Please allow me to introduce myself.

The name is Byron. Not the 18th Century poet-iconoclast, but the struggling hero of George Hickenlooper and Philip Jayson Lasker’s 2001 film, The Man from Elysian Fields. Sure, we’ve both written in our times, but you wouldn’t call me quite the revolutionary the Lord was – more a man simply trying to outrun his own entropy. Like many a writer, I’ve had to toil in other fields to make a living. Like some, perhaps, that day job was often compromised by what I considered my life’s work, thanks to late hours and consequent occasional lapses of focus. Same for my home life, with a wife and young son. To be a writer is to be a gigolo to either the job that supports you or to the muse that keeps you from your family and real-world obligations. You could say, as I have, that you’re doing it for them, but that’s only a tenuous metaphorical allusion – what you would really mean is that you’re doing it to honor your spiritual

self and some certain need to be loved. I write because I have to write; because it is, quite simply, as Stacey Earle has said, what I do.

Note, I didn’t say what I "am". Some writers are born, others are made; some find it necessary to create themselves. Like a musician learning his craft by transcribing others’ solos for study and play, you begin by listening to the music, scribbling down lyrics, then rewriting them into your own ersatz creations. Do it long enough and synthesize enough disparate sources, eventually you come up with something you can call your own. It’s the Frankenstein approach to regeneration.

A friend once called me "a minor gigolo of genius," and I’ll take that. It is perhaps how I came to be adopted by my co-creator Hickenlooper, who has

also toiled to invent himself through the auspices of others – a third-generation director and a deliberate auteur. By that second allusion I mean someone who not so much does things a certain way because he is a filmmaker, but because that’s what filmmakers do; by the first I mean to refer to the evolution of the figure of the director itself through the hundred-odd years’ history of the movies.

The first generation of auteurs consisted of those pioneers who, by their simplest actions, modeled the form for all others. With the New Wave of French critics-turned-directors and the film-school Americans who followed, a second wave was born, establishing itself on a personal, sometimes polemical response to their elders’ work. These in turn gave rise to the third legion, who grew up less on the Old Masters than on those they had inspired, and for whom they proved less prototypes than archetypes. Number among

them the P.T. Andersons, Quentin Tarantinos – and George Hickenlooper.

Hickenlooper came to prominence on the success of a documentary he and Fax Bahr assembled on one of these second-generation geniuses, Francis Ford Coppola, based on footage provided by Coppola’s missus, Eleanor. Hearts of Darkness, originally produced for cable channel Showtime but given a theatrical run as well, was an examination of the mental and financial implosion of not just one man and his film but of an entire decade of what Hickenlooper, as many others, has characterized as the last Golden Age of American filmmaking. He got that gig based on a documentary he had prepared on another professional casualty of the era, Peter Bogdanovich, in his previous capacity as interviewer for laserdisc supplements; before that, he wrote liner notes for the same company’s porn releases. His first several narrative features following on Hearts’ accolades were genre exercises of varying levels of derivativeness, including the direct-to-cable thriller Persons Unknown; self-referential Gen X drama reminiscent of St. Elmo’s Fire, The Low Life; variously-titled Civil War ghost story Grey Night/The

Killing Box/Ghost Brigade, and virtual Last Picture Show remake, Dogtown. Prior to making Fields, Hickenlooper’s logistical coup was in adapting an unproduced Orson Welles script, The Big Brass Ring, whose title was commentary enough on his own auteurist ambitions in doing so. Three of the six films – Low Life, Ring and Fields – involved characters writing a manuscript, one, Dogtown, a

movie extra struggling to become a fully realized actor. All concern figures caught up in the creation of an identity based, many times, on the personality of another.

Hickenlooper’s own auteurist trademarks consist of a quaint collection of idiosyncrasies and running themes. The former includes references to the St. Louis hometown the filmmaker shares with both his Knight and Low Life leads, the latter whose antagonist is a bruiser named Louie; likewise, an Unknown crook named Louis. It’s also the setting for Ring, which features a floating gay cabaret called the Louis Quatorze, and gets cameo mention as part of a book title in my story. Hickenlooper’s Yale alma mater doubles for both Life’s and Ring’s leads’ as well, and was the intended destination for his Knight hero before his father sidetracked him. Somehow, Cuba figures in to all

this too, as the fictitious Missouri burg in which Dogtown takes place, where characters are often seen smoking the eponymous cigars; parts of Ring are set in the actual Central American country, and it’s the birthplace of the protagonist of my story, Andy Garcia. (Unknown features a menacing group of Colombians.)

Like fellow independent Roger Corman, who himself briefly employed Hickenlooper as well as many of his Golden Age avatars, he often draws upon a stock troupe of mostly character actors, including Shawnee Smith and Rory Cochrane (Life, Dogtown), Ron Livingston (Life, Ring), Jefferson Mays ("Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade," Life, Ring, Knight) and J.T. Walsh ("Blade," Unknown, Life). He also lends frequent credits to such behind-the-camera talent as cinematographer Kramer Morganthau (dp on all

of Hickenlooper’s films from Dogtown on) and producer Donald Zuckerman (ditto); John Enbom, "Blade’s" camera loader, is credited with co-scripting Life.

