EYE OF THE CAMERA (flashback) 1998

City of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos. I invented a character for a film. I'm sixteen years old, and my fixed idea about the character in question is that a minimally sensible adventurer ventures first into his own imagination, reading and studying maps in a room isolated from the world, into dialogues with other obscure characters about mining routes, and into one or another nuance that the camera's eye can transform into an emotionally vivid and revealing video image. Only then does he leave! I talked about this last night in the screenwriting course I'm taking at the German Cultural Center in Corredor da Vitória, when I defended the central idea of my short film's preliminary script. But they didn't pay much attention because of my age. EXTERNAL SHOT: GIRL: Keep your hands still, everyone here knows me. JACK (ironic): Excuse me, wait a minute (now, a little awkwardly walking beside him, he is examining the girl, twenty years old, well-built, modestly dressed, with a rustic animalism in her face; between the Fish Market and Rio Vermelho Square, hot, with a cigarette between her fingers). ---- You're way ahead of your time (CUT). For months, I've been thinking about how to make my character go out into the world with a minimum of dignity, without family fights, financial despair, heartbreak, etc. Nothing like that: I simply want to prove that there are people like that in the world, who suddenly lose confidence in a world driven by diabolical backstage filth and leave with a joyful excitement in their souls and that's it (GIRL: --- Hey, let's go, it's going to start raining! (and there are quite a few...). And then, somewhat intimidated by the elegance of the car that passed by with its high beams on: - What a great car!) --- joyful excitement in their souls for changing the course of the safe and petrified reality of each day through a filtering system of the unpredictable that is pure vital energy. I said this in the screenwriting class last night and suddenly a thin brunette with thick glasses questioned me, saying that I was afraid of poeticizing the character and that he would end up boring and his adventure would be interpreted as a common existential shipwreck. She was much older than me, so I didn't know what to say. (JACK: -I'll talk to you tomorrow, what do you intend to say with that?), I read this dialogue in my pre-script and immediately retort to her: --- What do you intend to say with that(?) ---, the brunette, leaning on her desk and adjusting her glasses on her face, replied: --- I don't know! ---, and returned to a passive and indifferent attitude. (GIRL: - Isn't there a radio in the car?) - JACK, taking the wheel, closes the door and starts the car: - Let's get out of this city, NOW! ). I look around and I'm arguing alone inside my mind with the brunette with the bottle-bottom glasses, I want a farewell dialogue in front of something on fire in front of a vacant lot, maybe a bar with gypsies and grim-faced prospectors, discussing debts in loud voices. Maybe a shootout, running, screams. (JACK, shoulder forward echoing downstream: --- Don't think I'm satisfied with this psychedelic party (...) I'm not satisfied with it, my alter ego is not a fake hallucinator babbling nonsense to the starfish: he has a gold tooth in the back of his mouth and everything is important to him in life, his chest contracted against the bundles of silver cord and the large crucifix, indicating that he is a messenger of the spirit in struggle against the powers of the shadows that try to confuse and distress people by promoting false myths of success through the social value system (universities, media, political parties and multinationals: David versus Goliath) that control people's internal space, contaminating language with a game where mirror reflects mirror continuously and people only know each other's reflections, a heavy self-image that we all have to carry and defend before others, which conditions all our actions and reactions, which is like a beast made of energy strange to each one of us, floating over our heads, controlling the mental images within us, feeding on our psychic energy with each of our reactions of fear, anger, vanity, worry, etc. (...) Ah, if everyone could see with their own eyes how this works, this dreadful company of all our hours, treating us like food and keeping us all trapped in this condition so they can have their banquet day after day. (JACK sees the CONTROLLER GENERAL slumped in his chair smoking. The window lets in the flashing neon signs of the city outside. Next to the telepathic transmitter of the great social body of the empire, the great social body of the empire that has the consistency and inertia of a stranded telepathic jellyfish, in the great social body of the empire that is like an enormous and stranded telepathic jellyfish with all its roundness over the entire roundness of the EARTH, the ELECTRODES are planted. The Comptroller General stalks JACK's every step toward him with a wicked grin. JACK looks around, taking in the megalomaniacal dimensions of the control room. There are hundreds, thousands of electrodes, an incalculable number of electrodes, of such diverse types that they no longer even seem like electrodes. The television electrode, certainly, but also the money electrode, the black-label-medicine electrode, the social-assistance electrode, the loves-me-and-hates electrode. Through these millions of electrodes, of such diverse natures that JACK suddenly gave up counting them, THE Comptroller General maintains the encephalogrammatic plan of the imperial metropolis. Through these channels, imperceptible to the vast majority of the population, information, sudden mood swings, the likes and dislikes, the sympathies and antipathies necessary to prolong the zombie population's toxic dream of a devastated world dominated by darkness, are continuously emitted. And note that JACK ignores all the other devices attached to the main electrodes, such as journalists, sociologists, police officers, intellectuals, literary critics, teachers, and other agents of an incomprehensible volunteer force to whom the task of guiding the electrodes' subordinate activity has been delegated. DARKENING. A little help, Mariana! (JACK: -To hell with these apartment parties, I'm not going anymore (...) do you know where I slept last night?) Then, swimming. Going to school hungover, sitting next to her desk, holding her hand in front of everyone, the way she likes, and watching the cross-eyed chemistry and math movies. I look at the clock: ten in the morning, Friday half the neighborhood skips school and goes to the beach across the street. In the evening I have a swimming competition at the Bahia Athletic Association, beach, pool, swimming teacher, high school sweetheart, bedroom, loneliness, emptiness, moving forward between all the delusions of reality, having emerged with them from the same batch or jet of consciousness. Onward! (JACK, now he's standing in front of a bedroom door in a hallway. It's a fairly old door at the end of a fairly run-down hallway, in the kind of cheap hotel that was new back when the tiled bathroom became the staple of Western civilization. He goes into the room and gathers his belongings; it's a very bare, run-down room. Two beds, a rickety dresser, an enameled iron pan, and a set of gemstone sieves on the floor, which are his own. He falls onto the bed for a moment, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.