By Alan Rogers, London
Rubbish (as we say in England)
There are moments in everyone’s life, when we start to take stock. To re-evaluate where we have
travelled (so far) on this journey of life, and to mentally review our past.
This can happen as soon as late twenties for some people, and as late as deaths door for others.
I believe that this projekt has invoked a number of instances of Missy style navel gazing, and this film strikes me as an example.
The narrative tells of a time when you flew as part of a film crew to Perth, stayed in a very nice hotel,
had a fling with a helicopter pilot and recorded some footage of you posing naked in your hotel room.
It also hypothesises that you destroyed the pilot’s marriage, lit a bush fire that would destroy property,
then send the pilot into despair costing him his career and his sanity.
Whilst I applaud your story telling, and acknowledge your life journey would make a terrific novel; the
audience should analyse what you are saying. There are a lot of variables to the story that we are
unaware of:
Was the joint stubbed out before being thrown from the window
How did the helicopter flight get linked to the fire which could have been started in so many other
ways?
Was the pilot flying under the influence?
What happens when you lose a game of dick chicken?
I am not left with any sympathy for the Pilot in your story. Sorry, if that was the intention. The wife
sounds terrible too. The pilot’s mental health reads as if it were clearly at some tipping point when you
arrived.
But we are not interested in bit part players. You are the star of these shows.
Which leads me to another point: You are always surrounded by fucked up people. At some point in
your narrative you mention that you do not know who your father was. He was one of the towns two
drug dealers; but you also admit to playing sexual games with at least one of them?
You hypothesise that your personality is moulded from interactions with these messed up people.
However your intelligence, creative artistry, poetry and film making abilities hold you up with the
greatest of your generation. I am not judging or accusing you of falsehood, I am saying you are one in a
million. Like Einstein and Marie Curie marry and have a son that turns out to be a drugged up surfer
dude that can barely write his own name. But in reverse.
This film is an epic. A mammoth film weighing in at nearly 26 minutes long with so many elements that it
barely pauses for breath. Reviewing this work took me well over 5 hours to complete. It contains so
many elements. You have so much to say here, and the amount of work that has gone into making this
film is frankly staggering:
TITLES
“Let me give you a piece of advice, if you’re going to steal, steal a lot”
“Sir, the police are here”
Scene with the man from ‘Modern Family’ man chatting to woman:
“I don’t think you’re being crazy enough”
“I am not a violent man, but I know how nuts it can make you to create something special only to have it
stolen from you”
More titles
Music: I won’t back down
“Tonight we’re tuning in to manipulative television”
Screen showing a VCR type image of local 58 WCLV-TV channel logo with the word MULLUMBIMBY
inserted above the words ‘community television’
“Better known…as Local 58”
This is the start of a motif that runs throughout the film. You are clearly showing this as a rural issue.
“Alright here we go”
Fingers switching off a light.
“Thank you everyone”
Light going off. Then turning red’
“Quiet on set”
This sets the tone that the film is about making a film.
TITLES
Image of cartoon woman being filmed by cartoon men with a clapperboard appears.
bell ringing
“Quiet on set”
“Scene one, take ten, marker”
Clapperboard claps.
We see a silhouetted man walking towards a very old gramophone player which he winds up and puts the
needle on the record.
Music: Lou Reed ‘walk on the wild side’ plays
Screen goes black.
Before we begin
We have new apparel!
I like some of these. Did you create them?
More titles
“The following programme is rated M for a more mature audience. It contains course language and sexual
references”
If you carry your childhood with you
Image of you masturbating outside but the image is distorted, and keeps going out of synchronicity.
Music: string chords playing.
Image of man hittng the television.
Image of V for Vendetta appears.
You never become older
“For god sake don’t touch it”
Image of boy on settee (looking like a young Ed Sheeran) saying:
“Dad, what’s wrong with the telly?”
Image fades to black.
Foreboding.
ACT1: ROOTS
“Good Evening”
Music: Welcome to the Jungle Bitch.
