Have you spent quality time with someone, anyone, who could open a lot of doors for you?  You got a drink, lush foliage, a terrace, a dinner, wanna say the shimmer of an empty pool, trays of baby appetizers wheeled out, silence, bowls, the smell of a mosquito candle flickering in-out-in. You thought you could do it. You felt powerful. You liked your chances. And then came the moment you realized – no doubt – the special someone was mentally defective.  How on Earth were you gonna get out of this one? What the fuck. Pardon. You tried to school your features in a mask of politeness, the smile crumbled to a grimace. Eventually you told a few people to share the burden of proof. Your private Ringu tape echoed with the trapped words you banged on a hotel bedroom wall: please believe me / you don’t understand. 

 

Years ago I bore witness to the soon to be memory-holed Jada Pinkett-Smith directorial debut (The Human Contract, 2008) in a packed – absolutely packed – industry screening. No formal attire required. Fair to say 25-30% of the audience was trying to crawl a little bit closer to the stars. Maybe we’ll catch a glimpse, maybe we’ll have a shot at getting in good with them. Them them them. Jada was there and Will was there too; he had produced the movie. Paid for its labor. And back in those days the people loved Will. They gave him a round of applause just for showing up. He looked like a big kid in a suit: he was goofy and muted in a fashion off-the-clock movie stars never are – that was 2008, 2009, he might have forked the bulk of the money over, she was the woman of the hour. He was letting her shine. 

The Human Contract. Hit it.

 

You have a dude, a strait-laced urban professional type, he meets a tumultuous yet detached woman, he gets roped into a physical relationship. She’s pushing boundaries, she might dare him to shoplift, break social norms. Mind games are sprung on the dude. Your skinny erotic thriller template that could be misconstrued as the first lines in a synopsis for Jonathan 

Demme’s Something Wild, whereas The Human Contract was, let’s go with a lower-wattage psychodrama punctuated by sudden bursts of violence. 

 

I could tell we were entering a vortex of pain five to seven minutes in, but you don’t get to leave those screenings. You don’t want to antagonize a star on the grounds of taste. It is disrespectful to walk out of a theater if you believe the filmmakers are present (or hanging out close by), and you wouldn’t want a bunch of randos to dismiss your work in such a callous manner. So you stay put. You live, you live you die, you die you live again. You observe. You die more. At some point you’ll take a shower; it will shock you how much this never happened, Mr. Draper. (Master the mind hack, it will serve you well any time you must get in a car with a wasted uncle-father figure, hellbent on killing you all.) 

 

Anyway, the dude gets obliterated mid-movie and it happens in a click shot, one of the leads crushes his head with a giant cement plant pot, boom. He is dead. (Memory tells me someone clapped at the screening, memory on occasion rewrites it as “a TV set to the skull”. Wasn’t a TV set. Maybe a steel porch.) 

You don’t need to subscribe to Mormon belief, that framework according to which all fiction is confession or a pre-emptive admission of guilt for what you dream about doing. Still, 

the fuck was that. 

 

The sudden act of extreme violence, it was – not prevalent at the time, no – it was a widely accepted building block on your way to a prestige drama. Raise the stakes. Monster’s Ball. 21 Grams. You had an issue movie and then somebody was getting blown open. Not super great years for cinema but you did see a lot of children die horrible preventable deaths. To the degree, if you wanted to antagonize yourself, more torture more torture hah, you could keep a running tally of all the dogs and sons and daughters who got hit by drunk drivers to prove a point about bigger-picture chaos stuff. (Incidentally, prestige TV was entering its golden age, the boom headshot maneuver cast aside in favor of secrets, mistakes and their long-term consequences.) 

 

The following day, a person I associated with at the time—an older woman who had traveled the world and seen some shit—she summed it up with a fast quirk of her mouth. She said: jesus christ what a revelatory peek into the inner lives of ultra famous people; you would expect a Jada Pinkett movie to be, “let’s go shopping”.  (How would you truly divine what to expect from a lady striking out on her own, and also, please do not link a Black woman with shopping: never ends in laughter.)

