Wendell B. Harris
Il Camaleonte

"A braccio (Impromptu)" is the story, inspired by an actual event, of Douglas Street, a negro from Detroit who assumes different identities throughout his life. "Chameleon Street" is therefore the original title of this 1989 film that also won an award at the Sundance Film Festival.

"Have you thought about what you'll do when you're out? I want to know this: when you get out, will you try again? No, I'm done. So no more fake personalities. No, I assure you I've had enough. I don't believe you. Would I be a liar? You probably aren't lying, but you don't have control over your actions either; I believe you have a complementary psyche. Ah, I see... Do you know what that means? NO! It means you intuit others' needs and negate yourself to satisfy them. For example, you know my job is to diagnose neuroses. Neuroses are red, neuroses are blue..."

That Saturday, August 7, 1993, Raidue at 10:15 PM broadcasted it for the only time... I was there. The fact is, immediately after watching it, it became my favorite film of all time, and forever. The fact is, due to an unforgivable oversight, I didn't start the VCR. The fact is, I've looked for it for years; had they printed it on videocassette, I thought, I asked around at God knows how many places, at how many video stores, nothing... You might say internet, but there wasn't a network, or rather it wasn't "aggregative" like it is now. And one day, at the beginning of the new millennium, I found myself in a hypermarket in front of a bin with the last clearance sales of VHS tapes at 5€ each... Encouraged to peek by my future wife, I rummaged carelessly, and, miracle, there it was. I won't add more as I still get moved, just this: sooner or later resignation pays off.

Even though I am an assiduous frequenter of indecision and surrender, I am sure of this one thing (that it is, without a doubt, my favorite film) because, as with Tago Mago for music, it clings perfectly to my shadow, fits my psyche like a torn condom, embodies the impersonal within me, including disappearance. It provides a worthy burial for my amused carcass, sparing me elliptical yawns.

I feel in the protagonist a millennial brother who, to smooth out the boredom of yet another reincarnation, decides to play hide and seek with himself, creating as a side effect a reflection of our miserable mellifluous metamorphoses, since almost the entire humanity "due to a genetic flaw has their brain close to their ass." Demiurge of the aleatory and instability, he generates everything from everything and nothing from nothing. Being Zelig, transforming, transformism, are no longer dictated by egoic needs; it is boredom that moves everything, an allergic reaction to the crude human cleverness. We then realize that boredom is fought with boredom when "the negro" counters a globalist criminal camaraderie of 666 with a 3D that anticipates by a few decades the projections equipped with apparent depth of that game that is the cinematograph: Divorce Debts Depression, here is the legacy that befalls this ancient soul, an indexed Trinity, where the immersion in the variegated reality of this earthly condo is faced with gills that filter out all those washed and ironed brains living in jovial ignorance.

It goes without saying that the leading, fryer of hot air, is put in the pillory a priori because he doesn't encroach on others' money, and there's no quantifiable wrongdoing, but there's no greater crime than ridiculing with nothing the stupidity that surrounds him. And what a missed opportunity on the part of others who, systematically faithful to their loss of reason, reject a chance for individual growth through the cosmic farts he dispenses as "pearls," refreshing the environment, safeguarding a bit from the surrounding pigsty by presenting himself dressed (finally someone) in pure impersonality.

Compassion, compassion for everything, is an essential prerogative for such a performance of human labyrinthitis. The nonsense of the "Life" affair is photographed with a wide angle that captures even the veiled interior and projections of invisibility, tolerance reigns supreme in Street. Apart from a stunning material transformism, the chameleonism is interior, it's psychic, and allows a global reading, and allows for a detached involvement, and allows astral abstraction that accelerates material creation through thought. An impersonal boredom that ends up competing without any prize at stake, speeding up situations with the sole purpose of nullification.

Not being able to be caught, even if tasting prison, having created for oneself a function that doesn't allow the outside to engulf you: "Do you really read all those books? Yes, and I even understand them..." And the sexual attentions from other inmates are dodged with semi-simulated epileptic attacks that block the perverse desires of national prisons, at least managing to escape a proper ass-raping.

But what can be said to someone who purges the culpable seriousness that the system creates by instilling a fraudulent sense of duty from birth: "this is unorthodox," the colluding judge of the moment might say, in fact Street's illegality is non-existent, there is no legal person present and there never will be. In throwing off the mask of a role, as the protagonist constantly does, the commercialization of the individual is cut off, where is the unforgivable sin of not accepting original sin: "macula non est in te" when you don't think of giving a person a function, if you want to meet them. Dear Douglas and whoever sends you for this civil registry rollback...

With the continuous "disguises," our hero aims for "disappearance" by chance, and the phantom escape from prison is proof of that. The crystalline evasion eternalizes with the gesture of the thumb raised hitchhiking under the prison walls, under the falling snow, and under the sign forbidding hitchhiking: brrr, it's freezing here... And we're there filling out the form for an option to participate in this conclave of lucid madness seeking the adoption of Street when the father, after yet another escapade, disowns him, removing him from the family tree. We would have liked to have had such luck.

