In which our hero confronts himself in Michael Ironside.

LATEST NEWS:  I am a moving space.

Letters: I’d like to apologize to the makers of the original Total Recall film.

FIGHT SCENE.

Jack Nicholson pushes Michael Ironside[1] against the stacked garbage cans in his courtyard, slaps him repeatedly from cheek-to-cheek, and places a pair of large sunglasses on his face. Projectile spurts of saliva shoot from my mouth with bellicose commands. “Be me. Be me!” The sunglasses almost fall off Ironside’s face, but I hammer them against the bridge of his nose with a tough index finger. “Be me.”

I smacked his face with the trashcan lid until no dental records could be detected, and I waited for the plangent gong to fade away.

Is this laughter? Am I laughing?

my own figure coming toward me in a dress which I had never worn, - it was pike-gray, with somewhat of gold. As soon as I shook myself out of this dream, the figure had entirely disappeared. It is strange, however, that, 8 years afterward, I found myself on the very road, to pay one more visit to F., in the dress of which I had dreamed, and which I wore, not from choice, but by accident. However, it may be with matters of this kind generally, this strange illusion in some measure calmed me at the moment of parting. The pain of quitteing for ever noble [Alsace], with all I had gained in it, was softened; and, having at last escaped the excitement of a farewell, I, on a peaceful and quiet journey, pretty well regained my self possession. [2]

A line I remember from an email I cannot find:

> psychiatric unhealthy is just like a problem with your computer:

> it can either be attributed to a software problem or a hardware problem.

For the first time since buying the computer, Jack Nicholson picked up a pencil and let each letter fall to the page like an angel.

Dear Edith,

My name is Michael Ironside. I was born February 12, 1950. I speak fluent Hebrew, German and Russian. I used to pretend to have trouble reading the letters during eye examinations because I wanted glasses. Somehow the eye doctor always knew I was lying. Nowadays I teach drama at a Catholic school beside a park where Jack Nicholson sometimes eats sandwiches.

Love always,

Michael Ironside

Let’s start over: I am Michael Ironside. History might record me as not Jack Nicholson. Let’s start over: I am not famous in any way to anyone. I am a man who eats salami sandwiches. I am an amputated father. I am a haunted uncle. I am a lonely hunter. Or, rather, I am like an uncle. I am avuncular. I am like an uncle once written by Chekhov. I am like Jack Nicholson. Let’s start over.

Interior. Jack Nicholson. If I could make my head explode. If I could peel off my face… If I could take a reddish globule from my brain, pull it out my nostril, and be rid of Michael Ironside, be rid of Jack Nicholson. If I could swing a baseball bat against my own face, crack off my two front teeth, lodge them down my throat – my teeth are already gone. I can see myself pecking at a morsel of cheese, This isn’t me... This isn’t me... I am Jack Nicholson. 

Exterior. Something like watching myself on screen, but not. I can see my face – it is the single visage of a crowd of cinemagoers walking out a movie theatre – a liminal expression between worlds. Will the movie house vanish back into non-existence after the 20^th Century? Do you know who I am? Do people read in the future? Do you know who I am? Are you there? Do you know who I am?  From the book of Holocaust poetry: ‘he that I am forgives him that I was’.[3] Let’s say I am an actor, immured in a role, and now I am ready to step out of character. If I curl my fingers, he curls his; but I can’t get him up. I stand too firm for this to be an out of body experience! He just sits there, waiting for a stroke, waiting for sirens, waiting for his hair and fingernails to grow beneath roses with neither destination nor direction.

NOTE (found written in red on screenplay):

In end, JN must confront JN.

uncertainty if narrator is confronting double from mirror OR if JN is confronting narrator.

All that remains are images collected from my films, BUT those are just characters played.

---

[1] We can say here, “the Ironside character”. As in from Total Recall or Scanners. 

[2] Goethe from his autobiography Truth & Fiction

[3] Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, from the poem ‘Shroud’ p.71, translated by Michael Hamburger, Persea Books

In which our hero remembers Cragganmore.

LATEST NEWS: I’ve had everything a man could ask for, but I don’t know if anyone could say I’m successful with affairs of the heart. I don’t know why. I would love that one last real romance. But I’m not very realistic about it happening. What I can’t deny is my yearning.

Letters: I’d like to apologize to my father. My mother.  My grandmother. 

INT. EXTERMINATOR’S APARTMENT – DAY

Bookshelves lined with volumes upon volumes of encyclopedias resembling the large book the exterminator had brought upon his first visit to Nicholson’s New York apartment, and in which he had marked down Cragganmore’s name. They are organized by year, dating back to Ancient Egypt.

EXTERMINATOR

I’m something of a plumitif mal connu.

Finding a shelf indexed Plague Collection (Vol. 1-10), Jack Nicholson opens a book filled with strands of hardened mucous carefully placed over individual names.

               JACK NICHOLSON

There were mice in Ancient Egypt?

EXTERMINATOR

Cockroaches, scarabs, and many frogs…

The scene shifts to Jack Nicholson’s New York City apartment with our hero on his deathbed.

The exterminator is seated and staring at Nicholson’s face. The bespectacled cecum reaches into the black hoodie adorning his head, and he slowly peels off his face – like that fat lady in the scene from the original Total Recall – to reveal his naked skull. And, as if he had peered into the depths of Nicholson’s dream while our hero slept, the exterminator says:  “To produce a mighty script, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the mouse, though many there be that have tried it.”

