Spencer despises and envies his more successful contemporaries and friends. He has kept true to an ethos derived from high modernism and trash pop and has no time for anything that smacks of sentimentality or storytelling. Films are art and they are garbage and he disparages anything that aims for the in-between. He has seen the cleverest animator of his acquaintance, who had made beautiful suprematist miniatures that rigorously separated themselves from reference and representation, make a fortune from TV commercials and, ultimately, Hollywood. Others had become hacks, others had given up on the form and, or (or both), on themselves. Spencer had stuck to it. We admire your bravery, his friends tell him. Spencer had long ago realised that when people say brave they usually mean stupid.
‘Who’s the flower guy?’ Spencer asks, when he knows perfectly well who his father means.
‘You know. Nick. Dick. The one with all the write-ups in the Times.’
‘Nick? I can’t think of who you mean.’ ‘Ah. Forget about it.’
‘The point about the movies,’ Spencer says, ‘is that what everyone wants is an idea that can be summed up in one line, or less. The pioneer was Twins. People still talk about that with reverence. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are twins! You’ve got the idea, you’ve got the stars, you’ve got the poster, it’s all there, in one dumb-stupid sentence.’
‘Schwarzenegger, yeah. She’s good.’
‘I happen to think,’ Spencer says, with a pomposity that sounds awful to his own ears, ‘that if a film can be summed up in one sentence then there really isn’t much point to making it. Why bother?’
The lies that movie cameras tell, that the field of vision is as exclusive as the shape of a frame, that no one feels pain, that everything is surface, that things can make sense.
‘What’s the point of making a film if it’s not going to change the world?’ Spencer says.
‘Maybe because people enjoy it?’
Sometimes, still, his father can summon up a difficult acuity. Spencer responds by being merciful.
‘Rick Violet. That’s who you’re asking about.’ ‘That’s right. You still not talking?’
The last time that Spencer and Rick Violet had fallen out was when they were each surprisingly featured in a newspaper’s end-of-year round-up opining as to the five best films of the year. Spencer was seldom asked to do this kind of thing; Rick seldom agreed to it. Rick was not featured on Spencer’s list, which he had tried to compile scrupulously, and then lost the list he was making and forgot the spellings of the directors’ names and had to improvise on the phone to a subeditor.
Rick’s choices had been shrewdly advised. The reason that Spencer took offence was that his own most recent film was on the list, and its selection could have been made because Rick’s shrewd adviser wanted something that could qualify as an obscure gem that hardly anyone would have heard of, or Rick himself had included it as an act of patronising generosity, and Spencer couldn’t decide which was more odious.
‘No. Well yeah, we’re sort of friends again.’
Shamefully, a week before his departure from London, he had called Rick Violet. Spencer had been running bad online, his Visa card was just above its maximum, and there was enough money left in his overdraft to pay either his rent or buy flights and rent a New York hotel room for three days. The Short Beach Film Festival would offer him hospitality in Atlantic City but was not able to pay for him to get there. They assured him that he would understand. The only four people in the world who would give him the money he needed were the last people he would want to ask—his father, his producer, his almost ex-wife, and Rick Violet.
Just to test the water, he told himself, when in truth it was to toy with humiliation and shame, to taunt himself with his own feelings of inadequacy and dependence, he called up Rick, because he was the one he liked the least of the four. An assistant answered the phone, as an assistant always did. Rick’s assistants were invariably women, invariably beautiful, invariably in love with Rick. The only variety was the identity of the assistant; over the past few years, Spencer had never seen or spoken to the same woman twice. He left a message that he’d called, and a few hours later Rick was on the line.
‘I’m having a little party. It would be great if you could come,’ Spencer had said.
‘Birthday?’
‘No, just a party. No particular occasion. You know, drinks, people, maybe show some movies. It’s safe, I won’t be showing any of mine.’
‘Hey. Compadre. I love your movies. You know I’m your number-one fan.’
This wasn’t entirely false. Complacent in the knowledge that he was fabulously successful and Spencer a hardly-heard-of purist, Rick could indulge and patronise and, it was true, appreciate Spencer’s work, which made it all the more galling.
‘Yes, well, likewise,’ Spencer said. ‘It would be nice if you could make it.’
‘That’s so sweet of you. I’ll be there.’
It was a safe invitation. There was no chance that Rick would attend a party of Spencer’s, even if he were actually hosting one.
The conversation would move, as Spencer knew it was destined to, on to Rick’s casually worn glory. First, though, as if interested, Rick asked Spencer how things were in his world.
‘Oh. You know. A little rough. Trying to raise some money.’
‘You know you can count on me for contributions. You know that.’
‘I know that, Rick. I know.’
One of the subsidiary agonies of talking to Rick was the effect it had on Spencer’s speech patterns. He adopted the bogus style of dialogue of a character in one of Rick’s own awful films, reiterating vaguely significant phrases, calling Rick repeatedly by his name.
This was it now, when he might ask, state a figure that Rick would enjoy rounding up to the nearest five thousand. He could hear in the silence of the telephone Rick’s offer of charity waiting—well, not exactly silence, a hubbub of activity, people talking on telephones, carrying things, the industrial whirl of Rick’s success.
‘Tell me, how’s it all going with you, Rick?’
And here it would come, the litany of triumphs, the different projects on the go, most of it glossed over as if it was annoying, Spencer would understand, as few people could, the pain of the incidental, when all Rick wanted, all he ever wanted, was to make movies. And then, in the midst of this, one clunking moment—just when Spencer would be feeling that maybe he was too hard on Rick, that Abbie and all the others could be right, that Rick was a nice guy, who had talent, so why begrudge him any of his luck?—he would drop into the conversation something so tactlessly self-regarding that at least one positive effect of their conversation would be that Spencer would be supported in his resentments and spites.
‘It’s good, it’s good.’ Rick had been saying something about a recent triumph in a festival that Spencer had never been invited to, but was now segueing into a topic that he expected Spencer to be familiar with. ‘But you’ve probably been following all this, I shouldn’t bore you with it again.’
‘Well I’ve been busy. I’m off to a festival shortly myself.’
‘Cannes? I’m getting kind of tired of that. But I guess I’ll probably see you there. You in competition? Or Un Certain Regard?’
Rick’s French accent was casually, affectedly poor, with just a few glimpses of its available perfection. ‘Uh, no. Not Cannes. America.’
‘Oh, Ann Arbor. I love that festival. A lot of people don’t get how cool it is.’
‘Um. No. East Coast.’
‘Well that’s great, Spence. Terrific. I didn’t even know there was a festival