The Pale Milky Eye of the Storm
Saluting the not-quite-winner of the 1965 Palme d'Or at Cannes
In 1965 avant-garde filmmaker Samuel Beckett was set to take Cannes by storm. His new film “Film”, a film about film, had ignited the ticker-tape telegraphs across Europe. The United States and Britain were behind the trend, as usual, in this case because their ticker-tape had all been used up in parades for returning Gemini program astronauts and the high school graduation of Prince Charles respectively.
The Cannes Palme d’Or was a certainty for Beckett that year, and he flew over his mystery star in a sealed clipper seaplane from the USA to be ready for the premiere. The reveal of his protagonist was to be culmination of the snowballing hype, and all other Hollywood stars were eclipsed by this unknown actor.
The star was smuggled into the premiere event under a blanket, and sitting in a rocking chair, only to be revealed at the moment the face was shown at the climax of the film. It was an electrifying moment, never to be forgotten by those who attended that night…
With the film “Film” a massive hit, all the other major Hollywood stars and directors went home. 1965 was to be the Year of Samuel Beckett - novelist, sportsman, musician, poet, action hero and dramatist. The world beat a path to his door, but he refused to be baited into revealing the mysterious secrets of “Film”…
At that moment a terrible clamity struck Beckett at the height of his meteoric success. At a press conference, actress Billie Hollielaw played a reel-to-reel tape recording of a confession of prior sexual indiscretions made by Beckett over some absinthe one evening. It became known as the “Crappy Last Tape” because of all the scandal it heaped on the great auteur, and was his last moment in the media spotlight.
Beckett was ruined, and he left Cannes for a life of exile and obscurity in Tahiti, but not before he made a singularly dire threat. A series of cryptic and occassionally obscene photographic postcards were sent to various departments of government in France and abroad, as well as to the offices of the Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm.
When pieced together, they provided a cryptic but definite prophecy about the end times, or “endgame”, to be brought about by a convergence of eldritch forces at the very same Cannes Film Festival which had brought him such ruin.
In particular he evoked “The Worming”, an ancient rite that, through certain obscure blood sacrifices, would summon some kind of worm, as well as “The Eye of Spica”, an entity, alternately (or simultaneously) eye and egg, that contained the germ of universal destruction.
Some said Beckett had merely revived practices that were already common in the most secret orgies of the jet set and film stars of the Côte d’Azur, occult rites that called into being the most unimaginably vile monstrosities, things that later swam in the blue Mediterranean and were seen on nights of the full moon off the Croisette.
Others said the Irishman had brought these things into being with his own sick imagination to exact revenge on a world that had brought him to ruin just because of a few moments of gerontophilic weakness. He disappeared from his yacht Belacqua’s Lobster off Tahiti one night in 1967, and was never seen again. Crew members spoke of a vile otherworldly scent lurking in the air as they searched for him.