Recurring themes include the dominant one of identity. Present in each of the films as well is a latent, closeted, threatening or denied homosexuality, which the married director qualifies as a consciously articulated homoeroticism; still, its insistence and persistence must pique any more than casual surveyor of his work. From Walsh’s "Sling Blade" caresses to the Crying Game surprise in his lengthy opening monologue; from the implied relationship between a couple of Unknown thugs to the vengeful "fat faggot" cop on the hero’s tail; from the unwelcome advances of two figures

in Life toward its protagonist to the shameful histories of the main characters in Knight, Dogtown and Ring, the theme is always conflated with guilt of one form or another. This is seemingly resolved when Ring’s politician antihero embraces his gay twin Viet-vet brother and promises to "go public" with his existence in the eventful conclusion to their story.

Metaphorically, at least, this harmonizes with another Hickenlooper theme. The homosexuality is a partial inflation of the self-containment of several of the author’s film-surrogates, his characters’ revulsion toward or rejection of their gay antagonists a projection of their own self-disgust and a recognition of the necessity of establishing emotional contact with an other. The withdrawn lead of "Sling Blade," for example, is about to be released from a long confinement in a mental institution, where he appears not to

have spoken much in the last 25 years; the centerpiece of the short is an extended interview with the first female he’s seen in years that unrolls mostly in monologue before she breaks the imposed onesidedness with a question. Life’s lead, who, as Hickenlooper has done, takes a series of menial jobs upon release from his own, Ivy League institution, finally learns to open up emotionally, as does the hi-tech loner home-security salesman of Unknown following the death of the painfully sincere roomie he’s been shunting and taking advantage of throughout their association. The gift of a portrait by his love interest late in Unknown, as for the similarly reticent Dogtown antihero, signals a self-realization on the part of their protagonists. Conversely, the burning of the manuscript by Ring’s mentor and alleged lover, which would have revealed certain unseemly details from his Ivy League past, liberates the film’s similarly aloof independent politician.

In a like vein, characters or types reappear throughout the films. The childlike brute of "Sling Blade" is reincarnated as Life’s lug roomie with an unassuming psychotic streak; Unknown’s hulking rube Terry, in the person

of actor Jon Favreau, shows up in much the same role in Dogtown; Life’s aspiring writer character is a dry-run for my own screen persona, Ring’s wife Dinah another version of my wife Dena after several more years of the kind of heartbreak both husbands put them through. Dinah’s spouse, as well, is named after a poet, William Blake, as are both myself, again, and my editor, Virgil. Missouri

native Mark Twain is quoted in both Ring and Fields, Joseph Conrad in Hearts and Ring. Finally, a homeless man figures on the periphery of Unknown and Ring, and gets reconfigured as the "Dirty Party Girl" oracle of Life.

So many Hickenloopers turn on the death of a formidable father figure, from Hearts on up to my story, with Life’s beloved Uncle Darr, Dogtown’s benign patriarch Blessed Williams and Ring’s Kim Mennaker in between. With the combined dissolution in Hearts of both its immediate subject, Coppola, and his intratextual similar Colonel Kurtz in the movie he is making at the time, Apocalypse Now, as well as the similarities between Dogtown’s Williams and his model in Last Picture Show’s Sam the Lion, the suggestion

is that the noble, though not always beloved, elder represents the cherished Golden Age itself, whose passing leaves the director somewhat adrift in his need to create a contemporary, equally valid profile for the re-emerging American independent cinema.

At odds with this need is the filmmaker himself and the limitations reflected in several of my fellow main characters. Part of what holds us back is the self-interest with which we all grapple, but part of it also is the brute, animal nature which vexes us, as reflected in

Hickenlooper’s titles themselves, with the Low Life and Dogtown on one end and the Brass Ring and Elysian Fields on the other. It’s not such a long walk, then, from "Sling Blade’s" seemingly goodhearted Karl Childers, who is dealing with the forces which drove him to murder his mother 25 years earlier, to Ring’s queenly ex-Senator, who once produced compromising porn on the side, just as Dogtown’s sullen non-hero is plagued by memories of having had to hustle to make a living in caninophagus Hollywood.

Sometimes this struggle with the self is reflected outside, as well, in the form of a nemesis. Life’s reticent lead is shadowed by the hulking Louie, though mediated by roomie Andrew; in Unknown, Joe Mantegna’s ex-cop winds up with both J.T. Walsh’s corrupt detective and a cadre of violent South-

American drug thugs on his case. Ring’s conflicted senator is split four ways, into both his stepson-protégé and his wayward brother on the one hand and his protégé’s press secretary and blackmailing chauffeur on the other. All are evocative of the dichotomy within Missouri boy Hickenlooper made Ivy-League good. It is this relation to his material that must have helped him collaborate so successfully with the reportedly testy Billy Bob Thornton on "Blade" and to produce such a great document on Coppola’s struggle with the same issues via his surrogates in Apocalypse’s Willard and Kurtz.