Cut to man in typical YouTube influencer mode saying:
“We tend not to think of it that often”
My childhood roots were tangled
Nice words.
“But a film starts telling it’s story long before it even begins”
Record scratching
Cut to image of you in profile, in a field where people are sittng doing some kind of therapy sessions.
Music: Love my world?
The first thing you should know about me
Is that I grew up in mullumbimby, a small town in australia
Close up of you in sunglasses.
If you want to know what mullumbimby is like, do this
Cut to woman walking towards the camera then dancing away in front of a single storey building.
Go home and take a shit in your toilet
Back to close up of you in sunglasses with woman dancing superimposed on your face.
Then jump in there with it. That’s what mullumbimby is like
Now that the UK has decided it doesn’t like the EU interfering with things like the clean beach policy, we
have reverted to dumping raw sewerage into our seas again. Don’t swim off the coast of the UK (if you
dared to brave the freezing waters) as you will be sharing the waves with jobbies.
Mullumbimby is the only thown that has no stars at night
I thought you had been to London?
It’s a town where people stand around waiting for nothing
Record scratches
Cut to several stoners falling/gettng out of a VW camper van
“Were here c’mon”
Being a loser is a contextually transmitted disease
Brilliant.
Normally contracted in adolescence
Bell rings
Cut to two girls being interviewed. One blonde. One brunette.
Blond girl: “I think it was like, what I liked was kind of like, came like a , as if, she, like, is like oh..yeah. that’s what I think right now”
Brunette girl: “I wanna see what you just said, written on paper”
Cut to man in spotlight playing an electric organ.
Unless you know your parents backstory
Wistfully conjuring the past.
Man sings to his organ playing:
“You know, it wasn’t always like this”
Cut to influencer:
“I also want to mention the worst person in the world”
Cut to black screen.
Introducing my mother
Cut to woman laying back on settee in a hotel lobby, or highly decorated appartment.
Music: When I was just a little girl
Cut to girl throwing a tantrum on a bed, then the camera flips and we see her looking under the bed at a
glowing white ball.
Then we see a woman looking down at the child.
Cut to test card and television beep.
Then cut to girls face lit by screen, asking:
“Mom?”
Cut to Dolly Parton being interviewed. Dolly:
“Well I actually patterned my look on what they used to call the town tramp in my home town, when I was a little girl”
My mother was an obsolete child
Again nicely put.
Dolly: “this woman that used to walk the streets, had all this make up and hair, high heeled shoes, and I
thought she was so beautiful, and everybody used to say, aw but she ain’t nothing but trash”
With the hell left in her
She believed she was made of vagina & sequins
Dolly transformed. Her voice has been modified into a high squeal and her face is demonised.
“And I used to say, well that’s what I’m going to be when I grow up, trash”
Cut to test picture. Beep.
Cut to close up of bearded man in hat saying:
“There is no choice”
Cut to courtroom music video where the courtroom starts dancing.
Her one skill was fucking
Cut to Hugh Grant as an East End gangster, looking a bit beatnik, saying:
“Quite like it when you talk dirty to me, I can feel myself engorging”
“Now, I want you to image yourself a character”
My father was a dramatic character
“A dramatic character, like in a book or in a play, or a film, but not digital, not on a memory stick, analogue, chemical process, keep the grain in the picture I say, old school 35 mil”
He woke up one day and decided he wanted to be a drug dealer
Not sure it works that way, but still…
Cut to 35mm film spooling through a projector.
However, he had competition
Cut to black
Karl ‘ratface’ rattis
“Now I am seeing this though a lens I am, and I’m not talking about the small screen, it’s beautiful, beautiful cinema”
Cut back to Grant as the gangster giving his pitch.
In 1987, rattis was arrested for sucking very small dicks if you know what I mean
I do.
“Now, roll camera”
Cut to projector beaming light.
Cut to man pushing glasses up his nose as he views what is on the screen.
Rattis was my fathers protagonist
Grant: “Enter our protagonist”
Cut to man walking up a car lined street.
