“The public-relations campaign is a stunning success. Mark’s video news releases are regularly featured on CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, FOX NEWS, etc. Efforts to ostracize Colonel Alebua and his clique from the community of nations abate, as Mark is able to reposition Alebua as an emancipator and populist, defending his fledgling nation against the imperial predations of Papua New Guinea. With the assistance of ILM, Digital Domain, Sony’s Image Works, and Pixar (which did Toy Story), Mark shrewdly restages recent history to portray Alebua as an indispensable player on the world stage. Utilizing sophisticated computer graphics technology — akin to that used to digitally transplant Paula Abdul into a pas de deux with Gene Kelly in the Diet Coke ads and make possible the Kennedy cameo in Forrest Gump—Mark produces a fiendishly brilliant series of VNRs that not only place Colonel Alebua at the side of eminent Johns Hopkins neurologist Dr. Jeffrey Rothstein as they work together on an experimental drug, riluzole, that slows the deadly progress of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but that also show him assisting Richard Jewell in his lawsuit against NBC and anchor Tom Brokaw; as a pallbearer at Dean Martin’s funeral; carousing at Club Macanudo with New Edition members Bobby Brown and Ronnie DeVoe, Chinese Defense Minister General Chi Haotian, and former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker; and stoning an adulterer to death with Taliban militiamen in Kabul, Afghanistan (Alebua is seen throwing three stones: the first one, delivered from a full windup, misses high; the second, a slider, is just outside; on his third rock, Alebua — from the stretch — comes with his split-fingered fastball, and nails the unregenerate fornicator flush in the forehead, receiving a standing O from the turbaned fundamentalists).
“Although the campaign succeeds in rehabilitating Alebua’s image abroad, his job ratings at home remain dismally low.
“There are daily assassination attempts on Alebua and his associates. Dissimulation, treachery, and paranoia are pervasive throughout every echelon of society. The ‘enemy’ is everywhere, and there’s no certainty whose side anyone is on at any given moment. In one particularly disturbing scene, babies with bloated bellies, covered with flies, and sprawled listlessly in the dust, suddenly produce assault weapons, leap to their feet, and rake a passing motorcade with automatic gunfire. It’s chilling to see a gaunt, glassy-eyed infant, who’s apparently starving to death, peel off its full-body latex mask to reveal a sneering, heavily muscled, 6?2?” mercenary commando.
“ ‘My people despise me,’ the subtitled colonel concedes. It appears as if he hasn’t slept for days — dark rings circle puffy, bloodshot eyes. His speech is slurred.
“ ‘Tennesseeans love Senator Fred Thompson. Why? Because, as baby-sitting adolescents, they spent thousands of hours in front of televisions watching movies in which he was an almost imperceptible presence, and he subliminally insinuated himself into their subconsciousnesses as an avuncular icon,’ continues Alebua, a perceptive student of American politics. ‘I’ve been reviewing the entire Fred Thompson oeuvre — everything from Curly Sue, Dayo, and Unholy Matrimony to Aces: Iron Eagle III—that’s why I haven’t slept for days. And I’ve come to the shattering conclusion that having failed to subliminally insinuate myself into the pubescent psyches of my people, I will never have their love.’
“ ‘Au contraire, Mein Führer,’ says Mark coyly. ‘I have an idea. I will create a retroactive canon of movies for you. You’ll star in them all. We’ll get the most beautiful women in Bougainville — those cigarette girls from the trepang hatcheries you love so much — to co-star with you. We’ll churn out product like the great studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age. And we’ll flood the video stores and fill all the time slots on the classic-movie channels, so that people will actually begin to believe that they originally saw the movies long ago, and they’ll feel this nostalgic fondness for you, and they’ll even develop false memories about where they were as children when they first saw such-and-such a film, and they’ll come to cherish you with a love as innate and unconditional, as ardent and as unfathomable, as the love they feel for their own mothers and fathers.’
“ ‘Good,’ says Alebua. ‘Pitch me some ideas tomorrow.’
“Although Mark knows that the Colonel has been delighted with his VNR work, he’s somewhat apprehensive when he arrives at the pitch meeting the following morning. There are skeletons manacled to the walls — apparently screenwriters who’ve made unsuccessful pitches to the Colonel and his Minister of Culture, a sallow, hollow-cheeked, pockmarked, acromegalic degenerate (played by the formidable Derek Jacobi) in a sleeveless flak jacket and domino mask, who spends the meeting shooting up speedballs and fondling his ‘wife,’ a cardboard cutout point-of-purchase display of the Oak Ridge Mountain Boys. (Dental records would later identify the skeletal remains as notorious Euroschlockmeister Joe D’Amato, and Americans Ethan Coen and Todd Solondz.)
“ ‘You’re on,’ says the Minister.
“ ‘OK … this is, like, completely off the top of my head, but … We do the life of Leonard Gutman, the great signage copywriter. I see a full-blown, lush, 70-millimeter artist-hero biopic — a kind of signage Lust for Life. Maybe we call it Gutman—y’know, kinda like Basquiat. We start back when he was a little boy, because the interesting thing is that Len Gutman grew up with all these legendary jazz musicians hanging around the house — all these jazz greats used to just drop in. It wasn’t unusual for Len to come down to dinner and find, like, Eddie Vinson, Johnny Hodges, Coleman Hawkins, and Jo Jones seated at the table. Or to wake up and find Ben Webster, Jimmy Heath, Roy Eldridge, Charlie Christian, Milt Jackson, and Fats Navarro in the living room, jamming late into the night. But no one could figure out why, because apparently neither Len nor his parents knew any of them. So one day Mr. and Mrs. Gutman have one of those “I thought they were your friends”—“I thought they were your friends” conversations, and Mr. Gutman asks the jazz musicians to please leave, which they do, cordially and without incident. This entire episode has absolutely no effect whatsoever on young Len, who never had and never would have the slightest interest in jazz or any other kind of music.
“ ‘That summer, Lens parents take him on a vacation to Wiseguyana.
“ ‘Hundreds of years ago, Mafia turncoats — mobsters who’d “rolled over” and testified for the prosecution — were put into the federal witness protection program and exiled to an isolated region of a country on the northern coast of South America — what is today called Wiseguyana. And over the generations, as the ex-Mafiosi interbred with the indigenous population, they gradually devolved into a primitive tribe of hunter-gatherers. And although today they depend on very basic means of sustaining themselves — spears, blowguns with curare-tipped darts, and manioc cultivation — they retain a number of cultural vestiges of their forebears. They wear loincloths made from their ancestors’ $3,000 double-breasted Brioni suits, for instance. And the shaman keeps the tribe’s sacred amulets in the last surviving monogrammed sheer Gucci sock. But this culture’s fascinating lineage is most conspicuous in its speech patterns and idioms. Here’s a young hunter as he trusses a wounded tapir in the moonlit forest: “You don’t stay still, I’m gonna whack you in the fuckin’ mouth, you scumbag. I don’t need this shit. You think I enjoy this? I could be at the track or with some broad, but no, I’m here so you can break my fuckin’ balls? You piece of shit, nocturnal, ungulate cocksucker.” Here’s the tribal headman, a wizened elder in feather headdress and ornamental earsticks, pacing in front of his palm-thatch clubhouse, concerned about the outcome of the tapir hunt: “I send this bum out for tapir … this Johnny Butterass, Johnny Blowjob, whatever the fuck his name is. Where the hell is he? I’m like a fish in the desert here, for Christsake! I gotta read the New York Post to find out how he fuckin’ made out? I hate this [inaudible] with a fucking passion!”