The last star of the Underground Angels is dead. They were poets. They were heroes. Their brilliant writing and charismatic public performances changed the course of two generations.
Now the executors of the estates of the three central Angels meet to discuss future publication projects. In the public consciousness these Angels are forever connected, so it makes sense.
There's a problem. The America that they created, the Angels that is, has gone; now it's the America they were born into--more or less. Puritanical narrow-minded paranoid America that mistrusts its neighbour and condemns all cultural variations. A job, a mortagage, a good wife, two kids and a car--it's the only way. Any assertion of alternative lifestyles or psychologies is viciously condemned.
There's a problem with the Angels too. Ray Monette, the first to die, was a drunk, an anti-Semite, burned crosses on his front lawn, had Oedipal problems, denied parenting a daughter who was his precise double. Axel Silver, the last of the Angels, had been a teacher and he'd made public pronouncements that sleeping with his under-age students helped them to learn. Monte Merriman, the third Angel, had murdered his own wife and spent years of his life hooked on heroin and having homosexual affairs.
The executors agree that if some of these facts aren't swept under the carpet , the present vigorous sales of books related to the Angels will be drastically affected.The current socio-political climate just won't tolerate such deviance. Besides, those traits in their character were unpleasant, distasteful: why celebrate them? So (with possible atmospheric rain pouring against the windows, but no cigarette smoke curling around in the air above their heads), they draw up a list of unsavoury habits and opinions and actions demonstrated by the three Angels and begin to calculate strategies for denying them/ suppressing evidence of them. Certain letters will not be included in collected correspondence. The early part of Monette's life and Silver's life will be emphasised in publications, because they weren't quite so nasty then. The latter part of Merriman's life when he was off the junk and not killing anybody and only interested in cats will be emphasised. Writers and commentators on the scene who acknowledge the aspects of the Angels that the executors have agreed to suppress will be blacklisted and, wherever necessary, sued until they are begging for change on streetcorners.
The movie will show that the executors believe in what they are doing, in their Munich pact for the literary underground. The actors must not indulge in any villainous stereotyping as in James Bond or Die Hard films because the fact that the executors are nice Ivy League boys who think all this is perfectly reasonable will add to the eerie sinister impact on the viewer. If these sonsofbitches don't even know that what they're doing is rancidly corrupt, how far gone are their souls?
The director and screenwriter, of course, will have to find a way to bridge the credibility gap, because obviously this is a fantasy, an urban intellectual fantasy subsuming elements of classical horror and re-presenting them in a deliberately under-charged way. Nothing like this could ever happen in real life. The job of those involved in the production will be to convince people that it could.
No comments:
Post a Comment