The cutting room, p.32
The Cutting Room, page 32
Before I left, Martina showed me the waiting area, where two girls were watching TV and drinking coffee. They were both wearing blue cat masks. I didn’t stay, but the image bothered me for days afterwards. At least the sins you commit in your heart don’t expose you to blackmail.
The call came a few weeks later, but not from Martina. The man on the phone said he sometimes visited Kittens, and had been friendly with Tania. He hadn’t been there in a while. Today, when he’d turned up, Martina had warned him the police were after him. “I thought I’d better contact you myself.”
We interviewed the punter, whose name was Derek, for two three-hour sessions. He was aged nearly forty and lived alone. It soon emerged that he was an alcoholic. The interviews were very dull. He wanted to talk to us about Tania and his distress at her death. But he seemed to know nothing that could help us. The weekend of her death he’d been in Stafford, helping his parents move house. We checked the alibi and it held. He was harmless, ignorant, and about as interesting to listen to as woodlice in the loft.
“We were close,” he said more than once. “Tania liked me, I could tell. The way she reacted when I touched her. Sometimes I’d make her cum. Sometimes we’d make love fast, then just sit together and talk until the time ran out. We didn’t meet up outside the parlour, but we would have eventually. I could tell she didn’t have a lover. Sometimes I know things without being told them.”
His sensitivity didn’t extend to knowing who had killed her. “I could tell something was wrong, that was all. She was frightened. I think she got sacked, then some pimp made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. I wish she’d called me. I gave her my number, you know. Asked her to phone me if she was in trouble. Maybe she didn’t get the chance.”
The one unexpected thing he told us was near the end of the second session, when we pressed him for any hint she might have dropped regarding who she knew, how she’d got here. “She just wouldn’t talk about that,” he said. “I saw what happened. In a dream. Kept seeing it. Hearing her scream. The blows. It was driving me insane. All the men were wearing masks.” For a moment his face looked much older. “I don’t suppose that’s evidence.”
“Evidence of what?” my colleague Di Hargreave said wearily. She’d had about enough of Derek’s inner life.
The last question I asked him was “Why have you started going back to Kittens?”
He looked at me, and there was no hint of self-dramatisation in his face. Only blank despair. “What else have I got?”
The investigation stalled. It was partly the block on anything that might inconvenience the Forresters, and partly our failure to trace anyone connected with the murdered girl. The name “Tania” was a mask. For us, the case was symptomatic of a wider pattern. Birmingham needed something to replace its rapidly collapsing industrial base, and the city’s financiers had decided the answer was business conferences. That meant convention centres, mammoth hotels, expensive restaurants, and a blue-chip sex industry. Not girls on the streets, but girls in private clubs and parlours. Even without blackmail, the silence of the Council would have been guaranteed. It was business.
One question we spent some time looking at was why Tania had been dumped in the city centre. It was clearly a message to someone. Most probably to the girls working in the lap-dancing clubs, porn cinemas, and massage parlours scattered between Holloway Head and Snow Hill, the hinterland of Eastern European flesh kept behind closed doors and guarded by discreet pimps on the payroll of local businessmen. A simple message: Don’t get lazy. The Chinese restaurant was two blocks away from an “executive gentlemen’s club” owned by the Forresters. But Tania wouldn’t have worked there: she wasn’t the right physical type.
Within a year, we were given a solution to the case. But it wasn’t one that would cut much ice with the CPS. A local filmmaker called Matt Black, backed by Skin City Productions, had made a film “reconstructing” Tania’s life and death. A heavily cut version of The Last Ride was screened at the Electric Cinema in Birmingham, and a few other art cinemas across the country. A “director’s cut” was sold to adults via the Internet, and screened privately a few times.
The police team investigating the murder, including me, watched the full version on DVD at the Steelhouse Lane station. It showed a girl called Katja working on the streets in Romania, then being trafficked to Birmingham and given a new name. Her pimps were an Arab gang, nothing like the Forresters. Another prostitute told her better money could be earned doing private parties for businessmen. She was given a number, but didn’t call it until she lost her job at the parlour. The rest was violence.
It was a sleazy, brutal film. There were images that combined hardcore sex with prosthetic simulations of injury. Matt Black clearly thought himself a talented auteur with urban lowlife as his canvas. But the wooden acting and flat dialogue suggested that he saw the character of Tania only as a temporary barrier between the camera and her wounds. The Last Ride was as weak on external circumstances as it was strong on forensic detail.
Matt Black was interviewed for an arts review programme that went out on Central TV, late on Friday night. I watched it at home. He was about thirty, with a retro-style tailored suit and a nervous smile. The interviewer asked him what the main purpose of The Last Ride was. He said, “To deal with Tania as an icon. A media construct. We don’t know who she really was, where she came from. The film explores how her identity was constructed through the same transformations that destroyed her as a person. It’s also an examination of the Madonna-whore image in Western culture.”
The interviewer nodded in a slightly bemused way, then asked why two versions were being released at the same time. “It’s a statement against censorship,” Black said at once. “There’s a false distinction in our culture between art and pornography. The Last Ride deliberately blends the style codes of art cinema and gonzo porn. We’re breaking down boundaries.”
