Helen slides open her door and is indescribably happy to see that she had left her sleeping cot unfolded, and she can tip forward and be out in about five seconds.
The note she had written earlier is waiting for her on the pillow. She needs to make this video. Helen smooths her hair, rubs her nose. Her skin is grimy. The cleansing wipes are in the Lav. She cannot bring herself to get up again. She brings herself to get up again. She will clean herself up, make a video for her daughter, get some sleep, and when she wakes up, she will be given another opportunity to perform at the highest level, which she will do, will do, will do. She will find every loose cord, every single one.
MIREILLE
The gun is surprisingly heavy.
“Okay, Mireille, we’ll have you step onto the volume, please,” a voice tells her. Mireille cannot see who is speaking to her—outside the scaffolding of lights and cameras the room is a shapeless vastness. She steps onto the stage, which she knows is what the disembodied voice means by “the volume,” because her friend Wesley had run through the motion capture lingo with her in preparation for this audition. “Games are the best,” he said. “Mo-cap people love working with trained theater actors. They actually don’t want social media stars. I mean, they want them, but they know they have to use actors because to do games you have to have craft and storytelling skills. Games are the only place anyone needs a real actor anymore. Just make your motions clear and definite. Don’t do too much with your hands. Hands are hard to animate.”
The script they had given Mireille was not—she was informed—the real script, and the name of the game was a pseudonym for whatever the real game was called. She had been told to wear comfortable form-fitting clothes, and over her yoga pants and camisole they had put her into a dark nylon bodysuit striped with neon green lines and furry Velcro panels. Small reference balls had been attached to the panels at all her joints; her face is dotted with reflective tape. She must not let herself feel that this is not real acting. There were so many people in Los Angeles who called themselves artists but didn’t actually do anything because that would expose the difference between who they really were and who they imagined themselves to be. The fact that she was togged up right now to look like a rogue Ping-Pong table was work, and she needed to be humble about it, and find the art in the experience.
This is her third and last audition of the day—three auditions!—a banner day, though exhausting. The first one had been for a commercial and had involved wearing a bikini top and jean shorts and pretending to spray another girl with a garden hose. No garden hose at the audition, and no other girl—she’d had to aim a jump rope at a masking tape X on the wall. She and the masking tape X were meant to be enacting the “dream fantasy” of a married man standing in the aisle of a grocery store; after spraying the masking tape X with the jump rope, and laughing and shrieking and tossing her hair around, Mireille was meant to stop and face the camera and say, “Really, Richard?” Because, she was told, the commercial was subversive-feminist and meta-retro: meant to be making fun of the kind of commercial that shows wet girls in bikinis, and guys who fantasize about wet girls in bikinis, and also anybody who thinks that wet girls in bikinis are what guys fantasize about. There was a lot happening. Anyway, according to Mireille’s new agent, the first call had been for models, but none of the models had been able to say the line of dialogue with “sarcasm that was still appealing” and so now the call was for “very attractive/great physical shape/great comic timing.” Mireille had gotten up early in order to apply a fake tan, get her hair right, pad her bikini bra. She’d gotten a laugh from the casting assistant when she said “Really, Richard?” but the assistant had her do it again “less like you think Richard is a perverted scumbag and more like you think he’s kind of an adorable dork.”
Mireille’s second audition had been for three lines in a real movie, and Mireille wanted that job so badly it was hard to concentrate on what she was supposed to be doing now. She couldn’t tell how well she had done at the movie audition since she hadn’t even gotten to meet anyone involved; they just wanted a video that she’d recorded at her agent’s office. It was hard to do anything with three lines, and the three lines hadn’t been dramatic or funny or anything. Mireille had tried very hard to imbue her character—Female Clerk—with a point of view that wasn’t intrusive, since Female Clerk was just handing a male character called “Tomas” a package and then wishing Tomas good luck. Mireille had decided that Female Clerk was having a busy day, but something about Tomas charmed her, and her “good luck” was sincere.
Now she was here, at this giant carpeted warehouse in Studio City, handling a rubber gun and covered in fuzzy balls. Mireille had never handled a gun in her life, and this one was huge. Did she hold it at her hip or hold it up to her eye or something?
“Looky-look at what we have here.” Mireille addresses the bit of dialogue, as instructed, toward a tennis ball dangling from a ten-foot pole. Mireille is happy with her delivery of the line. She wishes she had more opportunities to express scorn in real life. Scorn for another person, that is. Right to their face.
It feels kind of sexy to hold the gun, although she dislikes the idea of violent video games. Mireille slings the weapon up to her hip and pretends to spray a crowd with bullets or whatever is meant to be coming out of this thing. Could be lasers if it’s a space game.