Feeling vaguely terrible - I did a Fight Club on the Censor Board

One of the exquisite moments in Fight Club is Tyler Durden talking about how he shows films, and between changing film reels, inserts a flash from a porn film. No one is sure they saw it. Sometimes they turn towards each other, mostly they are too embarrassed and look straight ahead.

Tyler Durden is a suppressed schizophrenic side indeed of a poor misfit bastard (schizophrenia in cinema terms is the same as multiple personality disorder, just like coughing is equal to cancer, and thin and sickly is AIDS, though just thin and ugly is beautiful). Now I'm not a poor misfit bastard at all (or am I??? laugh...) , but I definitely flashed the censor board. Me and an innocent man who handles the technical stuff. So I'm waiting with a balanced, historical presentation to make on censorship. It will meander through a raunchy dance by Maud Allen, ICC report with some interesting observations thrown in, and end somewhere with early cinema being likened to magic and sorcery.

Little did I know that beneath my fingers, the innocuous taken for granted wizard of technology, my beloved, shabby Mac is going to do a Tyler Durden on me. I'm fixing the projector for the presentation and the resolution on the screen is not right. In much enthusiasm, me and the projector guy are repeatedly pressing a button that resizes the resolution on the screen. Each time it is resized it flashes to this picture (because that is my desktop) ... a naked white woman lying on the road feeling herself up..she could be dead, she needn't be...it is infact not clear whether she died of excessive masturbation. But nonetheless, inspite of insubstantial evidence, it is being repeatedly flashed in the face of the Officials of the Censor Board of four states -Karnataka, Kerela, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh (I think, not sure of the 4th one).

Tyler Durden would be proud of me. I kept a straight face. No projector guy in the history of cinema has kept a straighter face. The signal sent directly from my brain was blasted in neon signs in front of my eyes - DO NOT LAUGH (I'm used to this particular neon sign going off...it comes from having been with many men who say silly things to you). Suppressed hysteria concluded, I see over Sharmila Tagore's benign still somewhat puffy hair (though she has made concessions to the new millennium, and discarded whatever object it was below her hair that made it twice its size an era ago), and I look at my cyber-woman, pristine white, naked, masturbating, paradoxically also seeming dead, on the road, chalk-marked, lying next to a man's boot and a black car, in front of a roomful of censor board officials ..

and I say...aaaaah...
"Agar anti-censorship firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast,
Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast....”

and ofcourse...
DO NOT LAUGH

also ...
and thank your kinky stars its not this or this one ...

Any debate on free speech for the toiling masses is never overt, and coded with reference to documentary films on sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS that would unfortunately be censored, not some man's frenetic masturbation that might be interrupted. What is carefully hidden is any sign of your own inner world of kink, being tied up, and even killed, and an obsession with erotic photography (your own photographs, photographs of other women) in these various states. And then - boom - something happens, to bring these two worlds together in hilarious sublime conjunction.

Borges describes a certain Chinese encyclopedia that contained a list of animals that Foucault said belonged together only on that list. But Foucault would have looked at these two disparate lists of mine, held out his hand (a leather band on his arm), someone with a masked face and whip in his hand standing behind him, and held my hand and said - Yes they belong together...ouch .... yes ..they most definitely do. ... yes, please, I want more....can I have a photograph of me like this, please?

FIGHT CLUB - the PRICELESS scene

EXTREME CLOSE UP - FILM FRAME

--And we see it's PORNOGRAPHY.

INT. PROJECTIONIST ROOM - THEATRE - NIGHT

Jack in the foreground, FACES CAMERA. In the BACKGROUND, Tyler sits at a bench, looking at individual FRAMES cut from movies. Near him, a PROJECTOR rolls film.

JACK (V.O.)
Tyler was a night person. While the rest of us were sleeping, he worked. He had one part time job as a projectionist. A movie doesn't come in one big reel, comes on a few. So someone has to change projectors at the exact moment one reel ends and the next one begins. If you look for it you can see little dots coming in the upper right hand corner on screen

Tyler points to the side of OUR FRAME and TWO DOTS briefly APPEAR ON SCREEN.

Tyler
In the industry we call them "cigarette burns".

JACK
That's a cue for a change over. The movie goes on , and nobody in the audience has any idea.

TYLER
Why would anyone want this shit job?

JACK
Because it affords him other interesting opportunities.

TYLER
--Like splicing single frames of pornography into family films.

JACK
So when the snooty cat and the courageous dog, with the celebrity voices, meet for the first time in reel three, that's when you'll catch the flash of Tyler's contribution in the film.

FROM THE AUDIENCE we hear the cartoon voices, and then for a moment the voice of a WOMAN MOANING. The film continues. IN THE AUDIENCE, CHILDREN suddenly start squirming, confused, looking at each other. A WOMAN abruptly stops sucking her soda straw feeling vaguely terrible. Her uncomfortable HUSBAND slowly leans back in his seat. Jack and Tyler watch from the projection booth window.

JACK
No one really knows that they've seen it. But they did.

TYLER
A nice, big cock.

JACK
Even a hummingbird couldn't caught Tyler at work.