“That leads to another question people are asking. Why did you use hardcore porn techniques in a film about sexual violence and abuse? You’re pushing not only what can be released, but what can legally be filmed at all.”
Black smiled. “This film challenges the censors to admit the audience out there are really adults. They’re saying you should not be allowed to see these images. Skin City is all about breaking boundaries. Including flesh boundaries.” His smile momentarily became a grin. “The anal space has traditionally been taboo in all cinema except porn. We’re saying, liberate the image. Open all the doors.”
“Does the image have a life of its own, apart from the human reality?”
“You’re asking the wrong question,” Black said. “You should be asking, does the human reality have a life of its own apart from the image?”
The programme cut away from the interview there, just as I saw my hands reach out towards the TV with the intention of strangling it. I switched it off and went upstairs to bed. Elaine was already asleep.
Months went past. Our vague hope that The Last Ride might stimulate someone who knew the murdered girl to get in touch came to nothing. Other crimes and more accessible villains took our attention. It was November when I got a call from the Steelhouse Lane station to tell me that Matt Black had disappeared. My immediate reaction was “Have you tried looking up his arse?”
We assumed the filmmaker had gone on an unplanned trip somewhere, for research or recreation. But when Christmas came and went and no one had heard from him, Black was added to the list of missing persons. A film he’d been working on, about the dark side of Internet dating, was shelved indefinitely. His absence provoked a renewal of interest in The Last Ride, and there was speculation in the press that he’d been swallowed up by the world his films explored.
In late January, I phoned the Kittens parlour and had a chat with Martina. She’d already been made to realise that cooperating with us was sensible. The Forrester brothers might be safe from police action, but she wasn’t. I asked her whether Derek had been in lately. “We saw him just before Christmas,” she said. “He comes in every few weeks, sees a different girl every time. But you know what they told me? He won’t put his hands on them. And while he does it, he keeps his eyes shut. They call him the sleepwalker.”
Several days later, Martina called me in the evening. “He’s here,” she said. I was off duty, but I apologised to Elaine and left my dinner unfinished. I parked across the Coventry Road from the parlour and watched carefully from my car. When Derek emerged, I crossed over and followed him at a distance. He was walking slowly, his head tilted, as if drunk.
I caught up with him as he was passing the children’s playground near the canal walkway. “Hi Derek. How’s it going?” He didn’t look surprised to see me. “Could we have a chat?” I asked. He nodded.
We crossed the canal bridge into the Ackers, a patch of semi-wasteland used regularly for cruising and shooting up in warmer weather. Just now it was deserted. The damp grass brushed the ankles of my jeans. Derek lit a cigarette, didn’t offer me one. It was dark, but the moon was out and the lights of the Coventry Road weren’t far away. “Do you get out much?” I asked. “Go to the cinema?”
“I bought it on DVD,” he said. “Didn’t think much of it. Is that what you wanted to know?” I didn’t say anything. “It was empty,” he said. “No truth. I don’t mean facts. I mean it wasn’t her. I don’t blame the actress. But the bloke who made it. Smart little fucker. Mouthing off on TV like he knew it all. He knew nothing. What I could have told him . . .” He stopped and drew hard on his cigarette.
“He didn’t know anything about Tania,” I said. “Someone had to put him straight. Make him understand.”
Derek stared into the murky distance. “You think I killed him, don’t you? But I didn’t. I don’t know where he is now. Neither does he.”
There was a long silence. I wasn’t armed, and didn’t look forward to arresting a desperate man. He turned slowly and looked at me. In the half-light his face was a mask with holes for eyes. “What did you do to him?” I asked.
“This,” he said, and touched my face.
The scream that tore her mouth apart. A baby on fire in her womb. Everyone she had ever loved maimed, infected, destroyed. The men who used her four, five, six at once, making new holes when they ran out. The crows that pecked at her hands and feet. The city that broke into fragments, stone rats that scarred every child they could find. The pain that never stopped, spreading through the past and the future, the grey mist, the sea of blood, the cloud of sperm, the bone-faced men, the cries for help, the broken cat mask.
The next few days are a blur. I don’t know exactly where I went. The images in my head were the only reality. I spent a night under a railway bridge, another night in a derelict house. I used the cash in my wallet to buy vodka from a few off-licences and heroin from someone I met on the streets. I smoked it under bridges in the dead of night. For a week or more I was trapped in someone else’s memories. And the pain of those final hours never left me.
One frozen morning, I followed a misty thread of forgotten life into a police station. While I sat inert on a bench, they checked my wallet and contacted my department. I was diagnosed as having suffered an acute nervous breakdown. They gave me tranquillisers, silenced the terror, wrapped me in chemical bandages. I spent a month in hospital. Elaine visited me, and when I heard her voice a little of myself came back.
I assume Matt Black is still out there somewhere, numbing the pain with alcohol or narcotics, on the run from something he can’t leave behind. I don’t like to think about it. It took me a long time to recover, and not all of me got through. Years later, there are still words I can’t stand to hear. And I don’t like to have anything touch my face, not even rain.
