THE WHITE WOLF, MONOLOGUES

Written for the film by Nathaniel Axel
If you wish to re-print or quote from sections of the monologue, please credit author Nathaniel Axel

SCENE 2
Title: M.M.R. Clinic

Nurse: I’ve always lived on this island. Most of us have. The rest came later, sick people looking for a cure. For as long as I can remember I’ve dreamed of an escape. I read about an ancient city in the middle of a desert, with 14 story buildings made of mud. Shibam Hadramaut, Rub al Khali. Yemen. I’d like to live someplace that doesn’t touch the ocean. This town will let you go for a short while, but something always pulls you back. And you can’t leave.

I’ve been working at the clinic for 5 years. People come here from all over. There was a man last year from Paris. He was a dancer – he danced in the Opéra National de Paris. He was stuck in bed for a month, barely able to walk, but I snuck him out of the hospital in the middle of the night and took him to the Jack Tar. He wanted to see people dancing. He was going to take me back to France with him when he was healed. He knew a dance company I would be perfect for. He said he had a beautiful apartment with a skylight and a view of the Seine. But then he disappeared. I wasn’t with him when it happened. He left a note, saying he wanted to walk on the beach. He must have fallen down among the rocks. They never found his body. He went off someplace, I don’t know where.

It’s so boring in this town. People used to say everything that happens, happens here. But they were wrong. Nothing ever happens here.

SCENE 5

Title: Transformer; A Lecture
M.M.R. Institute

Doctor: Werewolf mythology developed in an earlier time, when science was still hand-in-hand with alchemy. Belief in werewolves, stories of werewolves, masked real instances of murder, rape, and cannibalism… (images here shown in lecture) Or served to explain hereditary traits such as hypertrichosis in individuals such as Petrus Gonsalvus, the ‘hairy man’ of Parma. (more images here shown in lecture)

Since the turn of the last century however, lycanthropy has been reduced to folklore in the popular imagination. And yet I believe that the werewolf persists. Which is not to say it remains unchanged.

The American Journal of Psychiatry describes the case of a certain Patient A., who believed his wife had been replaced. A. worked as the lighthouse keeper on an island not unlike our own, had no history of mental illness and was in perfect health. Despite the fact that this wife remained objectively unchanged, A. could only recognize an impostor. He was convinced.

The doctor referred A. to a psychiatrist, who gave him a placebo script. It was this psychiatrist’s opinion that A. was having an unusual kind of mid-life crisis but would soon turn a corner. And in fact, A. began to come around. There were still days when he wondered what happened to the woman he married, when he missed her and when he feared for her, but these days grew fewer and farther between. In time, he found himself coming to accept this new wife as a fine replacement for the old.

A.’s wife, for her part, adjusted to other changes taking place. She was consumed with perverse fantasies by day, and roamed savage landscapes by night. At first she thought these night sojourns were dreams, but her husband sometimes asked her questions and gave her looks that led her to believe otherwise. Where had she been? She noticed changes each time she looked in the mirror. She saw a wolf’s mouth inside her face.

SCENE 9

Title: The Patient A

Doctor: Many years ago, a lighthouse keeper named A___ lived here with his wife M___. M___ was a singer of local renown. She headlined one night each week at a local bar. For the rest of the week, A__ and M___ kept to themselves.

Unknown to her husband, or to anyone else on the island, M__ was dying. She’d gone in secret to see a specialist on the mainland and had been diagnosed with late stage cancer. Her condition was terminal, but she refused to let herself be eaten by the disease. Instead, she resolved to take her own life.

When the time came, M__ crept out of bed, being careful not to wake her husband. She took a lantern, put an overcoat on over her nightgown, and headed off into the night. She’d already picked the spot from which she would jump, a cliff about a mile down shore. As she walked on, sadness gathered inside her, and to distract herself she began to sing. Suddenly a strange man appeared in the distance coming toward her. It was impossible that he could be out in this place, at this hour, with no light of his own to find his way, and yet there he stood, dressed in a black fur coat, with a long black beard, giving an impression at once feral and refined. A man from some exotic wilderness. M___, suddenly self-conscious, became quiet as the stranger approached.

He told her he had travelled all over the world, and never before had he heard such a beautiful voice. As she thought about all the places she would never see, all the things she would never experience, M__ broke down in tears. She told this stranger everything that she couldn’t bear to tell her husband. She told him about her illness, about her decision to suicide, and above all about her life on the island, the unbearable smallness that life.

The stranger listened to all of it without saying a word. And at the end of her story he did not offer his condolences, nor did he urge her not to kill herself. Instead, he offered an alternative.

A person is not a body, he explained. On the contrary, a person consists in two aspects: those of spaciousness and form. Spaciousness exists inside form like air inside a balloon. The body we are born into is one possible form, but it is not the only one. In the right hands, the balloon can be opened up and the air transformed into new container. It could be another analogous balloon, or it could be something else entirely. All kinds of forms can hold spaciousness inside. Soon after this encounter, A__ became the Patient A from my lecture. And as for his wife, she ultimately killed herself anyway. Perhaps it was a consequence of what the stranger had done to her, or perhaps it was what she’d always intended to do, long before the cancer gave her an excuse. All that can be said for certain is that A__ found her body washed up on the shore.

The night he found her body was the night of a storm, and the phone lines were down. He carried her into the lighthouse and laid her down in their bed, before heading into town to get help. When he arrived back home with a doctor, they could hear the sound of M__’s singing coming from inside the house. A___ thought that perhaps he had been mistaken, that she had merely been unconscious, and somehow managed to revive herself in the time he’d been gone. He ran upstairs to the bedroom with the doctor trailing behind him and the singing growing louder with each step. He threw open the door to find the bed empty. M__’s singing was so loud to be practically deafening and A__ placed his hands over his ears as he looked upwards and saw his wife’s corpse, soaked and bloated, staring down at him, stuck against the ceiling like a balloon.

SCENE 14

Title: A Sheltered Life

Nurse: She’s always joking with me. She’ll tell me stories about people from the past, about her life before the clinic, and about the island. Strange stories that are too fantastic to ever be true. She even tell me stories about myself. Long complicated tales about things I’ve never done, with people I’ve never met, in places I’ve never been. Sometimes the stories are funny, and sometimes they are so tragic that I can’t help but laugh. Then she asks me “Why are laughing? Because it’s truly awful what was done to you.” And I agree. I say “It was terrible. Unbearable. What a strange sad thing for you to invent about me.”

But at the same time, there is so much that I truly cannot remember. Mostly I try not to think about these things. But sometimes my mind will wander and settle on a person and I can’t help but try to remember. Of course, it never gets me anywhere. Instead, my mind always turns to another of the doctor’s stories, one of her very favorites, which goes as follows:

I am not a real girl. Instead, I am a kind of highly sophisticated plant life that she has grown herself inside a lab. This island is her garden, and the clinic is her nursery. Our memories are not ours alone. We’ve been grafted to a story far greater than our own. The process is not perfect. Things will inevitably become confused. How can they not with such an incredible amount of history to be sorted through? But really, a little confusion is a small price to pay. In fact, it is an enviable position. Only through uncertainty do we come to know ourselves. It is the one who knows everything that truly knows nothing.