These Very Stars was a motion picture extravaganza built around seven major musical numbers. Its kaleidoscopic choreography and visual effects incorporated over a thousand precision dancers and ice skaters. I will do my best to describe it here, but I must emphasize to the reader that mere words cannot begin to capture the grandeur and scale of this film.
The film opens on a beach, with a beautiful princess (we know she is a princess, for she is literally wearing a crown!) sitting chastely beside a fisherman. They read a book together, and share a few clementines. As the scene unfolds, we watch the princess betray the fisherman (after some initial hesitation) in order to avoid losing her title and royal privileges.
Pretty secret smile: The song begins with the princess on the left side of the frame, illuminated by a narrow shaft of light. Rose petals rain down from above as she gazes sadly at nothing in particular. The camera slowly zooms out to reveal a cross section of a whale carcass. Ribbons of gleaming seaweed hang from the ribcage, and mounds of flesh are piled up here and there, with agitated flies swarming over them. Inside the carcass is a repulsive hermit, played by Dimitri Phalaenopsis. Over swelling violins, the hermit praises the princess's beauty, her innocence, her watery smile. And in staccato asides to the audience, he remarks, "...and how easily corrupted she will be, for she is already on the path to perdition! How easily she lies. How satisfying it will be to deform her soul."
As the song ends, the hermit sidles up behind the princess and taps her on the shoulder. Startled out of her reverie–and possibly beginning to comprehend the gravity of her actions–she starts screaming.
It is at this moment that the next song, Quiet now, quiet now, begins. This song is a lullaby--a slow waltz with a simple melody, sung in Dimitri Phalaenopsis's resonant bass voice. The hermit embraces the princess until she calms down, all the while drawing her further into the whale carcass and convincing her that she did nothing wrong. As the lullaby continues, he gently manipulates her memory so that he becomes the guilty party. "You did nothing wrong," he assures her. "I did nothing wrong," she repeats. "It was I who lied," he sings. "You were the one…" she repeats.
Wrong places and faces: This number takes place back in the palace. It is dazzling and disorienting, with lines of dancers in garish makeup marching up and down impossible staircases–some that seem to defy gravity, others that abruptly disappear, still others that seem to spiral infinitely. "The things that once comforted me now mock me," the princess sings. "This home is no longer my home. If only I could find a way out of this nightmare."
By this point in the song, the dancers are no longer empty-handed: they are carrying chairs, linens, samovars, serving utensils, and empty platters on their physics-defying journeys. The audience realizes that they are preparing for a banquet. Meanwhile, singing in counterpoint to the princess, a group of spies discusses their plan to kidnap the banquet's guest of honor and ultimately start a war.
When the panic sets in: This is a polyphonic song, performed by the princess, the handsome hermit, and the the banquet's guest of honor: an ambassador from a far-off land. The hall is set for an extravagant feast. Peonies, chrysanthemums, and amaryllis tumble from pitchers and stain the tablecloths with their saffron-colored pollen. Guests dressed in velvet and silk preen and sigh. A procession of dancers brings a series of grotesque dishes past the disoriented princess: A roast pig with a writhing tentacle coming out of its ass; aspic molded in the shape of a penis, with chicken feet sticking out of it like the finials of a crown; rotten papayas with tiny eyeballs in place of seeds. By some enchantment, the hermit's face appears in the reflection of empty platters. He taunts her: "Isn't is wicked, princess? Isn't it sinful, princess? Isn't it delicious, princess?" He urges her to give in to her basest desires and become his queen. The princess, a coloratura soprano, responds--not in words, but in runs and trills that careen up and down the staff.
An ambassador from a far off country, a mezzo-soprano, is seated next to the princess. (I should note here that the actress who played the ambassador bore a striking resemblance to director Arabella Rye, except that the actress was prettier.) Repeating the leitmotif from "Quiet now, quiet now," the ambassador sings, "How pale you look! Your tiny hand is like ice! Will you take my arm? Please, let's get some air." The ambassador's words seem to momentarily break through to the princess, who abruptly stops singing to gaze at the ambassador.
