironic in this, no winks or smirks. Trinna was a true believer of the old school. She put on her sandals and left without saying goodnight.
Beside Paulo’s video was a documentary about outbreaks of speaking in tongues among Morrissey fans that attended group readings of a novella he had written called List of the Lost. One of these fans tumbled about the floor in ecstasy or despair and with bulbous salutation after reading out
Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.
And so began our interest in this astonishing book.
Photos by Sasha Kargaltsev, Gage Skidmore, and Charlie Llewellin.
Club Gevurah
BY 1AM LES AND STANLEY were away off home and Ella off to sleep cuddling Chica, so I went out for a walk. Near the Egyptian temple in the Parque de la Montana I sat on a bench and on Ella’s phone watched more YouTube. The next suggestion was Hang Weights From Your Nipples and You’ll See The Return and Morrissey in a Blinding White New Light.
The suggestions beside it turned out to have nothing to do with BDSM and were instead just US Manbams, militiamen, Mozheads, and their enemies discussing Mr Lynch or Mr Trump, or due to the mysteries of Ella’s search history sometimes Mr Morrissey too, three extremely wealthy white boomers with legendary hair who their fans believed took no nonsense from no one, the chat accompanied at times by supporting clips and screenshots and that thrash rock many Americans still have such a weakness for.
I began to take notes and check out and contribute to the recommended sites and groups and forums, learning as I went along unpleasant facts about Mr Morrissey and the hermit who was now my former higher power. By 5am I who still believed he’d made Season 3 had an inventory of how these three so-bad-it’s-good idols and their respective cult followings resembled one another. They became the rules for admission to what Ella would later, much later, name Club Gevurah^^.
The three men of Club Gevurah weren’t exactly progressives. Mr Morrissey on Chinese people: ‘a sub-species’; on Adolf Hitler: ‘left-wing’. Mr Lynch on Travellers: ‘This country’s in pretty bad shape when human scum can walk across your lawn, and they put you in jail if you shoot them.’
The three of them appeared to have a questionable attitude, to say the least, towards women.
This trinity had each apparently viewed themselves as among the few decent sorts in a world overrun by human scum, and had frequently exhibited other kinds of Where’s-my-Great-Pyramid? self-regard. Their over-confidence was so extreme it verged on the monstrous.
They had all ended up cheesy to the core of their being.
They appeared to be awed and fascinated to an almost impossible degree by their own thoughts. It’s necessary to appreciate in particular the volume of Mr Trump’s. He was swamped by his amphetaminised thoughts, drowning in them, and this was why he was so rambling, distracted, and berserk. As with the rest of Club Gevurah he gave the impression he’d hardly any distance from his compulsive cheesy thinking. It was his Almighty God because it was his everything, and like every plectoid with zero humility, he believed the world and his thinking about it were the same thing. He believed that the territory and the map, or his map, were the same.
They sometimes failed to weigh their words, to say the least, before they spoke in public.
The three titans shunned corporate liberal culture and politics, supposedly, but were in fact just the glorification and magnification of many of the culture’s lower tendencies. That is, they were garish love-them-or-hate-them trollish grotesques.
That is, they were like characters out of pro-wrestling: Mr Lynch with his hammy act as a hermit-bumpkin-guru, and his gimmicky overactive fingers; Mr Morrissey with his ridiculous Union Jack-waving, For Britain-touting struts and huffs and puffs, and buttock-rubs in the faces of opponents and the ringside crowd; Mr Trump the first US president to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, in recognition of his decades of dealings with the corporate wrestling world.
And compulsive watching of Mr Trump or The Return or reading List of the Lost often felt not unlike hours sat in front of pro-wrestling. It didn’t do you much good—‘Feels as though your soul’s gorging on Cheetos,’ admitted one reluctant Return addict—but you couldn’t pull yourself away from the travesty of the human condition on your screen.
As well as Mr Trump and his advisers crafting performances to mould reactions in audiences, in politics the equivalents of wrestling’s promoters were commentators within the media. These smarts focused on winners and losers and matters of strategy, rather than on substantive issues, e.g. Mr Trump’s plea for cash to fund broadcasts of The Return on giant screens along his Wall resulted in op-ed pages that considered the message he was trying to send tactically, who it was intended for, and especially the likelihood of tactical success, not on the damage these broadcasts might do to actual Mexicans.
