SHIRKERS: The Catcher Among The Durians

“D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn’t know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” – The Catcher in the Rye.

Having finished narrating his ordeal on the streets of New York, Holden Caulfield is unable to say what it all meant but finds that he feels nostalgia for the people in his story. He leaves his audience to wonder why he misses a vain young sexual predator who’d pursued his crush and the dead-eyed pimp who’d punched him in the stomach.

At the start of her documentary, Shirkers, about the unfinished movie of the same name she’d had quite literally stolen from her some twenty-five years before, Sandi Tan lays out the first principles that informed her creative and personal life at that time:

“When I was 18, a long time ago now, I had the idea that you found freedom by building worlds inside your head, that you had to go backwards in order to go forwards, that little kids had the answers to everything.”

Tan presents these ideas as keys to understanding her 1992 road movie, written by and starring her and shot on the streets of Singapore, but they’re just as useful in thinking about this 2018 cinematic post-mortem.

To these three points she tacks on an equally useful addendum: “Hang on. Just one more thing. Back in those days I was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye and Salinger’s idea of saving children…”

One of the reasons high school English teachers are so fond of making their students read The Catcher in the Rye is the chance it gives them to talk about unreliable narrators. As the teller of his own story, Holden Caulfield is unreliable not because he’s a liar, but rather because his version of his own story is subjective (like all stories!) and because he is a not yet fully formed young person (like all young people!) whose experiences of the world are mediated by strongly felt emotions and firmly held opinions and all the other things that make young people (like all people!) so very, very complicated.

What Holden has to say about what happened to him isn’t the truth. It’s his truth. And at the time he’s telling it, how he feels about his story hasn’t completely settled.

Sandi Tan, like Holden Caulfield, has a story to tell about the story she tried to tell when she was younger and “had so many ideas [that she] hardly slept at all.” Her narrative is reflective, searching. And she repeatedly allows other people’s feelings about what happened to contradict her own. Also like Holden, Tan rests her case on nostalgia for the people and places and events that Shirkers tried to capture, a long time ago.

On the Edge of Some Crazy Cliff

Sandi Tan grew up on the tiny island nation of Singapore, where the overtly patriarchal leadership of its founding father and first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yu, rapidly elevated the country to being one of the richest in the world, a feat he accomplished with the help of an exceedingly restrictive society. As Tan puts it, “when we were growing up in the 1980s, the state and the family were constantly in your face.” So Sandi Tan and her friends chose to rebel, fueled by “unusual movies and unpopular music.”

Because censorship makes things difficult for those with unconventional tastes, Tan enlisted the help of a cousin in the US who dubbed copies of the films she’d read about in publications like American Film and Film Comment. Her accomplice would record oddball classics like Blue Velvet onto long-playing VHS tapes, often sandwiched between innocuous mainstream titles like Angel Heart, and send them in the mail. Tan developed a particular fondness for independent filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders, and soon she dreamt of making a movie of her own.

In 1991, when Tan was 19, she enrolled in a filmmaking course at a local art center. The teacher was Georges Cardona, a mysterious expatriate, “a man of unplaceable age and origin,” who quickly brought Tan and her closest friends, Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique Harvey, “into his inner circle.” Despite the fact that Cardona was more than twice as old as his young, naive students, he became the charismatic leader of their band of teenaged iconoclasts. In the evenings, after class, he drove them around the streets of Singapore, hanging out and bonding over their shared interest in independent film and outsider culture.

Some time later, after the girls had left Singapore to continue their education, Sandi ended up in the US on a road trip with Georges that would take the two of them from California to New Orleans. Recognizing the potential impropriety of her time alone with Georges, who was in fact married and a father, Sandi kept the trip a secret. Following weeks of receiving “strange signals” from her companion, Sandi was confronted with an inappropriate invitation that she wisely ignored.

Though they continued the trip, pretending as if nothing had happened, Sandi felt herself drawn closer to Georges, deciding that he was her best friend. Even more significantly, the idea to write a road movie solidified in her imagination. Shortly thereafter Sandi penned a screenplay about a “16-year-old killer named ‘S,’” who travels across Singapore, collecting children whom she plans to “save” by taking them to “the other world,” a narratively ambiguous conglomeration of heaven, hell, and a supermarket.

