Popcorn

Chapter Seven

A hundred miles south, in the university lecture hall Bruce and Professor Chambers sat beneath the same frozen image of blood geysering from the fat trucker’s loins. There was applause from the students, which Bruce graciously acknowledged. He felt back on safe ground. Surely the senile, bearded old back issue sitting opposite him could not object to such a vigorous and empowering piece of filmmaking. It transpired, however, that he could.

‘Don’t you think that’s rather a clichéd scene?’ Professor Chambers enquired.

Bruce could scarcely believe the effrontery of the odious little gnome. Who did he think he was? In fact, and more to the point, who was he? A teacher. What did he do that was so great?

‘Have you any idea how much I earn?’ Bruce wanted to shout. ‘Are you aware that the Academie Française has given me a dinner?’

He didn’t say that but he might as well have done. He hit the tweedy old jerk with everything he had.

‘Cliché? Cliché?’ he said, jumping to his feet. ‘Well excuuuuuse me if I opine that the meanest, most derivative cliché I ever produced is more original than everything you have ever said plus everything you have ever done.’

It was a mistake. It was meant to be a joke, sort of, but it didn’t come out that way at all. Bruce had hoped to look sarky and disrespectful, the street punk in a leather jacket and pointytoed boots thumbing his nose at authority. He forgot that he was not a punk but an impossibly rich, Oscarnominated director, whereas Professor Chambers was a public servant on forty grand a year. Bruce was Goliath and the professor was David, not the other way round. The kids in the hall began to whisper to each other. Sweat trickled down Bruce’s back and into the the top of his black 501s. He had let himself get angry; getting angry was uncool and he knew it. He was supposed to be the guy who didn’t care. He realized that he must get a grip, bite the bullet, chew the carpet, go home later and kick the dog.

‘Just kidding,’ he said, with a littleboy smile. ‘You don’t “dis” the prof, right?’

The students relaxed a little. Bruce had concentrated all his considerable personal charm into this jokey semi-apology and it worked – for the students. Not, though, for the professor, who was looking at the screen again and shaking his head sadly. The woman in hot pants was still astride the trucker, the broken bottle was still embedded in his loins, the geyser of blood still hung in midair like a cruel red spike.

‘I’m supposed to feel all right about this piece of violent soft porn because the woman triumphs, am I?’

‘Well of course,’ said Bruce. ‘It’s immensely important that the female protagonist is shown in a befittingly empowering light.’

This provoked a smattering of applause from some of the young women in the audience. Bruce was even gratified to hear a couple of whoops.

‘Right on!’ shouted a girl with a ring through her nose.

‘Hmmm.’ Professor Chambers sucked on his pen as if it was a pipe. ‘You can have no idea how tired I am of filmmakers like you cynically cloaking their salacious, smutty entertainments in some laughably twodimensional antisexist agenda.’

This was getting silly. Bruce was a guest for Christ’s sake! When was this nasty old man going to give him a break? Bruce took further refuge in selfrighteous feminism, the modern equivalent of hiding behind a woman’s petticoats. ‘Maybe you find images of strong women threatening?’

‘Right on!’ shouted the girl with the nosering. Bruce wanted to kiss her. Fortunately he didn’t; had he done so she would have brought a civil action against him for rape. Professor Chambers did not seem even to have heard her.

‘I do not consider a woman who deliberately titillates some ignorant and unpleasant oaf merely to bury a broken bottle in his private parts, strong, I consider her psychotic.’

‘Listen, pal, a woman can dress and dance any way she wants.’

‘Any way you want. This is your fantasy, Mr Delamitri. The whole scenario is a fiction created by you, and the actress playing the role dressed as you wanted her to and did what you told her to do.’

The young woman with the nosering kept quiet. They all did. The debate was getting out of their league. They liked things simple, and an uncomfortable suspicion was dawning on them that what their professor and their hero were discussing was not simple at all.

‘Yes, I created it,’ Bruce admitted, ‘but what did I create it from? These things are going on out there.’ He was no longer concerned with looking cool. He had a point to make, a position to defend. He wanted to get through to the professor in the same way the professor had got through to him. ‘The connection between sex and violence is for real. It’s out there and it’s happening, USAwide. That isn’t my fault. I didn’t start it and I didn’t kill anyone. I just hold up the mirror.’

‘Rather a flattering mirror, isn’t it?’

‘Excuse me?’

The professor let him have it. ‘Why do your murderers and psychopaths have to be so attractive, Mr Delamitri? So cool? It seems to me that if the scene we have just watched had involved the nearrape of a plain woman, a fat, boring woman, then you would probably have let her get raped. Except there never would have been such a scene because the whole purpose of the entire grubby business was to show us a beautiful woman in a state of provocative nearundress-’

Bruce did not let him finish. Chambers had walked into a trap. Bruce had heard this ancient, purile argument many times before, and he was in a position to crush it with the utter contempt it deserved.

‘You ever see a Greek statue of an ugly chick? You ever see a painting of a battle when the guys didn’t look cool and noble? Where the blood didn’t look exciting and seductive? Artists make pictures and stories. That’s what we do. Dull, ugly people leading boring lives devoid of sex and adventure do not make good stories. I’m not a journalist. It is no part of my duty to report life. I am an artist. My duty is to my own muse, my creative self. I take what I want in order to create what I like.’

‘Really? I thought you said you were a mirror.’

‘I ‘m… I’m…’ Bruce knew when to throw in the towel. ‘Actually, I’m running kind of late here.’

In the motel cabin the toughlooking guy had returned from the bathroom, grabbed a beer from the minibar and lain down again beside the girl.

‘That sure was a fine motion picture,’ he said. ‘I may just have to watch it one more time.’

‘Oh, honey,’ said the girl, ‘can’t we go out now? Do something?’

‘You want to go to prison, sugar pie?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘You want to burn in the chair? You want to feel your eyeballs melting before you’re even dead?’

‘Don’t go saying stuff like that!’ Suddenly there were tears on her pale cheeks.

‘Then just you go get me another burger and let me watch my movie. Cos what I am working on here is our salvation.’