In the world of Return fandom the role of promoter was played not only by Mr Lynch and Mark Frost and Showtime’s publicists, but also by critics in corporate media. And just as wrestling and political commentators focused mainly on who would win a particular contest, so these critics declared that The Return was ‘the best television series of the year’, ‘guaranteed to clear up at the Emmys’, ‘the TV drama to end all TV dramas’, or, inevitably, ‘genius’, but said nothing regarding what it’s trying to communicate overall and ignored its obvious defects. Fans meanwhile spent more time typing extra e’s into genius than saying anything about the series’ Trumpish attitude to rape.
None of the three appeared to be the greatest of listeners.
In public at least, they seldom really laughed or smiled in response to anyone else. The most they could manage, it seemed, was to force a smirk, or a pursing of the lips that was nearer to a wince. But a genuine smile sent out to the world in response to it? Hardly ever. Their self-amusement appeared unlimited, however, resulting in tiresome amounts of archness and trollish games about whether or not they were joking.
In public they were often surrounded by subspace hangers-on who laughed too loudly at what they misconstrued as their idol’s jokes. These hangers-on told everyone else ‘Don’t take him so literally. He’s just kidding on, just playing around.’ But veins throbbed in their temples if you doubted their hero’s authenticity. They’d now insist that ‘He tells it like it is.’
The cultists were more liable to be men than women, and were mostly white boomers and gen xers with heads wasted by lifelong infantilism, cheesiness and other so-bad-it’s-good. They sometimes admitted they hadn’t a clue what their great man was on about, but they still felt qualified to bluff everyone else when it came to words or actions we could see with our own eyes, and as with the rest of their fanaticism were egged on in this by fellow marks within el zumbido’s bubbles of plecto.
They engaged in many other forms of mental contortion to defend the indefensible and exonerate their idol at any cost. They defended his every word or act with vein-throbbing earnestness but if they discovered he was in fact only kidding pretended they knew this all along. But don’t you dare say he’s inauthentic.
If you were lucky they’d give you a shrug and Well, I just know he’s great and that’s the end of it. Some can just see it and others can’t, i.e. the relative serenity and innocence of kayfabe 1. Less lucky and it would be denial that angry it shot past demeaning and shocking to funny then back around again to demeaning. They slapped and punched and spat at people who criticised their idol, and in some cases sent them death threats or bombs, turned off their walkie-talkie, or stole hundreds of euro from them. Like many cultists they threw fits of denial when called cultists. This fury implied an awareness in some of them, however subtle or temporary, that they’d been conned. In other words it was kayfabe 2.
But it was also kayfabe 3. This desire to shrug off the stale smirking knowingness of postmodern kayfabe 2 and to once more play the clueless mark was at the heart of these three cults and a good deal of the rest of modern entertainment and politics. The cults devoted to Ex on the Beach, The Crown, and Boris Johnson were kayfabe 2, of course, but for many admirers they were also kayfabe 3, as were those devoted to UK Unionism and Gove. It doesn’t get much more kayfabe 3 than the George Square riot after the independence referendum, or roaring your delight at Gove’s prances around the ring and sneery buttock/face rubs.
The complex relationship between wrestling’s fans and TV coverage was mirrored by that between these politicians’ supporters and their campaigns. Both exhibited kayfabe 2 refusal of suspension of disbelief, and at the same time generation of belief, of marking out. These supporters knew that backstage there was a team of speechwriters, brand consultants and stylists, and like wrestling fans they analysed these influences, not to distinguish between what was real and what merely performed, but to find the purpose behind each specific fake performance.
When Mr Gove said of his post-Brexit leadership bid ‘I compare it to a group of people standing outside a collapsing building, wondering who is going to rescue a child inside. I thought: well, I don’t think I’ve got either the strength or the speed for this, but as I looked around, I thought, God, I’m at least as strong and at least as fast as the others. I’ve got to try to save the child’, did he want people to forget he himself campaigned for Brexit and so helped collapse the building, or was it cynically funnier all round, so-bad-it’s-good funny, if they knew this perfectly well but like him didn’t care?