Not that the match with duality is over. Not for nothing did they come up with the name of Byron Tiller – the first for lofty intellect, the last for the sense that I have to work at it and for some certain connection to the earth. It’s also why both my story and the preceding Ring are narrated either wholly or in part by a dissipated Brit, the epitome of civilization at odds with its baser nature.

Fields focuses on a time in my life between the remainders-bin debut of my first novel and the publication of my second, and the desperate path I take from one to the other. Serially humiliated by my editor, former boss and father-in-law in the pursuit of a paycheck, I finally find myself moonlighting for the title escort service, through which I come to meet Pulitzer prizewinning novelist Tobias Allcott. Rather than denigrate me, this powerful, dying man collaborates on his last work while I shtup his wife with his full blessing. Fate, which is to say Hickenlooper and co-scenarist Lasker, throw me a few curveballs on the way, but it is under the

Allcotts’ tutelage that I make the spiritual growth necessary to finally achieve success on my own terms – meaning, the creation of the identity of which I spoke.

I live in Pasadena, which is a pun on my wife’s name, Dena. The gag is multifaceted, however. Dena’s love and admiration for me at film’s start are so resolute she could almost be an extension of my own self-regard; it will be my object therefore for these two hours and the period of my life they document to surpass this complacency and gain a greater objectivity and sense of others’ worth in addition to my own. The androgynous quality of her name – after Life’s love interest, Bevan, Unknown’s A/man/da and my "other woman" here, Andrea (the feminine form of "andro" – "masculine" – and an echo of Life’s similarly borderline Andrew as well as a partial

anagram for Dena) – suggest another, ambiguous quality consistent with Hickenlooper’s oeuvre, which I must also transcend before I can truly realize myself. Our relationship is unresolved at film’s end, as it should be: I live in a state of passage.

My first glimpse places me in the comic position of seducing a shopper into buying my first novel from the sale table of a local bookstore. This is no simple irony, for by beginning in the remainders bin I am, essentially, dead. No surprise, then, that I should end

up at Elysian Fields, the classical oasis in hell, or that I should have been guided there, in a sense, by my editor Virgil, as his namesake directed Dante through the INFERNO. This lends another sense to the setting name, as Dena – mother, cheerleader, lover – represents life itself to me, which I must also transcend as my filmic forebears the brute nature they struggle against if, like the poet, I am to emerge with a greater understanding of our condition. That’s how I end up serving the diabetic master Allcott; the excursions to his home become as nightly descents into the Underworld also known as dreaming and sleep, where I eventually take up residence for a while.

What of this book, then, which my bargain-bin victim unceremoniously dumps once I turn my back on her? Its title, HITLER’S CHILD – like many Hickenlooper allusions, a meticulously crafted throwaway – suggests, most immediately, the

The plot, concerning the title figure at large in my Latin American homeland, recalls Ring’s Satanic Mennaker and his adoptive offspring also lurking in that region and threatening to surface at any time. You might also be reminded of the rogue character of Coppola/Conrad’s Kurtz, amok in the jungles and requiring a similarly Danteësque journey upriver to be "terminated" by just such a

person as myself in my forays to the Allcotts’ compound. To hear elegant me describe this hackneyed thriller, you may grasp what I have apparently not, yet: that like Hickenlooper I have been dabbling in genres clearly beneath me, though you might also hope I had brought some spark to them in the doing.

When Dena returns with the groceries, you see me feeding Nathaniel, suggesting the nourishing nature of my homelife and foreshadowing my dinners at the Allcotts’. Dena has, apparently, just gotten off work at the vinyl record store in town – the new boho-cred job, à la Empire Records and High Fidelity – hinting at the appearance to come of further musical relics Michael Des Barres as a fellow gigolo, and our boss, played by Mick Jagger. The offscreen lives of Des Barres and Jagger amplifies their

onscreen roles, as the latter, more successful rocker once "had" Des Barres’s famous groupie ex-wife, Pamela. It makes of Jagger’s Fox something of a primal-horde father character or a more urbane Kurtz, master of his domain with droit du seigneur over all within his fold. Our repartee here – casual, intelligent, and adult – signals an adherence to classical Hollywood wit for a collective not willing to whore themselves to contemporary movie standards, though the dialogue is peppered with a playful sexuality that tells you we’re no fossils, ourselves.

As Dena dirtytalks me that night with review quotes for CHILD, I, somewhat surprisingly, go down on her. It’s a beautiful, telling sequence, demonstrating her as not some prostitute, herself, for the onanistic gratification of her Tom Cruise-wonderful fella, but as

part of a circuit of erotic enrichment, making the betrayal to come all the more affecting. It’s also another indication of the gigolo within me already, as in the opening reader-seduction. When approached with employment by Fox soon after, it is again more a matter of recognition than temptation, an acknowledgment by that shadow side of myself and an invitation to explore this aspect to its fullest. It takes some trying on his part, but finally I relent.

