Ennui and Malaise Episodes 5-8

The second series of the programme famously attacked by mainstream media as 'a toxic mix of drugs, drones, deviant sex, anti-social behaviour, pointless hedonism, hopeless 'lefty' politics, leaden symbolism and teenage decadance'.

Continental philosopher, guest star and fan Slavoj Zizek wrote about the series extensively in a monograph called 'Black Milk: Television and Toxicity' published by a small Belgian press.

'Whatever one might like to say about this series- that it is indulgent, that it is pretentious, that nobody does anything but take drugs and have sex and so on, should reconsider their interpretation. The series does not say 'This is the Real', it is against the Real. Everything that happens in Ennui and Malaise is a projection of fantasy so that the person denying these images is immediately disavowing their own fantasies which involve exactly the same exhaustive explorations of sexuality, destructive devotion to libido and stuff like that.'

Episode 5: The famous New Year episode. Alex and Sophie endure the first hour of the New Year at their friend's massive townhouse in Wimbledon. Sophie sits watching hip hop videos with a pair of oversize pigeon wings tied to her back, icicled cocaine and snot hanging from her pretty nose. A gang of underfed art-school girls who talk like they're performing Einstein on the Beach make intimations of boredom throughout. Meanwhile Alex lies in a bath wearing a plastic crown, fucked out of his face on 2-CI and repeatedly touching his hands and the pale surface of the bath while someone with a megaphone recites the lyrics to Respect by Biggie Smalls. Fox, that triumphant homosexual, returns, makes a joke about getting his own spin-off on the annexed tennis courts, does a bit of coke and then gets his 'Alf' sucked by a ataraxic blonde girl who bobs her head to the rhythm of Ivor Cutler's mournful harmonium. Soundtrack: 'Heartbreaker' Maria Carey and Jay Z, 'Heartbroken' by T-2, 'Well Tuned Piano' by La Monte Young and Gruts by Ivor Cutler. Subtitles.

Episode 6: While playing The Game of Death one Saturday afternoon Alex and Sophie decide that they wish to be Situationists. They record an episode of Ren and Stimpy which they then talk over, transforming Stimpy's destruction of the lummox's hang nail into a scene where the sleeping pig of bourgeois territorialism is being slaughtered for his sins. Frequent shots of the skinny couple bathed in cold, ghosty TV light. Soundtrack: 'Broken English' by Marianne Faithfull.

Episode 7: Sophie's sister, Alice, returns from Iceland. The girls flick through magazines, smoke weed, meet Fox at a Kingston underpass where he is snogging a soldier, walk near the sea, go charity shopping, get fuzzy on the kerbs, score some drone shortly before it is illegalised and then try and sleep in the cinema. Fox gets arrested for holding a policeman's cock during an interview while Sophie and Alice climb out a bathroom window, squelch across the winter earth, finish a joint that crackles like glass, steal bikes and sleep in Hyde Park. Alex is in Bristol, shooting heroin, convinced he is dead. Soundtrack: 'Ari's Song' by Nico, 'Too Many Creeps', The Bush Tetras, 'Beat Bop', Rammellzee and K Rob, 'Christmas Time Is Here' by Vince Guraldi. Subtitles.

Episode 8: Reading their dialogue off cue cards held by a skinhead, Alex and Sophie have an argument which often falters or fails entirely. During these frequent silent passages Alex re-enacts Tilda Swinton's breakdown at the end of The Last of England, each time more and more distressed. They conclude the argument eventually, undress, bite, spit, suck and spank each other. Sophie feeds Alex honey until he throws up. She tongues him desperately straightaway afterwards. Soundtrack: Ravi Shankar's work on 'Alice in Wonderland'. Subtitles.

Images: Chloe Sevigny photographed by Terry Richardson and Franny and Zooey poster by Will Holden.

The Screen Test

a) Before the screen test comes the test-card...

The projector kicks in. Light flickers onto my eyeballs, at the second kick, I wake up, and I'm in the cinema again, nothing but nothing but dark, dead light. Why would I dream about Charlotte Gainsbourg in an abattoir? A little girl, soft as fox, sleeping in a freezer on a bed of cold meat. Charlotte is grown up now, recording brain-scanners in California, having long abandoned her experiments in Ada-land, stopped fooling and being silly with all her lemons, libidos and 'in-zest' and settled down in the forest with a smart psychoanalyst. The foxes are talking outside, sneaking over the wintry earth in their little white shoes. They are on their way to the train station because that's where all the best rubbish is kept.

