Popcorn

female protagonist’s private parts?’

Bruce was somewhat taken aback. Was this guy criticizing him? Surely not. Bruce was Oscarnominated, for Christ’s sake.

‘Say what?’ Bruce demanded.

‘Ahem.’ Professor Chambers cleared his throat, uncomfortably aware that all eyes were most definitely upon him. ‘I was just wondering whether you feel that the same effect could perhaps have been achieved in your scene without delving into the female protagonist’s private parts.’

There was a pregnant pause while Bruce debated whether to crush the professor like a small, bearded insect beneath his supercool pointytoed boots. A moment’s reflection convinced him that this would look uncool. He didn’t want to imbue the man with more significance than he deserved, which was none. Instead Bruce opted to wither him with a look of hip bemusement.

‘The girl’s private parts are not shown,’ Bruce said. ‘Didn’t you watch the piece, professor?’

‘I realize that the girl’s private parts are not actually shown,’ said Professor Chambers rather nervously. ‘Nevertheless, they seem to play a disproportionately central role in the proceedings.’

The guy was criticizing him. As if he was the subject of some essay. Bruce decided that this had already gone on too long. He wanted to talk to cool kids not old jerks.

‘I do not make exploitative pictures,’ he said with an air of finality, and turned away from the professor to feast his eyes again on the sea of adoring and expectant young faces before him.

Professor Chambers sighed. He looked older than his years, with his lined face and grey beard. He felt like a schoolmaster forced to confront a brilliant but wayward pupil. A genius boy physicist who spent his time making stinkbombs, or a gifted young writer who insisted on putting swearwords into all his creativewriting assignments. He did not consider himself oldfashioned or a bore; he had once written an appreciation of Jim Morrison’s poetry for the Boston Literary Review. There was however, in his opinion, a limit. Eroticism was one thing, pornography another. He felt that the place for delving into people’s private parts was a doctor’s surgery or in the context of a loving relationship. Not while searching for cocaine.

‘Nevertheless,’ he said to the back of Bruce’s leather jacket, ‘the character Mr Snuff does stare up the girl’s private parts. That is the case, is it not?’

‘Ironically,’ Bruce replied without turning round.

‘Ironically?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Bruce drew upon all his reserves of patience, which was almost no patience at all. ‘The character Mr Snuff,’ he said, as if addressing a man who had donated his brain to an organ bank, ‘stares up the character Toni’s private parts in a manner that will imply an ironic juxtaposition to the audience. Didn’t you get that, professor?’

‘No, I’m afraid I missed that. Any ironic juxtaposition entirely passed me by. Am I being terribly dense?’

Bruce threw a look of tolerant exasperation at the audience, but the sympathetic response he anticipated was not forthcoming. The students were a bit lost: most of them thought that ironic juxtaposition was something dirty you did in bed. Some of them giggled nervously.

‘With respect,’ the professor added quietly, ‘I thought it was just rather rude.’

Things had suddenly become a little tense. Bruce, like most people, hated tension. His whole pose was one of laidback street cool. He was the grownup teenager in the RayBans who just didn’t give a fuck. The naughty thirtysomething genius who broke all the rules. It was his job to needle authority figures like college professors, not the other way round. And on this day of all days, Oscars day, when he should have been luxuriating in the sweet ecstasy of fame, basking in a hormonepacked wave of adolescent admiration, this dusty old fossil was pissing on his parade.

Bruce struggled to stay cool. He reminded himself just how far above the old turd he was. Only that morning the New York Times had published an adulatory twothousandword profile of him, using phrases such as ‘cultural icon’, ‘Zeitgeist’ and ‘defining images of the last decade’. Cultural icons did not let bearded gnomes with pens in their breastpockets wind them up.

‘You remember that the next shot is the POV of the girl’s snatch, right?’

This got an easy laugh, as Bruce had calculated it would. Using rude words in lecture halls showed just how much of a fuck he did not give.

‘POV?’ asked the professor.

‘Jesus! I thought you ran a film course here. POV. Point of view, for Christ’s sake, point of view.’

‘I know what POV means. I just don’t-’

‘We see Mr Snuff’s face from the point of view of Toni’s vagina.’

‘The vagina’s point of view?’

‘Yes, the vagina’s point of view.’

This was an entirely new concept for the professor. He wondered how a vagina could have a point of view and, if it could, what its attitude would be.

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t-’

‘Mr Snuff stares at the vagina,’ Bruce snapped, ‘and in a subliminal way the vagina stares back at Mr Snuff.’

‘And that’s ironic, is it?’

‘The irony is in what we take away from the image, professor. I want to show that this is all in a day’s work for Mr Snuff. I need to see his face in these extraordinary circumstances, so that I can show his expression of casual indifference. He’s almost bored. This is just a job, an American job.’

This bland assertion was too much for Professor Chambers. A faint note of irritation crept into his voice; you would have needed a sharp ear to spot it, but it was there. The students, who knew their tutor, shifted nervously in their seats.

‘Is shooting women in the stomach and then rummaging about in their vaginas for drugs a common occupation in your experience?’ the professor enquired.

‘Killing is, pal. Being a killer is a career option in America, like teaching or dentistry.’

‘Perhaps not quite as common.’

‘Ha! You wish.’

‘Statistically, I think you’ll find I’m right.’ Professor Chambers decided to drop the point and move on. ‘Mr Snuff’s next line is perhaps one of my least favourite moments in your motion picture, Mr Delamitri.’

‘I’m heartbroken.’ Bruce smiled wearily at the students and they rewarded him with a laugh.

‘Hmm, yes, well, I understand that taste is subjective and that you are indifferent to mine. Nevertheless, Mr Snuff’s observation “nice pussy” seems to be beyond the bounds of taste altogether.’

Bruce groaned audibly. He was genuinely offended now. He no longer cared what the pretty young things thought. It was between him and this pathetic man who seemed to be going deliberately out of his way to apply an attitude of archaic prurience to Bruce’s brilliant, startling and challenging images.

‘ “Nice pussy” is an important line, a pivotal line – the keystone line of the movie! I put it there so that even dummies wouldn’t miss the point I’m making.’

The audience was becoming genuinely uncomfortable. Confrontational debate like this was a rarity on campus these days: the consequences of giving offence to one specialinterest group or another were too severe. Bruce sensed the nervousness and attempted to moderate his anger.

‘Look, Mr Chambers, I am not insensitive to the fact that some people might find this sequence unsettling. I am also not blind to the possibility that other people might be titillated by the images I present. The woman has been brutalized and violated, tied down, shot, had her clothing removed, and as she breathes her last she finds herself being intimately inspected by a strange man. I do not offer up these images lightly.’

‘I am delighted to hear it.’

‘I am aware of my reponsibility to place all this in a suitable editorial context. That is why I took the vagina’s POV of Mr Snuff’s reaction.’

‘Which was to smile and observe that the character Toni has a nice pussy.’

‘Exactly!’ Bruce exploded. ‘Listen to how he says it for Christ’s sake! He doesn’t say, “Wow, get this! I am