I’m set on this journey by Virgil’s rejection of my new manuscript, a novel about migrant workers that accords with both Garcia’s Latin-American heritage and Hickenlooper’s indie filmmaker status while also anticipating my coming experience commuting to the Allcotts’. Virgil’s connection to the classical poet is twofold, firstly as mentioned above as Dante’s fictitious underworld chaperone, secondly as actual author of THE AENEID, whose

Figuratively, THE AENEID is a description of every boy’s journey away from the mother at childhood’s end and into the wide blue world. At the same time, it’s a turning inward to the unconscious, where he encounters and courts, or formulates, his vision of

not-the-mother – the Queen – his dream girl and feminine ideal. This accomplished, he is then free to return to the Source back in the conscious world, reborn with the New Woman who synthesizes the first two figures while suggesting a modification of the original in a mature and lasting union indicating a resolution of all those hybrids. You might also see the plot in terms of the dead soul’s progress from life to its rest on that western shore, the widow in between his grief for his own life, irrevocably left behind.

Soon after my rejection, I’m seen following Fox into his office, which is just down from my own little hovel, like separate compartments of the same mind. The hallway is a recurrent image for Hickenlooper: "Sling Blade" opens there, as does his 2003 documentary The Mayor of the Sunset Strip, and Ring, as well, after a brief prologue. It’s a trope he may have picked up from

Corman, who recognized its Freudian implication as the birth canal especially in his own Poe films from the early sixties. Given the title of the film as well as of Fox’s business, it’s not too far a stretch to also see it as the long black tube which both Wilhelm Reich and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross saw as the passage out of life, my action at this point threatening an end to things as I had known them.

Here, I learn that Fox himself is a mostly retired escort, suggesting that the area of my psyche opening up for inspection is an awareness of the whoredom in my past – the calamity from which Dogtown’s main character is trying to escape, also hinted at in Life’s opening situation of its protagonist under a huge NOW RENTING sign. He tells me that the purpose of his service is to provide not so much love as "symmetry," then gives me the symmetrical name of Andrea Allcott for starters – so the balance he is talking about may be my own, both as a foil to my adoring wife and as a necessary counterweight to some element of myself Andrea might proffer.

I take the bait, partly due to having done a paper on Tobias Allcott in college. That is to say, my education is about to restart, an archetype from my past – from within – about to become flesh. When Andrea invites me to their home, it replays Eleanor Coppola’s invitation to Hickenlooper to the real or figurative family compound to compile her footage into what was to become Hearts of Darkness, his access to the Great Man not unlike my dealings with the author. As this also recalls Andrea’s initial venture to Allcott’s as a journalist – as her predecessor to the "Sling Blade" hospital and her descendant’s infiltration of Ring’s political enclave – it puts me in a bit of a feminine position, walking in these three women’s high heels. Whatever my motive in accepting, the

result is that it brings me closer to the self-image I crave as a master of form even as Tobias’s arthritic old body itself is on the way out. Just when the film starts looking like a romantic-comedy remake of The Mephisto Waltz, however, it takes a left turn few viewers may anticipate.

Our first date at the opera contrasts Dena’s pop records, both women a reflection of my own divided affections for higher and lower culture, as nature, as again demonstrated by the script’s marriage of the earthy and the elite. When Andrea informs me, though, that I’m not a substitute for any missing love in her life, I don't know whether she’s kidding me or herself. Her disrespect for the physical, which is all I amount to for her at this point – possibly ever – suggests, at any rate, the detachment of the writer especially in times of production. Such remove allows the mind to reach otherwise

unattainable heights, though its contrasting ill effects are seen in the affliction that renders Tobias barely able to type and is, as it happens, crippling his genius too. What makes this Hickenlooper’s breakthrough film is that, despite representing a leap in sophistication in both form and material, it’s not at the expense of some of his more vulgar impulses, as reflected in the script’s often bawdy humor – the contribution, possibly, of co-writer Lasker, whose credentials mainly come from writing gags for Bob Hope and TV’s "Golden Girls."

In a real sense, Andrea is an emissary from Allcott’s soul – the classical form of the angel Fox describes her as – at once venturing

into the world to gather the experience that will enrich his art as well as embodying the longing for which I am the response – the answer to his needs. In this, she too is a migrant worker, Tobias the great consciousness that is my potential self reaching back to pull me up to my fullest height, the Agape to my own hungering Eros. One last, sad shot of her in her limo at evening’s end plays like a privileged insight into the sorrows of the literary widow – my recognition of the displacement Dena must also go through in order to love me as she does. It is, for me, the signature shot of the movie.

We truly connect at an experimental theater, which doubles as the subconscious itself – another absurdist laboratory where seemingly disparate elements come together to forge new associations. Her invitation home takes us through a tunnel that, like the earlier hallway, suggests either

a birth canal or its converse channel to death and the underworld, though it’s up for debate which way I’m headed. Outside, a sign reads PASADENA, emphasizing this as a rite of passage and verifying that I am at last transcending whatever qualities my wife represents to me. At the same time, it suggests that this might in fact be her threshold I am traversing: If I am such a migrant as I’ve been making myself out to be, then I would be an agent of Dena’s as well, delving that portal to find the Great Man within herself, the figure of power inside the sycophant. Indeed, that will be one of the outcomes of our journey, though it will serve to nearly destroy us in the process. (No one goes to hell alone.)

