They'll tell you to be a star, Sam Bones, to croak nightmares and dive from balconies overlooking crumbled city-scapes. The roads are empty. Somehow, it's always night. The world is always televised: microwaves, stereos, VHS players, plates, dolls, a brand new car. To stare in horror. To confront the mentor-self of your twisted mirror gaze. This is a film about dreams, about the fever pitch of success, about breasts pressed against mouths. About skin and sweat. And tears.
Turn on the lights.
Sink your eyeballs into a room of television monitors. This is the fluctuation of a videodrome apocalypse. An abandoned Los Angeles where only the screens are real. "He only wears a doll-like mask." Lips. A grizzly screen. We already know who did it. This film is not a mystery. It's a sleaze-drenched assemblage of unease and jazz. The purest jazz squeezed down your throat. But you're already seated on-set, already waiting for the empty room to be filled by the gaze of the unseen world. There is nothing left to do but laugh. And hack. And wander the empty halls. She's here.
We have become infomercials, brutal murder victims, and nightmare men in white shirts who convince us we are not who we think we are. Serial killer as star. Star as a trembling panic man, a maniac who still longs to dream, longs to become more than a news blip. Are the victims at home? Find them. Is there blood on the door? Cut to the news anchor. Create a culture of fear. Cultivate the fear of a society at war. This is Star Time. The diners are mostly vacant. The water sits full on the counter. Shoot the lead from a paranoid angle. Capture the dialogue in cuts. In hushed whispers and spoken distance. Language does not suffice. The pursuit of dreams turns to a fury of violence.
A mask conceals the haunt of a city of lines and asphalt. The walls are mere wood. The entire semblance of who you believed you were is a facade. Be alive. Be a white wall, sun-drenched on the back of an apartment. An electric breaker. A large abandoned ice skating rink. Blue walls. The television set of a show given-up, forgotten.
They will never understand. Let them be struck with the grandeur of solitude. And filmed blood. To rise as a star. "The eyes of the world are upon you." Clack. Clang the pipes. And become a jazz synthesizer. Become the dream of a night you'll never relive as a woman's head passes by the frame. Planks of wood tumble, clatter. A blank white wall. An industrial fan.
We dream to watch ourselves. To become flesh and raw skin. To become the wonder-eyed caricatures of our own demise.
And shine forever, dimly - on screens wet with blood.