Or who chose the Village People’s ‘Macho Man’ for this rally entrance, the obese orator with the byzantine dyed-blond hair and veteran-pornstar complexion and teeth, or someone else? If someone else, how sincere a choice was this? If insincere, if it was in fact supposed to mock the orator, was he aware of this, and if so did he even care?
Such multilevelled teases meant he could level with his rallygoers about his tactics ahead of the 2016 election, laughing at them and saying, ‘You people were vicious, violent, screaming, “Where’s the Wall? We want the Wall!” Screaming “Prison! Prison! Lock her up!” I mean you are going crazy!’ The chant, he told them, ‘plays great before the election. Now we don’t care.’ And his supporters, many of them dolled up in cheesy Village People-style leathers, military uniforms, hardhats, and cowboy boots and Stetsons, laughed along with the troll-in-chief. Only toothless hick dupes believed any of that garbage, they knew, even if they themselves had chanted along.
And this was the spirit in which many of its cultists enjoyed being mocked by The Return’s jokes about it being so uninteresting it resembles watching paint dry or watching an empty glass box, or the show naming Dougie Jones’ son after Jim Jones to mock the Manbams’ eager consumption of its Kool-Aid. And it was the spirit too in which they claimed to enjoy the series’ toying with the fourth wall. Just as a neo-fascist rally or a wrestling event needed its audience to perform their role as marks, the trainwreck needed Césars to behave like marks whose disbelief was suspended, even though it never was.
But what mattered wasn’t just the involvement of fans of Mr Trump, Mr Gove, The Return or List of the Lost—as they turned up to rallies, wore tee shirts featuring grateful rescued children, tuned in each week, ploughed through another paragraph—but also their enthusiasm. Even their idols’ kayfabe 2 cynicism and disdain couldn’t kill off their audiences’ fervour, because these fans were marking out.
A vital element of political support, the viewing of TV drama, and the reading of fiction was emotional engagement. And rallies for Mr Trump or Vox did or do engage supporters’ emotions, with their fellow supporters’ giddy enthusiasm for the style at the podium, inflammatory, faux-naive, and also genuinely childish, giving smarts the leeway in which to mark out. In a similar way, viewing The Return or group-reading Mr Morrissey’s novella alongside the enthralled yelps of fellow veteran boulevardiers gave fans the social cover in which they could mark out too.
In each case there was an atmosphere of faux-naivety, genuine reverence, loss of limits, loss of standards, loss of self, gleeful delirium, and forgiveness or even welcoming of one another’s degrading behaviour. Celebrants occupied a subspace in which it was acceptable to merge with the mass and screech, chant, bow, or whirl your chosen-idol-themed underwear like a lasso to communicate your submission before your hallowed orator, writer-director-producer-star or musician-litterateur, and to openly express contempt for political opponents or the series’ or novella’s doubters, both verbally (‘Jews will not replace us!’ or ‘Send those sceptics anthrax!’) and visually (tee shirts that said Make Aryans Genocidal Again, or Them Philistines Are Weak Sisters, Brothers), a kayfabe 3 in which even the most cynical could lose themselves in the moment and revel in the role of mark.
In Will Self’s Great Apes the main character Simon Dykes wakes up from a bender to find that all the people he knows have turned into apes. At first he refuses to believe this and keeps telling himself he’s lost his mind, but then something snaps within him and he capitulates to the new reality and accepts that everyone, himself included, really is an ape—if you can’t beat them join them.
This submission, the novel argues, shows that the mind always seeks homeostasis, that however good or bad or otherwise unusual things are we can’t view them that way forever. Think of how you get used to wearing a mask and hand-cleanser to go shopping, or to bedding a thermoplastic elastomer doll, or to the parasite class re-establishing full-spectrum dominance. Or of too-druggy parties where everyone’s speaking nonsense and you try not to and you try some more, but the drugs are in control and finally you just give in, submit, sick of the inner battle, submit to kayfabe 3, and now you’re well and truly speaking nonsense because of the relief it brings and how liberated you feel from the expectation to make any sense, and why can’t I do this all the time, you find yourself asking the empty room.
