The Juliette Society

2

The first thing we ever learnt in film class is this:

Plot is always subservient to character.

Always, always, always and without fail.

Any creative writing teacher worth his salt will tell you exactly the same thing and make you repeat it over and over and over until it’s as recognizable to you as your own name.

As a general point of principle governing a fictional world, that’s as immutable as Einstein’s theory of relativity. Without it the entire fabric falls apart.

Take any classic movie (or any movie, really), strip it down to the basics, and you’ll see what I mean.

OK, Vertigo, a movie that every film student like me is expected to know inside and out. Jimmy Stewart’s character, Scottie, is a detective whose single-minded and dogged pursuit of the truth, coupled with a crippling fear of heights and an obsession for a dead blonde that borders on necrophilia, are the very things – his Achilles heel, as it were – that blindside him to the elaborate con to which he falls prey.

Let’s assume instead that Scottie was a cop with a sweet tooth. It would have been more realistic. But it just wouldn’t have worked. He’d be a cop drawn inexorably to the donut stand instead of the femme fatale, and Hitchcock wouldn’t have a movie.

There you have it. Plot subservient to character.

Let’s take another example. Citizen Kane. Film critics love to call it the greatest movie ever made, and for good reason, because it’s all in there. Subtext, art direction, mise en scène, all the things that make a great movie into a work of art and not an extended commercial for Microsoft, Chrysler and Frito-Lay, the way movies seem to be these days.

So Citizen Kane, the story of a news mogul, Charles Foster Kane, felled by hubris and ambition – the self-same qualities that fueled his drive to the top, qualities derived from an overwhelming mommy complex that dwarfs his achievements, damns his marriage and, ultimately, destroys his life.

Condemned by this vicious circle that reaches to the very core of his being, poor old Charlie dies alone and unloved, simply because he could never detach from his mommy’s tit.

Or maybe not her tit… because the last word Kane utters with his dying breath, when his grip loosens and he drops that snow globe – or crystal ball, or whatever it was, in which he failed to see his immediate future, that his life was not just fucked but over – that word, Rosebud, was, so legend has it, a sly reference inserted by Orson Welles to the pet name used by William Randolph Hearst (the real Charles Foster Kane) to describe his mistress’ vagina.

Rosebud. The first word heard in the movie and the last one seen, painted on a child’s sled tossed into a furnace, as the flames lick at it and peel the word away to nothing.

Once you know that little tidbit of information, you’ll never watch Citizen Kane again the same way. You hear Rosebud, you see Rosebud. You think ‘vagina’.

You think Orson Welles might have been trying to tell us something? I think he was trying to tell us this: Charles Foster Kane was a real mother fucker. And that, not surprisingly, was the source of all his problems.

Just as an aside, there is one type of movie, and only one, that doesn’t conform. One genre that flagrantly breaks the rule. Not only breaks it but turns it on its head, just because it can, and it doesn’t give a fuck: the porn movie.

But let’s not go there.

Anyhow, this rule, I’ve realized it applies as much to reality as it does to fiction. That it’s not only in the movies that what happens to us is subservient to who we are, how we act and why, but also the stories of our lives, the choices we make and the paths we take.

This path I’m on, you can’t see it. It’s not a yellow brick road, the lost highway or a two-lane blacktop. And I don’t even know that it’s a road I’ve been traveling along until I reach my destination, look back at how far I’ve come, and realize that all this time the choices I made, the roads I took, were leading me to this place.

So here’s the deal. In order to explain how I ended up at the Juliette Society, I have to start at the beginning.

Not right at the very beginning. We’ll save all the embarrassing baby pictures for another day. And all those apocryphal childhood memories that locate the origins of traumas that have stayed with me ever since. Like the time I pissed my panties at Sunday school while Sister Rosetta was telling us about Noah and his ark.

So, no, not right at the beginning, but close to it.

And I need to tell you something about myself, my character, my Achilles heel. I have to start with Marcus, my teacher, on whom I have a secret crush.

Doesn’t every girl have a secret crush? An insignificant other who they can project their wildest sexual fantasies onto. Mine was Marcus who, unknown to him, became my fetish object the very first time I walked into his class.

Marcus: brilliant, rumpled, handsome, shy – shy to the point of seeming aloof – and intense. Marcus, who fascinated me the moment I first set eyes upon him. Nothing inspires the curiosity of a woman more than a man who’s emotionally distant and hard to read, especially sexually. And I just couldn’t get a peg on Marcus.

In film theory there’s a term, ‘frenzy of the visible’. It’s something to do with pleasure. The intense pleasure we feel at looking, seeing, comprehending, evident truths of the existence of the physical body and its workings, writ large up on the screen.

That’s how Marcus makes me feel. When I’m sitting in the front row of the lecture hall, where I can get the best view of him, projected against the whiteboard, illuminated by fluorescents that seem as bright as an arc light on a movie set. I sit in the same spot every class, in the front row of this huge hall that stretches back maybe forty rows, right in the middle of the row, directly in front of his desk, where he can’t fail to notice me. Yet Marcus rarely ever catches my eye. Or even looks in my direction, but addresses the room – the entire room – except me, and makes me feel like I’m not there, that I don’t even exist.

He’s there, I’m not, and it’s driving me nuts – a frenzy of the visible.

