PART 2: Matthew Krause - My Midnight Confession

My Midnhight Confession:
by Matthew Krause
http://www.myspace.com/sober_gaijin

A legion of sedentary, technology-dependent zombies has risen from the tomb of prepubescence, donning vulgar Internet monikers like Zorro masks and trudging across hyperspace like the proletariat workers in Metropolis. These automatons are marked by their disagreeable tempers, absence of manners, and private lexicons so foul they could melt a CAT-5 cable from a thousand miles away. I should like to call them *beep* but that would be hypocritical, for you see, at one time, I was one of them, a bitter, resentful little turd envious of those I deemed to be living dreams that were rightfully mine. Like the other Internet zombies--or iZombies, if you prefer--I realized the only way I could strike at the heart of those I resented was with the few tools at my disposable: My rapier wit and Internet anonymity. I have a story for you now. I know, I know … Matt always has a story …

Fourteen years ago, in my spring semester at Kansas State, a strange dreamer entered my Expository Writing class. His name was Steve Balderson, he was 17, and I had read about him the previous semester in the local paper, the Manhattan Mercury. Steve, you see, is a filmmaker, and in 1992, he and several of his high school friends banded together with a video camera and some editing equipment and put together a bizarre little movie called By the Light of the Moon. Somehow, Steve even landed a screening at the Wareham Opera House in downtown Manhattan (Kansas, not New York, in case you weren't paying attention), and in fact, I remember driving to the mall that winter and seeing Steve's name up in lights.

As Graduate Teaching Assistant and thus Steve's instructor, I found him to be a frustrating student. He didn't take to the education, at least not in the traditional sense. He had no use for rigid fundamentals of composition and conformity. He always sat in the back of the room, gazing out the window with a thousand-yard stare, no doubt composing celluloid symphonies in his head. As a result, he didn't even finish out the semester. Sometime in March, he up and disappeared, but not before giving me a copy of By the Light of the Moon on VHS tape.

With apoloigies to Steve, I have to say that movie made me crazy. I saw Steve's talent, sure, and although just a kid he had a distressing vision that clipped me on the frontal lobe with a solid right hook. The story, as best I remember, is about a clique of high schoolers that falls under the spell of a charismatic new kid named Zane, who then compels these impressionable youths to perform many manner of bad things. Granted the narrative fell into the usual clichés--heck, it was written by a teenager at the time--but it had style and energy, and it wasn't afraid to make its viewers squirm. I had a few nice conversations with Steve that spring, conversations about his movie and about film in general. I liked him a lot.

But after March 1992, I would not see Steve Balderson for another eight years.

* * * *

In July 2000, Laurin and I found ourselves volunteering for the Kansas Connection Film Fair, held on the Dreamworks lot in beautiful (*cough*) Burbank, California. The Fair was like a mini film festival, and only films with a Kansas connection were allowed to be screened. In addition to numerous shorts at the Fair, there were also a few fine features as well. Shades of Gray, for example, was a compelling documentary about the experience of being gay in Kansas. Elvis Took a Bullet, a mysterious little black comedy, starred Kansas's own Gregg Binkley, who currently has a recurring role on NBC's My Name Is Earl.

In the midst of this list was a little movie called Pep Squad, directed by one Steve Balderson. Realizing Steve would be at the fair, I was anxious to see him again, and since Laurin and I were working the check-in desk for most of the day, bumping into Steve was almost a given. Nevertheless, I was on a bathroom break when Steve arrived. After I returned to the table, Laurin pointed him out to me. Steve stood in the distance, lounging against one of the Dreamworks buildings, puffing on a cigarette and conversing with his friends. A lot had changed in eight years. He had grown taller and filled out a bit. His eyes were weary, his head was shorn of its wavy brown hair. Naturally, I wanted to say hello, so drawing upon a year and a half of big city rudeness, I strolled right over to his group, butted into his circle, and extended my hand.

"Hey Steve," I said. "Remember me?"

Steve looked me over and blinked. "No."

"Kansas State," I said. "You took Expository Writing. I was your grad assistant."

Steve shrugged. "I'm sorry. I don't remember much about that time."

I smiled politely and took my leave, but deep inside I was fuming. How dare he not remember me? Who does he think he is? Little did I know that he'd flown in on the red eye and gotten very little sleep the night before. If I had stopped to evaluate the situation, I might have recalled that Pep Squad was Steve's first real feature and Dreamworks was a pretty important venue. Perhaps Steve had other things on his mind than reminiscing with a silly old grad-ass he'd known for all of two months back in 1992. You think?

