FILM SET

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‘There is no justice. There is only pain,’ shouted the actress and then fell to the floor, her hands grabbing at it. Then she lifted herself to a kneeling position, her face raised to the ceiling. The gaffer turned on the rain machine. Big drops fell on the actress’s face and her mascara ran down her cheeks. She repeated, ‘There is no justice. There…is no…jus…tice.’

‘Cut!’ shouted the director and the actress stood up. ‘I’m bleeding,’ she said, ‘really bleeding. But I want that.’

‘Where is your wound?’ said the director, ‘Show it to me. I want to get it all down, all the pain, all the agony, in an eternal indexical sign.’

‘Baby,’ she replied, ‘You’re so relentless. I’ve been showing you my wound for the last ten minutes. Couldn’t you see? But enough. Right now, I want a frozen strawberry with just a single droplet of sirop de menthe. However, it must be an Etruscan strawberry. And it must be no bigger than the width of my nose.’

The director clapped his hands. ‘Catering!’

A group of locals had entered the bar where they were filming. They were farmers and they were making a lot of noise, talking about one of them who had made a deal with some giant company to use their genetically engineered seeds, which could resist almost anything, whereas the others, with just their normal crops, lost a quarter of their harvest. Pierre le Pire was the farmer’s name.

Filming resumed and the actors tried to concentrate amid all the commotion. They kept saying their lines while the farmers complained and burbled and farted freely.

One of the farmers was young, tall, muscular and extremely handsome. The actress noticed him as he was ordering a gin fizz at the bar and sidled up to him lasciviously. ‘I always say a gin fizz is a real man’s drink,’ she remarked, twirling a lock of her hair with one hand while pointing subliminally with the other at her mouth.

The young farmer said he didn’t really know what she expected of him. ‘I’m just a simple man, call me naïve and a primitive, but I call you a pervert like all people from the city. Leave me alone with the genuine people of my community. Ah, yes, I know what you want. You’re disgusting, you film people.’

The actress replied: ‘Yes, disgusting, that’s what we are. But we face up to it, unlike you pious hypocrites of the countryside, constantly impugning the decadence of others so as to deny your own. We, the fodder of the gossip mags, are the repository for all your disavowed corruption, your obesity, drunkenness, drug addiction, infidelity, perversion, greed, vanity and ultimate physical dissolution. We are the modern sacrifices, the scapegoats without which you would be unable to maintain your spurious sense of purity. We show you the selves you cannot face. And you, the audience, love it.’

And with that, she farted, loudly and satisfyingly.

Like crying real tears, it was something she had learned to do at will at acting school.

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written by John and Inge in summer 2017