Rattis was a colourful character
Grant: “So these two have met before…knows where, presumably at the annual international drug dealers convention in Las Vegas, and they’ve done some small deals together”
Cut to image of man walking past window
He was involved in a local oral pyramid scheme
Grant: “but now, they’re ready for the big one”
Cut to man walking into a sports bar, it is daylight outside but dark as night inside.
And he was the other drug dealer in the town
Cut to man walking further into the bar, we see a few patrons and the bar tender.
The problem with drugs is the people who deal them
Music: some country and western music is playing in the background in the bar.
We see the two patrons get up and join the man who just walked in a booth. The camera is on the man.
Because these social roaches think dealing drugs is a licence to act like an asshole
Man: “what do you want again?”
My father and rattis were both assholes
I am not sure who is who in this scene. Whether the man is Rattis?, or the men opposite him are your father and Rattis?
Patron 1: “Coke for Crystal”
My mother contracted assholism at a young age
Man (to Patron 2) : “You don’t say much”
Patron 2: “I figure, I’ll let my man give you the details”
Man (leaning in to Patron 1): “I can see your soul, at the edges of your eyes”
Because for about ten years
Man: “its corrosive, like acid”
She was fucking both of them
Man: “I don’t like your face”
I’m not sure which of them was my father
Man: “it makes me want to do things to it”
Selling my soul would be a lot easier
Man: “I see you again, and I’m pu?ng you down, there’s a shadow on your sun”
If I knew who I inherited my soul from
Man gets up to leave.
Cut to grainy shot of a detective speaking towards the camera
Detective: “can I ask your wife a couple of questons, ok?”
Cut to photo montage of young Missy growing up.
I don’t miss my childhood
As Paul Simon sings in ‘Think Too Much’: ‘I had a childhood that was mercifully brief…’ (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkBXaeHpt-Q)
“I remember a time when your name meant something to people, but now, you have no value”
But I miss the way I took pleasure in small things
“You don’t even exist anymore”
“You live your life for them,
Even as greater things crumbled around me
“And they don’t even see you”
“You don’t even see yourself”
Cut to blue green hue film of you on the beach. It looks like a selfie. Steve Angelo starts to sing “Nothing
Scares Me Anymore”:
You know even fools gold bring the thieves at night
You are walking around facing the camera, now you look down your nose into the lens.
Easy to, easy to get swept in
You put on sunglasses.
I found my place in the great design
Hard to see the way in the reckless life
Been living in a darked out paradise
Hate to say I’ve been fooled all this time
Go ahead and take your aim
I refuse to fight your war
Go on win the bets you made
Nothing scares me anymore
Although the screen keeps going dark, making the scene hard to see, we see that we are in a park now. There is the sound of radio contact being made but it is hard to hear what is being said. A cartoon character appears to be looking down a well.
If you stare into the abyss long enough
The abyss stares back at you
-MARK TWAIN 1835-1910
Friedrich Nietzsche I think you’ll find.
The abyss was imprinted on my character
The cartoon (which is in black and white) now seems to feature a child figure laying in a pit of despair.
Till the day I die
THE END
Music is wound down.
Konrad lorenz and the theory of imprinting
Sounds of geese. Kids by MGMT starts playing. This sequence contains a slideshow of Konrad and his geese with subtitles.
Konrad lorenz was an austrian zoologist
Who was the first to describe the attachment behaviour of geese after hatching
In his classic experiment
Lorenz divided eggs laid by a goose into two groups
One of the groups was hatched by their mother
And immediately began following her around
The 2nd group was hatched in an incubator
But in the absence of their mother
They began following lorenz around
Even if lorenz placed the goslings in a box
So that they were separated from their mother and himself
I saw a documentary about the making of one of David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries where a
female photographer did the same and was able to get amazing shots of these adult sibling geese flying
close to her in a speedboat crossing a lake (thinking she was their mother).
