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Forget the bag lady for a moment. What was I, the main character in my auteuristic masterpiece doing at the bus stop?
It was a backstory question I had to answer before proceeding. It was beginning to look like one more screenplay I had to scrap and start all over again.
I had to create a persona for myself.
I liked the idea of being a Gen-Y hate-child. A product of my clueless generation. Intelligent but dumb as. Claiming my own intellect as the anti-God. Claiming my own intellect as proof of no God. Multiple gods but no God. Searching for answers to shove down other people’s throats, and dismissing questions as emotionally-retarded baggage for the weak-minded. Criticising Tom Cruise’s acting while using my auditing mind machine to Breville a toasted beetroot sandwich at 2am. Taking philosophies and theories from here, there, and everywhere, and even some places people didn’t know existed beyond everywhere, and forming my own mind into the certainty of chaotic confusion, whereby I could relate to my peers, and we could discuss our commonalities of total disagreement with anything and everything outside our own heads at any particular time, due to the ever changing nature of what is and what isn’t. Nothing fixed. Yet wondering how the rental flat doesn’t collapse onto my leftover kebab sauce on the pizza box of life. Change itself was a butterfly’s short life reborn as maggot flesh in the wet, juicy fruit of modern life left out in a humid place warmed globally with ozone scars and rising water marks to identify itself at an ATM through fruit iridology, and the flash of a short-life cut short camera blast. Seeing my own life in nano-seconds as meaningful meaninglessness. True Kodak enlightenment. White noise in the multi-coloured kaleidoscope of a blind white cat’s vision. I was arguing for the sake of being disagreeable. Even with myself. Justifying my own contradictions by changing my mind each few moments. What I believed a few seconds ago, I no longer believe, therefore I haven’t contradicted myself at all. Dreaming of celebrity status. Of being on television, moving onto a singing career via mime, then having my own fashion label, and buying properties all over the world. Living life like some miraculous train – rebuilt and reinvented after each wreck - each crash. A reincarnation train. With my steam-whistle head about to explode from never having a quiet railroad to travel along. Just the clang clang clang of the noises constantly in the unlevel crossing of the brainwaves between my ears and my neurons. An i-Pod train. Choo choo! All aboard the www. Let’s connect the dots and leave the train tracks to loop through the earlobes like body piercing instruments of Gothic proportions. Tattooing my own brain with music turned visual. Non-permanent tattooes and scar tissues where my brain used to be. Trying to block out non MTV images of my Baby-Boomer parents and black-white-and-blue tv images of my hippy love-in grandparents playing the xylophone with their teeth and reminiscing about Hendrix. Blocking all memory of blood relations out with synthetic drugs, synthetic music, and stream of consciousness writing whilst in a comatose state, via dream-voice translation technology. Writing in my sleep. Writing during overdose spasms, to make connections with other cyber sleepers. Learning the power of words like zzz. Texting taking over the world of language. Deconstructing that which had never been constructed, just thought about esoterically during slow-eye-movement. Writing hate anthems, and tapping into the collective web consciousness of an information super-highway littered with car-less people. Driving their own vehicles of reinvention of self. Forgetting to concentrate. Short attention spans leading to more crashes than bad ISPs.
And so, there I was getting a handle on my character through backstory. Now I had to work out the finer details. What would I wear?
Most Catholics don't even know their own faith. That's a given. When people attack me for being a Catholic, they're actually attacking the modern Catholic Church. Hell, even I attack the modern Catholic Church, and disassociate myself from it.
People never think to ask me what type of Catholic I am. They just label me as one of those awful Catholics who probably is a paedophilic priest. Well, if you never ask a person any questions about that person's life, and just attack him at every opportunity due to labelling, you're not going to find out much about that person are you? You're going to remain in your own prejudicial ignorance.
People no longer ask many questions about other people. They're too busy attacking them.
Telling them to be tolerant?
Anyway, in the Apostles' Creed, Catholics say, I believe in the Communion of Saints.
What does that mean?
It means that no matter how fast the internet gets, a person has quicker access to saints than the internet will ever provide.
St Mary Magdalene's soul has been in heaven for 2000 years. If you believe the Roman Martyrology, my guardian angel (and yours) has been in heaven for 5000 plus years.
If I want to communicate with either of them, I don't need a broadband connection.
How long does it take to get to know someone on the net? How do we get to know someone on the net? By communicating with them.
We often don't meet the people we communicate with via the net, but we feel like we know them. And so we chat with them as though we had met them. We feel like we know them. That's the whole point of the communion of saints. We can read about Mary Magdalene in the Gospels and get a feel for the type of woman she was. We can read her life in Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. Or we can read Dan Brown and forget that Christ said that basically as long as the world exists, the story of what she did for him by pouring expensive perfume over her feet would be told world-wide until the world itself ends.
