I don't own a TV and only follow a few shows each week, over at my cousin Eduardo's apartment. I hadn't seen a movie in a theater for three months until my girlfriend dragged me over to the mall on Easter Day to catch Adventureland. This film struck me as almost surreally terrible, the cinematic equivalent of one of those games you have on occasion when you're playing hoops, and you do everything right and everything goes wrong. But I did have an optimistic reaction to the preview for the next installment in the Terminator franchise, Terminator Salvation. I'd like to see the franchise salvaged. The big robots in the preview, à la Transformers, were a good sign and promised to erase the bad taste of the lame Aerial Hunter Killers in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. And Christian Bale seems like a good choice as a screen presence to fill the Governator's shoes (albeit as John Connor), especially if you're of the opinion that there can never be too much Christian Bale, which is a convenient opinion to have at the present moment.
Anyway, the optimism induced by the Terminator Salvation preview, combined with the generally favorable critical reception that a dreadful film like Adventureland has received, made me susceptible to a form of demonic possession that is ubiquitous in L.A., in which an innocent cinephile becomes the amanuensis for some spirit that wanders the earth with a single aim: to find a host body that will write the one screenplay or television pilot that the spirit must unburden itself of before it can move on to the next circle of afterlife. (I should add that my girlfriend and I differed in our opinions about Adventureland. She agreed with the critics in seeing it as charming but forgettable. She used the word "etiolated," which I had to look up, to describe its relationship to other efforts within Apatowland.)
The spirit that inhabited me evidently chose my body because one of the few shows I do watch each week, admittedly for no other reason than totally puerile rapt absorption, is The CW's 90210. Curiously, the first hint that I had been inhabited by one of these wandering spirits was that I began dreaming of male nurses. That dream made sense when other hints revealed that the spirit was deeply familiar with the works of the French writing team of Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari. The clincher was when I sat down at my desk one midnight and found myself typing a pilot with the title Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-90210.
Rather than attempt to describe the experience of becoming the amanuensis of a spirit obsessed with getting a pilot off its chest, I'll simply give a sense of that experience by providing two short excerpts of the pilot I found my fingers typing:
**
SILVER: Since you refer to my nails several times, let me tell you what they are all about.
DIXON: Go for it.
SILVER: People say my mother used to cut them. They also say, and it is true, that I dream of not being invisible, but imperceptible and that I compensate for this dream by having nails that I can tuck into my pocket, so much so that nothing seems more shocking to me than someone who looks at them.
DIXON: People do say that.
SILVER: People also say, "You shouldn't bite your nails because they are yours, and if you love nails, eat someone else's, provided that is what you want, and if you can."
DIXON: You inundate me with ironic, evil advice.
SILVER: Anyway, isn't it strange that none of my friends ever notices my nails, finding them completely natural, planted there by chance as if they had been sowed by a gust of the wind, which no one would bother to talk about?
**
HARRY: You tell me that I am cornered in every way, in my life, in my teaching...
DEBBIE: You tell me that I suck your blood and sample your poisons.
HARRY: Vive la paranoia!
**
The spirit even had me transcribe a staged press conference that included Shannen Doherty and Jennie Garth and functioned as a lead-in to the pilot:
**
DOHERTY: Why do you have to rush right back to a reproachful attitude? As in, "You are not going to get away with it. We are waiting for a sequel; you will still be on the same track." No, that isn't true at all. We do have plans. We will follow up because we love to work together.
GARTH: But it won't be a sequel at all. With the help of the outside, we'll do something so different in both language and thought that those who are anticipating our work will have to say to themselves: they've gone completely crazy, or they've obviously been unable to continue.
DOHERTY: Not that we want to make believe that we are mad; we will go mad, though in our own time and our own way. Why are people in such a hurry?
GARTH: So we'll change; we have already changed; we're doing all right. We dream of other things, more secret and joyful.
DOHERTY: And we'll always find allies we want or who want us.
**
The pilot flowed out of me in a single night, and I swear that when I giggled and typed the words The End at the bottom, I sneezed 18 times in succession and was left feeling distinctly unhaunted. My dreams of male nurses have been replaced by greenlight daydreams. Truthfully, I'd be happy just to be able to afford a television of my own so I can watch Fringe without having to endure Eduardo's sarcastic commentary.