Meanwhile, as the music crescendos, the spies rappel from the glass roof and hang about 30 feet above the ambassador, preparing to drop a net on her. The tension in the music builds, with tympani rolls and tremulous strings; then, just as the net starts to fall, the princess grabs the ambassador's hand and drags her out of the banquet hall. A series of cymbal crashes ends the song.
Pretty secret smile (reprise): This seductive and menacing reprise, sung by the princess this time, is re-set in a minor key and in halting 7/8 time. The whale carcass has been transformed into a temple of marble, with soaring ceilings and distant skylights that admit slits of light. The hermit has transformed into a young, fit man--Dimitri Phalaenopsis, basically--wearing a plague doctor mask and little else. On either side of him are attendants who are nude but for semi-opaque plastic carapaces that resemble corsets or orthopedic devices intended to correct the curvature of the spine.
The princess slowly circles the hermit, whispering in his ear, and running lengths of thin rope up and down his body. She then begins tenderly restraining him with the rope, creating lines that divide his body in visually pleasing ways, bisecting his chest, drawing the eye down to his crotch, pinching the hair on his upper thighs, and causing the flesh to bulge suggestively. All the while, we hear the ambassador's voice in the distance, asking where the princess is, and urging her to leave the hermit. The princess pulls on a line hanging from the ceiling, raising the hermit's his body above the ground so that he is prone, head dramatically thrown back, one knee raised, the ankle tied to the thigh. The princess then rushes out of the temple, scoops the startled ambassador into her arms, and runs offscreen. The hermit bellows and thrashes, cursing her for tricking him and trying to free himself.
These very stars: This completely wordless song is as vast and rapturous as the previous numbers were chaotic and claustrophobic. It is the centerpiece of the entire film. The music is spare: arpeggios programmed on what sounded like an early analog synth. It was performed by six hundred ice skaters in black leotards with LED lights representing stars hot glued onto them. The stage featured several hydraulic platforms, also covered in ice, that rose and fell with the music, so when shot from above on film that was underexposed by several stops, it gave the illusion of depth and darkness, against which constellations--the orchid, the cuttlefish, the wasp--morphed, one into another. All in all, only thirteen fingers were lost during the filming of this song.
Land without rivers: This song, performed by the fisherman who was betrayed by the princess at the beginning of the film, is a dirge expressing a longing for death. The scene begins in extreme close up, with a fly crawling across the fisherman's lip and and stumbling over his beard. Thus begins an excruciatingly slow zoom out. We see the fisherman first, and then, in a cross-section of the building, the men and women in the prison cells adjacent to him. Their voices harmonize with the plodding, repetitive chorus. The camera continues slowly zooming out, and by the end of the song, the frame is filled with hundreds of people, singing in a building that looked suspiciously like one of Tux's infamous mega-prisons.
The director of These Very Stars, Arabella Rye, was a drunk and a visionary, whose films were characterized by massive kaleidescopic dance numbers. She had immigrated to Sel from Tux, where she was a gifted aerial choreographer and director of military marching band performances. However, she soon came to recognize the role of image-making in upholding the repressive Tuxedo regime, as well as her own complicity in this endeavor. She called it out loudly and publicly, drawing the attention–and ire–of those in power. Proclaiming that she would never again make another political work, Rye fled to Sel, where she was granted asylum. The Selenite crown went so far as to declare her its own national treasure. Though a bit presumptuous, this designation was quite convenient for Rye: the more her international renown grew, the more difficult it became for covert Tuxedo operatives to disappear her with any modicum of discretion.
Unsurprisingly, Arabella Rye detested her Vetiverian nationalist star Dimitri Phalaenopsis. These Very Stars was in fact their first–and last–collaboration. Rye had a seemingly bottomless well of creative epithets for Phalaenopsis, the most polite of them being "fucking twat." Phalaenopsis, in turn, merely shrugged, and attributed her abuse to the fact that she was as homely as he was beautiful.
