“Not last week,” said Perkus, patiently straightening me out. “Last week, I told you, I was in a death glaze, mostly. I’m reconstructing an epiphany from five years ago, at least. Probably ten.”
I wanted many things, but for starters I wanted us to quit saying the word epiphany. “What do you want on your bagel?”
“Let’s make coffee.”
When I’d performed what triage I could on his kitchen and we sat with coffee in fresh cups and pumpernickel halves frosted with whitefish, Perkus said, “So, what about Brando?”
What about sleep? I wanted to reply. “I honestly think it’ll be difficult to get hold of him.”
“Sure, but we have to try.” Between starved attacks on his bagel, gobbets of pureed fish and mayonnaise dripping from between his fingers, Perkus named Brando as the living avatar of the unexpressed, a human enunciation of the remaining hopes for our murdered era. His lordly vulnerability, his beauty overwritten with bulk, his superbly calibrated refusal to oblige, all made Marlon Brando the name of that principle which nemeses as varied as Mayor Jules Arnheim, the War on Drugs, Jack Nicholson’s museum-defacing scene as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had conspired to unname.
“You know Brando’s single most crucial moment?” Perkus quizzed me.
“Uh, not On the Waterfront?”
“Not even close. Too compromised by McCarthyism.”
I hated this game. “Apocalypse Now?”
“Well, that’s an important one, with the whole Heart of Darkness subtext, but what I have in mind is when he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to accept the Oscar in his place. I mean, it’s the most amazing conflation of the American Imaginary, just think about it! In one gesture Brando ties our rape of the Indians to this figure of our immigrant nightmare, this Sicilian peasant doing the American dream, capitalism I mean, more ruthlessly than the founding fathers could have ever dreaded. We’re as defenseless against what Don Corleone exposes, the murderous underside of Manifest Destiny, as the Indians were against smallpox blankets. And in the vanishing space between the two, what? America itself, whatever that is. Brando, essentially, declining to appear. Because the party’s over.” Here Perkus hesitated for breath, like a jazz soloist tipping his horn to one side. His unruly eye tested the bounds of its socket. He also snuck in another bite of whitefish and pumpernickel-at least I was getting some calories into him. “By refusing to show up Brando took on the most magnificent aspect, it’s as if Toto sweeps the curtain aside and the great and powerful Oz has absconded, leaving you to contemplate the fact that behind the illusion there’s nothing. The Oz of American history, for all its monstrousness, is all we’ve got. Brando could have done anything at that moment. Come home to us, instead of remaining in exile. He should have run for mayor of New York.”
“Like Mailer?” I might not pass many tests, but I recalled a recent Tooth History of New York.
“Sure, but Mailer had it all fouled up, he still bought the romance of Marilyn Monroe, all that Andy Warhol crap. Brando was pure because he’d been out there, had Marilyn, knew it didn’t matter. He was our captain. Maybe it’s not too late.”
“Not too late-?” To lure Brando here to run for mayor? I hesitated to complete the thought aloud, fearing I’d lead Perkus to this conclusion if he hadn’t reached it already. I wasn’t sure which was more worrisome, Perkus’s careening logic or that I’d mostly been able to follow it.
“No, Brando’s keeping faith. That’s what I realized, Chase. He’s still out there, sending up flares, if anyone’s paying attention.”
“What flares?”
“His most recent film, that spy movie, Footholds-you know how it was supposedly ruined by his battles with the director, Florian Ib, the guy who made The Gnuppet Movie? There’s this one anecdote from the set, seems like typical Hollywood gossip, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
“Yes?”
“So, there’s a scene they’re shooting, Ib’s setup calls for a wide shot, but Brando demands a close-up. They argue over it, but neither backs down, and then Brando goes back to his trailer, and when he comes out for the shot, he’s wearing only the top half of his costume. Right there, with the whole crew watching, Brando’s nude from the waist down. He’s basically daring Florian Ib to shoot the wide shot.”
“I’m somehow guessing Marlon got his close-up.”
He tried to contain his impatience with me. “Sure, but if that was the whole point it wouldn’t be more than showbiz vanity. The thing is, by that time Brando’s figured out Footholds won’t be much of a vehicle for what he needs to say, so he sends out this message.”
“What message?”
“It took me a while to decipher it, but think, Chase-what’s the Platonic form of a Gnuppet?” My baffled look told Perkus not to wait for my guess this time. “Your quintessential Gnuppet stands behind a wall, right? You only ever see them from the waist up. Remove the wall, or the edge of the frame, and you’d see the hands of the operators, making them move. I’ve been studying Brando’s scene in The Gnuppet Movie, there’s a reason he’s pointing us back to that work-the key is the relation between the actors and the Gnuppets. We’re players in a Gnuppet realm, reading from the same script. We’re All Gnuppets. Brando was saying: abolish this boundary, tear down the wall or the curtain, and let’s have a look at the Gnuppeteers.”
“Or at his genitals.”
“Haven’t you wondered why the average consumer is uncomfortable with letterboxed movies? It isn’t because most people are programmed to be Philistines, though they are. Cable channels go on offering scan-and-pan versions to keep people from having to consider that frame’s edge, which reminds them of all they’re not seeing. That glimpse is intolerable. When your gaze slips beyond the edge of a book or magazine, you notice the ostensible texture of everyday reality, the table beneath the magazine, say, or the knee of your pants. When your eye slips past the limit of the letterboxed screen, you’re faced with what’s framed and projected in that margin-it ought to be something, but instead it’s nothing, a terrifying murk, a zone of nullity. But the real reason it’s so terrifying is because it begs the question of whether they’re the same thing. Maybe the tabletop or the knee of your pants bears no more relation to the contents of the magazine than the images on the screen do to the void above and below.”
I rinsed a glass and handed Perkus some cold tap water, wanting to see something going in besides coffee.
“I think I ought to put up a broadside,” he said.
“It’s been a long time.” I spoke cautiously, not wanting to jar him, and anyway uncertain of my facts.
“Yes.”
We both glanced in at the paperscape of his living-room floor, the unreconstructed epiphany. Was it a broadside in progress? That groping collage seemed a kind of wan parody of the maniacal hand-scrawled rants of his heyday. It dawned on me that by lighting on a champion whose triumph was in declining to appear, Perkus might elaborately forgive his own years of inactivity, his hide-and-seek muse. That Brando had frittered away much of his prime gave them something in common. (Me, too, if I bothered to think in those terms.) Even better, absence could form a statement, especially if punctuated with a well-timed and phantasmal return, the broadside equivalent of Sacheen Littlefeather. Manhattan might have forgotten Perkus and his broadsides, but never mind. He’d send up a flare.