In hindsight, I realize that deep down inside I probably wasn't really angry with Steve. I was angry at the situation, embarrassed that I had failed to make a lasting impression on him eight years prior. I cringed a bit at my relative obscurity in a town where anonymity is a career-killer. Bit it is not Steve's fault that he did not remember me. Hell, it had been almost a decade, after all, and during those couple of months at Kansas State I'm sure he had other things on his mind than memorizing the nuances of an insecure Comp instructor. Nevertheless, in my petty conceit at the time, I was certain that his memory lapse was an intentional slight. He had chosen to forget me on purpose, as if to say I was not worth remembering. These were self-centered niggling thoughts, to be sure, but remember, I had spent the last 18 months in Los Angeles, where self-centered niggling thoughts are as commonplace as high-speed chases and smog alerts. No matter the situation or extenuating circumstances, I decided that Steve had dealt me a horrible insult by failing to remember me … and deep in my heart I vowed my revenge upon him.

It would be another two years before I would get it.

* * * *

One sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2002, I stumbled across a DVD of Pep Squad in the Hollywood Video in Palm Springs. The cover showed Steve's sister, Brooke Balderson, dolled up in heavy semi-gothic make-up, her face framed in flames. What the hell? I thought. I missed Pep Squad at the Film Fair as I was busy on other tasks. I felt a malevolent grin spread across my face. Steve Balderson, filmmaker, huh? Let's just have a look at his so-called masterpiece.

First time I watched Pep Squad, I did not get it. Sorry, Steve, but that's the truth. It felt like an exacerbated version of Heathers by way of kabuki theater, with ear-piercing performances by Brooke Balderson and Amy Kelly. I don't think it's dishonest to say that this film is loud, explosive, and in your face. It's uncomfortable at times, unpleasant. It's colorful, to be sure, but when the film is over one feels as if he has been tossed in a blender. I had a headache, and I think I felt my sperm count drop.

Then something awful happened. My two old friends, bitterness and envy, began to slither up my back and osmose into my soul like that nasty tar crap in Spider-Man 3. Like Karen Black at the end of Trilogy of Terror, I crouched on the floor, began stabbing at the carpet with a butcher knife, and allowed a razor-toothed grimace to spread across my face. I knew what I would do. I knew how I would get back at Steve Balderson for failing to remember me two summers prior. It was the most devious, underhanded revenge plot ever, far more wicked than anything Titus Andronicus could have come up with. I dashed to my office and fired up the computer. I signed onto the Internet. I found IMDb. I typed in "pep squad" and did a search, and when that film came up, I signed in as an IMDb user and enacted the most brutal revenge imaginable:

I wrote a negative review of Steve Balderson's film.

I said a lot of terrible things about Pep Squad, things that do not bear repeating. But I didn't stop at the movie. I went on to write about Steve himself, to call him vile names, to recount his infamous "snubbing" of me at the 2000 Kansas Connection Film Fair, and to paint him in broad and bloody strokes as an elitist and a fraud. Cackling madly when I was finished, I punched the submit button and waited for my words to be made public. That would show Steve Balderson. He would learn the hard way what happens to people who choose not to remember me.

* * * *

Two years later, in early 2004, Steve Balderson found me out. There is a certain irony to the timing of it. A lot had happened in the interim. Laurin and I had moved to Kansas and made Baby's Breath, but it had failed to perform in the foreign markets. Laurin and I had returned from MIFED in late 2003, beaten and broke. Our coffee shop in El Dorado was deep in the red, and I was about to close it. Laurin herself had left El Dorado, driven clear to the other side of the country, and I was left to pack boxes and get the rest of my affairs in order. It was a rainy Kansas afternoon, and I was in our storage area going through rotted boxes of useless crap, and in the middle of my misery, myself almost despising, I got a call on my cell phone from Laurin.

"Why do you do things like this?" she asked. "No matter what I tell you, you still have to do things like this."

"Like what?" I asked.

"I got an email from Steve Balderson," she said. "Remember him?"

"Yes."

"Did you write some mean things about him on IMDb?"

"Sure, almost two years ago."

"Apparently one of Steve's friends read it, and somehow they figured out it might be you. Steve wrote us an email today asking if you were the one who wrote that review."

Great, Steve. Now you remember me. "What did he say?" I asked, steeling myself for a fight.

"Actually, he was very nice," said Laurin. "You should read the email."