Rye's directorial method was quite unusual, and merits some discussion here. She would lie in the center of the set in an open casket (so no one would step on her) staring up a mirrored ceiling that reflected the entire stage, which could accommodate hundreds of precision dancers, can-can-ing themselves into interlocking shapes. Through a bullhorn, she would bark orders at the dancers: "Nine fifty-six! Left leg is too low!" "Eighth line, tighten it up!" "Seventeenth line, you're sagging in the middle!" This was the most effective way, she claimed, to evaluate and adjust the dancers' symmetry and form. Though it would have been much easier for her to suspend herself from the ceiling the same way the cameras were suspended, or to set up a scaffold from which she could direct the action from above, Rye seemed to take perverse delight in lying in a casket and shouting up at God.
In Sel, These Very Stars became the highest grossing film of all time, breaking the previous record set by You and Me at the Edge of the World. Many hot takes circulated among Selenite critics and academics, among them that the "land without rivers" was, depending on the nationality of the critic, Tux, Vetiver, or Sel; that the ambassador was a surrogate for Arabella Rye (or the real-life Selenite princess rumored to be Rye's partner); that the princess represented Dimitri Phalaenopsis, with the hermit and ambassador being his lesser self and better angel. Theorists analyzed the choreography and visual effects, musing about the implications of abstracting, fracturing, and multiplying the human form, particularly as it pertained to the vast military-industrial complex in Vetiver. Bloggers wondered: "Was These Very Stars truly a non-political film, as its director claimed? Can creative acts ever be non-political?"
Nevertheless, the film was met with almost universal acclaim and especial praise for Dimitri Phalaenopsis (despite Arabella Rye's much more foundational contributions to the film, and the fact that the role of the princess was far more emotionally and vocally demanding than that of the hermit). The few who questioned the film's substance could at least grant that it was audacious in its ostentation.
As was the case with all foreign films, These Very Stars was not distributed in Tux on account of its potential to incite subversive or treasonous beliefs. Undeterred, Tuxedo residents scraped pirate satellite feeds, downloaded clips, generated fansubs, and reassembled the clips into narratives which were circulated (along with karaoke versions of all the songs) throughout the district of Penumbra, where they were screened in abandoned warehouses and gyms. "Songs from These Very Stars" even became its own category in several Penumbra karaoke circuits.
Because Tuxedo pirates were unaware of the original order of the scenes, however, and because no one in Tux was allowed to learn or speak Selenite, the various Tuxedo "cuts" of the film bore little resemblance to the original. Among the Tuxedo variations of the film: the fisherman was actually the ambassador in disguise; the princess--not the ambassador--was the spies' target; the spies succeeded in starting a war; the spies ended up in prison; the film ended where the official version began: with the princess and fisherman sitting beside each other on the beach.
These Very Stars was distributed in Vetiver with Vetiverian subtitles and only one substantive change: the Vetiverian Decency Board objected to the imagery and lyrics in the reprise of "Pretty secret smile," so when the film was screened in Vetiver, audiences were expected to sit in silence and darkness for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
Vetiverians quickly made up alternative lyrics and choreography that were even racier and–dare I say–even more "creative" than the original. When screens abruptly cut to black for the "Pretty secret smile" reprise, entire audiences would leap out of their seats and perform the alternative number with tremendous gusto. The Vetiverian version of "Pretty secret smile" circulated among all three countries on pirate radio and cassette tapes, becoming an underground hit in Sel and Tux–particularly the Bubblecore, Stankwave, and Fungal remixes.
This part of the story is extremely difficult to relate. Reader, if you think you may be distressed by depictions of death and fire, or depictions of police brutality, I recommend that you skip this account and move on to the epilogue.
On September 1, a crowd of Penumbra residents was screening a version of These Very Stars in an abandoned school cafeteria. The militia arrived on the scene, hungry for a raid. As they approached the cafeteria, a fire mysteriously broke out in a trash bin in the kitchen and spread rapidly through the rest of the building. At this point, the agents could easily have helped the audience to evacuate. But they did not. They boarded all of the exits shut, and they left the scene.
Eighty-three people died.