And this time the "road" of surrender aims high and allows penetrative visions. The scrape in its tragedy transfigures into a tight entertainment that fills all the senses, especially the forgotten ones. The variety of registers deployed to impersonate lookalikes, which through their reflection allow others to perceive them, is phenomenal. Superb is the navigating in the shabbiness of the "cunning of the pale faces," nullifying and converting the traps of modern inquisition to the human cause and absorbing the bruises from the racist beatings endured, transformed into a roll of the dice on the table of a celestial survival.

The effectiveness of implementing these ravings, however, is at home in a needy game that shields from any identification. And in fact, even an eventual mystical classism is banned: "Let me wear your pink panties, your insolent pagodas like two juicy pears in my fruit salad, and your cherry on the maraschino points at me with so much grace through your Givenchy," fantasizes Douglas when interviewing the beautiful basketball champion, before being discovered. This means that the wonder of such a mystification instills in us the doubt of where the truth of the entire existence lies. Our chronological seriousness, which tends to elevate even the most putrid lie, wavers. Can we minimally understand what presents itself to us, or do we remain in the illusion, in institutionalized fakery? Despite the main actor embodying in a masterful absence the change of costumes, where we spectators are enthralled feeling them on our skin, he makes us believe what he decides to be at that moment. And he does it even "peacefully," inviting exploration of his game without deceit, it's all in the open!

And we find ourselves feeling like fathers, husbands, students, doctors, surgeons, journalists, prisoners, lawyers, psychoanalysts, in a whirl of situations that cause continuous bellyaches, the effect of the immediate proposal spurred by karmic residues. And he does perform the operation, he does...

A new frontier of futurism appears before us, surpassing the sensationalistic Marinetti's approach and launching us into roller coasters devoid of duels where the bliss of not having to prove anything to anyone reigns, while maintaining guaranteed vertigo. We are all spun in "total bilingualism" accompanied by a soundtrack suitable for the estrangement produced. The shots, the sequences, the dialogues, the slow motions, and the editing, flanked by true psychic takes, ensure that the cinematic rendering is no less in creating an apparent halo of existential indifference that results in misleading, but if one realizes that this too "is part of the plan," we find ourselves in a cast-iron barrel of transcendentalized mockery. The pathos of the unexpected accompanies us throughout the film and blesses us with a "to be continued" where no end is contemplated.

And the Bauhaus t-shirt worn by the "outcast" only differentiates the "confusion" of a cauldron that simmers the toil of Eternity over a slow fire. And the sanctity of presenting Eternity passes through a lazy grimace for example when: "Sir, smoking is forbidden here. But what, I've been smoking for two hours and no one has said anything. It's absolutely forbidden to smoke. Mérde! And what does that mean? But what? Mérde means mérde..." in the scene when he pretends to be a French student at Yale passing himself off as Jean Le Gabin. Not to mention each single frame is full of presence, in the face of any kind of kitsch exhibitionism, for a revisitation of hedonism aimed at dismantling itself.

How can one not be bewildered in those occasions where the evolution of the narrative shakes us in a "but what does he want to do, where does he want to go, will he really do it?", where a vagabond mysticism drags us into gruesome surrealism that claims victims among delicate stomachs and young souls due to the horrifying displayed dynamism. And the implausible is presented as the only key that by opening to conscious disintegration allows the leap of species, and not only. Martyrdom, ecstasies, resurrections take form creating a disturbing alternative terror that gallops towards sneering self-serving solutions where the gratuitous gesture manifests itself in a celestially authorized manner. And if this were the "rational" we need? Logically, our hero at a certain point of the film pulls out a: "forgive them for they do not know what they do."

The acceleration of self-stimulations that opens to visions of unthinkable beauties and never-tried entices the taste, ultimately one is attracted to "Beauty and the Beast", a proving ground for bronzing our miseries with solar anxieties. "Your father is very strange" communicates Douglas to the daughter just before finishing the home slaughtering, and he makes us all believe he has lost his grip definitively, but this justification for our peaceful life is not let go of: "Your father is just insane. Insaaane..." And we miss, thank God, the hope of misleading tranquility even mocking non-existences: who injures with gnosis, disappears with gnosis.

In short, the passing is always becoming, one is always on edge, surrounded by an underground laziness that never tires: "I eat tripe and tripe eats me." And the mistake by the histrionic Wendell B. Harris is deliberately sought to get others to participate where "Hide!" on him is suggested by himself to be found, where at least a foothold is allowed to stimulate future rarefied translations, to reveal an impersonal vanity that is also set aside and fraternally duality is not frequented, monotheistic tabulae rasas do not enter in.

At most, "Black Barbies" are proposed even here to counter the "once upon a time", the rule of the game, the Happy End that an Armina Tatiana (the intimate friend from university) of the moment proposes inviting in offer as a princess. Too easy is the happiness that passes through induced gratifications, the mandala is immediately erased a moment after completing it, and immediately another one is started. One notes the psychopathy of the earthly flock and opts for a vivid alchemical gym absorbing the deserved slaps released by the wife for the betrayal suffered and preserving them for an elevation of patience, after the carnival of the masquerade ball: "The time is up, happiness disappears when Gabrielle (the wife) appears."

