By Z.P. Kibbleworth               October 24, 2089

The new documentary Dr. Namaste about the man who fueled the epidemic of moon meth on Earth is taking the solar system by storm. New York Times critic Nicole Spipzikopolis has called it “perhaps the most despicable thing to have been shown on a film screen since the Third Reich,” and New Olympus Dookie critic Oxorobotitron Farb has declared it as “a film that can wake cinema from its dogmatic slumber and usher in a new golden age.” The film has been hailed by both progressive and fascist movements across the solar system as a manifesto of their causes, seemingly for entirely different reasons, and has also led the government of New Zealand to put a bounty on the head of its director, Jacques the Coyote. In the midst of the film’s crackling reception, I had the chance to sit down with Jacques the Coyote and talk with him about the film.

Z.P. Kibbleworth: What has it been like for you to see the way the film is being received?

Jacques the Coyote: You know, that’s an interesting question. Just the other day I was on the way to my Tuesday poison ingestion class, and I chanced upon this moment where there was a bird sitting atop one of the lampposts on the street. And I saw this bird and I thought, surely this is what Gandhi meant when he said that snitches get stitches. The bird is like the vacuum robot who falls down the stairs and ends up upside down trying to suck on nothing but the air which it uses as its own medium of operation. Neither of them have ever been to Vancouver.

Z: When you were at the premiere in Hagerstown, were you surprised by the audience reaction? How did you expect them to respond and what was unexpected about how they saw the film?

J: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll answer the third question there first. Reponses to a film are a very fickle thing. Sometimes your audience knows your film better than you do. Other times are like the time when I was showing my film Mommy and Daddy Have Been Convicted of Felony Insurance Fraud at the Draymond Green Center for the Arts in Detroit, and a very kind gentleman in the audience told me that the grandmother in the film must have been the reincarnation of General Custer based on her plaid-heavy wardrobe. The audience of a film is like a symphony. Sometimes you play them and sometimes you sleep through them.

Z: What was your intention as you began the process of making the film, and did that intention change as you went about making it?

J: When I began working on the film, there was a very simple idea at the start: potato chips. Criminals and businessmen like Dr. Namaste are like potato chips, you can crack them open and see what comes out, and they’re also in sacks that are filled with air. Also, they have very good potato chips on the moon, and when I was shooting the movie, I kept having to mix potato chips with different form of sedative pills. My doctor, Rico Stickums, he recommends that I put as many things into my body as I can so that we can collect data about what is good for me and what is bad for me. Several times I tried to put bellows in my body by swallowing them to see if they could serve as an extra set of lungs, if there could be perhaps an acoustic version of the transmogrification implants that we see all over the place today. The bellows are also like the potato chips in that they are surrounded by air. The entire film is a potato chip except for when it isn’t. When it isn’t, it’s a tin full of orange crayons instead. Orange is the color of nutrients and treachery. That’s really what the film is, isn’t it? Nutrients and treachery.

Z: What fascinates me about the film is its relationship with glamor and power. On the surface it’s branding itself as a scathing criticism of the kind of lifestyle that people like Dr. Namaste have, but there’s also clearly a seductive element to it that you seem to get wrapped up in. What mindset were you taking approaching that aspect of the issue?

J: I believe very strongly in the e-Buddhist conception of the dharma grindset. If you’re going to go out in the world and slay like a boss-ass bitch, you also have to slay your own inner demons that infest you with false gods like reciprocity, the patriarchy, and Taco Tuesdays. Dr. Namaste is the slouching double of the grindset guru. He sends out his magical fairies in the form of erotiselenite and Buggy Skul watches and false charisma. You must be careful when you come in the presence of such a decadence lens. The vibes may be immaculate, but the only thing immaculate in the world was the birth of Jesus, and he got nailed to a cross and had his name used to justify genocides. These are the two vulture poodles we have inside of us: the one we feed, and the one we fornicate with. It is the Apollonian and the Dionysian, do I make myself clear?

Z: Well … what’s clear to me is that you’ve gone a step further in your transgressive filmmaking. Do you think this film represents something of a climax of your previous work?

J: Let me tell you something, Kibbleworth. Every film I make comes out of a place of sexual frustration. Every single one. Obviously the one about people arguing with their grandmothers in the nursing homes on Callisto was a fundamentally sexual film, but so was the one about the dog wandering around Paris looking for a dog bathroom but only finding human bathrooms. If I did not make films, I would likely go insane because my urges would overtake me, and if I had a healthy sex life, my art would cease to have any value. That is why I exclusively take up relations with prostitutes who have animal transmogrification implants that make them at least one third crab. There is a coital accent in every film I make. With this film, the sexual frustration came from the fact that my partners would always call my luggage a petite gopher, or something along those lines. The extravagance of the film, of Dr. Namaste, was all posturing. We were trying to compensate you see, to show that we have husky sabretooth tigers. But even if your luggage is more of the kind that white middle class families bring on a weekend trip to the beach, we all have a petite gopher somewhere.

Z: The way you paint Dr. Namaste in the film is certainly a unique one. There’s a feeling I detect that you see some of yourself in him, no?

J: No, absolutely not, you could not be more wrong. That is just entirely false. What I see myself in is the camera and in the moon meth. But Dr. Namaste is not like me at all in the slightest. Sure, we may both be outcasts unloved by our mothers who have a distaste for authority, and sure, we may both enjoy demonstrating our power in the most spectacular, deliberately unsafe ways, and sure, we may both be guided by the worldview that we can only look out for ourselves when the general mechanisms of society conspire to swallow whole anyone who accedes to it and ostracize anyone who demonstrates individual thought, but he tries to make his hair spiky and I would never dream of making such a crude fashion choice. We are not alike in any way.

Z: One of the big questions I’m left with after watching the film is where ethics falls in the picture. How do you respond to the criticisms that your films are unethical?

J: The great debate has always been about what kind of social, ethical responsibility art has. That goes all the way back to Plato, of course. Moral panics have existed about works of art for as long as there have been works of art. It’s because works of art are powerful that the debate exists. If works of art were not powerful, then institutions would have no reason to fear them. But throughout history, the church, and governments, and the intellectualist imperium have all sought to restrain art under the bounds of morality because they know that art is more powerful than they are. This is how brother turns against brother, one aspect of the soul turns against another. We are at war with ourselves, and we are like the general who is barking out orders on the bullhorn, but the horn has been cursed by an ancient wizard so that what comes out of it is not your native language but a Mercurian limerick. A limerick which is not altogether unlike a shoelace frayed at both ends and used not to tie a shoe but to strangle a pigeon to death. The pigeon is the urban bird, the bird of repression and depression. The pigeon droppings which we find on the sidewalk are our own blood, our blood is white from all the ammonia that they put in our breakfast waffles.

Z: What’s next for Jacques the Coyote?

J: I need to find my right pinky, I think I left it somewhere in Norway.