Immediately after the fire, the Tuxedo regime claimed, variously, that the agents had blocked the exits because their own lives were in danger (from the people trapped in the burning building), and that the agents had blocked the exits to protect the audience from itself, and--and this one almost defies belief--that the audience had locked itself inside the burning building.
What began as a vigil with nineteen shell-shocked neighbors became a protest with five hundred demonstrators calling for the immediate resignation of the Tuxedo prime minister, the reinstatement of the rule of law, and the holding of elections. Within a few days, it had grown into a massive wave of popular--and peaceful--protests, not only across Tux, but also among Tuxedo communities and their allies in Vetiver and Sel, as well as labor unions and communities of faith in all three countries. The Tuxedo militia responded with an initial flurry of violence, killing seven protestors. But they soon realized that they were hopelessly outnumbered, and they withdrew from Penumbra.
The pro-democracy protestors adopted "These very stars" as the rallying cry of their movement. This was a curious choice, given the rather circumstantial connection between the protest movement and the film. Perhaps there was something about the princess (or ambassador or fisherman) that the protestors related to. Or perhaps it was because of the multitude of messages that people read into the film's wordless theme song: that human lives were significant, that every moment mattered, that nothing was inevitable except death.
After fourteen days of protests, the Tuxedo prime minister resigned amid pressure from the public, from within his own party, and from the nations surrounding Tux. Tuxedo officials dusted off their constitution and held elections, in which the pro-democracy party overperformed but did not sweep.
And so began Tux's Ninth Republic.
NOTE: Many years later, historians uncovered evidence that Vetiverian operatives working covertly within Tux had also pressured the Tuxedo prime minister to resign. Vetiver's position back then was that Tux's devolving into a "rogue state" did not serve Vetiverian interests as effectively as a smoldering--but still rules-based--conflict did.
Soon after Tux restored its democracy, Vetiver denaturalized Dimitri Phanaenopsis. Shattered, he began pickling his organs in gin. He never worked again. The skin on his gorgeous face turned the color and texture of dried cuttlefish. In a freak accident on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the theatrical release of These Very Stars, the glass roof on his atrium shattered and fell on him, killing him instantly. He was found by his maid, face bloodied, eyes staring up at the sky in disbelief.
In Sel, overharvesting of the moon poppy led to the extinction of both the poppy and the plague doctor moth. When the poppy bubble burst, no amount of debt restructuring could save the crown from its creditors. However, it turned out that the monarchy's loyalty was less to their kingdom than it was to "the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed." In exchange for their abdication, the monarchy received full immunity and protection in Vetiver. Vetiverian military transport airlifted to safety the royal family, along with its furniture and art, and a menagerie of giraffes, monkeys, camels, and sharks. They continued to live a lavish life in Vetiver, while Vetiver set about establishing an officially recognized puppet government in Sel.
Arabella Rye was never heard from again. There was much speculation about whether she had fled to Vetiver with the Selenite princess, whether she had finally been captured by Tuxedo agents, or whether she was simply sitting on stacks of cash, living her best life far from the public eye.
Over the course of several generations, the pro-democracy party in Tux gained some ground, lost some ground, and then gained some ground again. Tux's electorate was one that could be by turns fickle, vindictive, and sanctimonious; but it was nevertheless always vigilant. The Ninth Republic remains in place as the current and legitimate government of Tux.
I must confess that I question my motives for documenting and sharing this story. Do I offer it as a cautionary tale? As a message of hope? Perhaps I am only trying to fill the silence with my meaningless little words. Thank you, reader, for your indulgence.
Since the events documented here transpired, all known prints of These Very Stars were destroyed by the governments of Vetiver, Sel, and Tux, though the raw footage may still exist somewhere, in the hands of collectors or in one of several "shadow archives" that emerged during and after the Tuxedo protests. References to the film were purged from official sources. Nevertheless, bootleg copies continue to circulate widely among inhabitants of of all three nations. Hundreds–maybe thousands–of versions are extant, versions featuring all variations of the plot, versions in which myriad futures are possible.