They would reliably separate toward their mother
Or towards lorenz, depending on who they were first exposed to lorenz was the first to name this phenomenon
“imprinting”
Later investigations would determine that imprinting
Occurs within 12 to 13 hours after birth
This led to the notion that there are ‘critical periods’
In the development of the brain and behaviour
Konrad lorenz’s experiments helped psychiatrists
Understand that early experience shapes
Social behaviour & attachment in adulthood
I think it refers to ‘bonding’ in humans. Which is why the child is presented to the mother as soon after
birth as possible.
Static. Cut to picture of a television.
Act 2: commitment
“Different people are going to want different things from the movies and one of the things I’ve always really valued for whatever reason is commitment, commitment to a vision, commitment to a concept, a story, a perspective”
Cut to man talking.
As a way of coping, I committed to film making at a young age
Cut to silhouette of a man.
And karl rattis was very supportive of my commitment
I am not sure what to make of this. There is a sexual undertone to this statement.
“We can pursue success but material success on its own, just for it’s own sake is empty, meaningless,
unfulfilling, when we concern ourselves more with our image and our reputaFon, and what people think of us rather than whether our work is authenFc to what we value. We lose sight as to whether it’s worth doing at all.
Images of two people kissing.
You’ll be an awesome director
And I’ll be the village loser.
Image of someone with the word director on their headphones.
You think I’ll become an awesome director?
We are on a production set.
I’ve got another story in my head
Back to the silhouetted man.
When I was 16, I started writing scripts with rattis
After we played games of ‘dick chicken’
The video for ‘Can I get a Witness’ by SonReal starts to play
Dick chicken is where I would hold his dick
I would win if I didn’t let go
Or he got an erection
At his trial, he said I won every game of dick chicken
I assume it was raised as proof that he was ‘straight’?
Dead thump leading to silence and black screen.
So how did this open the door to destroying a man’s life and his family?
Act 3: sexual conflagration
Cut to various scenes of domesticity
“Like a typical horror story, it all began well for the victim”
Various scenes of husband and wife being romantic together.
It is 2014, and I am producing corporate videos
View of an aircraft taken from above. Then of a lunch being served on the airplane
The intro to Dire Straits ‘Brothers in Arms’ starts.
Now back of woman’s head in a car.
I fly to perth in western australia
Woman’s feet up on the dashboard. We are meant to assume this is you gettng a taxi from the airport to
your new swanky hotel.
And I stay at the 5 star pan pacific hotel
Woman’s feet on highly decorated duvet.
Then I fly to the remote mining town of karratha
Image of you on an airplane looking out of the window.
This trip would have a catastrophic effect on many lives
Image of wing from airplane window.
And two children would lose their father
Plane touches down at a very remote airfield.
All because a game of dick chicken
Back to selfie of you on the plane
Filming progressed on schedule
You are either filming yourself at work, or someone is filming you very close up. You put on safety goggles.
But during filming I became aware of someone
One of the american helicopter pilots was watching me
Image of man pulling curtains back to spy on someone.
I did not discourage him
Back to you at work, sticking out your tongue. Who was this for?
We got talking
Image of man looking like a cowboy.
Image of a letter, saying ‘I trust you’ll get wheryou need to go, you always do’
Image of wallet saying: ‘So to M.M. – Thanks for the great work’
Is M.M. you?
I asked him to take me flying in his helicopter
Image of cowboy emerging from single storey building.
He enthusiastically accepted
Image of helicopter pilot with US flag on arm. Then image of man flying helicopter from inside the cockpit.
He flew us to an isolated hilltop in the outback
Image of birds swarming in the skies
While we were flying, he asked me about my childhood
The birds form a face of a woman.
I told him about ‘dick chicken’
And suggested we should play a game
Image of you and walking legs.
One thing led to another
Image of man undressing and you naked.
When we landed we got stoned
And we fucked all afternoon
Cut to goat on hillside
But when we took off, I did something that changed his life
I threw a joint out of the window
Cut to red view of ground taken from the helicopter.
And the rotor wash ignited a bushfire
I like the term rotor-wash. Very descriptive.
