It doesn’t take much rope for some people to hang themselves. “Overnight” is a 2003 documentary about someone who hung himself with six inches of empty air. Troy Duffy was a bartender in LA with a screenplay, and he received an opportunity that hardly ever happens to bartenders in LA with a screenplay – a major production and distribution deal from Harvey Weinstein. Thrilled, he immediately hired a couple of local filmmakers to make a documentary about his assured rise to fame and riches. They ended up capturing a Hindenburg disaster on film.

When aliens land and ask us for positive reasons why we shouldn’t be assimilated, I don’t there’ll be many fingers pointing at Troy Duffy. Arrogant, belligerent, with a tendency for insulting the big-name actors that he’s supposed to be schmoozing, he’s never made a movie before, and hasn’t even been to film school. He brags about showing up to production meetings hungover and wearing last night’s trousers. He has one talent: malapropism. “We’re a cesspool of creativity!” he exclaims. Elsewhere, he schools a naysayer: “Get used to my film career, ‘cuz it ain’t going anywhere.”

His boorish antics land him on Hollywood’s collective shit-list, and soon he receives a call from Weinstein. His film has been put into dreaded “turnaround” mode, halting production until a new deal can be negotiated. When a new offer to pick up the film emerges, its financing is very, very thin. And when the film is made, nobody wants to distribute it.

Another plot thread involves Duffy’s band, The Brood, who received a label deal to score the soundtrack to his film. His bandmates soon come to suspect that Duffy is not sharing his sudden windfall equally. At first Duffy says they don’t deserve a share of the royalties. Then, he moderates his position. “You do deserve it, but you’re not gonna get it.”

Things go from disaster to disaster, with Duffy’s family, co-producers, and bandmates going along for the ride (it’s not their first time dealing with this guy. You think they suspect there’ll be rubbernecking opportunities aplenty). As his projects steadily burn down, there’s endless scenes of Troy either partying or being a jackass. No doubt he fancies himself a work-hard-play-hard type, like Howard Hughes. But he hasn’t actually achieved anything yet. He’s like a runner who wants the champaign popped at the 900m line.

The documentary is fairly narrow in focus. We don’t see the critical moment where Duffy negotiates the film deal in the first place. And it doesn’t delve into the conspiracy theories about why Weinstein took a chance with Duffy, even if only for a figurative moment. It’s been speculated that he never planned to make Duffy’s film, that The Boondock Saints was destined for turnaround since day one, and it was just a PR stunt for his company. Yank a peasant out of the mud, and put a crown on his head. Then, when the cheering crowds are gone, quietly take it away. We don’t know if this is what happened. It’s certainly about as plausible as Weinstein trusting Duffy with millions of his dollars.

Ironically, Duffy’s film has proven to be massively popular on DVD. Unfortunately, he signed a contract that does not make him party to DVD profits.

“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.” – Antonin Artaud

“You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going “a most judicious choice, sire”.” – Stephen Kaas

“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.” – Jean Genet

“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” – Charles Bukowski

“To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.” – Michel Houellebecq

“I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.” – Antonin Artaud

“A woman should soften but not weaken a man.” ? Sigmund Freud

“Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad” – Rainer Maria Rilke

[on theater] “The actor is both an element of first importance, since it is upon the effectiveness of his work that the success of the spectacle depends, and a kind of passive and neutral element, since he is rigorously denied all personal initiative.” – Antonin Artaud

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.” – Albert Camus

“Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization – a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.” – Nick Bostrom

“Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can’t help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be.” – T.H. White

He started a worm farm.

Worms ate household waste. Worm castings made good fertiliser. But these were insignificant reasons, small change in his pocket. He did not need a worm farm.

He bought a plastic worm box, and assembled it in the shade of his veranda. The box had four levels, the first three for varying strata of soil, and the final level for liquid released by the worms. There was a tap, so he could drain out the effluent from the worm castings.

He filled up the box with dirt, shredded paper, powdered eggshells, and water. Then he got out a plastic bag filled with red wrigglers. It seemed to pulse with life, like a beating heart. He upended the bag over the bedding, watching a thousand worms sprawl and tumble out. Then, he covered the worms with more kitchen scraps and more dirt.

He dusted off his hands and put the lid back on. He was suzerain of a thousand little lives.

The phone rang, and he went inside and answered it.

***

Three days later, he lifted the lid on the worm farm, and his nostrils flared at the smell – a heady organic stench, paradoxically dirty and clean.

He looked down at the mix of shredded newspaper, coffee grains and potato peelings.

Where were the worms?

Thirty seconds later, he still couldn’t see any movement. He must have done something wrong. His worms were dead.

Then, he noticed the end of a gelatinous tail slip into the vermicompost.

It was as if this set off a reaction across the worm farm. Suddenly he could see lots of movement, lots of twitching segmented bodies. There were worms everywhere – why hadn’t he seen them?

Maybe the human brain codes worms as unimportant, and his eyes just filtered them out.

He sat for a long period of time, watching the worms – seeing the invisible, exalting the tiny, worshipping the small. But were they truly small?

He thought of Einstein, and of relativity, and how one reference point is as valid as any other reference point. From a man’s perspective, a worm is small. But there are other perspectives – an infinity of them. And they are all equal.

Staring down into the farm filled with lives little yet big, he rubbed a patch of skin on his ring finger.

***

His house was lonely. There was so much empty space now that the furniture was removed.

He spent long hours outdoors, with the worm farm.

He tried not to keep the lid off for too many hours – the worms would dehydrate. He collected the worm castings and used them to fertilise his garden. Sometimes it rained, and he dragged the worm farm into the downpour. He wondered if worms understood rain.

He found the worms themselves fascinating. He’d started off with a thousand, and knew that soon there would be far more – he’d read about the little cocoons, with still more pink tubes of meat spewing out in a cycle that would encompass hundreds of generations.

One day, he saw a wriggler leave the soil until it’s entire body was exposed. He realised something – they were beautiful.

A smooth shiny body, unmarred by Paleozoic disasters like limbs or a face, sensual and voluptuous. One section of it shrank, another section expanded, the worm pushing itself along with pulses of contractile fibre. Was any animal as thrilling when it moved?

He reached down, and picked up the worm between his thumb and index finger. The little thing was about six centimetres long. Caught in his grip, it twisted and contorted itself into all sorts of shapes – helices and curlicues and loops of almost iridescent ochre. He smiled as it accidentally touched its head to its tail, like the Ouroborus.
Such a small thing between his fingers. But at the same time, colossal, unimaginably huge, a destroyer of words.

A man is bigger than a worm. But there is nothing intrinsically big about a man, and nothing intrinsically small about a worm.

He imagined himself as a being one micrometer tall, standing astride a single grain of dirt, watching as a worm burst from the ground.

A gargantuan red serpent, segment upon segment upon segment, thrusting itself skyward, blindly seeking heaven.

He imagined himself watching it thrash and flail, an incredible limbless god. Watching its mouth open and shut, columns of scintillating teeth gnashing.

He turned the worm over and over in his fingers. It twisted and turned at both ends, like an glistening parabola of flesh.

He brought it up to his face, and understood the true reason he had gotten a worm farm.