A Film by Spencer Ludwig

‘I thought maybe we’d go on an excursion.’

‘Terrific,’ his father says. ‘What a terrific idea.’

If this were an independent film, Spencer considers, they would not be allowed to return to the apartment and sit in the dimness of his father’s decline, chilled by the storm of his stepmother’s neuroses. He keeps on driving, south along Park Avenue.

‘Where are we going?’ his father asks. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we should visit the town where I was born.’

‘Why would we want to do that?’ his father says, and, closing his eyes, drifts away to a place that is accessible to none but the very sick.

‘You always were a cold-hearted bastard,’ the son says to the father. His father is sitting in the passenger seat, mouth agape, oxygen fitting trailing out of one nostril, eyes closed, snoring with his laboured breath. Spencer realises, to his shame, that he would not have dared say this unless he knew his father was asleep.

‘Fuck you too,’ Jimmy Ludwig says, not bothering to open his eyes.

Spencer goes into the right lane on Park Avenue, takes the turn on to 42nd Street. If this were an independent film, the sort that juries on competitions favour (and even Spencer’s own difficult slow movements of anguish and observation have been rewarded with prizes), then it would turn into a road movie, father and son driving down an American highway with the sound of the radio and his father’s oxygen tank for company.

‘Ninety-Six Tears,’ says Spencer. ‘Mexicali Baby.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I was thinking about the soundtrack.’

‘What?’

‘For this. Us. If this were an independent movie, I’d have 1960s garage punk and maybe some classical. Schubert. Late Beethoven quartets. The Stooges. Rio Rockers. That’s what I’d have. Maybe some blues. Blind Willie Johnson. And Dylan. But he probably charges too much. Basement Tapes.’

His father stares at him. He shakes his head slowly.

His father used to say to him, When they made you they threw away the mould. Which Spencer in his naivety had at first thought of as an announcement of respect, a recognition of his particularness. But then he realised that it was just a customary fatherly rejection of anything or anyone he failed to understand.

‘Watch out. She’s got her eye on you.’

They have a police car for company. The very male cop is scrutinising them for signs of illegality. Ever since his stroke, Spencer’s father has designated most men as she. His braindamaged mistakes with pronouns make him sound like an elderly, cantankerous homosexual.

‘It’s cool,’ Spencer says, but realises that he’s sweating. He takes this as an effect of his father’s scrutiny rather than the cop’s. Or it might be a symptom of his own ill health. He resolves that when he gets back to London he will improve his diet and his body. Take walks and bicycle rides. Maybe even join a gym and face the self-ridicule of working out. Sit sweating healthy sweat on a rowing machine watching share prices tumble on a TV set.

‘How do you like them apples?’ Spencer says. He tries to remember some of his father’s other catchphrases. When his father was in his difficult, combative prime, he had accumulated a small batch of phrases that he would recite at moments he thought were appropriate in order to demonstrate his unimpeachable ordinary Americanness.

‘You’ll be the only boy in the girls’ school,’ Spencer says. ‘Piss or get off the pot. That’ll put hair on your chest…from the inside!’

‘When they made you…’ his father starts to say.

And Spencer nods in his sentimentality, hoping his father will get to some former coherency even if it is an entirely fatuous one.

But his father doesn’t reach it—the sentence dribbles away into the awkward vacuum where most of his conversation resides.

The patrol car that had been beside them speeds away, looking for more dangerous company.

‘What’s your favourite music?’ Spencer says.

‘Absolutely,’ his father says, which is his customary remark when he is not sure what is required of him in a conversation.

‘Your favourite songs,’ Spencer persists. ‘Or artists. Singers. You liked Frank Sinatra didn’t you?’

‘Sure,’ his father expansively says.

‘We could get some Sinatra on the soundtrack, but it might be a bit cutesy-cutesy. On the nose, if you know what I mean. It might also cost a lot.’

‘Dime a dozen.’

Spencer tries the radio. He finds jazz on NPR, which gives a nice atmospheric soundtrack to their drive, but his father reaches down irritably to fidget and fumble with the radio buttons, so Spencer switches it off again.

‘When are we seeing Gribitz?’ Spencer’s father says. ‘I haven’t been able to shit for a week.’

‘We saw him. We saw him today,’ Spencer reminds him.

‘Who?’ Spencer’s father says.

His father had been a strong man, the smartest and toughest man Spencer had ever known. He feels the loss of his own vitality and cohesion more painfully even than Spencer does, more than anyone except, probably, his wife, whom he now rejects because she condemns him for his weakness. It is painful to be in his company now, diminished, incoherent, uncohesive. It is as if pieces of him have been allowed to drift in different directions, untethered. Spencer feels an enormous rush of pity and shame, which is abruptly halted when Spencer’s father asks him,

‘How’s your friend doing? The flower guy.’

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.