32: Evolution

Rousseau and Marengo Part 2 --------------------------- Tommy Rousseau, the movie star who perhaps best defined the term ‘megaration’ with his seemingly endless expansion, in ego and in urge, the Tommy we all knew, from The Outsiders to Inner Planets, a lone wolf in all but pelt. Actor; director; screenwriter; stuntman; pilot; pioneer, and in his lost decade, low ranking apprentice to the spirit of OTIS. But what was the secret of his success. How exactly was it that he came to be regarded by so many as ‘the real deal’? The truth may be a little more gamey than some fans would have it, who, like many an unsuspecting tourist shovelling down their steak hache, are contentedly oblivious to the significance of the ‘chevaline.’ It was during the filming of the epic battlefield costume drama First Consul, that Tommy and Tommaso met. Tommy, who appeared to have been born to play the role of Napoleon, perfectly filled his velveteen breeches as he strummed the line between anger and honour. The boyish gold buttoned emperor looked to have come straight out of a painting by Ingres. Tommaso, who had found such a strong foothold in the industry by this point, was known to many simply as The Fall Guy, the emphasis weighing on the definite article. And he, in his turn, appeared to have been born to play Tommy. Their likeness was in many respects uncanny. So much so that the director would often confuse the two on set and wasted reel upon reel in a costly comedy of errors. Soon it became habit to refer to them simply as Tommy and Tommy Too. Part and counterpart quickly developed an elastic bond and thickly they thrived, like two thieves in envious pursuit of the other’s riches. It was Tommy 2 who first introduced Tommy 1 to the central ideas of Innerology and the notion of manifesting. Tommy found it impossible to get his head around until Tommy 2 managed to get hold of an extremely rare copy of the legendary apple crunch movie. He couldn’t quite believe that the apple the actress held was in fact not there at all. She was so advanced in her ability to manifest that she could not only see, hear taste, feel and smell the apple herself, but she could make us see it too. Tommy 2, with a little concentration, could make the apple disappear, stripping the performance of its illusions and returning it to the humble mime it was, but the reverse was still somewhat out of his reach. Tommy wanted to know everything, to learn all that he could. It went way beyond the method acting that he had been used to. This was something altogether different. From Tommy 2s side he said that in a scene when you’re being shot, you don’t just imagine the bullet flying towards you and hitting your shoulder, shattering your scapular and propelling you to the ground in a spasming ball of pain. No. The bullet, your pain, they had to be summoned into existence. Your fall, and this after all was his forte, had to be driven by the external forces that you brought upon yourself. You make the real and then the real makes you. One night drunk on Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio, Tommy 2, on some slurred rant about the art of the stunt double, had declared: ‘You can copy a fall, but you can’t fool a copy.’ Tommy, struck by this enigma, had asked about it the next day but he replied that, not only did he not remember saying it, but that it didn’t make much sense either. If he tried to understand the tail, then the head fell off, and on declaring that the head in fact made some sense, then the tail would hide itself, until he concluded that it was no use trying. It was a see-saw saying and nothing more. From Rabat to Rome, Reykjavík to Riga, Riyadh to Roseau, the two Tommies crocheted their brows together, learning from each other as if they were joined at the cortex. They started a new production company: TNT, which cleared the ground for many new ventures. Though an equal partnership on foolscap, to the public, it was a statement of Tommy’s supremacy, as Tommy 2 preferred to act as a shadow partner, avoiding the unseemly side of the business. As he got ever closer to that elusive goal, Tommy gradually started taking on his own stunts. But having taught him as much as he could, Tommy 2 seemed to lose interest in that goal. As Tommy tried to make it beyond belief, Tommy 2 turned farther by degree to the make believe. It was at the original Festival of Light, later rebranded as DVDivali, that Tommaso was exposed to the work of Anna Van Schreider. It befell him like a malady. Her movies attacked him, they lay siege to his body. At one moment during the festival, he had grabbed Tommy’s arm and screamed wildly in a delirium that he felt like his organs were being re-organised. It took a few months to recover, but something had definitely changed. The Rhapsody trilogy can perhaps now be seen as the summit of their collaborative efforts. Stunt doubling for each other, both starring, both directing, voice dubbing each other’s inner thoughts. This merging, mixing and confusing of identities left some longing for simpler days, but the general agreement was that these movies had reinvented a tired genre. The stunts, as could be expected, landed with a certain gravitas, but what was most notable was the direction of the combat scenes. Like a bored gang member uninterested in the gratuitous violence, the camera turns away and instead focuses on the minute details of the surroundings: piles of trash, greasy windows, rats sleeping under broken pallets, cracked drainpipes dripping, the delectably smooth interiors of parked cars. The soundtrack suffices to tell us what is happening, for our over saturated minds can easily fill the absence. In another scene, the camera focuses on the eyes of the two assailants. A split screen telling the whole story through the gaze. And yet another takes a birds eye view, but this is an active bird, frightened by the commotion it flies up to the roof tops, peers down, changes position, eats a worm and eventually flies off, indifferent to the human struggle. For anyone versed in Marengo’s work, these scenes are obviously his, but at the time they bore a certain novel shock value, a delirium of detail, in what would otherwise have been mere meat grinding. The critics had highlighted several scenes and stunts as noteworthy, and as Tommy was officially the director and officially the stuntman, as well as officially the star of the movie, he officially accepted all the praise. But in truth, he had been overshadowed by his shadow and he had started to feel like an imposter. For Tommaso, old scores had settled in the dust of their own accord and he had now drifted to the other side, far from manifesting, far from making real, he now saw his end in the crafting of artifice, in the making of worlds rather than the remaking of this one. The circle had almost been completed when a line of flight became visible. To matter no longer mattered. Indirection was his new direction. When he told Tommy about this path, he had replied: ‘But we’re so close.’ The eyes of inquisition: To-gether or To-what, were left unanswered. Tommy, having played so many selves, garnered the praise for his characters, the people so loved by many, these people, none of them were him. None of the fans were fans of Tommy, though they thought they were. The women were in love with Jack DeRosa, the guys all wanted to be Jimmie Garrick. He had been typecast to such an extent that it was generally acknowledged that he in fact couldn’t act, and was always just playing himself. It had been handed to him so often like a tastefully typeset business card, that as he began to direct his own movies, he even typecast himself. But where was this self? The harder he had tried to manifest, the farther away his self had seem to fly, and now, trying to find a route down, he saw that the ladder had been kicked away, and all there was left to do was fall. Tommy Rousseau, a constellation in his own right, was a deity in doubt, and what becomes of a god who no longer believes in the existence of gods? On leaving the empty studio one day, with an urgency that only the unengaged can lay claim to, Tommy had heard a voice calling: Mr.. Hey, Mr.. A bristly haired man, who had something hoggish about him, with eyes that held the steady confidence of a predator who had locked onto its unsuspecting prey, handed Tommy a card without saying a word. On the card was written in majuscule: EVER FEEL LIKE A FAKE? and on the back, from major to minor: OTIS knows you true. Come join us. We’re gathering this evening. I guarantee you’ll really find it quite the biz. On that very same evening, Tommy was admitted to The Order of The Inner Sanctum.