While I bed Andrea, her husband slippers down the hall, his face deliberately unseen. The impression is given of an incomplete ideal approaching, invoked by our lovemaking – Eros, technically, being the desire to be uplifted. It’s as if by entering the tunnel (nudge, nudge) I had entered another plane of existence, a metaphorical realm otherwise known as the Allcott estate, where I was now acting out figuratively what my explicit actions of only a moment before "meant." By fucking Andrea, who in her role as loving, nonsexual caretaker to her husband codes her as Aeneis’s mother-wife Dido, I am conceiving my own genius-self. In both cases, this involves

entering the feminine, that unknown halfworld representing the unconscious. When Tobias walks in on us and demonstrates his approval, it’s a suggestion of the nature of ceremonial sex once practiced by the ancients, intended to enrich the gods through its release of energy. The fact of my own relative artistic failure signals a more melancholy aspect to my cunnilinguistics with Dena, a suggestion of impotence to be verified in the film’s virtual punchline later on.

Tobias’s diabetes – a condition shared with Ring’s brother Billy – makes of him another borderline figure, for the term diabetic is Greek for one that straddles. Had this been a mainstream film, there would have been a trick ending where I discover I’ve been lured into a haunted house, Andrea and Tobias the spirits requiring an interloper to wrap up some unfinished

business between them before they may be laid to rest. Therein would lie the pun in my "ghost" writing, I the psychic agent similarly invoked and pressed into service, care of – who else – the caretaker of Elysian Fields, Luther Fox.

About these ghosts. On one level, my experience with them is meant to be "spiritual" in nature. They are the embodiment of some formless quality that can only be dealt with when represented tangibly, an aspiring and inspiring element I have either lost or misplaced in my world. As such, they contain certain godlike qualities, their home the Olympus to which my lofty ideals have led – I, whom Virgil criticized for including Excalibur (think the Big Brass Ring) in my manuscript on migrant workers. This is a dangerous situation, keeping company with the gods while trying to maintain a home on earth. It’s no wonder I handle it with such lack of grace.

Another, possibly more common association with ghosts, however, is as something out of the past coming back to haunt one. In

Hickenlooper, of course, this is old ground. For the subject of his first documentary, Peter Bogdanovich, this spirit would represent the dissipated critical and commercial cachet revisited on the set of his Last Picture Show sequel Texasville, as well as his affair with their star, which broke up his marriage. In Hearts it’s the mental instability welling up via the similarly Olympian figure of Coppola’s Kurtz, for "Blade’s" Childers the decades-ago murder of his mother, and for Life’s Yale alum the sense that he’s not good enough, embodied in his passive-aggressive roommate. Unknown’s ex-cop is paying his dues for the accidental death of a disabled vagrant, Dogtown’s actor fleeing his own hustling sideline as well as Hollywood failure. In Ring it’s a tightly woven knot of violence, cowardice, pornography and the insinuation of homosexuality threatening its independent-party politician (as

indie filmmaker Hickenlooper) on the eve of his gubernatorial election. Here, however, the spirits seem more representative of my potential than of my history.

Or do I kid myself? Assuming for the moment that these ghosts of circumstances past and present could be one and the same – that the "desperation" whose teleological pull Virgil tells me will help me to realize my genius is rooted in some archaic, apparently unconscious force or situation – I consider what reflections of such a past Andrea and Tobias might provide.

Though Dena, at least, has a father, I have no parents, no backstory – even my ethnicity goes without comment, despite its continuity with previous Hickenlooper. When the childless Tobias and his wife welcome me into their family at one of our dinners, therefore, it’s the creation of a substitute family for each of us in order to rectify the lack that’s been holding us both back for so long. With Tobias the father and his wife the mother I’m fucking, I then am the son living out an oedipal Eden of fulfillment without the threat of retaliation. It’s a writer’s paradise, of communion with the genius and intercourse with the muse, effortless as childhood and free of that crippling critical faculty I encounter in other authority figures such as my editor, former boss, and father-in-law.

So there are issues here which obviously must be worked out. There is a question of love without fecundity, as reflected in my lack of success in writing; of an absence so profound it leads a writer to invent himself a second family despite the love and esteem of his existing one; of creating a personal identity in the lack of any tangible success-figures on which to model oneself; of finding a proper framework on which to hang your own mantle of genius; of a glory which is past and which can be revived but for which the effort might go unremarked; finally, of a shadow life which I can never share with my dearest one, though I tell you it is that for which she

truly loves me. Such a trunk of ghosts we carry with us – such a mess of hopes, desires, pain and potential ever to be redeemed with plain words.

My serving Tobias breakfast the morning after my breakthrough with Andrea replays my feeding of Nathaniel in the earlier scene, suggesting that my story – my life – has indeed restarted. When we see THE BIG BRASS RING among Tobias’s book titles in this scene, you can tell that Hickenlooper saw his own vicarious apprenticeship at the feet of master Welles in the previous film as a re-learning of his craft, lifting it up from the lowlife dogtown dregs and standing it on its feet. (Welles – quoted at intervals throughout Hearts – shared with Allcott’s British wife Andrea another exotic European companion late in life, his own, Croatian Oja Kodar.) Here, Tobias complains of the paucity

of ideas flowing through him, which we may equate with the diminished sexual potency which has led Andrea, for all her denials, to my engagement, gigolo me amounting to something of a sperm cell making its way up that passage to fertilize the egg which has been sitting unhatched in the Allcott encampment these last 12 years. His ensuing complaint about the organs now "turning against" him indicates the dreamer or terminal patient’s waning relation to his own body, he some obsolete part of the Self I am here to usher out of the world even as I act as stud, obstetrician and midwife to his last great work.

