L.A. gets rain. People don’t think of the rain in L.A. if they don’t live there. We get a lot in the winter, and the rain in Pasadena near the mountains comes down hard on our little paper-roof stone home that stays wet and cold no matter how many fires we burn in the giant hearth of the old stone fireplace.
Clouds have blown over our ancient eucalyptuses and collection of live oaks on our property and beyond the canopies of the hundreds or so ten-to-fifteen-feet-tall birds of paradise on our weird little often-photographed property.
I think of this house as the Lapvona house. It is where the novel was written. And it’s church-like feels timeless, and has a holy yet dungeon-esque quality.
A lone German named Herman Kholer built the structure alone for over twenty years out of found objects like bits of old flour mills, beams from a toy factory, a church bell that fell in an earthquake in Santa Barbara, tiles and artifacts and sundials from across Central and South America, as well as massive stones from across five states: Idaho, Oregon, California, Arizona, and Nevada.
He built our home in the early twentieth century. It was his masterpiece. Now we live in this strange, secular church, down in the winter-wet holler at the base of the San Gabriel mountain range.
Yes, it is late—too late—past the hour where writing feels like work and into the hour where it feels illicit. We are two lonely gods typing into a shared document across a spotty wifi connection, trying to find our way to make an A24/Safdie film work (one Ottessa was right to say she didn’t want to do before the starting bell ever dinged on the project.)
It’s an anti-biopic about Debbie Harry but telling her story in allegory form in which she is a wrestler in a replica city on another planet, Mars, and in this replica metropolis it is always New York City in 1971. Back in the downtown scene of Max’s Kansas City, Blondie, Lou Reed, Basquiat and Warhol going to see WWF at Madison Square Garden, garbage strikes, rampant crime, and heroin run riot.
Ottessa reads the scene aloud again. We’ve been trying to crack it for days. We are under contract for four movies. Two have already come out, four more are under contract. There’s money, expectation, the quiet panic of deliverables. It’s my fault for pushing us too hard into this situation. I am the one to blame. She would never have lead herself this far from home—novels. To me, she’s the greatest writer of our generation, the coolest, the wisest, the most moral, and rigorous.
People used to say we were like John and Joan—two voices braiding themselves into one, a shared temperature, a shared sentence, but she didn’t need that sentence. It felt true at the time. It felt inevitable.
But right now it is just the sentence. She reads it aloud and then she laughs. I love when she laughs, which she does often, even though some people don’t know this about her. I know she’s laughing not because it’s funny but because the line I’ve written—it’s dead. Some of this may be an amalgamation of experiences, this essay, and I often forget things, remember things wrong, I am someone who had multiple major head injuries before I was five—bad ones. The kind that all serial killers share, I was told, although I haven’t looked it up.
You can feel always feel when something is dead. If you have an talent at all. It moves, technically, the line of dialogue transfers information, or characters behave like a character might, but nothing is being risked, and nothing new is exposed, and therefore nothing is alive.
Someone, me or her, has written something correctly but it is simply inert. This is the stickiness of screenwriting: you write structure without life. You Frankenstein a perfect skeleton with no blood in it.
Brian De Palma understands the power of a scene that doesn’t behave correctly, but is magnificent. In Body Double, a man moves through a mall—lingerie, escalators, polished light. Nothing happens in terms of what producers and critics call “plot” but everything happens in terms of sensation and the scene is more alive than a car chase because it risks something—desire, exposure, looking. Someone needs something and is trying to get it. Even if nothing happens. Even if they are just watching. I watch her in the couch across from mine, couches that were my grandmothers, that Ottessa never wanted.
In Dressed To Kill, also a De Palma classic, the museum sequence abandons dialogue. Movement stands in place of explanation. The story tracks the subject, but the experience intensifies as the viewer has no idea what is going on. Is it Cinéma verité, is it the POV of a killer, or is it us watching our own voyeuristic nature, or is it reverence for the woman on camera and her loneliness?
It’s something more. It’s De Palma knowing the job is not to get to the story but the job is to make the getting there the story.
Back in the house, my wife says, “It’s just boring.” So we tear it apart in the church that is also a dungeon that is also, what, a spaceship, a marital palace, a workshop. This is where writing becomes dangerous again. We stop protecting the scene and start exposing it, which is also exposing ourselves, our marriage, our souls, and our frustrations and hopes and dreams. At the same time, I was writing Kill Dick.
At first, the violence functioned structurally. Murders as engines and bodies as devices, when I wanted them to be my dead brother, the outrage we should all feel for the half-a-million-dead Americans we lost to the planned opioid epidemic, and the solemnity of human life we have tossed to the wayside. Our little church is a home where both members of the marriage have lost their only brother to Oxy and/or dope.