Mary Magdalene was a known prostitute. Her brother was Lazarus. He was a senator. Her sister was Martha. Martha was the woman who was always busy doing various things while Mary was sitting at the feet of Christ, washing his feet with her tears and hair. Begging for mercy for her past sins. And, although Christ doesn't think being busy in the name of God is a bad thing, He values contemplation more, and said Mary chose the better part. She just wanted to be with her God, and contemplate his infinite perfections.
And while Mary Magdalene is not on the net at the present time, she is as real (if not more real) than most of the people we will never meet on the net, yet communicate with as if they were real to us. And actually present in the room. Having a convo with.
And you can fall in love with a person you've never met. Quite easily.
My love for Mary Magdalene operates on a few levels. Firstly, she lived a debauched life, but was able to change that life around completely by loving her God. And they say Catholic men are misogynists. If only people truly knew that real Catholic men admire the female saints as much as a male saints. But what's the point of trying to tell people that who are already convinced in their own minds that all Catholic men are bastards? No point at all. So, even though Mary Magdalene was a woman, the way she went about correcting her debauched life has as much instructional value for a man as it does for a woman.
On another level, Christ didn't spend much time at many people's houses during His public ministry. The one house he did love going to for a bit of a break from the world was Mary, Martha and Lazarus' house. It's well documented in the Gospels. Why did He like going here? It was a house where the love of God reigned supreme. They were all humans who were just trying to get through this life loving God, and a visit from God meant more to them than anything. I don't think anything extraordinary happened in that house. Sure Christ did raise Lazarus from the dead, but that wasn't in the house. It was just somewhere God could go to take a break from people hating him and trying to kill him.
It's a huge mystery, the life of God made man. You have God in human form under the providence of God not in human form, and it can do your head in if you think about how there can be three persons in one God and yet only one person became Incarnate and yet that same person was true God and true Man and therefore possessed all the qualities of the Godhead. So you just go. Okay I'll accept it without trying to nut it out then. And then you get down to how God acts towards those who love Him. Now Mary, Martha and Lazarus loved God. So he visited them. I'm sure he imparted more than a bit of His Infinite Wisdom to them.
But the real issue here is, what Christian wouldn't give his eye tooth to have been born in Christ's time and had the privilege of actually seeing Him in the flesh? As St John said, We have handled the word of life.
That's the thing that astounds me most about Mary Magdalene. I mean she was His friend. Adam may well have walked with God in the cool of the evening, but Mary Magdalene was hanging around with God made Man as though there was nothing abnormal about that.
And there wasn't. That's why I like my Catholic faith. From the outside it looks really abnormal, but taste and see how sweet the Lord is. As they say in the ads for the Northern Territory. You'll never never know if you never never go.
There is no bitterness in her conversation. And to finish off. That to me is the difference between the communion of saints and the communion of devils (associating with certain devils on the net) Sure there are good people on the net, but there's more evil people on it than good ones. It is Satan's pulpit. But God has always sent missionaries into hostile territories.
What a lot of people forget is that God Himself gives Satan the power he has and wields on the world today. If God withdrew his graces? The world would collapse. Satan would be powerless. God's only really interested if there are any souls out there seeking him. Have you seen Him whom my soul loveth? And He keeps the world running because for one soul to get to heaven? It's all worthwhile.
So the communion of saints is just the art of conversing with God and His saints. And children don't care about what they've said. THey don't edit their thoughts or words. They just speak from the heart and go, this is what I think.
I'm really so over people attacking goodness.
I've never seen anything as beautiful in my entire life (American Beauty)
Catharsis is difficult in a film about fate. I agonised over how to dramatise fatalistic catharsis in a way that would be seminally uplifting. And gave meaning to a generation of souls looking for celluoid answers in a world of rapid images flashed before our eyes like a young girl considering working in the sex industry who sees a lot of bald, fat men flash before her eyes, and thinks, Is the money worth it? And, a film about fate where Providence didn't play a part, but fate was the thing. The only thing. No mention of God. Just women with crucifixes out in the forest at night watching Foxtel and talking about how they'd made a sea-change to a place nowhere near the ocean. These are difficult propositions for the serious filmmaker. Something anyone who has ever shot a home video will understand.