Kayfabes 2 and 3, the prevailing states for people in recovery, wrestling fans, Mozheads, Césars, supporters of Mr Trump and Vox, druggies who succumb to talking nonsense, people who screw sexdolls, and maybe even for most faux-naive smart-cum-marks enduring the perpetual con of pre-apocalyptic Total Capitalism: it’s a little odd that we just accept these kayfabes, is it not? That moment when you give in and speak a load of drivel, or tell yourself this plastic doll you’re forlornly spasming inside really loves you, it’s not a particularly proud moment in your life, is it? People who live under totalitarian regimes have similar problems, if even more onerous—exploitation, imminent environmental collapse, pervasive lies, no likely alternatives—but largely speaking their reaction hasn’t been the glazed-eyed half-drowsy half-hyper-aware self-loathing 4channish cheese of kayfabes 2 and 3.
Hard to shake the sense that they’re yet another sign we’ve lost our way. Like handing nuclear weaponry to a man whose very essence is so-bad-it’s-good-no-it’s-actually-demonic, humans wandering around in kayfabes 2 and 3 about perpetual lies and environmental convulsions were not in the entities’ original plans for our world. (‘Meanwhile if you wanna see the entities shake up the Ultraverse with laughter, laugh so loud you think the Diamond might shatter,’ Ella used to say, ‘remind them that when it comes to what really matters, the entities’ scripted manipulations of this world of ours, almost every mark on earth is still lost in kayfabe 1’).
To finally spell it out, then: as with all cultists the relation of these followers to their idol was that of addiction. They’d long since lost the ability to choose whether or not to venerate the great man and his works. Seldom if ever did they entertain the fourth option, which we might call kayfabe 4. To walk away. To sober up.
And this is why our most pervasive form of defeat, the barely acknowledged submission to the overclass encouraged in us since childhood, matters in this context and many others, because incrementally it convinces you that existence means permanent heartsore frustration, irrelevance and defeat, that no escape or spine-straightening’s possible, which makes you forget there’s any such state as kayfabe 4, and therefore you believe the best you can ever hope for is 1, 2 or 3, to keep putting up with the contempt of Lynch, Trump, Johnson, Gove, Morrissey, Jorge and other bosses, fossil-fuel industries, and the like, or your boyfriend coming in your face, or most mothers and fathers putting no porn filter on their kids’ devices, since you’ve no other option since this is just the world we live in so if you can’t beat them join them.
And if this same civilisation continues to boast that it’s one of the greatest in history, this civilisation that destroyed the planet in our lifetimes, then why not get down on your knees and stick your tongue out yet again and join them across the Line in their sty of lies, capitulate to the giggling sociopathic cynical dissolution of it all, get those SSRIs in your synapses, that meth in your lungs, that rape porn on your phone, and declare your favourite moment in cinema a child-abuser’s comeuppance played for laughs?
Unsurprisingly, then, these three cults were also full of shit. Post-truth doesn’t come close to describing the indoctrination, brainfog, brain-damage. Future historians need to understand the slurry these people had flooding through their mouths and typing fingers.
And the final thing I learned was this: that no matter how hard you tried, how much your gut told you it must be, how much 3-FEA and 4-HO-MiPT you’d taken to argue the case now that Les isn’t around, it was not in the end plausible to put in the same league as these three titans Scotland’s very own Michael Gove. He seems cursed to always fall just short of glory, doesn’t he? So near and yet so far. Hitchcock at the Oscars, No Cigar Roth at WrestleMania, Scotland in the World Cup.
It’s shite being Scottish. We are so shite that even when we had those world-class footballers in the ‘70s we still couldn’t get over the Line to the latter stages of tournaments. And even when we put everything we have into it, a Manhattan Project of effort and national will, and produced an undeniably world-class diddy in Mr Gove, an A-bomb’s worth of diddiness, we’re so shite we still couldn’t quite get him up there among the big boys.
And the sad thing was that until that last-minute discovery of Mr Morrissey’s novella Gove would have been a certainty for a top-three finish. So far and yet so near. Virtually every rule for admission was passed with flying colours by our Michael. And some ebullience and devil-may-care and his hair might have been up there in renown with that of the big three, and even more offensive and he’d have inspired similar fervour in his followers. But there he was, patiently waiting for one of the trinity to drop dead or somehow come to their senses.