There’s a subset of celebrity wives and sooner or later they write and direct a movie they star in, and those movies are about, essentially, how the world is. Society. Marriage. Power imbalance. The West. Cross-generational trauma. Men do this, women do that. Morality. Rules made to be broken. Things. 

 

The mega wealthy telling you, in caps, how the world is? That’s precisely the bad look guaranteed to trigger an Internet class riot. Doesn’t seem to matter. The genre keeps itself in vogue. Rie Rasmussen made a movie like that: Louise Linton made a movie like that. Key difference is, which movie gets wiped from existence, which one is held over the maker’s head, a bottomless bucket of blood for Miss Carrie.

 

I’m not talking about Olivia Wilde. I’m not talking about Maggie Gyllenhaal adapting a novel for the screen. And I’m not gonna polish common grievances about “out of touch elites”: one, fascist talking point!, and two, this is no screenwriting board. 

 

I’m talking about ladies / whose claim to fame is not directing / getting their husband— / or wife!— / to pay for a feature film. 

 

Socialite Louise Linton became a minor punchline in 2017. Her crimes, being a non-famous actor, being married to Steven Mnuchin, being clowned on ad infinitum because she flaunted her wealth and connections to the Trump White House. Yeah, not great, Louise Linton, but not quite up there. Genocide? Did you advocate for genocide? Was it good, actually? Oh you did not. Carry on. 

 

This woman was met with universal scorn for (what else) writing and directing a movie she could star in, fun fun fun. It’s called Me You Madness. Independently financed, 90% filmed in a gigantic glass house. Linton cast herself as a millionaire spree killer entangled with a dumb boy slash thief. The clothes: a flash. The cars: abundant. The house: so much nicer than the one David DeCoteau used to shoot his direct-to-DVDs in. And this one got a theatrical release, in your fucking face. 

 

Final product was a swift add to many worst movie ever lists, sight unseen, and it made several critical worst of 2021 lists – not even close, boyos – it’s a medium-bad black comedy that gleefully mocks you for watching. (Let me tell you, I streamed it from the couch, and around the tenth sociopathic monologue about fitness, I did rewind on the fact I was covered in cigarette ash, like a vagrant – lady, you got me there.) As for the presentation, it’s engineered to shift the perception juuust enough, benefit of the doubt style – is Louise Linton in on the joke? Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t, maybe the river of blood I was crying upon listening to the soundtrack was, in fact, money honey! Me You Madness had a small promotional screening, about half the audience left before the end credits:      that detail made the Hollywood Reporter. 

The original person who tells you how the world is is, of course, the Libertarian wet dream of the dude self-financing a film he can write direct and star in: to showcase his looks, his talent as a leading man, a spy, an adventurer, a lovelorn Romeo, whatever, all?, and the script boils down to a vessel for him to regurgitate centuries of Ideas about society. Here’s where you find your Neil Breens, your Tommy Wiseaus. All those who paved the way in the VHS realm, the kind of multi-hyphenate-multi-hypenate whose efforts are bound to wash up in a Best of the Worst episode. 

 

There is a metallic Scientology tang to this kind of movie, regardless of the religious affiliation of its makers; it’s in the contumacious insistence on, this is how humanity really works. Dovetails with the fucked up search for a one size fits all system that regulates human interactions, learning, personal development, science. Magic bullet, but make it spiritual technology. 

 

Have you tried watching a Neil Breen movie, knowing he’s for real. 

The Human Contract had a Neil Breen fever-dream quality to it. 

They all do. 

You grab the wrong end of the publicity stick, you’re liable to get donkey-punched until the Sun cools. You marry someone who can do no wrong, here is the part where you are all forgiven. 

Flash forward to 2022 and Jada Pinkett-Smith is in the process of being cast as history’s second greatest monster after Phil Spector, the shrewd megamind behind the throne of her husband smacking people at the Academy Awards, live, for real. The process wasn’t kickstarted in a day. Over the past four years, ever since Jada started hosting a talk show built around her lived experience as a mother / a daughter / a wife, there’s been an appetite for her downfall. How about, she’s an emasculating harridan! Disloyal! The dragon lady fucking it up for the hapless dude who could, on paper, put a stop to the insanity, but he won’t. 