This communion with what Jungian analysis terms the senex, or higher, "elder" wisdom within, is kind of what I mean when I tell Dena, by way of explaining my latenight absences, that my editor has given me Tobias’s manuscript; that is to say, Virgil’s challenge to use my desperation to inform my own wanting prose has led me to "meet" my greater potential, through whom I come to create my

first important work. I tell her this as she models the suit she has just bought me with her father’s money, theatricalizing my own trying on of new, mature, sophisticated habiliments; my feminization – turned whore, nurse and midwife – helps bring out the masculine her, too. Since this scene recalls the crepuscular drag cabaret of Ring, however, it also indicates my homelife’s transformation into an equally strange halfworld, a peculiar burlesque on the confusion boiling unspoken within.

A couple of my interviews with Tobias take place by his sunken swimming pool, now a shallow and stagnant duck pond. As a metaphor for his dried-up life and talent it’s pretty obvious – a stopping-off place for passing notions rather than the grand, developed themes of the author’s productive days, migrant me just another such. As a paraphrasing of the traditional hearth

image, however, symbol of the center of the self, the pool adds more fertile depth: this is an intra-view more than anything, a commingling by the reflective waters.

It is here that he belts me for being straightforward with him about his manuscript when I call it "wonderful – for a first draft." Coming, as it does, immediately following Allcott’s ruminations on the charmed life he has led and his disregard for an afterlife, you may draw inferences between one opus and the other, Allcott’s offense equally at my assessment of his life as of his final work. Being married to an Indian, this may also be Hickenlooper’s reference to reincarnation, suggesting me as Tobias’s second draft, my subsequent work his rebirth to a higher, more well-informed state; it may also be a self-deprecating comment on the director’s own, previous work, the punch a visualization of the emotion impact of Virgil, his internal editor’s, earlier evaluation of this effort. It reminds me of the Twain injunction against falling in love with your writing by reviewing the finished piece and noting all your favorite passages, then striking them: In order to get beyond simply writing to become a writer, you have to leave much of what you love behind.

As Fox said of HITLER’S CHILD, Allcott’s strength had been in his characters, as you could also say of Hickenlooper. Watch any of his films more than once and you’ll discover, no matter how flawed their personalities or how derivative their story lines, a kinship with and a concern for their protagonists. Allcott’s folly in his latest work, however, is in producing "800 pages on the fall of the

Roman Empire, for God’s sakes," suggesting that the lesson I’ve learned in my romantic journey is that the proper study for men at this point is the humane and domestic rather than the grandiose and ideological. It is this revelation which will transform my writing, as myself, by the bittersweet conclusion to our story.

As if to punctuate the importance of this lesson, Dena’s loneliness and dejection come to a head when she finds my Elysian Fields card in a closet, hinting at the queer aspect of my double life. Hers is, again, the jealousy of the literary widow over the inwardness and solitary requisites of the writing life, no matter the supposed nobility or revolutionary nature of the work. When she gives voice to Nathaniel’s "What the hell ever happened to my daddy?" it tells me at least that I’m making progress, for for me it suggests a

postoedipal disconnection from my own "boy" on reaching toward maturity; for her it’s the separation of a nascent masculine extension of herself from the shadow of her own powerful father. On the other side of the world, so to speak, Andrea brings Tobias flowers while he lauds me on my work, such parallel action illustrating both the classical expense paid by mortals for the whims of the gods and also the toll dwelling there takes on us earthly types – an allegory on the addictive nature of writing, as any obsession.

The first time Tobias walked in on Andrea and me in the bedroom he had come looking for his medicine, indicating an ailing, needy force whose cure would be found in eros. Next it was to offer his kudos, verifying that this healing link had been forged and my talent recognized. The third and final time, he announces he’s feeling good, grateful and lonely, and edges me out of Andrea’s bed. I could say that I guess I had served my purpose and was being excused, especially in light of what happens soon after – but out of respect for the fact that it’s the last time I see him I’ll say the reverse, that it is at this point that his character is resolved for me. His wife/my muse was a conduit to my own genius. Being expelled from their Olympus didn’t mean I could no longer write, rather that my talent and my inspiration were at last united, the fruits of their union yet to be harvested. On my own.