Brutal Is the Night: A Review
REMEMBER The Blair Witch Project’s marketing campaign? It was an update of sorts on 1971’s The Last House on the Left, except where Wes Craven would have us keep reminding ourselves that it’s just a movie, it’s just a movie, Blair Witch kept whispering that this was actual found footage. It’s the same dynamic, though; it was tapping the same sensationalistic vein.
Writer/director Sean Mickles (Abasement, Thirty-Nine) knows this vein very well. And, for Tenderizer, he let it bleed.
As you probably recall, the first trailer was released as a “rough cut,” with the media outlets quoting Mickles’s grumbled objection that Tenderizer wasn’t ready, that production difficulties were built into a project like this, weren’t they?
Speculation was that he just wasn’t ready to let it go, of course.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Whether actually released with his approval or not, that first trailer definitely had nerve. Just the title at lowest possible right in a “roughcut” font, then ninety seconds of black screen, punctuated by shallow breathing, the kind that makes you hold your eyes a certain way, in sympathetic response. At the end of it there wasn’t even any large-sized title branded on or swooping in—there were no closing frames. It was all closing frames. It was as if a minute and a half of our pre-movie attractions had been hijacked. Watching it, you had the feeling you could look up at the theater’s tall back wall, see a prankster’s face smiling down at you from the projection booth.
Except that breathing, it was supposed to be actual recorded breathing. From one of the twenty-four victims of the Woodrow High School Massacre.
Neither Mickles nor Aklai Studio ever suggested it, but in the press surrounding the trailer’s release, Aklai did deny it, and not just in an oblique way, but in a way that felt coached. By a lawyer.
Mickles had no comment.
It was obvious he was part of this junket very much against his will.
Soon enough, another rumor found its way into circulation, from no source anybody could ever cite. But it was so terrible it had to be true. It was that that black screen, that nervous breathing, it was the last voicemail Mickles had received from his six-year-old daughter nearly ten years ago, when she was playing hide and seek with her nanny—when Mickles, according to the reports, assumed she was just carrying the cordless phone with her and had accidentally speed-dialed him.
Whether an intentional call or not, she still suffered the same fate: carbon monoxide in the garage, her new best hiding place.
The rumor about Tenderizer, then, was that Mickles was dealing with his own grief (or guilt) by exploring visuals that breathing could have been associated with, for a girl playing hide and seek on another ordinary day.
If either theory were true—the breathing was from a victim of the massacre, the breathing was from his own daughter’s accidental death—then the studio should have stopped the project right there. Aklai would have lost a few dollars, sure, but it would have gained some public opinion points, which are finally worth more.
Film is intensely personal, yes, and it can be violently pornographic, but playing either the labored breathing of someone now dead or the last missive from a dying daughter to a father, that’s combining the two in a way that shouldn’t be flirted with, right? Shouldn’t there be a line?
Apparently not.
Six months after that initial trailer, there was the soon-to-be-famous thirty-second spot—perhaps originally intended for network, for prime-time—that featured footage culled from on-the-scene news reports, complete with station identifications, license plates, and sports logos blurred over. No, not blurred: smeared over. Instead of scrubbing the pixels or smudging the print, Mickles was showcasing his art-house pedigree. The news footage was playing on a small television, and the legally necessary “blurring” was actually Vaseline dabbed onto the screen. Which is to say those thirty seconds were shot, cut, and piped into a television monitor, then paused and rewound continually to wipe and reapply the Vaseline, a process that would have taxed even a Claymation artist’s patience. And for what effect, finally?
As with the rest of Sean Mickles’s body of work since his daughter’s accident, that’s always the question, yes.
Of course, save for one telltale glare of the screen right at the end of those thirty seconds, it takes a trained eye to even clock that it’s a television screen being filmed in the first place. Simply because of what that television is playing: thirty seconds of respondents and interviewees and witnesses to the Woodrow Massacre. Which of course we’ve all seen nearly to the point of memorization. Those easy, iconic moments weren’t the one Mickles chose for this trailer, though.
Do people know about heads and tails anymore, as it applies to film? It’s how you give a scene punch, how you cut run-time: snip as much off the front and back as you can, until only the absolutely vital remains. Because the modern audience doesn’t have time for the rest. In the early days of film, heads and tails were often bought off editing-room floors and spliced into what they called ‘shadow movies,’ where you could tell the story was actually happening in the space just beside the screen. There was an audience for it in the early 1930s, and not just because the theaters those shadow movies played in were cheaper.
That audience never died, either. It just went to sleep for a couple of generations.
Sean Mickles shook it awake.
The moments he clipped for Tenderizer’s second trailer, they’re the moments right before those witnesses’ and parents’ and emergency personnel’s voices creak on, when they’re looking past the camera, into some unclaimed middle distance. It evokes not so much a fly caught in a web, sensing some many-legged, inevitable shape taking form at the limits of its perception, but a human dreamer waking in that same web, about to offer an excuse to the spider. How this is all a big misunderstanding.
There were eight of these clips, of varying length, none longer than six seconds.