 

Biggest smoking gun for this narrative being, a 2020 episode of Red Table Talk where, allegedly, Pinkett-Smith humiliated her partner by having him on camera while she recounted an affair she embarked on, with a younger man, a singer, during a rough patch of the marriage. 

 

(Who cares. Who cares! The main aesthetic takeaway was, fuck me if these two believe in radical honesty we’re in for months of re-litigation. However, it would behoove us to remember, anyone could still jump off the Will and Jada carnival, anytime, unless they racked up the eyeballs by staying on board – self-employed court watchers.)

 

Pinkett-Smith also happens to be a highly attractive Black woman who achieved massive fame in her acting career. Therefore, you might get dismantled as a hater for addressing a flaw in the design. 

But: The Human Contract has been swept entirely under the rug. Which is weird. Vanity project or not, it could boast recognizable faces (Idris Elba is in it, a lot) and nicely lend itself to a peacock tail of promotional opportunities, it’s fucking weird it disappeared. 

 

What’s more, Jada never said a single word about the enterprise. 

 

Double strange. No theatrical release, no press junket, no need to pose for a Polish DVD case, okay but hear me out, we’re four seasons into Red Table Talk, you would imagine that “I wrote and directed a movie” would come up once in a show about awareness and empowerment, if only for the lure of a teachable moment, tasty tasty “here’s what I learnt about myself” teachable moment. 

 

no no it’s more like 

how soon can you block this out 

like the whole thing 

You get around you hear actors talking about themselves in the third person, out loud, in public. 

 

Who does that. He does. 

 

What the fuck. Stars are not like us. 

 

Every single face you meet on the way up / down / up   is one month removed from selling skincare. 

 

You get lone. You stay home. You’re working. You’re not working. You wonder about diversifying. You want the world to know there is much more to you than a face and a visible output. You have ideas. Intense, fixed ideas. Sometimes you are pressured into developing intense fixed ideas about how the world is. You get told you can do anything. You get told you can be anyone. You can do anything you set your mind to. You want to act like you belong. Real people have ideas, right?. 

 

You don’t know me. PLEASE go ahead and be so bold as to assume I put my full name on some ghastly failed artistic endeavor, floating in space forever. What if I’m Josh Trank. Yeah. That works. I made Fantastic Four. I’ve been a bad bad boy. Just to let you in on the biggest secret: it’s easy to get stuck in the delusion salt mines. 

 

Not gonna say we all wrote The Human Contract – we did not – pretty sure we all drafted or started a questionable project, though, a drama meant to shine a light on our daring / our humility / our superior taste, and then we got told no, the fever broke, we lost the impulse. 

 

And directing is notoriously demanding work. Hard to reconcile an adult wanting to put themselves through that wringer if they lack any fortitude, the physical strength, some kind of sustained need for it. 

 

We got wise to our boredom.

Over a whole decade, bits of The Human Contract popped up anew in my brain. Always the same small weird-sad stuff. Memory was not a trace of my body motionless in a dark dark room but a whisper of hey loser, remember that. It’s wild. I watched Hell or High Water, I read that Taylor Sheridan married a model/actress, oh nice!, hope they’re happy!, have I seen her in movies?, let’s hit IMdB, fuck she was in that movie. Motherfuck. What did she do, was she the woman who enters the frame from the right to let us know she’s been filming the leads with a handheld camera as they’re fucking in the backseat of a limousine, that woman wearing a chaffeur outfit. Or just a hat. Why. How. Was there a demand for masquerades, was it a specific itch, was it – give the people what they want – which people, where. 

 

There is this strangeness about being a body out there, disposable and irreplaceable, you’re a freak, you’re fragile, nobody told you no, ever, or, or, you got told no a billion times and once you become a known quantity, someone with an output, the world is yours for a revenge tour: you get to do all the things, in terror. Darkness is spreading. Lanterns are raised.