At first they didn’t feel like anything, the “killings” in Kill Dick. Then the body entered the work.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Susie exists in a state where her body is both hyper-visible and completely numb. By the pool, she is glass and lead at once—seen by everyone, felt by no one, not even herself. She is present as surface, absent as self, and her reclaiming of her own body and her anger are the means of her eventual survival. But at first, she’s not a real body. The dead are not real bodies, not really, until at one point in the novel, this changes in a very profound swerve I felt in the hairs rising on my body as I wrote it.
In the Beverly Hills hotel, the body becomes architecture. The room is sealed with its Hughes-history and air-conditioned neutrality. It is white and expensive. A place where nothing interrupts the slow drift toward absence until Susie hangs the sign—Do Not Disturb—and the phrase becomes doctrine. It is the opposite of what it reads. It is a time for essential disruption.
Do not interrupt the decay. Do not interrupt the dissociation. Kill Dick is meant to disturb, interrupt, and destroy. It also names names. It is not something to submit to the agents and the producers. It’s indie, alt, and pop. That makes it dangerous.
There is a rule in Hollywood: never kill the dog. What that rule really means is: don’t make the audience feel something they can’t control.
In other rooms of other hotels—bodies are no longer just absent, but altered. Rearranged. By “the killer.” A girl in a shower, water still running, blood thinning into something almost decorative, hair cut and scattered across the room, and in others zip ties around necks, nipples cut off and glued on eyelids, but in this bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Susie takes action. The line between her and “the killer” is further blurred and questioned.
The body is no longer private. It is displayed. This is where Saint Bartholomew, my middle namesake, enters.
In “The Last Judgment” Bartholomew holds his own skin. The face in the hide, empty slack is not the face of the living man—we have the mask of what has been removed. Identity has been displaced, shirked off, and yet the saint continues. The self is no longer lodged inside the body, but hangs from it. That’s the most precise image I know of what art does. When the script is working, or the novel, or the painting, it reveals something new, and to get there, often you have to remove everything you identify with and that’s used to identify you. You have to strip yourself.
In Caravaggio’s version of the martyr who died by the flaying of his skin, the act is still happening. The body is being undone in real time, and this is not symbolic, but physical. Historical. The knife is there. The tension. The inevitability. I guess this is what I began to understand in that home and in the novel I was writing. The bodies in Kill Dick are not there to shock. They are there to reveal.
Because I had already seen a body.
My brother’s.
Death is not metaphor and it is a weight. It is stillness and the unbearable fact that a body that held a person is now only a body. You can kiss it, but do it before they put the makeup on, the chemicals, steal the blood—I never want this. Please do not process me for profit.
The difference between those two states is everything, alive and dead. Maybe this is too obvious. But you don’t understand this abstractly, once you understand it physically. In the room, in the silence, the Earth reveals its truth. Death is beautiful. And it’s painfully final. And once you understand that, you cannot write dead scenes anymore.
Because you know what dead actually is. Back in the house, we look at the scene again. We do this a million times over years and years. Maybe, it is still technically correct. But is it risking anything?
Does it expose anything?
It is alive? Is it even death? So we strip it. You remove what’s safe and push it further than you should. You make it uncomfortable. You make it specific. You make it personal. You make it about something you actually feel. For me, this is often pressure, doubt, desire, need to prove myself.
There is a rule in Hollywood: never kill the dog. What that rule really means is: don’t make the audience feel something they can’t control. In Kill Dick, I break that rule. In life, I break that rule. In Kill Dick, at least, it works. Not because it shocks.
Because it reveals.
You care.
Even if you don’t want to.
That is the entire job.
That is what De Palma understands.
That is what Bartholomew understands.
That is what I thought we both understood, back then.
People used to say we were like John and Joan—two voices braiding themselves into one, a shared temperature, a shared sentence, but she didn’t need that sentence. It felt true at the time. It felt inevitable. Now we don’t write together. Maybe she stands up from the couch and says she’s going outside. The stars are out there. The clean air. Wet, crisp, full of eucalyptus and the little cement channel full of rushing water beyond our wooden gate Kohler carved by hand and painted green.
She’s off to smoke—back when she still did that. We used to smoke together. The door opens. Then closes.
I sit there with the scene in my hands, still not working, still not alive, and I can’t tell if it’s the writing that changed, or if something else did.
Or when.
The house is quiet.
The scene is still dead.
And I understand, suddenly, that sometimes you don’t notice the shape of the thing until it’s already over.
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Kill Dick by Luke Goebel is available via Red Hen Press.
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