Red image of clouds and plants
It would burn for seven days
Biblical.
Red sun going up.
And destroy hundreds of square miles of flora and fauna
The authorities correlated the start of the fire
Cut to view of you taking a drag from a joint.
With this pilot’s flight log and our little excursion
He would end up losing his job and his career
And also his family
When he got home that night
He told his wife what he had done
She immediately left him
Boom
Cut to woman alone in a house.
Taking his children with her
His supervisor asked him ‘was this girl hot?’
The woman sits down at a table looking depressed.
He replied ‘yes’
Cut to two cowboys walking to a car.
‘but not hot enough to see my children every 2nd weekend’
Ha! Au contraire.
The next day he would try and overdose on sleeping pills
Hmm.
Cut to man lying on a bed looking up at the ceiling
He would be found an hour later by hotel staff
The overdose caused him to suffer permanent brain damage
He never flew a helicopter again
Cut to man shouting ‘EVIL!’
Then cut to Local TV screen saying 3pm Real Sleep.
Record scratch effect and we are back to the ‘Can I get a Witness’ video
I was imprinted with the toxic influences of a sociopath
For most of my youth
All the signs were there
Cut to Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ where he gives the finger to whoever is on the
speakerphone.
I chose to ignore them
“There are people in this world looking to take advantage of others. Whether they are classified as
narcissistic, sociopathic, compulsive or pathological liars, they operated differently from most people you will encounter”
Cut to Pinocchio with his nose growing
Because I thought I was immune to their influence
Cut to man walking down a corridor.
“I used to believe in God. But now I don’t believe in anything at all”
Act 4: nature vs nurture
Cut to you moistening your lips.
“I didn’t sleep last night, at all”.
“If anyone is watching this, go to hell”.
This is a visual open letter
You bite your lip.
On the destructive impact of past associations
“ I want to take control of the narrative for the first time”
“ I don’t think people consider her, the owner of her own image”
You take a drag on a cigarette.
A manifesto of mis-steps at the intersection of chaos & hurt
“Public Property”
Poetic aggression created from a clear vision of wasted time
“I had this secret, there’s a darkness inside of me”
Sociopaths are made of complications quirks & secrets
“They followed me here”
Cut to black
“You know what this is, it’s like someone looking at you and going ‘and then?’, ‘and then?’, ‘and then?’”
Cut to corridor in hotel.
I automatically assume people won’t like me
A figure appears at the end of the corridor. The view is from the carpet. Jingly music plays with a thumping beat. The figure advances.
Too many secrets. Too much baggage
I can’t become part of a crowd
“The movie will begin in five moments, the mindless voice announced. All those unseated will await the next show.”
Because I can’t get past that feeling that I don’t belong
“We filed slowly languidly into the hall, the auditorium was vast and silent”
As a child I felt myself to be alone
“As we seated and were darkened, the voice continued”
And I am still
“The programme for this evening is not new, you’ve seen this entertainment through and through, you’ve
seen your birth, your life and death, you might recall all of the rest, did you have a good world when you
died? Enough to base a movie on?”
Because I know things
“Gettng out of here”
“Where you going?”
“To the other side of morning”
“Please don’t chase the clouds (Bergodas?)
And must hint at things
“Her cunt gripped him like a warm friendly hand’
We see that the figure is you. You pause outside your hotel room door.
That are best left unspoken
No. I disagree. Your story is what drives this projekt. The past is a mess of memories. Some of those
memories are so painful you will still wince on remembering them. But you have channelled that pain
into beauty and art. Into poetry and images. Into sex and psychology.
You go back down the corridor and round the corner disappearing.
“It’s alright, all your friends are here”
“When can I meet them?”
“After you’ve eaten”
“I’m not hungry”
“Ah, I meant beaten”
Cut to local TV and jingle music again: 11:00pm Show for Children
Sequence of cut shots about a murderer with photographs of a symbol.