'A mistake on video is forever. All the other mistakes can be crossed out...'

I wish I was a Fassbinder-Fox: no sleep ever ever! Awake the whole time with my dick out the whole time, banging against my fat, mottled thigh, this way and that, while I bomb coke in my Munich bathroom and make phone calls to all my lovers, all suicides, all dumber than I am. I forget I am indoors and mistake the toilet for a train station bench and two criminals come and steal the Nikes from my feet. I am on the phone... 'This is not a cry for help. Darling, liebchen, I am desperate. Please, please, come over and let me touch you, only once.' A muddy residue collects around my nostril, my eyes turn into bloodshot puddles and my cock grows, swollen like a supermarket bag, as I stare at a light fitting. 'Listen... fucking listen to me!'

I am no longer Fassbinder, I am myself again and sitting in my bed in the soft and silent dark. The television snores- LIGHT- and emits a low drone, saying I'm awake. Ceefax jazz and pixellated stories about children drowning then that little girl with her blackboard and clown. What kind of lesson would she teach me? Test-tones underneath: we must make sure all the frequencies are fit and ready for consumption. I guess all the day's programming is put together behind that little board. As soon as it disappears the programmes play out from another screen underground in London.

'Just a small fix, I feel, would recreate the strewn ramparts of Jericho'- Trocchi

While we are talking I'd like to show you a picture of Fassbinder. There he is, poor Rainer, talking very eloquently, slightly subdued (he might be numb from medication) and probably bored. He went all beastly, Fassbinder, by the end, and started to look like a wild animal dressed in leather.

OK, I confess, I was never awake or even alive at the time of the test-card. The most I can claim is being drugged and hallucinating that her image was projected against a flat block wall. I think it was a drunk bird. I ache for all the technology I never experienced or only experienced as a consequence of adult nostalgia. The subject of all poetry is being born too late- too early- or not being born at all.

b) Screen tests. (Because you love quotidian things and the test is the most ordinary, unavoidable thing you can imagine. The test hurts the star, makes them quotidian. In my art I'm making beautiful things quotidian and I'm making quotidian things beautiful, but I think this is really because I'm in love with that particular word. I'm in love but it is a very ordinary kind and a very tedious feeling.)

BOB DYLAN SHOT BY ANDY WARHOL IN 1966.

'I asked [Robbie] what ever happened to that Elvis painting that I gave Dylan because every time I run into Dylan's manager Albert Grossman he says he has it and Robbie said that at some point he traded it to Dylan for a couch! (laughs)' Warhol, in his Diaries.

Dylan by electric moonlight....

After copping speed on the Factory fire-escape from Billy Name, Bob is told 'the light is ready' by Gerard, at which he cracks a joke, sounding like a cross between Groucho Marx and the European weasel. Bob finds the experience tedious and, near its end, disquieting. He complains to Edie, later that night, in her dirty, inherited brownstone that 'That whole thing was bad, man, it's just creepy in there anyway. I don't care about being photographed but-' Edie nudges him with her skeletal arm in a sisterly gesture, moving her head against the pillows and asks, 'Where's the rest of Billy's speed?' Bob imagines that gold-clawed mirror is a camera. Cocteau has already written on the glass. 'The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face.' Queer what a camera does.

What I mean

is actually really unimportant.

All you need to know is that I want

you to misunderstand.

DONT LET ME BE UNDERSTOOD

I care deeply about being insincere.

I say, all my life I have suffered from a mental dysphoria-

I always wanted a different mind

But if you read me carefully enough

you'd know I'm a very good liar

and in art that is enough.

KATE MOSS MODELS FOR L'OREAL

You can be beautiful, too. Don't be silly, you're not ugly at all. All great models come from public housing like animals. The dirtier, dumber and scummier you are, the more beautiful a bird you can become.

1. Ikonika- Red Marker Pens

2. Y Pants- Favorite Sweater

3. Johnny Depp and Kate Moss- Morning Interview, 1994

Images of Test Card Girl, Charlotte Gainsbourg aged seventeen, Fassbinder in interview available on Criterion edition of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and Kate Moss auditioning for L'Oreal hair products in the early '90s. All images are used without the desire to hurt anyone and in this case that means really without intending to incur a hefty fine which we couldn't possibly pay anyway because, duh, we don't have any money.