The title of the manuscript we’ve just completed is THE SILENT BALLADEER – fitting, for my habit of typing the product of our daytime sessions while Tobias slept. This silence – an apparent attempt at modesty – turns on me in the end, however, when Andrea has the novel published posthumously, with Tobias as sole credit. Her telling me this by the by the same pool by which her husband had socked me draws an autobiographical picture of a pugilistic Eden suggestive of the lifetime of hard knocks that must have formed my own feelings of inadequacy. (It’s also Hickenlooper’s comment on the brutal, stagnant state of Hollywood ca. 2001, particularly

his experience with Thornton’s appropriation of their "Sling Blade" collaboration for his own career-making feature film of the same title.) The parallel with my scene with Tobias is brought home by her "Thanks for a wonderful time," echoing my description of his original draft. That it is her now delivering the suckerpunch tells me that she has ascended to his place, not me, she as calculating in the service of her beloved as Ring’s Clintonesque wife Dinah. In any event, the lesson is learned: You can’t reinvent yourself by consorting with ghosts. It only makes you one of them.

Turned out, now, by both Dena and Tobias’s widow, I am left to play out the classical role of the hero who loses everything before he can reestablish his life and kingdom. Relegated to bitter, controlling, nightmare janes whose dialog – "For what I’m paying you I expect you to be on my side in

everything" – suggests Elysian Fields as any job or studio where writers and directors are mostly hired guns, I am now on the course to rediscovering the needs and importance of the physical being I have neglected too long while carrying on with the Allcotts. It’s like a return to life after a near-death experience, where the world seems that much more vulgar and mundane and the simple processes of running a home and caring for others disagreeable. It is my PURGATORIO.

While so adrift and with all defenses down, the point of my life and the film are permitted to come to the surface. This occurs when I run into Des Barres’s Nigel in a hotel lobby, and find him squiring Dena. Captured in the frame at this point you see, left-to-right, Nigel, myself, my mirror-reflection, and that of Dena – enclosed between images of my lower and higher potentials. When Dena reveals her reason for hiring Nigel by asking, in another of the film’s rare privileged moments, "What makes a man do what you do?"

it is as if I were asking the question of myself. Nigel’s aphoristic response, "Fucking is the last resort of the man who feels impotent," carries all sorts of implications.

First, it’s a comment on the writerly disposition, the urge to create characters to populate a world in which one does not feel influential in the first place. This is probably what led Tobias to lure me into his enclave, as the unremarked-on appearance of my first book on his shelf suggests he may have done, he and Andrea treating me like a fictional figure in order to realize his latest work – which, like the great man’s system itself, they knew all along to be ailing.

The meaning for Dena would have to do with hers and other wives’ lack of

agency in a world still largely governed by men, incompetently, and their need to avail on us to provide their own sense of meaning and value. And for our part, such men, vexed by the loss of our own regenerative feminine element and the inability to create actual life, can only hope to reconnect with that spirit in intercourse or in the manufacture of artificial systems – religious, technological, political, architectural, theoretical, legal, philosophical, or artistic. Under the current sociopolitical structure, we all live in a condition of ECLIPSE – the title of my comeback novel – and all it takes is one slighted client to remind us that the sole reason we men get to serve the real, feminine possessors of power is because we're the ones wearing the tux.

One listen to Marlene Dietrich’s exhausted, resigned reading of the standard "Just a Gigolo" off the soundtrack to that feature film,

song so that some, at least, will understand. As a singer myself, I know where she’s coming from.

For I might as well admit it, my name is not Byron Tiller after all. It’s Luther Fox, narrator of the story, inseparable from the figure playing me, His Satanic Majesty Mick Jagger. Like my cognate Lucifer, I, too, am a hopeless romantic and a notorious liar, for, like my writer alter ego, I have constructed this whole burlesque of redemption after the Fall to form a blueprint for my own romantic revival from here in this oasis in hell. From my first line of narration to my final word at the end, it is ultimately unloved me in the remainders bin that is death (being born in 1943, I could very easily be HITLER’S CHILD himself), awaiting the author whom I have written to arise from his psychological Cuba and deliver me to my own rightful position among the living – the SILENT BALLADEER forever living in ECLIPSE.

Just as I have opted to leave myself to the sidelines of this narrative – so to see that self more clearly – you might notice my elision of

the entire subplot involving myself and the love of my life, Jennifer Adler. The last of my personal clients, she is also my last slender thread of idealism – the guilty secret of any cynic. Our first scene together plays out as a poignant, ironic joke, as we are found in our Olympian apartment, dressing, seeming for all appearances like a couple of gods enjoying the luxuries of their exalted station; until Jennifer betrays the nature of our relationship by bestowing a check on me for my services. Bittersweet as it is, the scene is only a dress-rehearsal for the humiliation of our next big encounter.

Here it might do to point out that playing Jennifer is Anjelica Huston, daughter of one of the first generation of great film directors, John, and former longterm lover of satyric actor Jack Nicholson. She truly is royalty. She is also another man’s woman, placing me in a protracted oedipal position Byron is here in part

(I can’t help it. I am forever enamored of the ideal.)

The later scene of which I spoke takes place in the restaurant where we had our first date, after an oceanside interlude between me and Byron meant to contrast those meetings by the Allcotts’ pool and harking back, as well, to some riverside dialog with another Cuban in Hickenlooper’s previous Ring. Here, I tell the young writer of my past as a piano prodigy; "then I grew up," I explain, hinting at an affinity between this film and my friend – and Gigolo star – David Bowie’s similarly descended-from-the-heights character in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 Man Who Fell to Earth. (There are also suggestions of my appearance in Roeg and Donald Cammell’s earlier Performance, where a decidedly less innocent character than Byron experiences an erotic change

of personality in the enclave of another iconic figure, the rock star Turner.) My choice of restaurant is another return to source, I emboldened by the romantic success of my protégé.