Filled with youthful ambition and determined enough to follow through, Sandi and her friends secured a generous donation of celluloid and equipment and enlisted the help of dozens of other friends, family members, and fellow enthusiasts to fill out the cast and crew. Due largely to his knowledge and experience, Georges became the film’s director. Finally having completed a whirlwind two and a half months of preproduction and shooting, Sandi, Jasmine, and Sophie all went their separate ways and left Georges in Singapore to process the footage. But over the next year the progress of post-production became increasingly uncertain, with the director avoiding all requests for an update. Eventually, Georges disappeared, leaving Singapore and taking the 70 cans of exposed film with him and completely cutting off contact with Sandi and her friends.

The Girl Can’t Help It

The shock of that betrayal would come to affect the young women more and more deeply over the years. Sophie remarks that “There was a piece of my spirit that died.” But perhaps even more profoundly than her friends, Sandi was devastated by the loss, which almost completely crippled her creative efforts for the following two decades. In the wake of that early failure Tan’s career would, as she now sees it, move backwards, regressing from screenwriter and film star to film critic and then film student. Her most significant artistic accomplishment in the intervening years was, fittingly, a novel about “the story of a young woman with extraordinary powers who falls under the influence of a charismatic but sinister man.”

Though the lost footage eventually came back to her, Tan was ultimately unable to resurrect Shirkers as she had originally conceived of it. Still, it’s perfectly clear from her description of the story and from the footage visible in her documentary that Tan’s ideas were extremely original and deeply personal. She appears, cinematically and emotionally, to have successfully distilled her idiosyncratic and intensely pure vision of reality. The images are vibrant and colorful, tinged by a dreamy quality itself informed by her naive but inspired story.

In a recent interview, with Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf at the LA Review of Books, Sandi Tan says that the visual beauty of the film is a “testament” to Georges Cardona, whom she praises for his abilities as a “raconteur” and insists was to her more “nemesis” than “villain.” Tan’s documentary apparently agrees that Cardona was a nemesis of sorts, but it doesn’t completely absolve him from being a villain.

All these years later, Tan can’t help herself from trying to understand what Cardona did and why he did it, carefully decoding the messages that she thinks he meant to send to her, and trying to understand who he was rather than trying to forget him. She casts herself as a detective, scrutinizing not just their experiences together but also the long list of films they had in common. Each text contains potential evidence she must puzzle through in order to solve the case.

In the end, she is able at least to identify who Georges Cardona was. He had emulated “Michel” from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, a liar and a criminal who is obsessed with the image of an onscreen gangster. And he had claimed to be the inspiration for “Graham Dalton,” from Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a character who records interviews with women, collecting their intimate secrets on videotape. But to Sandi, Georges Cardona is the vampire “Nosferatu,” because he was “trying to become immortal by feeding on young people’s dreams.”

In the context of 18-year-old Sandi Tan and her “obsession” with The Catcher in the Rye, Georges Cardona is a sort of anti-catcher, a negative image of what Holden Caulfield imagined his role as “the catcher in the rye” to be:

“…I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.”

In his mind, Holden Caulfield aspires to be a protector of youth, a self deputed guardian of innocence who would give his life to prevent kids from “going over the cliff” into the hypocrisy of adult life. Georges however didn’t protect but rather stole innocence. By absconding with the 70 cans of film that would have been Shirkers, he quite literally stole the childhood dream of Sandi Tan and, with it, her innocent, childlike vision of the world.

When she was younger, Tan saw herself as the literal protector of her young cousins, guarding their innocence by “training” them not to grow up. The story she tried to put on screen was a dramatization, a fantasy of herself in that role, her own version of Holden’s “catcher in the rye.” Now, more than two decades later, she is the catcher once again, revisiting a more innocent time in her life in an attempt to restore that innocence to herself and to her friends.

Georges Cardona still haunts Sandi Tan. While watching her story, particularly at this cultural moment, it’s easy to be reminded of the #MeToo movement and the insecure, entitled, creepy men who have in many different ways derailed the professional fates of undeniably talented women. It’s consolation to know that Sandi Tan has been able, all these years later, to produce this incisive and compelling cinematic version of her story. There’s hope in the possibility that this will be not just the bittersweet and triumphant end of one saga but also the beginning of the next chapter in a creative, prolific life.

What movie or book do you consider a guide for your own life?

Shirkers premiered on Netflix on October 26, 2018.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6uj88j