The reset is left to the begging of each of us on a road that could rehabilitate with the infinite: "Some call me heavenly wonder, others just wonder." These displayed "happinesses" trigger, by the universal law of cause and effect, the sacred final arrest (it is the wife who reports him) of our dear notorious wonder (heavenly) who reveals a revelation so that the most hidden secret turns out light: "Women want neither power nor money. They want blood." And a silence falls in respect of the realization by the men present that says a lot about the "vampirism" uncovered.

They open even more to clownish curtains, the facial syncopated end credits where everyone takes part in the human comedy of the frog and the scorpion story: the pursuit of know yourself turns out to be a gruesome exercise in a level change of existence that breaches into pure metasemantics. It takes just a pin on the barcode to materialize the alchemical cloud.

The enormous work of diversion not to let on that they are toying with the divine and misleading by suggesting settling the accounts of "earthly justice." Dissimulation is the password, the Athanor distills hallucinatory elixirs. The masks used in a needy action for the opening of a Pandora's box that is in each of us: "what must I do to prove that life is not made with life," Douglas seems to say in realizing we're surrounded by inevitabilities. Inevitable is the renunciation of cynicism to don the cap with bells and try to be a jester forever. The jingle of Dharma's lepers...

The calm unfurled by the "man of color" agitates us in the cotton wool of the solution to all problems: "Things are going well, why worry? Things are going badly, why worry?" And it's all gold drenched by a King Midas who tans here and there instead of petrifying or giving an angelic tan with reptilian scales sloughing off. In grasping the androgyny inherent in all things, Douglas acts as a litmus test of human miseries and wins the game of external misrecognition, he suffices to such a degree that everything takes place directly in the unthought of the act, overcoming the obstacle of premeditated action.

The proposed communion is an alchemical marriage that can be unconsciously accepted from outside only with the sacrifice of the one who proposed it, "as Christ commands." The rejection by normality is inevitable, as the truth that reveals itself is rejected, but truth is a wanderer and is painful. Masks worn to cast off the mask of existential winking where even the hypocrisy of false modesty is amputated: "If the moment calls me, I answer immediately... because that's my moment." Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde coexist simultaneously in the grounding of possessions and in annulling the influence of astral whispering parasites. One is cleansed thus in demonstrating in absence the immediacy of thoughtlessness: "Everything that is here is somewhere else. Everything that isn't here is nowhere."

In fact, the film is esoteric and therefore unacceptable, so much so that apart from a minor role in 1998 on "Out of Sight" (that Soderbergh film with Clooney and Lopez) it seems that our Wendell B. Harris has been barred from further revealing activity, and this work remains "the first and the last," suggesting that the system tends not to digest real anarchist individualist revolutionaries. Sending them away after a recruitment attempt by the "table," the totalitarian quality control conformity labels him as a manufacturing defect when instead he is part of the core of those very few heretics, saints, warriors, poets, genuine human beings who have no price and who disintegrate the veil of Maya by living real life.

Whisking the oblivions that await us, Street's changing entity wanders in the doggone interstices of relativity. The psychic redundancy explodes in an inner baroque that involves the outside unknowingly dragging it out of the sufferings that feed deception, pushing the pedal to the metal in an inevitable disintegration of unacceptable truths that uncover the "youth" of the souls running out of breath because they are poorly trained in these divine whirlpools.

Rejection and abduction of the audience freeze the moment still not ripe for alien-destination flights entrusting earthly justice with the task of arresting all this "obscenity." The handcuffs snap, but the prison is irrepressible for someone with that face of a dick and doesn't give a damn. Hell no, it's not over, it's just begun: What's the hell happening? Wake up! Leave everything and follow the "right Street." In his infinite goodness, he feels responsible for your stupidity dragging you along with hand grenades instead of "resilience," and asking you in return at most a "straw."

Masterpiece of non-representation recalling the psychic nudities of truly "cursed" artists like Francis Bacon or Franz Xaver Messerschmidt but where Wendell B. Harris, in his "character heads," puts a "grimace" that definitively distances him from any possessions making the whispering spirits finally throw in the towel and freed to fly like ibises from this "rigged" living act that is existence. Then normal people dismiss it all by pinning "mental disorders" and schizophrenia on the Christian of the moment, where they fail to understand that something existing but invisible is revealed: he sees them and you do not, that's the point. Secret cognitions and the semblance of supernatural powers disturb simple souls. If you reveal unspeakable secrets, both the living and especially the demons are there to make you pay. Well, let’s move on...

One must always strike when the iron of presence is hot because "people forget," but the performance of the Chameleon, that truly cannot be forgotten: "Make yourself comfortable, relax. Quiet. For the first time, do not answer. Tired as the paint on these walls the Chameleon is about to confess. I think therefore I stand, I think the air is sweet. I don't know who I am, I am Street, the Chameleon..."