And I wonder if he’s just playing hard to get because I’m making it pretty damn obvious.

On the days that I have class – Monday, Tuesday, Friday – I find myself dressing for him. Today is no different. Today, I picked out figure-hugging jeans that show off my ass, an underwired balconette bra to lift and separate, a blue and white striped tank top that accentuates my curves and a navy blue cardigan that frames and directs attention towards them.

I want him to catch sight of my breasts and think Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, Kim Novak in Vertigo, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.

Is that obvious enough?

I hope so.

So today, as always, I’m sitting in class, pretending to take notes, and undressing Marcus with my eyes. Marcus is talking about Freud, Kinsey and Foucault, about the spectacle of cinema and the feminine gaze, and I’m trying to trace the curve of his cock in brown suit pants that are just a little too tight around the groin not to be revealing.

He’s half-standing, half-sitting against his desk with one leg splayed out along the edge, forming an almost perfect right angle with the other, which is firmly anchored on the ground. And I’m chewing on a pencil, counting a span of inches from the seam of his pants along his inside leg, taking guesstimates of girth and width and length.

I jot down the numbers neatly in the top right hand corner of my yellow legal pad, which, twenty minutes into class, contains nothing but scribbles, scrawls and doodles. And when I tot them all up in my head, I’m impressed. Because Marcus clearly has a cock that’s more than a match for the size of his brain.

I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not as if I haven’t done this close to a hundred times before. Every class, the same routine. And, miraculously, the same three numbers come up every time. Like I’ve hit the jackpot over and over and over. And I get that same little thrill shooting through my body every time.

Marcus, as I said, is oblivious. For all he knows, I’m absorbed in his lecture. It’s not that I don’t care about the subject or I’m not listening. I’m following his every single word and being distracted at the same time. I’m multi-tasking.

Marcus is talking about Kinsey and the conclusion reached in his landmark sex study that women don’t respond to visual stimuli in the same way as men, and sometimes not at all. I beg to differ. And if Marcus only knew what he was doing to me, he would too.

He elides neatly from Kinsey into Freud – another old pervert with strange ideas about female sexuality – and now he’s got all my gears churning.

He writes CASTRATION on the white board. And PENIS ENVY. Then underlines each twice as he repeats them aloud for added effect. And you’d think that’d be one gigantic buzzkill for my scholastic masturbation fantasy, right?

Wrong.

See, Marcus has a voice like brown sugar – soft, dark, rich. Just to hear him say anything makes me all gooey inside. But the words he says that really turn me on are the least sexy of all. Words that sound clipped and cold and technical, but when Marcus says them it sounds like he’s talking dirty – in an intellectual way.

These words especially:

Abjection.

Catharsis.

Semiotics.

Sublimation.

Triangulation.

Rhetoric.

Urtext.

And last, but certainly not least, my absolute favorite, the one word to rule them all:

Hegemony.

When Marcus speaks, it’s with such quiet authority that he has me in his grip and I feel like I would do just about anything he asked.

So when he says, ‘penis envy’, I hear him plead, order and command, ‘Please fuck me’.

And even though he’s not looking at me, I know he’s speaking to me, and only to me.

Only to me.

This has nothing to do with Jack, my infatuation with Marcus. I love Jack and only Jack. This is just an amusement, a little romantic episode I’ve dreamt up to amuse myself in class. A pedagogical daddy fantasy that’s got me hot for teacher and flies from my mind the second the bell goes.

This time it doesn’t even get that far.

I’m looking at Marcus’ sinewy arms and long muscular legs and imagining what it would be like to have them wrapped around my body, my entire body, the way a spider holds a fly in place as it prepares to consume it. I want to be held by Marcus, consumed by Marcus, in that way. And I wonder if Marcus can fuck as expertly as he talks about psychoanalysis and semiotics and the auteur theory.

I let the question hang in the air.

The answer comes unexpectedly from behind, in a conspiratorial whisper.

‘He’s a freak.’

I turn around and look directly into a pair of bright, clear, almost luminous, green eyes and full, sensuous lips arched into a coquettish smile. And that’s how I meet Anna. Leaning over me from the row behind, whispering into my ear, in full view of Marcus.

I know her, of course. She’s in my class. Anna is blonde, petite and voluptuous; the super-hot girl at school who turns everybody’s head. She’s the girl everyone wants to be friends with; the girl all the guys want to fuck.

I was brought up Catholic and taught that sex was something you weren’t supposed to seek or experience pleasure in. It wasn’t until I started going out with Jack, long after I’d lost my virginity, that I stopped feeling so conflicted and started to enjoy it.

Anna doesn’t seem to have had any of those hang-ups. She’s flirtatious, free and relaxed, always ready with an easy smile. I look at her and see someone who’s comfortable with her body, her sexuality, and the power it holds. And she intrigues me.

Have you ever met someone and thought, from the second you laid eyes on them, from the moment they first spoke to you, We’re going to be friends.

That’s how I feel about Anna, the instant she says, ‘He’s a freak’. It’s like hearing my own voice, like she knows exactly what I’m thinking. And understands.

That’s how it will be between us from now on. A secret bond.

What I didn’t know is this:

She’d already fucked him, Marcus.

And on those rare occasions when Marcus caught my eye and I wanted to believe he was looking at me?

Well, he wasn’t.

He was looking through me.

At her.