But this too is a dream. I know it is a dream. I suspected it before, but I know it now for sure.

INTERIOR. JACK NICHOLSON’S STUDIO APARTMENT - MORNING

There is a crumple in the bedspread where Edith once slept – once, as in for one night. Our hero sits on a piece of bed still warm from the night’s sleep and spills the remainder of scotch on the floor in memory of Cragganmore.

After they had a falling out and Jack Nicholson had berated Cragganmore for being a bad roommate and not taking out the trash often enough, the mouse grew accustomed to sneaking in and out of the apartment from corner to corner and by night, so as not to be seen. The more Crag skulked about the place, the more Jack became suspicious. His toothbrush began to taste like toilet mornings; his sleep seemed to be disturbed at the pivotal moment each night; and the food in his fridge was increasingly tainted with germ and disease. Nicholson had decided that if the mouse could not stand to be around him in his own home, if Cragganmore would not pass the remainder of days beside him with love and care, she would have to go. After all, he had only put up the notice seeking a roommate in a naive hope of a romantic meet-cute. If Cragganmore was unable to serve this purpose, the mouse would have to go. He certainly didn’t need anyone to share the meager rent of his tiny studio apartment. Jack Nicholson had millions of dollars. He was a Hollywood star.

Beginning to masturbate to visions of Edith dressed in a mouse costume, he suddenly stops upon noticing her sitting on his toilet. Her face has been replaced by Cragganmore’s. Continuing to play with himself, he is mystified by this human woman quizzically turning her mouse-face to the side. David Lynch. Stanley Kubrick. “Oh my God, I think I just shit my pants…” says she in a mousy New York kind of way.

“Edith, I only love you because you’re there,” says Nicholson. “And you just happen to be there at this moment. I apologize. It ought to be my burden to bear alone.” He tosses the empty bottle into the fireplace, having to imagine a fire since both consideration of tenants on floors above and New York City law prohibits him from actually lighting one. Suspension of disbelief. Just as he opens a new bottle, however, a baby mouse appears. Too small to be Crag.

Perhaps Cragganmore was a woman, pregnant. From an entire family of mice living within the confines of my walls. A happy family. He raised the bottle to the new arrival, baptized the little guy Tiny Talisker, and tenderly kicked the old cage.

The clank of a trashcan and a wretched stench – heavy in the crisp morning dew. Ironside. “You are an abrasion below my knee,” he thought. “I tried not to notice you for too long and you are now an infection I’d like to get rid of; but I fear that I’d have to lose my entire leg in the process.”

In which our hero performs misanthropic acts in the midst of a traffic jam.

NEWS: We make our own fate.

LETTERS: I’d like to apologize to Eugene O’Neill, to Anton Chekhov, to William Shakespeare (whom I’ve never had the pleasure of working with) for the things I said and the things I say. Hum, mum, hughm meughm, yum….

He had lost his sunglasses somewhere. That’s why he was late. Where were they? Stolen! No, I lost them. Stolen! I lost ‘em… STOLEN!!!! Lost ‘em! Stolen! Losten! Ha, ha, ha!!! Ho, ho, ho!!!

With an awful smell in his mouth lingering for the third day in a row and without a couple nights’ sleep in my eyes – no fucking sunglasses to hide them – Jack Nicholson poses in a Santa outfit in front of green screen. When asked if he’d like some coffee or tea, he requests “a shot of water."  Then I do the little ‘nip ‘nip Easy Rider thing with my elbow. Those advertising guys love that.

Exterior. Westside Highway. Day. In the midst of a traffic jam, he stood from the piano on the back of the exterminator’s pickup and jumped over the driver’s head, which shrugged our hero off with an eye-rolling grin. Jack stretched his hands out freely, pissing all over the back window of a white Honda Civic, and howled at the wind. The initial force of his flaxen spray ricocheted into the flap-flap October breeze, and golden sprinkles danced towards his face where they were imbibed by pores his sunglasses would have otherwise protected. Safely shielded by the rear window, Ironside’s son was unsure if he should look away or not. Before time allowed the boy reaction, the exterminator honked to warn Nicholson that Michael Ironside had stepped out of the car. [CUE Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Total Recall].

            “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The urine slid down the windshield with perfect smoothness and there was no reason to believe it would leave a stain – perhaps something small, but hidden within the deluged gap demarcating the trunk.

            “That’s my kid, asshole!”

            “Fuck off, Family Man!”

            “If you don’t put that thing away in the next –” 

Upon realizing that the impassioned villain would continue to shout, threaten, preach, Nicholson redirected his piss onto Ironside’s forehead.            

Before he knew it, the Honda Civic reversed into the truck and he was thrown off the roof. Backing into the car behind him, the exterminator positioned his pickup for attack on the Honda Civic. The child went flying into the front seat, and Nicholson did not know who was more worried, Ironside or Edith. He laughed pleasurably and smashed their front window in with a baseball bat. “That’s how you do it!” He screamed at the now dented metal frame. “You see that? That’s how you do it!” He pointed the bat toward Ironside and warned, “A wife and kid is no life for you! You are alone!!” He presented the bat with a devilish grin, and a final trickle of urine sneaked out his flaccid penis and stained his pants. He looked down, pulled a hair from his eyebrow and held it up for the couple to ponder.

The papers described the performance as passionate and enraged but this they had only come to by watching my films. “Perhaps it’s time to step out of the spotlight. Take a break from yourself,” suggested my agent. This is not a confession.