John Greyson | This Is Nothing / 1999

nothing and everything

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Greyson (screenwriter and director) This Is Nothing / 1999 [8 minutes]

 

In many respects, Greyson’s short undercover caper film This Is Nothing, despite its terrifying commentary about the daily NATO bombings of Belgrade in 1999 prompted by Yugoslavia’s ethnic cleansing of Albanians which led to a NATO interim peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, is also an almost comic variation on the numerous CIA missions as documented on television and film.    

    While his former lover Dimitri (Greg Atkins) in Belgrade daily emails Jack Rivers (James Gallanders) about his experiences throughout the bombings, Jack imagines himself as a CIA hero, assigned to take out a Boston professor, war theorist Noam Bombski (Gordon Jocelyn), clearly a reference to libertarian socialist commentator Noam Chomsky. Rivers is furious that he is not being sent to Belgrade, but his handler explains that Bombski is Belgrade, evidently the source of all the evil action occurring in real time.    

     Yet nothing is fully explained ever in this oddly humorous short: “Facts were the targets he chased, but now the facts were chasing him.” And again, the narrator shouts out, “In wartime words become double agents.”

     The actions with which camera reveals Jack is involved—a bucket of water with a lemon twist being tossed into his face, a face-to-face inquiry with two Bosnian-like thugs, and a meet-up with a buxom woman who seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with anything in the discombobulated story—seem anything but terrifying. In quick flashes throughout this film, we see Jack and some other male, shirtless, sitting in high window in a half-hug. “In wartime, words become bombs,” screams out the narrator (Scott McLaren) of what appears to be a film trailer.

      Meanwhile, we hear somewhat coherent messages from Dimitri, while Jack’s hackwork film fantasy becomes increasingly confused with a dying couple on a sideway expressing they last words: “This is nothing,” she responding, “This is everything.” Dimitri’s mother in fact may be dying because of her refusal to go to the shelters in her attempt to call her sister to check on her well-being.

      While Dimitri talks of real bombs, Jack seeks out the meaningless Bombski and writes his friend about his last visit to Canada when they evidently slept on an empty floor of a newly built high rise, now filled with offices. Even in the midst of the crisis Dimitri has been watching on TV the film Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s 1997’s work which itself is a dark political satire in which to cover up the President’s sexual indiscretions, a political operative creates a fictional war in Albania—and which Greyson’s work itself is also fast becoming as the ridiculous and the tragic are given equal time.

      Suddenly there are no new messages on Jack’s server. Jack observes that the news of the poison gas factories is “really scary.” Maybe Dimitri’s e-mail simply is “down.”

      Meanwhile the imaginary film Jack has conjured up becomes even more ludicrous as Jack Rivers is announced as being played by Ben Afleck, and the strange woman (Sarah Polley) who keeps appearing is described as Penelope Cruz. With Dustin Hoffman as Noam Bombski.         

     Finally, Jack Rivers puts a gun to Bombski’s head. The frightening theorist responds: “This is nothing,” before muttering “This is everything.” As the narrator continues to scream out about Jack being pushed to the edge and the fate of the world, Jack puts down his gun and turns to the camera, thinking for a moment back to the no message sign on the screen of his computer, before walking off, leaving the narrator in a kind of stunned stutter.

       This short film makes quite clear the difference between everything and nothing, between the real worlds and the fantasy fictions about international battles. Yet it is often hard to tell the difference between the two, except perhaps that one ends in silence, real death, while the other shifts only into a strenuous stutter. And where, in all of this, is love? A few seconds, apparently, give evidence to it, without us fully being able to even determine the reality of even that.

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).