And so I got onto the Internet and did just that. And Laurin was right; it was a very nice email. Steve admitted that he did not remember me that day at the Film Fair, but after reading my comments on IMDb, he searched his memory and recalled the class at Kansas State. He recalled some of our conversations, and he vaguely recalled me … and he was dismayed that I would write something so cruel and heartless about him. I must really be hurt, he reasoned, to unload so much bitterness. At the end of the email, he said something quite remarkable: "Please, Matt. Try to be nice to people."

At first, I considered lying to Steve. After all, I had deniability. I could tell him that the guy at the Film Fair was someone else, that I had no idea who he was, that I had never written an IMDb review in my life. Sure, Steve, I went to K-State, but you and I never met. That was a different Matt who taught your class. I knew that guy, and man, was he an *beep*

But then I heard a little voice in my heart, and I knew that honesty was the only right course. I wrote back to Steve. I admitted that I was the person who had written those vile words. I told him I had no idea why I had done it. Something had come over me at the time. I was bitter, I guess; bitter and angry. And I was jealous, oh so jealous. Steve Balderson was making films. I had always wanted to make films. And even though Baby's Breath was in pre-production at the time of my original post on IMDb, I had this sense of flying blind, playing by ear. At the time, I felt I lacked the assuredness that I had seen in Steve's direction of Pep Squad. Despite the sound and the fury of that film, it was helmed by a guy who knew what he was doing. Steve Balderson is a real filmmaker, and for that I resented him.

Once I got the truth on the table, Steve and I talked. We wrote emails. And I discovered something wonderful about Steve: I liked him, just as I had back in 1992. Not only is blessed with ever-expansive creativity, but he is a really good man. He takes a spiritual approach to his craft, and walks the walk as well as talks the talk. Despite my cruelty and bitterness and rage, Steve was willing not only to forgive but to forget as well. This was not token magnanimity. He truly impressed me as a man impervious to the insult. Yes, he wanted to know why I wrote what I did, but here is the amazing thing: He was concerned that perhaps he had inadvertently hurt me back in 2000. He felt that if he had done something wrong, he wanted to rectify it. Never mind that I had been the real jerk, harboring a meaningless resentment and lashing out in anger. Steve wanted to clear his side of the street and made no demands that I clean mine in return.

But I did clean mine. I wrote to IMDb, and I requested that they take my mean-spirited post off of the page for Pep Squad. The IMDb staff tried to dismiss me, informing me that all commentary was permanent, but I hounded them until they caved. The IMDb stafff assured me that they would make a "special exception" in my case, and I got an email scolding, but in the end, my comments disappeared.

After that, Steve and I were friends. When I wrote him and told him we were not making another movie after Baby's Breath, he wrote back and said, "I challenge to you make another movie. I order you not to give up your dream." Months later, I watched Pep Squad again. It's still loud and explosive and at times abrasive, but you know what? At last, I see what Steve is trying to do. I will still contend that on some level Pep Squad is kabuki, the trademark gesticulations of Japanese theater manifested in the histrionics of hormone-riddled teens. On another level, the film is almost Shakespearean, with plot elements right out of Richard III, and on yet another level, it is something surreal, Fellini-esque, like a moving painting.

Recently, I rented Steve's 2004 film Firecracker. This film is stylish and it's brutal, and at times it made me squirm, but when it was all over I was stunned by its uncompromising honesty. In fact, it inspired a level of honesty in my own writing. Firecracker is an unconventional film, and the exaggerated rage of the film's two main villains, Frank and David (both played by Faith No More front man Mike Patton), is reminiscent of my own affected hysterics back in 2000. I wrote Steve and told him he had made a beautiful film, and he wrote back and said he felt privileged to know me. That's how far we have come from the mysterious invisible Film Fair "snub."

It's kind of interesting to write this now, in light of what I wrote yesterday. In a comment to yesterday's Blog, Keith the Metal Reviewer Guy wrote: "If these anonymous morons [on the Internet] knew who they were talking *beep* about they'd beg for your forgiveness." That's pretty much spot on. When you're playing on the Internet, it's not just your anonymity that empowers you to be an chawbacon; it's also the anonymity of your victims. As long as those you belittle are separate from you, you can form your own assumptions and issue underhanded insults without remorse. But once you know a person--once he lets you see into his heart--it changes things a bit. Any old chawbacon can make fun of an Internet photo, but if you knew the man in the picture, you might hesitate to be such an ass.

That's what happened to me. When I was at my lowest, when my behavior was its most atrocious, I assumed that I knew Steve Balderson. And in the assumption, I passed judgment on him, judgment that was, and still is, unwarranted. The truth is, when I wrote those harsh words I didn't really know the man. I didn't really know the man at all.

And if I'm going to take offense as a consequence of that, the only person I really have to blame is me.