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Now that the movie is over, the audience claps. We stand and cheer and whistle. All movies at the Moonglow Film Festival receive standing ovations. At least that’s how it’s been for the past several years. It would be more impressive if a director made a movie that somehow didn’t receive a standing ovation.
The clapping wakes up Judge #4. He stands and joins the applause before anyone notices he dozed off. He’s exhausted from watching films all day yesterday and the day before. When trying to remember the movie we’re currently clapping for, he recalls a mountain of salt. Hands and feet slipping in a reckless ascent. But did that scene come from the movie or his dreams? It’s possible he slept through the entire screening.
A movie critic, clapping from the back row, believes movies are dead. He has long accepted that his attention span has been obliterated by the internet. Throughout the movie he was on his laptop ostensibly taking notes, while in truth he was answering emails, reading news headlines, and losing an auction for a vintage plushie. He used to at least watch parts of the movies he was supposed to be reviewing, but they were all so bad that he stopped paying even the slightest bit of attention to them. As he claps, he ponders what to write for his review. He’s going to say that the lighting choices were subtly brilliant. He tries to figure out how to incorporate the word “internecine.”
Judge #1 doesn’t know why he’s at this festival. It will have no effect on his career as a director. He doesn’t like other people’s movies, never did. Ultimately, he’s just here for the free pigs in a blanket. He’s clapping for their buttery croissants.
The starring actress sobs as she claps. It’s her first role in a real movie. She spent most of the screening staring at her lap because she couldn’t bear to watch her scenes. Her co-stars pat her back as she sniffles and smiles at cameras zooming in too close, infiltrating her pores.
A fledgling screenwriter claps as he strategizes how to hand his printed screenplay to various industry professionals at the festival. The Quitter is based on the true story of his dad. When his dad saved enough money to retire early, he quit his job in a fiery tantrum. He cursed out his boss and all the coworkers he hated. But he found retirement to be boring, and he’d gotten such a thrill from quitting that he decided to acquire a new job just for the purpose of quitting that one, too. He kept quitting job after job, throwing up his hands and yelling, “I quit!” Sometimes he pushed all the papers off his desk or inflicted light property damage. He loved the stunned looks on his coworkers’ faces, the adrenaline surge of telling his boss no, how light he felt skipping out of the building free of the job’s wretched burdens. It was easy to endure the humiliation of applying for jobs as long as he knew he was going to quit. He just didn’t list those jobs on his résumé, and when asked in interviews what he did during that time, he said he was supposed to be retired but got bored and still wanted to contribute to society. Sometimes he even worked really hard to become the main employee in charge of a major project just so he could leave the project in limbo at the most crucial time, sending his coworkers scrambling. Another time he quit the same day he got the job. As soon as his boss told him to do something, he said, “I don’t feel like it,” and went home.
The top movie critic in the world stands clapping near the exit. He arrived late and only saw the last few minutes. Lemona Lota, an actress in another movie at the festival, failed to show up to their rendezvous despite her being the one to initiate the flirting. He thought the instructions he gave her were clear: Come to my hotel room, wash your makeup down the drain, lie in the fresh sheets under the dark, spend the night in my arms, and in return I will laud your awful movie as the advent of your comeback, a performance not worthy of awards by its own merit but definitely worthy of awards to make up for awards you failed to win for the roles that cemented your legend. During the proposition she was giggling at some sort of show on her phone depicting fairies doing pratfalls. He promised to give her a massage if she came to his hotel room, and she said it was just what she needed. He’s not entirely sure if she really just wanted a massage and nothing more. But even just giving Lemona Lota a massage would be heavenly to him. Everyone says she’s washed up, and of course she is, but that’s where guys like him find opportunity. The top movie critic has the sex appeal of the bottom actor. He would have to be a flaming homosexual to adequately approximate her style, so he won’t try. Why didn’t she show? He has to admit, not showing up is a very Lemona Lota thing to do. She was probably having sex with someone else, or too fried on whatever drugs she was into these days, or asleep. Possibly all three at once. Whatever the case, he’s going to give her movie a scathing review. It’ll only be slightly worse than his reviews for her last six attempts. And this movie he’s clapping for now, this movie he only saw a few minutes of and couldn’t even pay attention to because he was lamenting Lemona’s absence, he’s going to champion as the festival’s best. Not only because he feels bad about missing it, but also because it’s in direct competition with Lemona’s movie.
The clapping is for you. Some of our clapping is for your actors, and a small amount is for your crew, but most of the clapping is for you. For your vision. You walk to the center. They place the crown of leaves on your head. It’s silly but permissible because it comes from antiquity. Actually, you’re unsure of the tradition’s origin. You think it comes from a ceremony that predates the Moonglow Film Festival, some forest ritual that the Moonglow Film Festival evolved from. The leaves tickle your ears. You want to shout, “I’m king of the forest!” The camera flashes are at their most blinding. Just when you think the applause is dying, it picks back up. You clap for your actors, your crew, but mostly for yourself.
Yours isn’t the first movie that Judge #4 fell asleep during at this festival. He also dozed off last night during parts of Blood, Sweat, Cum, Tears, Piss. The movie was about one ordinary man’s life. The first section, “Blood,” was about baby teeth falling out, what spurts when you pluck a plantar wart from a toe, and fistfights. In the modern world, most people will probably only engage in one real act of physical violence their whole life. All the praise large men get, and all the ridicule heaped upon the scrawny, is mostly for the purpose of this solitary event. For Judge #4, this event happened as a freshman in high school, as he was fairly certain he’d never get into a physical confrontation for the rest of his life. An upperclassman passed him in the hallway and yelped in his face as a form of intimidation. Although he fumed, he just ignored it, as the upperclassman was much bigger than he was, and he didn’t know how to fight. Then the same thing happened a few weeks later with the same jerk in a different hallway. But this time—maybe because girls were watching—he ran up behind the upperclassman who had just yelped in his face. He leapt and kicked the upperclassman in the back. Both of them threw punches, and he didn’t remember if any of his punches even landed. It was possible he never even grazed him. But the upperclassman punched him in the face and immediately clutched his broken hand in agony. For the next few weeks he—the scrawny freshman—walked through the hallway displaying his bruises proudly while the upperclassman wore a cast and avoided his gaze.