These are just the conclusions I can remember from that night. There were many more, now lost in the fog of all those chemicals. It was around 6am when it hit me that I was deep into the YouTube rabbithole down which so many people with good intentions, or so they believed, were sooner or later funnelled into falling for the politics of the hard right.
Of course I wasn’t yet all the way down the hole. If I reached up I could still grab a tuft of grass, I felt, and pull myself out. But I’d been shaken enough to wonder if this was why the reactionary loner made The Return and the reactionary singer-songwriter published his novella: with the secret co-operation of YouTube to send their fans and haters alike into the waiting arms of fascists.
Reworks material from David S. Moon’s ‘Kayfabe, Smartdom and Marking Out: Can ProWrestling Help Us Understand Donald Trump?’
Commander Holy Cross of the Grand Order of Geniuses of the United States of, for Now, Still Just President Trump
[Ella]
FOR MANY MONTHS FOLLOWING THE FINALE pride and relief kept filling the skies of the world, flowing on through streams in hills, thundering all the way down past hotels in plunges which were magickal. These wild and glad feelings swept on across the whole planet and made themselves felt in art galleries, museums, nightclubs, boutique hotels, cupboards for podcasting, psychiatric wards, prisons, terminals for buses, oilrigs, and toxic dumps. This new magick coated the earth with sparkles and painted every bit of continental space with sparkling glamour, went on painting, painting the marvellously revived lands of this world of ours in the months after The Return bowed out in glory.
At long last the United States of America had given the planet a work which did not merely match Don Quixote and The Divine Comedy and other epics but zoomed away past them in every way which mattered—nice to see the country regain its pride like this, after all those years of not being Great. To thank David Lynch, who was of course possessed by the Demonic Twin, in June 2018 the president hosted a parade at Washington DC’s National Mall.
While everyone waited for the auteur to appear that day, the tone of mind of the world reached its highest ever point. Entities gathered round the crystal bowl of the horizon to share 10D popcorn and Maltesers and watch what unfolded.
Along the balcony of the president’s palace this large group got ready to express the delight they felt: Jeffrey Epstein, the curatorial staff from MoMA, Richard Brophy of The New Yorker, Martha P. Nochimson, Franck Boulègue and other Cahiers du cinéma writers, Pablo Casado, Rudy Guiliani, Prince Andrew, Jim Jarmusch, Damon Lindelof, John Waters, Sam Esmail, Bryan Fuller, Rian Johnson, Ron Jeremy, and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby that had been especially released for this occasion. Sí, this was the day that the Demonic Twin would meet for the first time much of the cast of Season 4. It was also the first meeting of the future Club Gevurah and also the waiting list for membership.
Then onto the Mall stepped the auteur’s auteur in red pumps, red ankle-socks, and not a lot else. And exhibiting an erect red penis hung with minúsculas red bells.
Great inward breaths from the crowds now as this red figure dashed up the Mall to give everyone a good look at the sight of him, and a good listen to the cheerful bells.
Then down, down the Mall this tinkling figure dashed with one hand placed upon a hip and one waving Howdy at wellwishers, the exertion of it all turning that celebrated craggy face an attractive fiery red.
On the palace balcony there came gleaming a pornographic grin from the president as the auteur raced towards him, gorgeous as a god, extraordinariamente fackeen red by now, shooing packs of barking strays spellbound by those merry tinkles.
Then the president, who was cheered on by the crowds in rapture, placed on his head a red cap with the words MADE AMERICA GEEENIUS AGAIN. As everyone else did the same as this, he invited David Lynch, as he believed it was, to join him and his fellow celebrators up there on the balcony, and the beyond-doubts erect auteur was watched on screens across the world in patriotic, red-blooded apotheosis, face bright red in a red cap and a red coat which was pinned with the red ribbon of Commander Holy Cross of the Grand Order of Geniuses of the United States of, for Now, Still Just President Trump.
The Twin waited for silence from the crowds, from the celebrities, and finally the bells. Then it smiled the repugnante sneering smile of a heel in wrestling and said into the waiting microphones: ‘President Trump could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much.’
Reworks material from Charlotta Carlstrom’s ‘Spiritual experiences and altered states of consciousness—Parallels between BDSM and Christianity’ and from David H. Fleming’s Unbecoming Cinema: Unsettling Encounters with Ethical Event Films.
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