Seminal films only come along when seminal filmmakers seminate. To disassociate oneself with semination is to disemminate in a non-copulatory and quasi/pseudo celluloid way without the cellulite. But bring on the bulimia and watch the wide screen with the skinny woman on it. Which seems such a waste of seed. To split a woman in half is not what King Solomon had in mind when he wrote his first film, The Tyranny of God. He was thinking wheat taxes and tithes in that Old Testament way of filmmaking that Chartlon Heston got into before he discovered guns were the only way to protect your property from losers with guns. Thank God for condoms. And people who don't use them. And may we all disseminate in a way whereby the brotherhood of mankind and womankind comes together in a collusion of confluences which truly display the altruistic propensity of the human spirit to coagulate into a non-gluggy coagulum of love and understanding. Blessed be Henry Ford for creating a black car and not a white one. And will a minority group please put forward the cause of Mark David Chapman for canonisation to the Vatican before they totally lose the plot and canonise John Lennon.
And these were the thoughts coursing through my mind during this cathartic, estoteric, aromatheric filmmaking process, before even making a film. Before even writing a film. Just visualising it in all its glory and planning the Oscar acceptance speech for the greatest film ever written.
The filmmaking process is only understood by critics once the seminal moment has been realised beyond post production. Post post production. When a child is born to us after a long time of pregnant filmmaking. And let's face it. Film is all about tits. Forget the plot. Think tits.
It was the bag. Or the bags. It was the bag lady. There she was with her bags. Flapping in the breeze. And there I was like a hungry journalist in film-making mode, ready to pounce on a story. The auteur. Needing someone else to write about, whilst maintaining my status as auteur. The filmmaker who needs no-one else in life other than people with stories to exploit. And actors to act the part of other people while maintaining my status as auteur. The solitary filmmaker who need no-one other than actors, a decent script and a film crew. A true auteur. While I let her die. It seared my conscience to realise I could be so callous in a world gone mad with disinterest and inidfference. And apathy. As if I care about apathy. What a paltry thought. Let the apathetic make their own films. About violence. I'll make films about where a photograph of a person dying was more important to me than saving the life of a fellow human being. It was a defining moment in my filmmaking life.
I thought about the final scene in American Beauty. And just how beautiful a bag flapping in the breeze could be. And what approach Forest Gump would have taken to a Bag Lady's empty bags bereft of chocolates. Life is a $2 bag? You know there'll be nothing of value in it? Stay, Forest, stay! Could I write a film about a bag lady where bags featured prominently. Not just in the final scene in a way that says you people are idiots?
I realise I haven't told you a lot about the film yet, but I think if you're going to write a film, you have to go through the catharsis of what urges you to write a film which the masses will be interested in. And who hasn't ever had compassion on a bag lady? Apart from a filmmaker who only cares about his film and how to use and abuse her?
It is definitely a film about bags. Plastic bags are about to be outlawed from supermarkets. This is a film that taps into the subconscious of a collective generation of consumer shoppers. It's a film about plastic versus cloth. It's laminated Jesus meets Shroud Jesus. Without the blood stains. It's Don De Lillo's White Noise screaming out at the scanner at the supermarket checkout.
Each to their own. That's my philosophy.
Once upon a time there was a morally depraved person. Now this person did not want to fix his morally depraved lifestyle. He wanted to justify it by obliterating the notion of moral uprightness from his own conscience, and the consciences of others of a like mind. So he searched and searched and searched on Google for an article by someone with a certain amount of worldly credibility. If having morons believe you qualifies as credibility, that is. And he found an article, by a scientist, which denied morality was fixed. And he posted the article on his blog
[ Click here to read more ]
Dear Lady Henrietta,
How delightful it is to have the pleasure of your son's company. He is truly enchanting.
I could enumerate David's many admirable qualities but of course you well know, as his loving mother, what a wonderful and talented boy he is.
[ Click here to read more ]
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Comment by Mistersmith
on Missing the Bus. (My film gets accepted at Cannes)
MRS SMITH
READ THIS
SISTERS IN CRIME
I'm glad you like my name. It ends in 'a' like yours.
There used to be a bag lady - well known around St Kilda and Prahran in Melbourne.
When I was pregnant with my first child I was happier than i'd ever been in my life and strangers were always stopping to talk to me. I was waiting for a bus one evening. This bag lady came by and she stopped and began to talk. At first it sounded like gibberish but her speech suddenly become lucid. She told me her age - which I forget but I do remember it was much younger than I would have thought. She told me that she had children and a husband somewhere. They had been wealthy. Her husband had kicked her out. I tried to ask her questions but she returned to her gibberish. I was curious and I was sympathetic. It had only been a relatively short time before that I had seriously pondered the chances of ending up like that myself.
I left Melbourne a couple of years later and spent 8 years away. When I came back i saw that bag lady, still around, looking exactly the same as she had all those years before.
Teresa