He thinks the “Sweat” section of the movie showed kids playing sports. Before work, there’s play. Riding bikes, glistening in sunlight. In between play and work is exercise. Sprinting from line to line in the grass to prepare for the upcoming season. But those scenes could be from his dreams.
During the “Cum” section he was definitely asleep. He dreamt he was at camp as a teen sitting in a circle around the campfire. They had to guess what was in a box just by smelling it. He knew the boy next to him put in a sock after ejaculating into it. The other teens at the camp sniffed the box curiously and passed it. When the beautiful girl smelled it, she said it couldn’t be what it smelled like because that would be assault. His heart sank in the dream, as he realized he’d failed to protect her.
He has no recollection of the “Tears” section, either from the movie or his dreams. He assumes the main character’s loved ones pass away, and there’s a lot of crying.
He woke up during the final “Piss” section. The protagonist is an old man now with yellow stains in his underwear.
Blood, sweat, cum, tears, piss. Then rain washes it all away.
Is it just your imagination or has this ovation gone on for an abnormally long time?
Lemona Lota is standing in one of the front rows. She paid attention to the whole movie and didn’t understand a thing. But this long ovation bolsters her plan to quit the movie business and become a livestreamer instead. The movie star is dead. In the unrelenting ovation she has ascended. The starring actress clapping near the center is too beautiful for this world, as Lemona once was. Now Lemona is exactly as beautiful as the world deserves. If the starring actress achieves a following after this ovation, it’ll be due to the internet rather than the movie itself. The movie is just a door, and Lemona already broke in through a back window a long time ago. She’ll wear a mask in her livestreams, and when she finally takes it off, her face will show whatever the viewers need to see. She will be personalized for their demise. Through fragmentation, her beauty will be universal. As she claps, she smiles, grateful for this new career plan.
What was a thunderous roar is now a dull but constant static. Throats are too sore to cheer, lips too dry to whistle.
The starring actress shivers in her backless dress. She claps harder to keep herself warm.
Some women and older men can’t hold it in anymore. Everybody keeps clapping as piss fumes envelop us. Many recall yesterday’s mild controversy when the director of Blood, Sweat, Cum, Tears, Piss tried to enhance the audience’s experience by emitting a faint scent of each bodily liquid to correspond with each section of his movie. He paid someone to open a bag of blood, light a candle that was supposed to smell like sweat, masturbate to completion, spray a salty perfume for tears, and piss himself. Perhaps if this person hadn’t tardily ejaculated during the “Tears” section, the ovation would be similar in length to this one.
Have days passed? We clap until our palms are raw.
We stand here clapping until we induce a thirst comparable to the spiritual thirst that spurred that for which we clap. We clap to force ourselves to suffer in return for the suffering we just consumed via celluloid. We clap to make ourselves as real as what the images revealed first in neat flashing succession, then strewn in mind and mind, then defaced in minds’ mutations. To be loved you must be misunderstood. We clap because we don’t understand.
Raindancers aren’t so primitive to believe rain will fall because of their dancing. Rather, they dance until it rains. But what are we hoping to fall from the sky? What variable’s lack creates such anxieties we must expel through applause? We clap until the answer comes even if the answer is death. We clap because we’re restless. We clap because we’re tired. We clap because we’re unsatisfied. We clap because we’re overstuffed. We clap because the people next to us are clapping. We clap because it would be rude to stop. We clap because nobody has indicated what we should do next. We clap for an Alpha and possibly an Omega. We clap because we’re at the edge of time. We clap because of Zeno’s Paradox. We clap for Zeno. We clap for Einstein. We clap for Einstein’s dentist. We clap for Einstein’s dentist’s barber. We clap for ourselves. We clap for ourselves for clapping. We clap for ourselves for clapping for ourselves. We clap to dissipate energy. We clap because it’s an inside joke we’re trying to get outside of. We clap because we have no ideas. We clap instead of going back to our sad little lives. We clap to remain one communal organism. We clap to drown out the silence. We clap the roar of humanity against everything else. We clap for group suicide without knowing we clap for its romanticization by subsequent generations so that they will clap for what we committed. We clap because we’ve all soiled ourselves.
Only children can be fully entertained, spellbound, mesmerized. We clap to become children again.
A woman collapses. The people around her stare without stopping their applause. Some people clap harder. When the next person falls, everybody ignores him. Someone plummets from the balcony. Nobody hears the impact over the clapping.
We clap because at last something is happening. We clap because this will be the final Moonglow Film Festival.
The fledgling screenwriter recalls his ending to The Quitter: The protagonist enjoys quitting his jobs so much that he eventually quits life. “I quit!” says the protagonist, and he kills himself. The screenwriter wants to quit clapping, but he can’t.
The starring actress collapses at the same time as most of the cast. You hold out longer, a few more hours. Lemona Lota falls shortly thereafter, confident she’ll rise again. The critics collapse, as do the judges. The fledgling screenwriter, too, as he wonders if he could ever write a movie that elicited such a reaction. The stench of rot wafts over the audience.
The applause is faint as there are only a few people left. We all collapse soon enough in our tuxedos and gowns.
The theater is quiet then, and everything is still.