Of course, it’s not the actual restaurant – which, like my own archaic ambitions, has been torn down – but a reconstruction on the same site. Our interaction here carries with it the same element of surprise Huston’s diner confrontation with Nicholson had, in Sean Penn’s 1995 The Crossing Guard. There, loaded again with the baggage of the actors’ own offscreen turbulence, what looks like an imminent reconciliation turns horrifically for the worse for her. Hickenlooper’s reversal of the character parts here, however, is no less cruel for its low-key delivery, for it is at this point that I lay my heart on the line and ask Jennifer to marry me, and she, instead of

offering a movie-perfect acceptance, bursts into incredulous laughter. (There must be something of the prankster in the director as well, for in his next film, the documentary The Mayor of the Sunset Strip, in which I feature as myself, he goads his subject, dj Rodney Bingenheimer, into proposing to his longtime friend over the air, only to have her blithely dismiss him as a romantic interest at all, later. Mercifully for him, Bingenheimer doesn’t take the bait.)

So what’s a romantic to do but smile and go along with the joke? For the sake of balance, however, you should play this moment against my several restaurant meetings with Byron, where I am easily in control. The deep red décor in these scenes, which Hickenlooper likens to the hues of hell in his Columbia-TriStar DVD commentary but which I consider more womblike and

intimate, suggests an interior world more easy to manipulate than the bright and open outside world Jennifer inhabits and which functions mainly to humiliate and bring me back to reality. As if to offset my rejection, this scene is followed by Byron’s dinnertime welcome into the Allcott family for the purpose of revising Tobias’s unfinished work – literally, rewriting history.

Nigel’s impotence remark makes explicit my motivations for taking advantage of the likes of both of them. Dead to my own life, I am

buffered from the realities of marriage through my relationship with Jennifer, which probably caused the failure of my fictional marriage years ago, this writerly addiction to the ideal not sated even by the manipulation of my several surrogates. At our last meeting, I urge Byron to quit the profession as I am considering doing, and it is, perhaps, Hickenlooper himself reminding himself that it’s time to stop forging a personality based on others’ creations and to start fashioning his own, independent oeuvre. Having indicated where the drama must lead, I leave Byron to carry out the breakdown necessary to our discovery of that core truth which self-described "cocker spaniel with a hard-on" Nigel dispenses, like many a sage fool.

When I finally turn up again, on Byron’s return to the bookstore of his

earlier humiliation to read from his new novel, it’s only on the periphery, hovering like a ghost to see how my protégé has fared. His leaving there with Dena resolves both his comic inability to connect with the Asian woman of the opening as well as my own failure to attain that unreachable, superior sense of myself I saw reflected in Jennifer Adler. Watching them walk off, it’s as if I were seeing

my own life fading down that street, the whole film a long, tragicomic act of letting go.

"I’d spent years learning to pleasure women," I note at this point; "he’d come to the conclusion that what’s important is learning how to please only one." For Hickenlooper it’s a warning to younger filmmakers, of Hollywood as the Elysian Fields that may seduce you at first with the promise of meeting and working with the finest of creative artists but which can just as easily destroy you with grotesque and inappropriate couplings. It’s also a reminder that the necessary path to happiness for all the world in this new century lies not in man’s fucking the entire planet but in simply looking after his own. "Now there’s something to write about" I quip in the last line of the movie, perhaps leaving open the possibility that I may just become that writer one day, while

at the same time suggesting that what you’ve just seen is that story itself, populated by the same stable of surrogates as Hickenlooper also employs.

Writer or no, I can at least lay claim to be able to carry a tune, like the SILENT BALLADEER for whom Byron was unable to take credit. And in that I have managed to please more than a few, though I would assure you that’s not the sole, or even soul, reason I do it. When I sing, it’s for the sheer sensual pleasure of the vibrations in my throat, the control in my lungs, the notes reflecting off my palate and sounding out into the world. It’s recognizing the gods within every breath I take, our ecstasy the communion between outer and inner spaces. When I sing, it matters little whether I have invented the words or the notes I bend around them; it’s performing cunnilingus on the Muse, and when she comes, there’s nothing better. Thanks to Byron and the hell I put him through to get us where we are today, I have learned to live with the fact that to make use of your gifts, however meager, is not such a woeful purgatory after all.

If it took a fictional death to realize this, small matter. For those who get to benefit from the foibles and mistakes of romantics such as me – glad to be of service. For those who have to learn for themselves the pitfalls of wooing an unattainable ideal before embracing the security of a domestic truth – have many lovely adventures before you fall. Since this romance with life is only an affair and the lover with whom we must share forever the grave, you learn to value your carnality for as long as it lasts, then wish the next stable of escorts the best. Immortality is best left to the mortals.

So I’m not a writer, after all. I’m just a gigolo.