“The only link between all these cases is this symbol”
“The symbol is associated with a pagan deity named ‘Bagule” he consumes the souls of human children”
Cut to you naked in a hotel room. Orange palette. Feel it Still is played, not by Portugal the Man, but by
Revelries & Henri Purnell.
6TH MARCH 2014
Pan pacific hotel perth
10:36pm the next night
You throw yourself on the bed.
The only way I know how to understand myself
Is to write it out and try to catch my faults
You kneel up and pose for the camera.
And then own them now matter how distasteful
You kneel with your legs spread and raise your arms over your head.
Roots are formed from seeds
You get off the bed and walk towards the camera.
By who, what or why were they planted
The why is the reason metaphysics rise up in rebuttal
You go and retrieve a towel on the floor of the room.
The ‘what’ makes no sense
You hide behind the towel.
Unless viewed through the lens of something opaque
The towel is removed.
The ‘who’ is a seed blown by the random wind
Under ideal conditions things take root and grow
You wander about the room, then come back to stretch in front of the camera again.
Conditions are met
I have wondered about my obsession with satisfying
Was it shaped by early experience
You pose with your hands behind your head and arch your back for the camera.
Where I was rewarded in turn after all
I believe it was a male who imprinted me
You look directly into the camera
Showed me what I was worth
And it just so happened to line up
I think many men have influenced your views on life. But that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing.
You stretch then turn away.
With the acceptable want a man is taught
I was taught to be a good thing
To be a source of pleasure
You continue to wander around the room.
And thereby I was a thing of value
You climb up onto the bed.
As if my sexuality was separate from me
You stretch and touch the ceiling with your hands.
I am a diagnosed, high functioning, non-criminal sociopath
And this is my world from my point of view
You pose once more before leaping off the bed towards the camera.
I am different from the average person in very dangerous and scary ways
You stop filming. We see a test card and bleep then the screen goes blank. Then we see the local TV screen
again.
“Before you go. Stay tuned for a quick message”
12:00am skywatching
12:30am city council meeting
2:00am paid programming
Cut to you naked in front of blinds. This section appears to be an appeal for sponsors.
You are different from the average person. You strike me as extremely desirable to men, and incredibly
intelligent, which would create affinity with like minded women. You are an artist and creator. What you
are not (I am afraid) is scary.
CREDITS
Act6: I’ll fix myself in post-production
Cut to man.
“No. Ive never been so sure of anything in my life, I will be the new boss of….”
Pauses. Turns to look at company name on board behind him.
Screen goes black.
We see the film you made in Karratha
CREDITS
Back to local TV screen:
11:55pm contingency
Kanye saying “you are a celebrity. So basically what’s gonna happen is, there’s product here, and this is
where you end up right here. If you can communicate this product, you can make money off the product.
Cause look at Gaga, she’s the creative director of Polaroid. I like some of the Gaga’s songs. What the
fuck she know about cameras?”
Cut to people dancing to Gaga.
I had never regarded other people as anything but puppets created to fill up my
Empty world – guy de maupassant (1850-1893)
You have changed it to the first person. I like it.
Cut to local TV
3:00am end of broadcast day
This concludes our broadcast day
Cut to test card.
Contingency message will now begin
Please comply with the following instructions
God bless america
Thought research initiative
Its a good thing people bleed on the inside
Or this would be a gory, blood-smeared world
Star spangled banner being played on a damaged tape.
In conclusion:
This film takes us on a deep look into regrets for things we do in our lives, and where the source of the
behaviour that led to those regrets, came from.
I believe in nurture, and I believe in nature. We are all products of both. The ability (for a person) to
perform critical thinking exercises is considered high functioning intelligence. This whole film is an
exercise in critical thinking.
You may have come from a dodgy town. You may well have been bought up in a drug dealers house with
a mother who had sex with many men. But you have still garnered an intelligence that has allowed you
to question your upbringing in ways beyond that stereotype.
This is a leap from the cliff into the ocean. Let’s hope it is the Tasmanian (not the North) sea.
All the best
X
A