was so infected with glamour by proxy that she didn’t even bother trying to be nice (successful men are often piloted by these creatures), asked a few frowning questions; but I’ve dealt with assholes before and the meeting ended on a co-operative note and a handful of passes and party invitations.
Remember the light-swept office? All those busy young people, typewriters clacking, phones humming, Martin Scorsese on hold? The typewriters were gone, but everything else was the same. I recognized a frizzy-haired woman from a small northern town (grey-haired and shawled now) and went over to her desk. We chatted for a bit, but after only a few minutes I began to feel an odd sensation, as if I was boring her or keeping her from something, and I thought, this is how I used to feel in this office. A sensation of irrelevance. But that had been almost twenty-five years ago. I looked closely at the woman’s face. She didn’t seem bored; no, the problem was me, was in me, as if some old poison, locked away now for years in a special film festival bottle, were slowly leaking into my body from a crack in the cork.
I found myself trotting out a rather shopworn anecdote about interviewing George Harrison in London, and with each theatrical pause I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper. And again I asked myself, why are you feeling this? And why are you behaving like this, currying the favour of a woman you barely know and never gave a shit about in the first place? And yet I could not talk out the sensation. The lights, the busy chatter, the ringing of telephones had set it off. It was as if inside their zone I was a kind of prisoner.
I didn’t stay long, and as the elevator sank downwards, as I passed through the lobby and out into the soft September sunshine, as I began to make my way down a narrow side street, I felt the grasp of these awful feelings lessen its grip, like a belt being slowly loosened around my chest. What, I wondered, was that all about? But I knew what it was about, and the notion that it had even happened felt like a defeat, as if this violent response was a personal shortcoming, the proof of a shortcoming.
I went back again that night. I went to the world premiere of a new American film. The director, writer, producers and actors all paraded on stage. A glittering audience applauded with a wave of almost holy excitement as the star, a baby-faced actor in a white suit, told a story about the last time he was in Toronto, about a customs official who’d said, “I’m a big fan!” and then asked him for ID. Waves of sympathetic laughter. What a dunce! Asking for ID, can you believe it?
There was a brief question-and-answer. What drew you to the material, tell us something funny that happened on set, do Oscar nominations really matter?
And there it was again, this feeling of being slowly poisoned, of being excluded from something; that the centre of life was elsewhere, up on that stage, and that I, along with all the other anonymous people in the audience, was stuck in the marshes, the shallows.
But how, I wondered, could you be distressed to be on the margins of something that you were no longer interested in being on the inside of? I began to see myself as a sort of comic figure, a collection of uncontrollable nervous twitches and responses over which I, their ostensible owner, had almost no control. And what did that imply? That there were some experiences simply too big to wipe out, to neutralize? But we’re not talking about a madhouse or a prison or a torture chamber. We’re talking about a fucking film festival.
All night long I wandered about in a toxic fog. I took a taxi to the post-gala screening down at the waterfront, hundreds of beautiful young men and women dressed to the nines, all talking, all thrilled to be there. I drifted among them like a ghost and then, when I got to the end of the room, I turned around and started back through the crowd again. I knew lots of people. I shook hands, I
Remember the light-swept office? All those busy young people, typewriters clacking, phones humming, Martin Scorsese on hold? The typewriters were gone, but everything else was the same. I recognized a frizzy-haired woman from a small northern town (grey-haired and shawled now) and went over to her desk. We chatted for a bit, but after only a few minutes I began to feel an odd sensation, as if I was boring her or keeping her from something, and I thought, this is how I used to feel in this office. A sensation of irrelevance. But that had been almost twenty-five years ago. I looked closely at the woman’s face. She didn’t seem bored; no, the problem was me, was in me, as if some old poison, locked away now for years in a special film festival bottle, were slowly leaking into my body from a crack in the cork.
I found myself trotting out a rather shopworn anecdote about interviewing George Harrison in London, and with each theatrical pause I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper. And again I asked myself, why are you feeling this? And why are you behaving like this, currying the favour of a woman you barely know and never gave a shit about in the first place? And yet I could not talk out the sensation. The lights, the busy chatter, the ringing of telephones had set it off. It was as if inside their zone I was a kind of prisoner.
I didn’t stay long, and as the elevator sank downwards, as I passed through the lobby and out into the soft September sunshine, as I began to make my way down a narrow side street, I felt the grasp of these awful feelings lessen its grip, like a belt being slowly loosened around my chest. What, I wondered, was that all about? But I knew what it was about, and the notion that it had even happened felt like a defeat, as if this violent response was a personal shortcoming, the proof of a shortcoming.
I went back again that night. I went to the world premiere of a new American film. The director, writer, producers and actors all paraded on stage. A glittering audience applauded with a wave of almost holy excitement as the star, a baby-faced actor in a white suit, told a story about the last time he was in Toronto, about a customs official who’d said, “I’m a big fan!” and then asked him for ID. Waves of sympathetic laughter. What a dunce! Asking for ID, can you believe it?
There was a brief question-and-answer. What drew you to the material, tell us something funny that happened on set, do Oscar nominations really matter?
And there it was again, this feeling of being slowly poisoned, of being excluded from something; that the centre of life was elsewhere, up on that stage, and that I, along with all the other anonymous people in the audience, was stuck in the marshes, the shallows.
But how, I wondered, could you be distressed to be on the margins of something that you were no longer interested in being on the inside of? I began to see myself as a sort of comic figure, a collection of uncontrollable nervous twitches and responses over which I, their ostensible owner, had almost no control. And what did that imply? That there were some experiences simply too big to wipe out, to neutralize? But we’re not talking about a madhouse or a prison or a torture chamber. We’re talking about a fucking film festival.
All night long I wandered about in a toxic fog. I took a taxi to the post-gala screening down at the waterfront, hundreds of beautiful young men and women dressed to the nines, all talking, all thrilled to be there. I drifted among them like a ghost and then, when I got to the end of the room, I turned around and started back through the crowd again. I knew lots of people. I shook hands, I
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